Page 78 - THE FOURTH DIMENSION

duḥkha-rūpo ’pi saṁsāro / buddhi-pūrvam avāpyate / yathā svapne śiraś chedaṁ / svayaṁ kṛtvātmano vaśaḥ

tato duḥkham avāpyeta / tathā jāgarito ’pi tu / jānann apy ātmano duḥkham / avaśas tu pravartate

One must realize that the material condition of life is full of distresses. One can realize this with purified
intelligence. When one’s intelligence is purified, he can understand that unwanted, temporary, material life is
just like a dream. Just as one suffers pain when his head is cut off in a dream, in ignorance one suffers not
only while dreaming but also while awake. Without the mercy of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, one
continues in ignorance and is thus subjected to material distresses in various ways. (SB 7.7.27 – purport)

The desire for self-indulgence through selfish sense gratification, which are the animal tendencies of eating,
sleeping, mating and defending are the root cause of suffering continually in the conditioned state of illusory
existence. The illusion is to think that the goal of life is to satisfy oneself through subtle and gross activities or
in frustration the desire to eliminate all activites and perception by impersonal merging into the light or
suicide.

The alternattive is the striving for the goal of life: to please Lord Krishna (God) by all activities of the body,
mind and intelligence. This is Krishna Consciousness by which the attraction and attachment to self-indulgent
activities is purified and transformed into pure love for Lord Krishna and constant engagement in His service.

Prahlad Maharaja concludes his precious instruction how to free oneself from the material entanglement in
the cycle of birth and death.

tasmād bhavadbhiḥ kartavyaṁ / karmaṇāṁ tri-guṇātmanām
bīja-nirharaṇaṁ yogaḥ / pravāhoparamo dhiyaḥ

Therefore, my dear friends, O sons of the demons, your duty is to take to Kṛṣṇa consciousness, which can burn
the seed of fruitive activities artificially created by the modes of material nature and stop the flow of the
intelligence in wakefulness, dreaming and deep sleep. In other words, when one takes to Kṛṣṇa consciousness,
his ignorance is immediately dissipated. (SB7.7.28)

Bhaktivedantsa Swami Prabhupada explains this verse:

This is confirmed in Bhagavad-gītā (14.26):

māṁ ca yo ’vyabhicāreṇa / bhakti-yogena sevate
sa guṇān samatītyaitān / brahma-bhūyāya kalpate

“One who engages in full devotional service, who does not fall down in any circumstance, at once transcends
the modes of material nature and thus comes to the level of Brahman.”

By the practice of bhakti-yoga, one immediately comes to the spiritual platform, transcendental to the
actions and reactions of the three modes of material nature. The root of ignorance is material consciousness,
which must be killed by spiritual consciousness, or Kṛṣṇa consciousness. The word bīja-nirharaṇam refers to
burning the root cause of material life to ashes. In the Medinī dictionary, yoga is explained by its result: yoge
76