“Nature of the Jiva” (SB 4.6.33)
Thompson compares the descriptions of the abode of Lord Siva mentioned in this verse with the parable offered by C.S. Lewis in his classic allegorical narration, The Great Divorce (1945). In this theological dream vision rooted within the Christian tradition, Lewis portrayed the mundane world as a manifestation from within the cracks of heaven's mire. Thompson proposes that esoteric portrayals such as these can make better sense if one is willing to suspend belief in a strictly linear space-time continuum.
TRANSCRIPT: Srimad-Bhagavatam, Canto 4, Chapter 6, Text 33. “Nature of Jiva.” San Diego – 1994 / (045)
[Text 33]:
The demigods saw Lord Śiva sitting under that tree, which was competent to give perfection to mystic yogīs and deliver all people. As grave as time eternal, he appeared to have given up all anger.
Purport by Śrīla Prabhupāda:
In this verse the word mahā-yogamaye is very significant. Yoga means meditation on the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and mahā-yoga means those who engage in the devotional service of Viṣṇu. Meditation means remembering, smaraṇam. There are nine different kinds of devotional service, of which smaraṇam is one process; the yogī remembers the form of Viṣṇu within his heart. Thus there were many devotees engaged in meditation on Lord Viṣṇu under the big banyan tree.
The Sanskrit word mahā is derived from the affix mahat. This affix is used when there is a great number or quantity, so mahā-yoga indicates that there were many great yogīs and devotees meditating on the form of Lord Viṣṇu. Generally such meditators are desirous of liberation from material bondage, and they are promoted to the spiritual world, to one of the Vaikuṇṭhas. Liberation means freedom from material bondage or nescience. In the material world we are suffering life after life because of our bodily identification, and liberation is freedom from that miserable condition of life.
So continuing description of Kailāsa The demigods, of course, are coming to try to placate Lord Śiva who had destroyed the sacrifice of Dakṣa. So Lord Śiva was sitting under a banyan tree 800 miles high. Hmm… So this gives you a hint as to the nature of this place called Kailāsa. Obviously the whole place must be built on a larger scale of size than the world as we know it. It's not that just this one banyan tree would be so big and everything else would be of normal size because then it would sort of be out of proportion. Actually, everything there is quite large from our perspective; and we may think: “Well, this is very fantastic. Obviously you can't believe that!” Or, “You could only believe that if you're brainwashed,” or something of this nature. But actually from the point of view of common sense, such things are possible.
We have examples of great differences in relative size which are immediately visible to us. For example, consider the ants that you see walking along on the sidewalk. You can see that they have a very orderly society. Typically the ants will be running in little sort of ant highways. It is said that they have a special chemical – the name for it is pheromone – which they use to mark their highways so that they can travel along them in an organized way. So consider the difference in size between an ant and a human being. So the human being is absolutely gigantic compared with the ant. And it seems quite likely that the senses of the ant can't really appreciate the human being. Probably an ant has no idea what we are really like. Perhaps when a human walks by, the ant hears a distant thundering sound and feels some vibration, something like that; or it may smell some frightful odor or something of this nature. They have a very sensitive sense of smell. But certainly the ant can't appreciate what we are and the ant probably has no idea what the human life is like and how the human being is living for many years, whereas the ant probably lives only for one season at most. So similarly, it’s perfectly possible that there could be regions of the universe which are on a much greater scale than the world as we know it. So apparently that is true according to the Vedic literature.
[4:47]
This Kailāsa is described as being somewhere in the greater Himalaya Mountains, which as I mentioned before, are 10,000 yojanas high. So that would be... this is using eight miles per yojana because, of course, the verse says yojana-śata – that means a hundred yojanas. So the tree is a hundred yojanas high in an area of mountains that are 10,000 yojanas high, so everything is proportional. So from the point of view of people living there, it's not that they would think that everything there is so big, rather they would think our world is extremely small. What are those tiny little human beings anyway? So actually it's interesting.
There was a Christian author named C. S. Lewis who used to write books about heaven and hell and all this kind of thing. And in one book he was describing heaven and he described the world that we live in, the material world, as existing in some cracks in an area of dried mud in heaven. In other words, our whole world is just down there in the cracks and in one sense you can see the Vedic description is parallel to that idea. So this may seem incredible, but it's perfectly possible if you consider examples such as the example of the ants and so forth. So also, by the way, this illustrates the fact that the different siddhis are used in traveling from one realm to another because the demigods obviously were on the scale of size of this region of the world. So you can consider this point, that the branches of this tree spread for 600 miles around, so that's quite a large tree. Presumably the demigods were on a similar size scale, but when they come and visit people here on the earth they come in human size. So there's a siddhi called aṇimā-siddhi which enables one to shrink down in size. So the demigods have to do that just to come here, and then by mahimā-siddhi they can expand their size and go back to their normal state of existence. So that's the description.
Although this Vedic philosophy has... or Vedic teachings, have many aspects that seem incredible from the point of view of our ordinary experience, one point to make is that the Vedic philosophy is very consistent and that it makes sense. I think this is an important point because someone may say: well, you're just believing some incredible fantastic thing. Well, you can find many books full of incredible fantastic things. For example, there's the genre of channeled books. You can find dozens of them in any nearby New Age-type bookstore, and basically they're full of fantastic things. But if you read through some of these books you'll see that it's all gobbledygook – it doesn't make sense, whereas the Vedic philosophy does make sense. In fact, it is superior in that respect to practically any other philosophy or system of religion in the world. I would suggest that that is an objective fact that you can verify by making a comparative study. That's of course a whole elaborate project. But I think it is significant that this philosophy does make sense. And one way to illustrate how much it makes sense is to consider what happens if you begin meddling with it and altering it – then you see that it ceases to make sense.
So I thought I would speak today about one illustration of that and this has to do with the famous issue of the origin of the soul. So just to illustrate what happens when you meddle with the presentation that Śrīla Prabhupāda made of this philosophy. So it is said that... in Vedic literature, that the conditioned souls are nitya-baddha which means eternally conditioned. Nitya means forever or eternal and so on. The word anādi is also used, which is beginningless. So the question can be raised of: what does it mean to say that the spirit soul is conditioned eternally or without beginning? So one way to look at that, which I've been hearing about recently, is that: well, actually beginningless means that literally there was never a time when the spirit soul was not conditioned and within the material nature. The spirit soul has always been within the material nature; there was no beginning to this. So however far back you go, that's where the conditioned soul was and that's it. So that's one way to look at it.
[10:33]
Śrīla Prabhupāda said something a bit different. This is one statement that Śrīla Prabhupāda made:
Since no one can trace the history of the living entity's entanglement in material energy, the Lord says that it is beginningless. By beginningless it is meant the conditioned life exists prior to the creation. It is simply manifested during and after the creation.
So this statement is made. So here beginningless is taken to mean two things: you can't trace out the beginning of the spirit soul's entanglement in the material energy and it dates back to before the creation. Well, those two things sort of go together because certainly if something dates back to before the creation then you're not going to be able to trace it out. So those two things are consistent. Now this idea makes sense in terms of the Vedic conceptions of time, because in fact time in the Vedic literature does not consist of one infinite timeline, but it consists of many separate chunks of time. Each one is marked in the beginning by a creation of a universe and it's ended by an annihilation of that universe. So when the universes aren't manifest you have a situation in which material time is not active.
We have many descriptions in the Bhāgavatam of the creation of the universe. The first stage of creation is that Mahā-Viṣṇu glances over prādhana and He introduces the time factor or He enters into it as the time factor. Kṛṣṇa says that “I am time” in the Bhagavad-gītā. So the time factor is the activating agency which sets the modes of material nature into action. In the prādhana state, the modes of material nature are not active and nothing is happening so their... time is suspended. So Kṛṣṇa or Mahā-Viṣṇu enters as time and things begin to happen. So then the elements are created one after another, and then the universal globe is formed, and then Viṣṇu enters into the universal globe as Garbhodakaśāyī Viṣṇu. Brahmā is produced from his navel. From Brahmā different generations of beings are produced and this goes on for a long period of time. But finally there comes the annihilation: Brahmā dies, the elements are absorbed back into one another and finally into the primordial state of prādhana, and everything goes into the body of Mahā-Viṣṇu, and that's the end of the of that material manifestation. Then later in spiritual eternal time Mahā-Viṣṇu will again create. So this goes on eternally, but you don't have unbroken eternal material time. Material time exists when universes are manifest and then it ceases to exist when universes are annihilated. So the very idea that the soul has been eternally in the material nature in the sense of existing on a timeline that goes back forever – that doesn't even fit in with the whole description of the creation of the universes in the Vedic literature. So that's one point, that what Śrīla Prabhupāda is saying here actually makes sense in terms of saying what it means to be beginningless.
Now another aspect has to do with the whole meaning of the spirit soul's existence. If you say that the spirit soul, let us say, has without beginning been within the material energy, then practically you're saying that the spirit soul is material in the sense that it may, formally speaking, be spiritual but it has never acted spiritually; it has always acted materially. In the context of material conditioning, there has never been anything else in the experience of that soul. So in effect the soul becomes material – it's only formally spiritual. And then one has to think that something that for eternity, without a beginning, has been existing in materially conditioned consciousness, now today is going to become liberated from that and is going to enter into spiritual consciousness for the first time ever. And that becomes a little bit... not plausible. How is it that something that has eternally been conditioned materially is now going to suddenly do something totally different? It's going to enter into a spiritual state.
[15:58]
So Śrīla Prabhupāda has given a different account of what happens with the spirit soul. And what I would argue is that this makes sense, whereas the idea of the soul eternally in the materially conditioned state and then becoming liberated doesn't really make sense. So what Śrīla Prabhupāda says is that the spirit soul by nature is existing in the spiritual world, and by misuse of independence the spirit soul enters into the material state of existence. And then by proper use of independence the spirit soul can go back to the spiritual state. So according to this idea, the soul can exist in one state or the other – spiritual or material. The soul is capable of switching back and forth between the two. Its power to do this is called independence. This independence is a natural feature of the soul because the soul is part and parcel of Kṛṣṇa. Kṛṣṇa by nature is independent, so the soul, being part and parcel of Kṛṣṇa, should have a minute degree of independence. So independence means the power to do things rightly or wrongly. One has the power to decide. And if a soul misuses that power, then the soul comes in contact with material nature; otherwise the soul is in the spiritual situation.
Now this makes it very plausible that the spirit soul could go back to Godhead, which by the way is an interesting phrase, because how can you go back to a place where you've never been?! And one would have to say that that phrase is meaningless if in fact you've never been there… from a grammatical point of view. So it's good to read this in Śrīla Prabhupāda's own words. There are a few statements here, for example:
The living entity exists in the natural state of Kṛṣṇa consciousness, but he has marginal independence and this allows him to forget Kṛṣṇa. Originally pure Kṛṣṇa consciousness exists, but because of misuse of marginal independence there is a chance of forgetting Kṛṣṇa.
So that is stated. In another place, Śrīla Prabhupāda said,
Arguments may be put forward as to why we have been put under the influence of this material energy by the supreme will of the Lord. This is explained in Bhagavad-gītā where the Lord says, “I am sitting in everyone's heart and do to me one is forgetful or one is alive in knowledge.” The forgetfulness of the conditioned soul is also due to the direction of the Supreme Lord. A living entity misuses his little independence when he wants to lord it over material nature. This misuse of Independence, which is called māyā, is always available; otherwise there would be no independence. Independence implies that one can use it properly or improperly. It is not static. It is dynamic. Therefore misuse of independence is the cause of being influenced by māyā.
So here you have an explanation of a cause and effect. Why are you influenced by māyā? Well, it's due to misuse of your independence. According to the idea that you have eternally been in the material world, if you say, “Why are you under the influence of māyā?” Well, there's no answer to that question because you've always been under the influence of māyā. So there's no question of that being caused because it's always been there. Here's another one:
The spirit soul, the living entity, has no death, for he is eternal and inexhaustible. Being free from material contamination, he can go anywhere in the material or spiritual worlds. He is fully aware and completely different from the material body, but because of being misled by misuse of his slight independence, he is obliged to accept subtle and gross bodies created by the material energy and must be subjected to so-called material happiness and distress.
[20:13]
So this makes an interesting point: the soul by nature is fully aware. So you can say, “Well, if the soul is fully aware, why would the soul do something foolish?” Well... independence is there. So even if you're fully aware you can misuse your independence. Then again:
The conditioned state is caused by the misuse of the individual independence of the spiritual platform, for this separates the living entity from the association of the spiritual energy.
So that means if there’s separation, the soul must be connected with the spiritual energy and then due to this misuse of Independence there is a separation.
Now there's an interesting point about the question of whether or not a spirit soul in the material... in the spiritual world could come to the material world. There's a conversation in which Śrīla Prabhupāda made a very clear point about that. A devotee named Bhaktijana asked,
“When the souls that were never conditioned at all, do they also have their independence?” he asked.
Prabhupada said, “Yes but they have not misused. They know that I am meant for Kṛṣṇa's service and they are happy in Kṛṣṇa's service.
So Bhaktijana: “Could they ever misuse it?”
Prabhupada: “Yes, they can misuse it also. That power is there.”
Devotees: “Well I believe you once said that once the conditioned soul becomes perfected and gets out of the material world and he goes to Kṛṣṇaloka, there's no possibility of falling back.”
Prabhupada: “No, there is possibility, but he does not come. Just after putting your hand in the fire you never put it again if you are really intelligent. So those who are going back to Godhead, they become intelligent.”
So he's saying that even if you go back to Godhead, there's a possibility because you still have that independence. But it's just like someone putting his hand in the fire – if you're intelligent you're not going to do that again. And apparently, you don't get to go back to Godhead unless you become intelligent. Presumably those who go back are intelligent.
So let's see. Oh, yeah. This is a verse in Bhāgavatam:
“The brahmāna continued: My dear friend, even though you cannot immediately recognize Me,” (this is from the allegory of King Purañjana) “...even though you cannot immediately recognize Me, can't you remember that in the past you had a very intimate friend? Unfortunately, you gave up My company and accepted a position as enjoyer of this material world.”
So the dear friend is Kṛṣṇa here. So he's saying you gave up My company and accepted a position as enjoyer of this material world. So that's in the Bhāgavatam. In the purport, Śrīla Prabhupāda said,
The natural position of the living entity is to serve the Lord in a transcendental loving attitude. When the living entity wants to become Kṛṣṇa himself or imitate Kṛṣṇa, he falls down into the material world.
And again he says,
By misusing his independence the living entity falls down from the service of the Lord and takes the position in this material world as an enjoyer. That is to say, the living entity takes his position within a material body.
So you have the definite idea of a process which results in one's coming to the material world. Let's see one more; this is the one regarding taking a life as Brahmā. It is stated:
Both the Lord and the living entity, being qualitatively spirit soul, have the tendency for peaceful enjoyment, but when the part of the Supreme Personality of Godhead unfortunately wants to enjoy independently, without Kṛṣṇa, he is put into the material world, where he begins his life as Brahmā and is gradually degraded to the status of an ant or a worm in stool.
So that's stated. Oh, this is in the Ninth Canto, Chapter 24, text 58. So a few observations on that topic, namely, that this philosophy of Kṛṣṇa consciousness actually fits together in a very logical way if you consider it. And by making small changes, actually, you can derail the logic of that philosophy.
Jaya! All gloria to Śrīla Prabhupāda.