Message of Godhead by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupāda, founder-Acarya of International Society for Krishna Consciousness

When a nation proudly turns away from God and concentrates on worldly success and prosperity, it meets its doom. What is essential today is not so much the rehabilitation of schools and libraries or shops and factories but the rehabilitation of a man; we must re-create man if we are to create a new world community.

We cannot approach the Absolute Truth by our poor fund of knowledge, but out of His own mercy the Absolute Truth reveals himself by his own appearance. In the darkness of night, the sun cannot be obliged to appear, even by the power of our highest technology.

Every morning when the sun rises, we see that vast mass of matter as if it were just a small disc. Of course, the sun is much larger than the earth on which we live, and thus every morning of every day our self-reliant ocular vanity is put to the test and reduced to absurdity. Our eyes can gather knowledge only under certain favorable conditions. We can't see things that are too far away from us, nor can we penetrate the darkness, nor can we see things that are very close to the eye, such as OUR OWN EYELIDS. Even though we have wonderful eyes, we can't see things in their true perspective.

Whatever we are experiencing at the present moment is totally conditional and is therefore subject to mistakes and incompleteness.

Because we are always busy in the discharge of our worldly duties, generally we do not wish to understand any philosophy except our mundane philosophy of the stomach and allied subjects. We have extended many branches and sub-branches of this philosophy of the belly in various directions, and thus we have hardly any time to understand the philosophy of gaining eternal life --- for which we are perpetually struggling, life after life.

If we want to perceive a certain subject in the darkness, we can't use just our eyes: we have to rely on some other means to aid our perception. Only if somebody bringsa light into the darkness is it truly possible to see things as they are.

The knowledge that we gather by our education in the 🎒📚 schools and colleges may help us temporarily in the study of some particular subject in the present 🎁 span of life, but this education can't satisfy our eternal need for transcendental knowledge, for which we hanker life after life, day after day, hour after hour.

Lord Jesus Christ appeared as the son of Godhead, Muhammad introduced himself as the servant of Godhead and Lord Caitanya presented himself as the devotee of Godhead. Such messiahs were of the same opinion about one thing: there can be no permanent peace and prosperity in this mortal world. All of them agreed that we have to go to a separate world, where peace and prosperity have their real being. Even Lord Buddha and Sankaracarya never preached that there is any possibility of attaining eternal peace and prosperity in this material world.

We need to establish a relationship with a preceptor who can really open our eyes and lift us from the clutches of nescience. The Upanishads and allied scriptures ordain that one must approach with awe and reverence the feet of a spiritual master who is well versed in all the scriptures and who has attained perfection in transcendental knowledge. One must attain the disciplic succession, the spiritual line. Attainment of spiritual perfection can never be possible without undergoing spiritual discipline.

Unless one tries to solve the problem of regaining one's eternal life, there can be no peace whatsoever, either in this life or in life after death. That is the supreme teaching of Bhagavad-Gita spoken by Lord Shri Krishna.

We modern men supposedly have no time to get into the details of the philosophy of Bhagavad-Gita, even in the midst of our ordinary daily duties. But just to teach us, Arjuna pondered the philosophy of Bhagavad-Gita at a time when even a moment seemed impossible to spare i.e. at the the time of war. All this he did for the sake of people like us. But attaining transcendental knowledge doesn't mean renouncing the duties of our ordinary life. After Arjuna had understood the philosophy of Bhagavad-Gita, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Sri Krsna, never advised him to give up his ordinary duty.