Modern life can mean a lot of time traveling in conveyances, affording us many opportunities to remember that we’re not the body.
By Karuna Dharini Devi Dasi
Where am I heading in the technologically sophisticated conveyance that carries the body that carries me, the soul within?
In the eyes of a small child an automobile may appear to be moving of its own accord. When a little older, the child understands that a car cannot move unless it has a driver. Beyond the shiny automobile’s exterior sits a living person. Like a car with a driver, our physical body is a machine with someone stationed inside. The spirit soul, a particle of the energy of God Himself, inhabits and “drives” the material body.
Bhagavad-gita describes the human body as a yantra, i.e., a matrix or machine, temporarily occupied by spirit. This yantra is useful for the soul inside, but within certain limits. Just as a driver is limited by the abilities of his car, so the soul’s natural freedom is curtailed by the matrix of the body.
Anyone who has experienced modern traffic jams will admit that moving inch by inch inside a machine with a motor is at best only a simulation of freedom. Similarly, for the spirit soul, originally a free agent in the service of God, there are many unnatural restrictions because of dwelling in the body. The soul originates in a world where movement is effortless.
You’ve Hit Me!
During Prabhupada’s childhood many machines of conveyance were conceived and manufactured – planes, cars, buses, etc. – and Prabhupada created many descriptive analogies based on them. Strong identification with combustion-engine conveyances became a social norm, and he evaluated this tendency. His example of the man driving along the road whose car was suddenly hit by another car is a self-realization classic.
Jumping out of his car the man shouted, “You’ve hit me! You’ve hit me!”
Srila Prabhupada:
First of all one must know, “What is my position? How am I packed up with all these twenty-four elements?” In the Vedas it is said that the soul is unaffected with this material condition. I have several times given this example, that a person has got a good car, and it is somehow or another broken, and he becomes upset, because of his car. Although he knows that “I am not this car,” but his thoughts being absorbed by the attraction of the car, when the car is broken somehow or other, he becomes almost unconscious. So this is due to our attachment. (Lecture on Bhagavatam 7.6.8)
Due to a lifetime spent in a city sometimes compared to an enormous parking lot, I am delighted by Srila Prabhupada’s comments regarding travel in vehicles. To travel in sprawling Los Angeles County, people invest in a car, and whether it is ordinary or fancy, it is usually to their liking. Cars seem an extension of ourselves, a shiny steel-framed statement of a faster, abler me. The unending increase in the number of vehicles jammed on the road does not seem to create any hesitancy to hurtle about in them, regardless of the danger of collision – or of poisonous fumes that sabotage the environment – so strong is our want to get out and defy our bounds.
As pure spirit souls we were never meant to live in a word sans Krishna. By our spiritual nature we are meant to be fully enlightened, always ready to soar in the pure liberated state of ecstatic love. By virtue of our own natural deep relationship with God, we are meant to be released from the problems that now shackle us.
“The need of the spirit soul,” Srila Prabhupada writes, “is that he wants to get out of the limited sphere of material bondage and fulfill his desire for complete freedom. He wants to get out of the covered walls of the greater universe. He wants to see the free light and the spirit. That complete freedom is achieved when he meets the complete spirit, the Personality of Godhead.” ( Bhagavatam 1.2.8, Purport)
Goat Nipples
Driving highly engineered cars and flying in jet planes mimic this complete freedom. Spectators line up to get only but a feeling of it at racetracks and airports, for such machines certainly defy human limitation. Prahlada Maharaja, however, offers a caution. He explains in the Srimad-Bhagavatam that every material facility carries with it an equivalent and opposing inconvenience. So it has come to pass that human society’s long-cherished identification with moving vehicles is causing a grand environmental backlash. Carbon emissions have accelerated the warming of earth’s atmosphere and triggered unprecedented natural disasters, costing the loss of various types of life and trillions of dollars.
Now begins the big rush to be the inventor of the perfect clean-energy car, while we continue to plaster the earth with asphalt highways. The relentless din of gross physical conveyances echoing through every valley, sometimes just on the other side of one’s bedroom window, is hardly a success for the bewildered scientist.
Modern science is striving to make adjustments to engineer material nature, but its attempt is like trying to get milk from a goat’s neck nipples. No milk can be found there. The attempts to discover the perfect energy for the new, improved car, plane, or truck is laudable in one sense, but making it our priority will find us milking the neck of the goat; nothing is actually there. No one can eat nuts and bolts. We have failed to ask the most fundamental of all questions: Who is seated in the car?
Who Is This Gentleman?
Commuters can attest to how much precious time commuting takes out of one’s day. In this regard Srila Prabhupada told of a commuter he knew whose son could not recognize him. The man went to work very early in the day and came back very late. The little child’s waking hours were not the same as the father’s, so the son did not see his father while growing up.
One night he saw his father coming in late and asked, “Mother, who is this gentleman?”
She replied, “Why, that is your father, my dear son!”
Prabhupada commented: “Now we are utilizing this facility of aeroplane; that means we are getting good chance for serving Krishna. But others, materialists, they are getting this facility so that his child cannot recognize him. So we can take all facilities . . . So therefore we are actually utilizing the scientific improvement for the benefit of the people.”
Traveling the boulevards, freeways, airways, and rails, we may spend hours to get to a destination to earn money, see a specialist, or buy something. If it means getting good facility for Krishna’s service, then the trouble or inconvenience is sanctified and pleasing because Krishna’s blessings are there. We are traveling, essentially, toward Him. Otherwise, travel in a conveyance here and there to try to satisfy one material demand after another cannot be satisfying. One of Srila Prabhupada’s favorite questions to modern man: What is the difference between an animal’s scurrying on four legs and a harried man’s running about on four wheels?
Formerly, a man used to work on his field, a few steps from his house. Now we have created facility of transport; therefore we have to go to work three hundred miles away from home. This is the position. But they have no brain. They’re thinking they’re advancing. [ Chuckles .] Six hours I have to spoil. Then I can go to my office. Then I work there the whole day, and again come, again six hours. Then I come at night to sleep along with my family for three hours. (Lecture on Bhagavatam 1.3.10)
The Need of the Soul
Like the child who lost his father to commuting, people are losing their real needs in the furious blur of modern transport. Science proposes to curb an impending environmental crisis with more evolved technology for optimum travel. But without the full Vedic science that takes into account the fundamental need to serve the Supreme Lord, no one can solve the problem of continually circling around and about in the material atmosphere. The driver remains stuck in congestion, his finest, optimum destination obscured. It is the soul, not the body, who is the conscious living being. The soul’s needs are not made of petrol and steel. They are satisfied by the super-fine activities of devotional service.
Srila Prabhupada writes,
There is a dormant affection for God within everyone; spiritual existence is manifested through the gross body and mind in the form of perverted affection for gross and subtle matter. Therefore we have to engage ourselves in occupational engagements that will evoke our divine consciousness. This is possible only by hearing and chanting the divine activities of the Supreme Lord, and any occupational activity which does not help one to achieve attachment for hearing and chanting the transcendental message of Godhead is said herein to be simply a waste of time. This is because other occupational duties (whatever ism they may belong to) cannot give liberation to the soul. The hankering soul must be satisfied by the perfect scientific process of perfect devotional service. ( Bhagavatam 1.2.8, Purport)
The systematic process of perfect devotional service is easily practiced by joining with other devotees to chant Krishna’s names. This sometimes requires the use of physical conveyances. Devotees go out to chant in crowded locations, and they risk safety and comfort commuting to their favorite places to offer sankirtana – the chanting of the names of Krishna and distribution of Krishna conscious literature. Other devotees make their way by bus, plane, or train, following a speaking itinerary to a variety of venues to share Krishna’s glories and enthuse others by the depth of their spiritual association. Still others faithfully pack a van with cases of fruits and vegetables and head to the temple kitchen to prepare sumptuous prasada . Eager devotees load colorful festival tents and exhibits into trucks to move all over a continent, city after city, where crowds gather and come in contact with Krishna’s message.
Friday Night Harinama
We are on the I-10 freeway in a passenger van, ten of us, on the way to an evening chanting engagement. Our van has to cross an overpass above the 405 freeway, which climbs through the black hills to the right and across the coastal-cities basin to the far left. The five lanes of stalled white headlights beside five lanes of red taillights glow like an immense winding jeweled snake in the dark.
If I were in this situation for anything other than Krishna’s service, I’m sure I would be disturbed. This is no brilliant sleeping snake, nor is it a long shining necklace. It is a veritable sea of steel material conveyances, idling bumper to bumper, complete with thousands of passengers anticipating the night’s potential sense gratification. Their vehicles leak emissions into the air that repeatedly bring this population to its knees with severe drought and one wild fire after another. I am happy to remember Srila Prabhupada’s words: “For preaching we are getting good facility, but for the other . . . ” And I pray that all of my movement on this earth will stop being for “the other,” the harried pursuit of material wants.
Then I surprise myself with a positive thought: the sea of red and white lights becomes auspicious. Beyond the shiny automobile exteriors are eternal living beings, perched upon chassis, a river of souls seated in marvelous yantras made of Krishna’s material energy. A stream of these souls will make their way to the tourist spot where the devotees of Krishna will play musical instruments and sing a variety of melodies to deliver His holy names. A succession of dear, tender chords will carry the holy names up in the streets to soar higher than any city roar, washing through the ears of the living beings. Everything is situated perfectly.
A Precious Gift
The vehicle of this human body is a rare and precious gift, not to be shuttled about in search of various sense indulgences or technological tricks. Modern science and its attempt to discover the perfect transport cannot ultimately solve the mystery of our existence. Like the child who thinks a car moves on its own, they do not understand that there is an inner driver. They have neglected the need of the soul. Our genuine satisfaction lies in steering the conveyance of the human body toward the ultimate destination, back home, back to Godhead. On that journey, Krishna is discovered at every turn of the road.
The solution to our perennial failure to engineer a pleasure ride against the odds of birth, disease, old age, and death is to drive the vehicle Krishna gave us according to the regulations of the Vedas . The skills and propensities we are born with are to be used in His service, not to prolong our stay here by improving physical conveyances to move at – in Prabhupada’s phrase – “neck-break speed.”
Free movement is our primordial nature. Our natural home is back home, back to Godhead. It is the unfettered soul’s only desirable destination. In that place dance is the mode of travel, and the flow of eternal movement is toward rendezvous with the Supreme Lord Krishna. It is a world that lies beyond the accumulation of grime and waste. Every morsel, blossom, and waft of energy there is pristine because it exists in full affection for the pleasure pastimes of Nanda Dulala, the son of the king of Vraja.
Hearing the descriptions of this topmost destination by the great acharyas who are ambassadors of the spiritual realm inspires us to make wonderful pilgrimages to sacred places on earth such as Mayapur or Sri Vrindavan Dham to get a further glimpse. Embodied souls carried by physical conveyances to destinations inhabited by great devotees are always rightly situated, especially if motivated to serve those great souls. The progress of devotion to Krishna conveys the driver of the material body back to Godhead, a destination never reached by modern travel.
Karuna Dharini Devi Dasi, a disciple of His Grace Virabahu Dasa, serves the deities at ISKCON Los Angeles, where she joined ISKCON in 1979. She has also been distributing Srila Prabhupada’s books since her earliest days in Krishna consciousness. She lives with her husband and daughter.