Srila Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada my Spiritual Master
I cannot believe I am seventy six this month. But it is true. My body certainly feels older now. I cannot do anymore what I was able to even ten years ago. So much strength has already left. Sometimes I feel very tired even though I do not work anymore.And yet something has not changed at all.
My consciousness.
It is always steadily present, exactly as it always was. The same awareness that was there when I was young is there now. If consciousness had anything to do with the body, why is it not aging along with it?
This does not mean the body and brain cannot affect how consciousness is expressed. The body can become diseased, the brain can become damaged, and conditioning can sometimes limit a person’s ability to express what they inwardly perceive. But the witnessing awareness behind these changing conditions remains present. The instrument may become clouded, yet the conscious self observing through it remains the same.
This also raises another interesting observation. Some scientific research has shown that before the brain sends signals to the mouth to speak or the hands to act, measurable signals appear in the brain before a person becomes consciously aware of deciding. Experiments by the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet in the nineteen eighties observed what he called a readiness potential in the brain that appeared before the subject reported making a conscious decision to move. Later researchers such as John Dylan Haynes at the Max Planck Institute found similar patterns suggesting that the brain shows activity predicting a decision even before a person becomes consciously aware of it.
Scientists still debate what this means, but it raises a profound question. If the brain is only receiving and transmitting signals, then where does the original impulse come from. From the Krishna conscious perspective the brain is not the source of consciousness, but an instrument through which the conscious self expresses intention within the body.”
But I have to mention one small suggestion for accuracy.
The experiments do not literally prove that the signal comes from outside the brain. What they show is that brain activity precedes conscious awareness of deciding. That is why scientists still debate their meaning.
We all can verify this within ourselfes. The body changes. The consciousness that observes the changes does not.
My temporary self
Krishna explains this directly in Bhagavad Gita 2.13
“As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.”
The body has passed through childhood, youth and maturity, and now old age. Yet the conscious self observing those changes has remained the same.
When we identify strongly with the body and the mind, we experience constant changes, like pleasure and pain, ups and downs, fear and hope, hankering and lamenting. But as one gradually becomes detached from the gross and subtle body, that turbulence begins to diminish. This is a big part of Self Realisation.
Krishna also says in Bhagavad Gita 2.14:
“O son of Kunti, the non permanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata, and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.”
Happiness and distress come and go. They are experienced.
But they are not the eternal Self.
I remember when I met my spiritual master, Srila Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada for the first time in his garden in Krishna Balaram Mandir (Temple) in Vrindavan India. His body looked so emaciated that I let out a sudden deep sigh. At that moment he looked at me. His eyes were powerful, saying without words, “What are you sighing for?
I am not this body. This is nothing.”
At the time I did not understand. I was young.
Later I realised what he conveyed without speaking. His body was weak, but his consciousness was far above material consciousness.
The atmosphere coming from him was not that of an old, suffering, incapacitated man. It was transcendental, free from material hankering and lamentation. It felt powerful and at the same time very sweet, like the pure fresh air after a thunderstorm, when the heavy rain has passed and everything in nature settles back into its natural state.
Krishna describes such a person in Bhagavad Gita 2.56:
“One who is not disturbed in mind even amidst the threefold miseries or elated when there is happiness, and who is free from attachment, fear and anger, is called a sage of steady mind.”
Such transcendental consciousness is not really known in the western world. But it is the original natural state of the Self. The eternal soul.
We are not water. We are not chemicals. We are not merely a collection of biological processes. The body is made mainly of water and elements. But are we water. Are we chemicals.
Krishna says no. The Bhagavad Gita says no. Great saints say no. And if we observe carefully, our own experience says no.
Much of what I called suffering in my life was not actually me. It was my karma unfolding through the body and mind. The body felt pain. The mind felt distress, ups and downs. Circumstances changed. But I, the witnessing self, remained the same from when I was young. What filled my consciousness were thousands upon thousands of impressions accumulating over the years.
This does not mean suffering was unreal. It was very real at the bodily and mental level. But it was not the eternal Self. It was karma acting within material nature.
To overcome material adversity with Krishna Conscious transcendentality does not mean that the body stops aging or that problems disappear. It means we gradually shift our identification.
Instead of thinking, “This is happening to me,” we begin to see, “This is happening in material nature while to this body and mind but Iam neither, I am the spiritual soul whose symptom is the consciousness that pervades this entire body. Gradually I have come to understand that my true nature, my eternal dharma, is to be a servant of Krishna.
Fear of death comes from thinking, “I am this body.” If I am the body, then death is the end. But if I am the eternal soul, then death is only a change of situation.
I can see these truths in my own life now more clearly than before. Age has forced detachment. The body itself has become a teacher.
But I must also honestly say, I still have a long way to go.
Understanding something philosophically and being fully fixed in transcendental consciousness are not the same. I still feel tired. I still feel affected. I am not free from all identification. I am not on the level of a pure devotee.
Yet I have seen and experienced enough to know that Krishna Conscious transcendentality is real. I have seen it manifest in great souls like Srila Prabhupada and some others. I have felt it. And I have tasted the peace that comes when identification shifts from matter to spirit. Having seen it, one gradually learns to distinguish between genuine spiritual realisation and its imitation.
If we anchor our consciousness in the Absolute Truth, adversity loses its power to define us. I am not this body. I never was. And even at seventy five, the real journey of realisation is still unfolding. And that is both humbling and hopeful. It has nothing to do with modern debates about identity. It simply means that the conscious self is different from the temporary body.
Because I have come to understand that I am the non material soul within this body, I can also understand that all life forms are also embodied, eternal and individual spiritual souls. Externally we all differ, but internally the life force within all living beings is of the same spiritual quality.
Hare Krishna.
Thank you for reading. I wish you good health and the rare and precious fortune of coming to realise your true spiritual nature.
Devarsiratha das
Vanaprastha
Disciple of Srila Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada since 1973
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