SB 11.2.2

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TRANSLATION

My dear King, in the material world the conditioned souls are confronted by

death at every step of life. Therefore, who among the conditioned souls

would not render service to the lotus feet of Lord Mukunda, who is

worshipable even for the greatest of liberated souls?

PURPORT

The word indriyavan is significant in this verse. Indriyavan means

"possessing senses." Although we are conditioned within the material world,

by the mercy of the Supreme Lord we are awarded a human body, which

possesses distinct senses, such as the eyes, ears, tongue, nose and skin.

Generally the conditioned souls use these senses in a false attempt to

exploit the material nature for sense gratification. But our material senses

and their objects are temporary, and it is not possible to become peaceful

or happy in the attempt to gratify our temporary senses with the temporary

sense objects offered by maya, the illusory energy of the Lord. In fact, our

strenuous endeavor to satisfy the material senses inevitably brings exactly

the opposite result, namely material suffering. A man is attracted to a

woman. Being sexually aroused he marries her, and soon there is a family

that requires ever-increasing support. In this way his innocent and simple

life is ended, and he spends the major portion of his life working hard like

an ass to support the demands of his family. In the Third Canto of

Srimad-Bhagavatam, Lord Kapila describes very clearly that in spite of the

exhausting work a man performs throughout his life, his family is ultimately

dissatisfied, and when the exhausted father reaches old age, the irritated

family members look upon him just as farmers look upon an old and useless

ox. Sometimes the sons dream of receiving their father's money as an

inheritance and secretly wish for him to die. Nowadays people strongly

resent the trouble of caring for elderly parents and therefore send them to

an institution, where they die lonely and neglected after a life of hard

work for their so-called loved ones. One doctor in England is seriously

proposing euthanasia for elderly persons who are no longer productive.

Nowadays some people, desiring material sense gratification but hoping to

avoid the inconvenience of family life, try to enjoy "free" sexual relations

with women, without the trouble of marriage. Through birth control and

abortion they eliminate the disturbance of caring for children. In this way

they hope to enjoy material sense gratification without any material

impediment. By the laws of nature, however, such persons become bound in a

network of sinful reactions by avoiding their real duty to the Supreme

Personality of Godhead and by thoughtlessly causing violence and suffering

to others for increasing their own sense gratification. Caught in a network

of impious activities, they drift further and further away from their

original pure consciousness and gradually lose all power to understand the

laws of nature. Therefore it is stated here, sarvato-mrtyuh. Mrtyu means

"death." Death suddenly appears, startling such confident sense gratifiers,

and destroys their entire program of so-called material happiness. Often

such persons are afflicted with ghastly diseases and undergo inconceivable

suffering, which ends in death. If a sincere well-wisher points these facts

out to them, trying to inform them of the reality, they become angry and

accuse him of being a pessimist or a religious fanatic. In this way they

blindly ignore the laws of nature until these laws inevitably smash them

down and drag them out of their fool's paradise. Because of an excessive

accumulation of sinful results, they are forced into situations of great

distress by the laws of karma. Sinking down into the lower species of life,

they lose all awareness of that which lies beyond their gross material

senses.

 

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