The material world, by Haripada dasa
It is very interesting what Srila Prahlada Maharaja says in his prayers to Lord Nrisimhadeva. He says that whatever we do in this material world to be happy, if there is no awareness of God or Krishna, these things are the source of many anxieties. to illustrate this point I will put two very simple examples. A person thinks that if I were a very rich person then I would be very happy. When he gets money, now he has a bank account with 30 numbers. However, he thinks, “now that I have a lot of money, where I will put it to have more money, now that I have a lot of money,” “it is possible that someone may kidnap my daughter or my wife to force me to pay a ransom, etc.,”
The other example is that one can think that If I get to marry Miss Universe I will be happy. A man gets to marry Miss Universe, and now he thinks, “now that I have such a beautiful woman, to see if someone takes it from me, I have to control my wife a lot so that nobody will remove her from me.” “If my wife left with another I would commit suicide, etc. “
God or Krishna has created this material world and He is so intelligent that He describes it in the Bhagavad-gita with two words, this material world is a temporary place full of suffering. The ignorant, materialistic and atheistic people think that we have come to this material world to enjoy and exploit matter. They ignore the reality of it because God or Krishna has created this material world. This material world has been created by God or Krishna to give us an opportunity. By practicing Krishna consciousness, we purify ourselves and we return back to God. We are an energy of God that is called marginal, that means that we have two options to choose. We can choose what we call free will. One is our constitutional nature that is that we are eternal spiritual souls, loving servants and eternal of Krishna and His devotees. When we practice that we are happy and we live with Krishna and His devotees.
When we forget that, we are in maya, maya means here that which has no existence but is only a temporary illusion, maya means “what is not”. And, what is that illusion? The illusion is that we try to be the lords of material nature, when the reality is that we are subject by the shackles of their strict laws. When a servant tries to artificially imitate his almighty master, that is called illusion. Contaminated by this concept of life, we all try to exploit the resources of material nature, but the reality is that we get entangled more and more in its complexities. Therefore, despite our hard struggle to conquer nature, we depend more on it. This illusory struggle against material nature can be stopped immediately if we revive our Krishna consciousness. Srila Prabhupada always said that the problem of people is that they are not afraid of maya.