Is wearing clothes unnatural as no other species in nature wears clothes?

From Jagat Singh P

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
Question from Jagat Singh Prabhu. Is wearing clothes unnatural? Animals don’t wear clothes. No other species except human beings wear clothes.
So, is it that the wearing of clothes is unnatural? That we should live like the rest of nature lives and not wear clothes? Are we going against nature by covering ourselves and therefore living unnaturally? Answer, here there is a fundamental confusion about what natural means. Now, does the word natural simply mean imitating everything that nature does or everything that is done in nature? Now, nature, for example, has the rule of survival for the fittest. So, now, we human beings may also in a competitive world have this rule.
They say the fittest or the students who get the best marks survive and get the top marks or get the jobs or whatever. But is that what is ennobling? Is that what is inspiring? Now, what inspires us is not survival of the fittest, but sacrifice by the fittest. Now, when some person is drowning and some other bystander jumps into the river or into the sea and risks one’s own life to save the other person, that is what we consider as inspiring.
So, when the WTC was collapsing and the firefighters went inside risking their own lives to save the innocents who were trapped inside, they became national heroes. Why? Because although survival of the fittest may be a brute fact of nature, it is by no mean an inspiring or ennobling fact. It is actually just a brute fact of nature.
The inspiring and ennobling fact is that we would like we like to see sacrifice by the fittest. This means that actually our human existence is bi-dimensional. We have our material nature and we have our spiritual nature.
So, now we are souls who are covered over by material bodies. Now, in the human form, the soul, the human form allows the soul’s consciousness, soul’s spiritual awareness to be expressed. The non-human or sub-human forms, they cover the consciousness so much that actually there is not much, there is very little possibility for spiritual perception, for considering the meaning and purpose of existence.
So, now, so we as human beings, we are at the junction between the material and spiritual, at the intersection. So, our bodies are material, no doubt, but our soul is essentially spiritual and the soul’s consciousness is constantly coming out, is seeking for the ultimate purpose and meaning, something that animals don’t do. So, therefore, the important point to understand is that we have to decide which nature we wish to express.
Now, if we just desire to express our biological nature, then we see that we end up making a mess of things. Now, animals eat, but animals are more or less regulated in their eating. When the biological urge for eating comes, they eat.
But we human beings, we don’t eat just because of the biological urge. We actually overeat and we get a huge amount of diseases related with the stomach. So, obesity is as if not a bigger problem than malnutrition and starvation in the world today in terms of its economic costs, in terms of its health costs.
It’s also epidemic. So, the point which I’m making here is something very deep. The point is that because the soul’s spiritual nature is being nascently, being slightly manifested in the human form.
So, in the human form, we seek more happiness than what the body can naturally provide. And when we try to seek more happiness than what the body can provide from the body, that means we try to get more pleasure from eating than what is normally needed for the body, then we create health disorders. Similarly, when we create pleasure from eating, we create pleasure from eating.
Similarly, with respect to sex, sex is a biological drive and there is pleasure associated with it also. But we try to get pleasure in sex through agitating the imagination in thousands and thousands of ways. And animals don’t create a pornography industry, humans do.
And we are trying to extract more and more pleasure, but ultimately the body’s capacity to enjoy is limited. So, human culture, what does it mean? Human culture, just like we have bacteria culture, that is a bacteria culture means it’s a culture in which the bacteria grow nicely. So, human culture is that culture in which the humane qualities grow, they flourish.
It’s a culture that is conducive for the blossoming of those humane qualities. So, now, humane qualities at one level is, as I said, selflessness, sacrifice by the fittest. But beyond that, it is our capacity to experience spiritual awareness and spiritual happiness.
So, now, the spiritual faculty can’t awaken much if we are caught up with the hopes and the schemes with the dreams and schemes of material pleasure. So, if I have to meditate and if there is a big feast of food in front of me, then it will be very difficult for me to meditate because the mind will repeatedly go back, oh, what is, when can I eat this, when can I eat this, when can I eat this. So, like that, if there is constant opportunity and temptation for material enjoyment, eating, sleeping, mating, defending, then the mind just gets so caught up in these futile dreams and schemes for pleasure.
They are futile because the pleasure in that is very limited. But the mind keeps hoping, oh, I’ll get more, I’ll get more, I’ll get more. And then one keeps getting caught.
So, one doesn’t rise to the spiritual level, one’s consciousness gets caught, stays caught in the material level. That the samadhi, the concentration of the mind doesn’t occur when we are caught up with hopes of material enjoyment. So, the human culture regulates the activities of eating, sleeping, mating, defending so that the mind can be peaceful and the mind can turn towards spiritual reality and then our spiritual nature can be awakened.
Spiritual nature means the nature of the soul to know and love God and to love all living beings in relationship with God. So, that spiritual nature is our actual nature because we at our core are souls. The body is dead.
It is made of matter which is unconscious. It cannot give consciousness. So, that means, if we human beings have a material nature or a biological nature, we could say our material nature and a spiritual nature.
Now, we have to decide which nature we wish to express. Is it our spiritual nature which will connect us with eternal unlimited truly fulfilling happiness or we express only our material nature and also in terms of the urges for eating, sleeping, mating, defending, which when we try to seek pleasure through, we actually create more misery. So, animals don’t wear clothes, but animals don’t get sexually transmitted diseases of the magnitude that humans do.
Animals, how many animals suffer from indigestion and due to overeating and things like that. So, the wearing of clothes, it is a part of the human culture which regulates the human imagination about sexuality. So, by wearing clothes and not just wearing clothes, by wearing decent chaste clothes which properly cover the body, then the mind’s default imagination about sexual pleasure gets shaken because the more the mind is given food for imagination, the more mind goes wild.
And then when the mind becomes calm, Srila Prabhupada writes in a Bhagavad Gita purport that the purpose of marriage is to regulate the human mind so that one can pursue, one can fix it on God, one can pursue spirituality in the long run. So, we shouldn’t mistake natural to be only that it is materially natural. For us souls, natural means that is spiritually natural.
And at our condition stage, we are not, we are not meant to imitate the rest of nature. If we imitate the rest of nature, then we meet the fate of the rest of nature. That is now everything in nature is under the law of death.
It’s going to grow old, get deceased and die. Now, we at a material level are also going to grow old, get deceased and die. But as souls, we can get out of the cycle of birth and death, out of this material entrapment.
So, that’s why the Upanishads say that go from darkness to light, the darkness of the bodily misidentification. That go from death, death is something which happens to the body. But when we rise to the spiritual level of reality, we become spiritually conscious and the body will be destroyed, but the soul will become liberated.
So, that is the purpose of human life. And for us, if we mistake natural to be that which is biologically or materially natural, then we stay in the cycle of birth and death. Survival of the fittest is what the slogan in nature is.
But the fact is that even the fittest don’t survive. Everybody is killed. So, that is that extremely excruciating suffering of old age, disease and death.
Is that what our natural destiny is meant to be? No. And if we don’t want that to be our natural destiny, then we have to rise above material nature and act according to spiritual nature. So, acting according to spiritual nature doesn’t just mean wearing clothes.
Wearing clothes is one aspect of it. But beyond that, ultimately, we are meant to live in a civilized way. Civilized is not just a value judgment over here.
Civilized means that which enables us to rise to a spiritual level of reality. And that’s how we attain success as human beings. So, human beings are at the pinnacle of all other living beings.
And we are not just meant to unthinkingly imitate the rest of nature in the name of being natural. We are meant to rise above the rest of nature by recognizing that we are not meant to be slaves of our material nature. But we are meant to release our spiritual nature and then relish eternally in that spiritual nature.