The soul wears out the body and the body wears out the soul

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. The soul wears out the body and the body wears out the soul.
The soul wears the body in the sense that the body is like a dress for the soul. Bhagavad Gita states in 2.22 Bhagavad Gita states that the body is like a dress for the soul. And just as a person gives up an old dress, just as we give up an old dress, and we take up a new dress.
Similarly, we give up an old body. And we take a new body. So now the soul doesn’t wear the body.
The soul wears out the body and the body wears out the soul. Let’s see what this means. So the soul wears out the body.
That means that the body is actually, being material, is subject to deterioration and destruction by the power of time. But when the soul seeks pleasure at the bodily level, the soul is innately pleasure seeking, and the soul is not spiritually realizing, the soul seeks pleasure at the bodily level. And pursued by the soul of pleasure at the bodily level, leads to suffering, leads to too much eating, leads to digestive diseases, too much sex, leads to sexually transmitted diseases.
And like that the body’s regeneration, which is anyway inevitable, becomes accelerated. And that way the body gets worn out. So the soul wears out the body when it misdirects its search for happiness at the bodily level.
And similarly the body wears out the soul. That means that the body acts not just like a vehicle, not just like a dress, but also acts like something like a pre-programmed machine, which runs on particular tracks, which behaves in particular ways. So just as a computer may run default programs, similarly the body repeatedly runs the default programs of eating, sleeping, mating and defending.
Because that’s what is the pattern of behavior, that is stored in the genetic makeup of the body. So by repeatedly prompting the soul to seek bodily pleasure, through eating, sleeping, mating and defending, the body tires out the soul. Why tires out? Because first of all these are demands which come again and again and again.
Repeatedly these have to be fulfilled. And not only do they have to be fulfilled, but secondly they are actually not fulfilling. We have to eat, we have to do the bodily functions, but it’s not that doing the bodily functions gives a great sense of fulfillment.
It just removes the sense of agitation which was there when those bodily drives were not fulfilled. And just trying again and again, struggling again and again to fulfill the body’s demands, tires out the soul. So the body wears out the soul.
And in this way the body and the soul become, although they wear each other out, but basically they stay trapped. As long as the search for pleasure is misdirected to the bodily level, the solution then is to redirect the search for happiness to the spiritual level. So when the soul practices bhakti yoga and learns to seek happiness at the spiritual level, then the soul can no longer bound in material existence.
Rather the soul rises to the spiritual level of reality. Consciousness of the soul rises to the spiritual level of reality. And devotion to Krishna finds lasting happiness.
And even for spiritualists, the body’s deterioration and destruction is inevitable. But the soul’s consciousness, if it is attached to the body, the soul’s consciousness also is dragged towards tribulation, towards misery with the body’s destruction. But when the soul is not attached to the body, then the soul’s consciousness gets elevated despite the body’s destruction, body’s movement towards destruction, the soul keeps moving towards its imminent liberation at the time of death.
Thank you.