It has just occurred to me that I really am eternal. I know I've been hearing it and reading it for years, but I never thought about the reality of it.

If I don't go back to Godhead, then after this life there will be another one. Of course, it's nice to know that I will keep living, but in what conditions?

I will have to start all over again, from nothing. All the knowledge I have acquired in this life will be lost, and I will have to start learning to read again, assuming I even have a human birth. I will have to go through the whole struggle all over again to build something that will again be lost at death.

And it goes on forever, starting again and losing everything at death, again and again and again.

It's given me a new look at the following statement in Srimad Bhagavatam (1.1.1):

"Only because of Him do the material universes, temporarily manifested by the reactions of the three modes of nature, appear factual, although they are unreal."

How can it be unreal? Srila Prabhupada says, on the other hand, that the world is temporary but not false:

"The creation is not false, but it is a temporary manifestation just to give a chance for the conditioned souls to go back to Godhead." [Srimad Bhagavatam 2.10.4]

Why then do the scriptures also say it is unreal?

Because it is temporary. We struggle so hard to obtain temporary things that vanish from our grip, like a magician's illusion: Now you see it, now you don't.

I may struggle to acquire a fortune, and it all seems real—the struggle, the money, the goal. But at the end of my life, it will all disappear.

So as real as it seems, it is also an illusion because in the end it all disappears, without a trace, without even a memory.

And I will have to start again, maybe a man struggling to get rich, maybe a tiger struggling to catch a buffalo, maybe the buffalo struggling to escape from the tiger.

Where will I be, what will I be, a hundred trillion lives from now? a hundred trillion creations from now? And that's nowhere near the end because there isn't any end.

It's like the old saying: You can't win, you can't break even, you can't quit playing.

All this, and yet the way to an eternal, deathless life of bliss and knowledge is on the tip of my tongue.

Hare Krishna.

© Umapati Swami, January 20, 2007