The following is an excerpt from a room conversation with His Divine Grace Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami and some of his disciples.

Date: Aug. 8, 1972
Location: London
Orginal Source and Audio

Prabhupāda: Now after few hours millions of germs are coming out. They were not visible when the body was not dead. Now where they were?

Revatīnandana: They were within the body.

Prabhupāda: Yes. Similarly, in everything there is living entity.

Śyāmasundara: Yeah. But…

Prabhupāda: They will be visible in due course of time.

Śyāmasundara: What, what he was telling me was that this table itself has a jīva soul, as if the table…

Prabhupāda: No, no.

Śyāmasundara: …is a person. Oh.

Revatīnandana: So that’s what I was asking when I said, “Does the table have a jīva soul?” I was trying to ask that question.

Śyāmasundara: That’s what completely threw me off. I thought, oh…

Revatīnandana: That, that threw us all.

Śyāmasundara: That means the table is a person, this is a person…

Prabhupāda: A particular jīva soul was in that body. That it, it is also proof that every jīva soul is individual, although they are living combinedly. Everything is individual.

Revatīnandana: Well that’s…, that’s all right then.… Read More...

vande ‘haṁ śrī-guroḥ śrī-yuta-pada-kamalaṁ śrī-gurūn vaiṣṇavāṁś ca

śrī-rūpam sāgrajātaṁ saha-gaṇa-raghunāthānvitaṁ taṁ sa-jīvam

sādvaitaṁ sāvadhūtaṁ parijana-sahitaṁ kṛṣṇa-caitanya-devaṁ

śrī-rādhā-kṛṣṇa-pādān saha-gaṇa-lalitā-śrī-viśākhānvitāṁś ca

The man having forgotten himself as the son of Godhead, has forsaken his real constitutional nature. He has misidentified himself with everything non-godly and therefore manipulates a material existence conducted by the mind and the six instrumental senses. He is concerned only with his material coverings of gross body and the subtle mind but cannot see either himself or his so-called numerous fellowmen. This is what we mean by Nescience which is darkness. The man having designated himself with the relation of his vehicular body and the finer elements of mind and ego etc., like the motor-car driver who has identified himself wrongly with the motor-car itself, has manufactured a civilization which is self contradictory and self denial.

His so-called rationality having not gone far above the rationality of the lower animals, he laments at the death of his fellowmen or at the loss of his own things which he has never witnessed by real experience. This is what we mean by Nescience which is darkness. He slightly feels only and that after the death of his fellowmen that the body loses something that moves it just like the driver moves the motor-car, but still due to the darkness of Nescience he never concerns himself with the driver of the body but takes care superficially only for the body or the mechanical car.… Read More...