After many, many lifetimes of this, maybe I’ve become receptive to the truth, “Oh, gee. I want to hear the truth. What’s wrong here? Something… there must be another message that I haven’t heard yet.” And there is, it is the message of the Vedas, the message of the truth. The Vedas are not a sectarian religion, this is truth, and it has nothing to do with sectarian beliefs. Truth is always true, absolute truth.
In the material world the truth, even as it is, is relative truth. It is relative; it is dependent on a whole lot of circumstances to make it true. An example is water. Water freezes at 0 degrees right? Yeah? No, only under certain set of circumstances – if it is at sea level, it boils at 100 degrees – at sea level. But take it to 3000 meters (9000 feet), it boils lower. So it is dependent on altitude and it depends on the purity of the water: put salt in the water, it doesn’t freeze at 0. All kinds of things are concerned in the ‘truth’.
Absolute truth is different than that. It is absolutely true always; it is not dependent on any other circumstances to make it true.
We are absolutely spirit souls; we are not our material bodies. That is an absolute truth that never changes. I, the spirit soul, can enter into and do enter into many, many different bodies. This lifetime we are in human bodies, in this particular body we are in a male body, a female body, we have our certain set of parents etc., etc., whatever our situation is right now. That is who we are relatively as far as our body goes but the absolute identity is I am spirit soul. Next lifetime I may wind up in a dog body so now my external identity is a dog, but my eternal, true identity is the same, a spirit soul. I am not any different than before. Last lifetime I was in the human body, I am the same; I have just got on a different suit of clothes. I changed clothes, now I am looking like a dog and on and on it goes.
So as an absolute person we need to know the absolute truth. If I don’t know the absolute truth, I will never be free. “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
What is freedom? Again that is part of the illusion. “Freedom is the freedom to enjoy your senses uncontrollably, unrestricted. Anything you want to do, any sense desire you have, any desire in your mind that comes up, pursue it and therefore if you can do that without anybody getting in your way, you can be happy.” That is ‘freedom’. This is what people fight for. “I want to be able to do what I want to do, when I want to do it and how I want to do it.” That is considered freedom.
That is not freedom, that is bondage. We are more free in this way than ever before, there are fewer restrictions on our sensual activities than ever before. Is everybody feeling happy and satisfied? No, less so than ever before. In fact, the symptoms are the opposite, we are more depressed, have more anxiety, there is more mental disturbance, there is more crazy acts of violence, all kinds of things which are symptoms that this person is not happy, something is wrong here.
The ultimate proof is that more and more people are committing suicide than ever before. Suicide is the extreme end of unhappiness where everything is so bad that you just decide, “I want out of here, I want to give it all up.” So you kill ‘yourself’, the body, that is part of the illusion. “I am this body therefore I can end all of these problems and miseries and depressions and anxieties by killing my body, which is me, in my misunderstanding.” So I do.
More and more people are taking this ‘escape’; this is their new solution, their new freedom. “I’ll just liberate myself by killing myself.” On the planet today every 40 seconds a person commits suicide, every 40 seconds! That means since I started talking many people have taken their own life.
But we are not the body; they kill the body and they don’t die, they are still them. Now they’ve got all their previous problems but now they have another whole set of problems. They’ve got the karma that comes with that, the reaction. All of these attempts to be happy are only creating more and more future suffering as a result of our bad karma. This is the law of material nature; we cannot change this. But we don’t know these things because nobody teaches us, nobody teaches us what we should know and everybody teaches what you don’t really need to know. It’s all backwards.
So we are on this wheel of birth and death, going around and around and around, many lifetimes and many different situations, but basically it is all the same. Freedom means I get off of the wheel of birth and death; that is freedom. Freedom from taking another material birth, freedom from being under the control of the laws of material nature, freedom from false identity, freedom from all of this illusion, freedom from all pain, suffering, hardship and death. Going to another world… there is another world and that world is called the spiritual world.