36
Beyond Birth and Death
This material world is certified by Śrī Kṛṣṇa, the creator, as  duḥkhālayam —full of miseries. How then can we make it comfortable? Is it possible to make this world comfortable by the so-called advancement of science? No, this is not possible. As a result, we do not even wish to know what these miseries are. The miseries, as stated before, are birth, old age, disease and death, and because we cannot make a solution to them we try to set them aside. Science has no power to solve these miseries that are always giving us trouble. Instead they divert our attention into making spaceships or atomic bombs. The solution to these problems is given here in  Bhagavad-gītā : if one attains to Kṛṣṇa's platform he does not have to return again to this earth of birth and death. We should try to understand that this place is full of miseries. It takes a certain amount of developed consciousness to understand this. Cats and dogs and hogs cannot understand that they are suffering. Man is called a rational animal, but his rationality is being used to further his animalistic propensities instead of finding out how to get liberation from this miserable condition. Here Kṛṣṇa explicitly states that one who comes to Him will never be reborn to suffer miseries again. Those great souls who come to Him have attained the highest perfection of life which alleviates the living entity from the suffering of conditional existence.
One of the differences between Kṛṣṇa and an ordinary being is that an ordinary entity can be only in one place at a time, but Kṛṣṇa can be everywhere in the universe and yet in His own abode, simultane-