80
Rāja-vidyā: The King of Knowledge
our minds, we accept material existence as happiness. A dog or hog cannot understand what kind of miserable life he is passing. He actually thinks that he is enjoying life, and this is called the covering or illusive influence of material energy. On the Bowery, there are so many drunkards lying in the street, and they're all thinking, "We are enjoying life." But those who are passing them by are thinking, "Oh how miserable they are." That is the way of the illusory energy. We may be in a miserable condition, but we accept it thinking that we are very happy. This is called ignorance. But when one is awakened to knowledge, he thinks, "Oh, I am not happy. I want freedom, but there is no freedom. I don't want to die, but there is death. I don't want to grow old, but there is old age. I don't want diseases, but there are diseases." These are the major problems of human existence, but we ignore them and concentrate on solving very minor problems. We consider economic development to be the most important thing, forgetting how long we shall live here in this material world. Economic development or no economic development, at the end of sixty or a hundred years our life will be finished. Even if we accumulate a million dollars, we must leave it all behind when we leave this body. We need to come to understand that in the material world whatever we are doing is being defeated by the influence of material nature.
We want freedom, and we want to travel all over the world and all over the universe. Indeed, that is our right as spirit soul. The spirit soul in  Bhagavad-gītā  is called  sarva-gataḥ , which means that he has the