“Build Your Nations on the Spiritual Platform”
Śrīla Prabhupāda gives an address at the University of Nairobi: “You are trying to develop yourselves, so please develop spiritually, for spiritual development is sound development. Don’t imitate the Americans and Europeans, who are living like cats and dogs. . . . The atomic bomb is already there, and as soon as the next war breaks out, all their skyscrapers and everything else will be finished. Try to understand this from the real viewpoint of human life, the spiritual viewpoint. . . .”
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for kindly coming here to participate in this meeting for spreading Kṛṣṇa consciousness. The Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement is trying to bring human society to the point where everyone’s life can become successful. The subject today is the real meaning of human life. We are trying to instruct the entire world about this meaning.
Human life is attained after many, many millions of years of evolution. We should remember that there are 8,400,000 species of life according to the  Padma Purāṇa . Life began with the aquatics, for we can understand from Vedic literature that at the beginning of creation the entire planet was merged in water. This material world is composed of five gross elements—earth, water, fire, air, and ether. Besides these there are three subtle elements—mind, intelligence, and ego. Behind these curtains is the spirit soul, which is covered by these eight elements. This information is given in the  Bhagavad-gītā .
Human beings are not the only living entities to have a spirit soul. We are all spirit souls—beasts, birds, reptiles, insects, trees, plants, aquatics, and so on. The spirit soul is simply covered by different dresses, just as some of you are dressed in white clothes, some in green, some in red, etc. But we are not concerned with the dress; we are concerned with you as spirit soul. Thus it is said in the  Bhagavad-gītā  [5.18]:
vidyā-vinaya-sampanne brāhmaṇe gavi hastini śuni caiva śvapāke ca paṇḍitāḥ sama-darśinaḥ
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