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Questions by the Sages
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strive to establish a competitionless society with God in the center. The contemporary socialist's conception of a competitionless society is artificial because in the socialist state there is competition for the post of dictator. From the point of view of the  Vedas  or from the point of view of common human activities, sense gratification is the basis of material life. There are three paths mentioned in the  Vedas . One involves fruitive activities to gain promotion to better planets. Another involves worshiping different demigods for promotion to the planets of the demigods, and another involves realizing the Absolute Truth and His impersonal feature and becoming one with Him.
The impersonal aspect of the Absolute Truth is not the highest. Above the impersonal feature is the  Paramātmā  feature, and above this there is the personal feature of the Absolute Truth or  Bhagavān .  Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam  gives information about the Absolute Truth in His personal feature. It is higher than impersonalist literatures and higher than the  jñāna-kāṇḍa  division of the  Vedas . It is even higher than the  karma-kāṇḍa  division, and even higher than the  upaṣana-kāṇḍa  division because it recommends the worship of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa. In the  karma-kāṇḍa , there is competition to reach heavenly planets for better sense gratification, and there is similar competition in the  jñāna-kāṇḍa  and the  upaṣana-kāṇḍa . The  Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam  is superior to all of these because it aims at the Supreme Truth which is the substance or the root of all categories. From  Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam  one can come to know the substance as well as the categories. The substance is the Absolute Truth, the Supreme Lord, and all emanations are relative forms of energy.
Nothing is apart from the substance, but at the same time the energies are different from the substance. This conception is not contradictory.  Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam  explicitly promulgates this simultaneously one and different philosophy of the  Vedānta-sūtra , which begins with the " jan-mādy asya "  sūtra .
This knowledge of the energy of the Lord being simultaneously one and different from the Lord is an answer to the mental speculators' attempt to establish the energy as the Absolute. When this knowledge is factually understood, one sees the conceptions of monism and dualism to be imperfect. Development of this transcendental consciousness grounded in the conception of simultaneously one and different leads one immediately to the stage of freedom from the threefold miseries. The threefold miseries are 1.) those miseries which arise from the mind and body, 2.) those miseries inflicted by other living beings, and 3.) those miseries arising from natural catastrophes over which one has no control.  Śrīmad-