The duty of the sane

Prabhupada had had an acquaintance in Allahabad who was only fifty years old when he was on his deathbed. The man had desperately implored the doctor to let him live four more years so he could execute his unfinished plans.

"What can the doctor do?" Prabhupada asked. "That is not possible, sir. You must get out!"

To the devotees' amusement, he then described the misery a child experiences when he has to go to school.

At least I was like that," Srila Prabhupada said and laughed. "I never wanted to go to school. And my father was very kind. He said, 'So why are you not going to school?' I would say, 'I will go tomorrow.' He would say, 'All right.' But my mother was very careful. Perhaps, if my mother would not have been a little strict, I would not have gotten any education. My father was very lenient. So she used to force me. One man would take me to school. Actually, children do not want to go to school; they want to play. Against their will, they have to go to school.

"So, you study life. From the beginning of this body, within the womb of the mother, it is simply troublesome. Against my will, so many distresses are there. Then as you grow, the distresses grow and grow."

He described how miseries disturb us constantly, and Srila Prabhupada said that a sane man's duty is to stop accepting a material body.

"Now realize that you are changing your condition of distress and happiness, being forced to accept some kind of gross and subtle body. That is the cause of your pains and pleasures. And if you get out of this gross and subtle body and remain in your original, spiritual body, then you are free from these pains and pleasures."