The Material State of Being

What we think and do in the Material State determines our other states of being

Thanks to that MIT study, and being made aware of the hidden costs of getting help from AI, I’ve finished this piece all by myself. :-) Er, actually I’ve done this standing on the shoulders of my spiritual master, His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. The Material and Spiritual States are based on the Bhagavad-gita and Srimad Bhagavatam. The middle section, about the Mental State of Being, is a bit of philosophical speculation, so I’ll be happy to hear your comments on that, as well as any comments you may have on any of it.

But I’m not an artist, and don’t want to become one, so I’m happy to let Dall-E create images for me (but for all of it's so-called intelligence, it doesn’t spell very well!)

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Dall-e creation. Prompted to create an Art Deco image with the text of today’s post .

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The very first step of spiritual growth is to learn that we are spiritual beings, or rather, spiritual energy. This requires some explanation due to the fact that the word “spiritual” is likely the most user-defined word in the English language. But rather than using a user-defined definition I’ll use the definition explained in the Bhagavad-gita As It Is. The Gita, as it is commonly known, is the fundamental text of spiritual literature, and was spoken by Krishna, the Supreme Spiritual Being, God, some 5,000 years ago when He was present on this earth. There Krishna explains that the spiritual energy is eternal, ever-existing, and primeval. The spiritual energy, commonly known as the soul, thus has always been existing. That is, you and I, are the soul, or the self, or spiritual energy, and we have been around for a very long time. This is not our first rodeo, as they say. Since we are spiritual energy we can understand what spiritual energy is by studying ourselves and our nature. Doing this, some of the characteristics we might come up with are that the spiritual energy is both conscious and personal. Consciousness means self-awareness. Beyond self-awareness we also have personality, or ego, which is a display of our uniquely individual nature. As spiritual persons we also experience emotions – love, desire, empathy, sympathy, likes and dislikes, and so on. And since we are eternal we will never die. We will never experience extinction, or what some ignorantly refer to as death.

The next step of our spiritual journey is to understand that we can exist in three states, or planes of existence: material, mental, and spiritual. Another way of saying that is that we can live in the material world, the mental world, or the spiritual world. Each of these worlds provides a body suitable to its nature – a material body, which we now inhabit, a mental body that we also now inhabit, and a perfect spiritual body suitable for our activities in the spiritual world, known as Vaikuntha, a place free from all anxiety.

This is an introduction to these three states of being, but this post will consider only an explanation of life in the material world. The Mental and Spiritual states will be for future posts.

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The Material State of Being

The material world is a combination of both material energy and spiritual energy. Material energy provides the body, or vehicle, that the living spiritual being uses to experience an unlimited variety of sense pleasures, whether in the sky, in the seas, on the earth and under the earth. The Vedas inform us that there are 8,400,000 species of life: aquatics, trees and plants, insects and reptiles, birds, quadrupeds, and surprisingly perhaps, 400,000 species of human beings. Before achieving human birth the jiva will transmigrate through all of the lower 8 million species, one after another in the process of spiritual evolution. As the bodies change consciousness gradually expands. “Species” means a unique manifestation of consciousness, therefore among each species there is a gradation of consciousness. You’ve often thought that your cat or dog, or even your horse, is a person because it has emotions and a desire for affection and recognition. And you are correct. It is a spiritual being that can express its personal nature to the extent its body allows.

You see, the body acts as a filter of consciousness, and consciousness is adjusted for each to allow it to enjoy the material energy in unique ways: fish enjoy swimming in the sea, birds flying through the air, and worms tunneling through the earth, each having a unique experience that is not available to other species. Human beings have full consciousness, free will and developed intelligence. Along with free will comes responsibility, and thus humans are subject to the karmic reaction of their deeds. Thus they can lift themselves up to higher and higher consciousness, and ultimately self-realization, or they can degrade themselves to being less than animals. The best use of human life is to realize our actual nature as spiritual beings, and to transfer ourselves to the spiritual world. Only humans can escape the material world of repeated birth and death to the spiritual world.

The material body is a composite of all three aspects: the spiritual self, enveloped by a body of subtle material energies – mind, intelligence, and ego, which make up the mental body, which is then enveloped by a physical body of material energy. The type of material body we now have was determined by our mental state at the end of our last incarnation, allowing us to continue our material experience from where we left off in the previous life. The mental body is the “blueprint” on which the physical body manifests, and acts as an interface between the spiritual being and the physical body and world. The senses of the physical body bring sensations to the mind, which are then experienced by the self.

The living spiritual being identifies strongly with both the body and mind, but this identification is temporary and illusory, because we are not the body. This identification with the body is called Maya, which means illusion.

The conscious experience/consciousness is fluid and changes depending on our contact with the material energy. Aspects of the material energy can elevate the consciousness, and other aspects degrade it. These qualities of the material energy are called gunas, of which there are three: goodness, passion and ignorance. Goodness elevates consciousness resulting in a peacefulness, happiness a sense of well-being and satisfaction. Ignorance degrades consciousness resulting in laziness, foolishness, crime, intoxication and destructive behaviors. The influence of passion inclines one to productive activity, the desire for gain, winning, successful accomplishment, prestige, recognition, honor, and interestingly, dissatisfaction regardless of how much is achieved.

The influence of the gunas are quite subtle, only by regular and repeated contact with a guna will their effect be noticeable. Thus it is our daily actions that determine the person we become.

Significantly, we can use the freedom we have on the material plane to determine our future state in both the mental plane, and the spiritual plane. Understanding how our thoughts and actions on the material plane can, and will, affect those future states of being, gives us a great advantage in charting a course for future happiness.