HH KKS: Fear immediately begins as soon as we are separated from Krishna…thus all the living beings are like that …on the one hand trying to enjoy the material world and on the other hand living in fear and making arrangements for their security and in this way we calculate, we calculate things that look favourable for enjoyment or things that could possibly threaten our security……and we manouvere and we manipulate, we somehow or other try to stay in a favourable position …safe …..yet getting the maximium enjoyment. We forget the long term vision , we forget the big picture, we forget how we get caught up in a series of lives that bind us in the material energy and rather we become absorbed in the moment.
There are two famous Bengali drawings that kind of remind us of the fleeting nature of material pleasure ; one is about a frog in the rainy season …and a snake is crawling up from behind and captures the frog and when snakes swallow the frog they do not chew , they swallow the whole frog, so the head of the frog was still sticking out of the mouth of the snake …just then a fly comes by and the tongue of the frog was just whusshhh…shooting out to catch the little fly! The snake is representing time actually…and as time is swallowing us, still we keep on capturing the material flies of sense enjoyment.
Another famous drawing is of a man who fell in a hole in the ground and grabbed a root and was hanging on the root and down at the bottom there was a serpent with a gaping moputh, cobra… huge mouth, wide open, ready to catch him and as soon as he would fall. At the top at the edge of the hole there was a tiger, staring over the edge, looking at him and so there was no hope …no hope, if he was to fall down he would be bitten by the snake and if he would somehow or other climb up to the top the tiger would eat him ….and the root was slowly coming out of the wall just then…something, a drop fell on top of his face, then another drop …what is this?…It was sweet it was honey …so he moved his head a little and caught another drop ..and another drop and another drop …enjoying the pleasures of the honey….So this is also a famous drawing.
So these two drawings are sort of depicting what is going on in sense gratification and it shows how it’s …how it’s doomed actually… so the materialist is simply wasting his time with pursuing sense gratification ..he’s not making any real progress…(More in part 3)