How transcendental knowledge can break the system

Most live under the illusion that material life is good, there is no God and everything ends with death. However, as they get more knowledge about what is outside this conception can change.

We all learn about the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain in school. It may look distant from our reality, but there was a time when the world was divided into two separate blocks, and there was very little communication between them.

There were many problems in the Soviet Union. In some cases, people were relatively happy by getting enough to eat and to dress, but frequently they would live in quite difficult conditions. There was no freedom whatsoever, and people could be sent to gulags in Siberia for the smallest offense. Culture and religion were repressed, the economy was strictly controlled by the state, and people often could not even choose where to work. It was not a good place to live. Mother Mandakini, who was the first European devotee to preach behind the Iron Curtain after the visit of Srila Prabhupada, describes how Moscow in the 1970s was a gray city, where people would walk looking to the ground, and distrust even close neighbors.

Still, however, the Soviet Union worked relatively well until the late 1960s based on ideology. People were told that they lived in a great society, that communism was the greatest invention in the history of humanity, and so on. It worked well enough for the government to keep people under control and keep them motivated enough to work.

However, starting in the early 1970s, the system started to crack. There was no open rebellion, but people gradually became more and more resistant to this manipulation. People started not wanting to work so hard, often just doing the minimum to get by. They started becoming more interested in things from outside and less interested in communism. Many started living double lives, being exemplary communists during the day (convincing enough to maintain their posts) but something else the rest of the time. Many started to silently work against the regime, basically sabotaging it from the inside.

This accelerated in the 1980s, up to the point that the system became so dysfunctional that it couldn't even produce basic necessities, which, in turn, led to even more dissatisfaction, culminating in collapse.

The determining factor for these changes was knowledge. Up to the late 1960s, people didn't have much knowledge about the outside world, and thus the government was able to convince most that they were living in a prosperous country. Starting from the 1970s, however, more and more information about the outside started pouring in, and people started understanding that the emperor was naked. As this influx of information increased, dissatisfaction grew, and as a result,t the system gradually collapsed.

Something similar can happen in the whole world. Right now, most live under the illusion that material life is good, that there is no God, and everything ends with death, but as they get more knowledge about what is outside this conception can change. When we take it into perspective, we can better understand why Srila Prabhupada insisted so much on the distribution of books with transcendental knowledge.

He explains that on Raja Vidya (ch. 7): "By engaging in the transcendental service of Kṛṣṇa, we actually get out of the cycle of birth and death. But because the fire of knowledge is not burning in our minds, we accept material existence as happiness. A dog or hog cannot understand what kind of miserable life he is passing. He actually thinks he is enjoying life, and this is called the covering or illusory influence of material energy."

There is a famous story of when Indra, the king of heaven, was cursed to fall to Earth and become a hog. Because he lost his knowledge, he became attached to the life of a hog and was not willing to go back to his post, even when Brahma came personally to take him back.

In our original identity as pure souls, each of us is extremely powerful. However, due to the influence of material energy, we forget about it, and deprived of knowledge, we become happy in living a miserable existence in this world. However, as we become acquainted with transcendental knowledge, we start to understand things better and look for a way out.

As Srila Prabhupada comments, "That is the way of the illusory energy. We may be in a miserable condition, but we accept it, thinking that we are very happy. This is called ignorance. But when one is awakened to knowledge, he thinks, “Oh, I am not happy. I want freedom, but there is no freedom. I don’t want to die, but there is death. I don’t want to grow old, but there is old age. I don’t want diseases, but there are diseases.”

Knowledge is the way to "break the system". As people understand that they don't live in paradise, they start looking for ways out. Some will just want to immediately stop cooperating with the system, with some even becoming revolutionaries who can spread the message to larger audiences. Others may become so-called exemplary communists, who pretend to perform their duties, while in reality working against the regime, while others may become sleeping agents, who continue living their lives but keep this knowledge in the back of their minds and manifest it in due time. As these people increase in number, their collective weight can bring down the whole materialistic system, with wonderful results.

As Srila Prabhupada comments: "Once we are liberated from material conditioning we can become very powerful. Actually we have no idea how powerful we are as spiritual sparks. Instead we are very much satisfied staying on this earth and sending up a few spaceships, thinking that we have become greatly advanced in material science. We spend millions and millions of dollars constructing spaceships without knowing that we have the ability to travel wherever we want, free of charge."