Extracted from an article "With Krsna in the Peaceable Kıngdom"

By Ravindra Svarupa Das

The material body of every living being is animated by a spiritual soul, who is the eternal offspring of Krsna. Each souls individual history of good or bad deeds causes him to become fastened into a higher or lower body, yet all souls remain in essence equal as children of God. God never forgets them, and a godly person, Krsna tells us, sees all animate beings as spritually equal sparks of the divine (Bg.5.18).

But if we forgt God and consequently develop eclipsed material vision, the transcen- dental unity of the eludes us. Once we have become estranged from Krsna, we become estranged from all other living beings-even those of our own kind. thesymptom of our divorce from God is our inability to sustain peaceful, harmonious, loving realtions with others. We incessantly make war upon our fellow humans, and we wantonly prey upon innocent animals, needlessly slaughtering them for food. At the same time we feel a need to rectify all our reationships—within our own families and communities, among races and nations, and between humans and subhumans.

Yet the disorder that has invaded all our relations is a symptom of one central enduring dislocation—our severance from God. Only when that is repaired will the disruption between ourselves and all other beings be healed.