Srila Gurudeva: Any weapon cannot kill the soul. Any weapon can only touch this material body. Also, water cannot touch the soul. Air cannot touch it and fire cannot burn it. Anything of this world, anything cannot touch the soul. The soul is here in our heart. The jiva, the soul, and also the Supersoul, God, both are here in our heart. But we don’t have the transcendental eyes to see this. We see that a man is dying, but we cannot see the soul when it leaves his body and that body becomes senseless. Scientists have done so many things. They should know what leaves the body when a man dies, but they cannot do anything about this.
Krsna is telling Arjuna, “You are saying that, ‘I will kill my relatives,’ but you cannot touch that atma and soul by your weapons. So how can you kill them? The soul is eternal, so they cannot be killed. You may say that, ‘I have killed their bodies,’ but the body is always dead. The body has no sense, no intelligence, nothing. It only made up of earth, air, water, fire, and ether. This body is only dead matter. The soul is eternal and so they will live forever. Anyone cannot kill them. You cannot even touch them, what to speak of killing them. So you should know that the soul is eternal, that it is the part and parcel of the Supreme Godhead. You cannot kill the soul.”
Krsna again began to explain that there are two kinds of souls. One is covered by maya and they are called a conditioned soul. Another kind is not bound by maya and they are called a liberated soul. All souls in this world are conditioned. We don’t know what is inside this body and what is the soul and how this body is only matter. We cannot even see our own eyes. We cannot see anything. So how can we know who we are and who the Supreme Personality of Godhead is who has created this world? Those who are not knowing all these things, they are conditioned souls. We are all conditioned souls. But there are many gradations of conditioned souls.
Some have some inclination towards God. They want to know God. Then there are those who don’t want to know God. They are simply happy in this world, thinking only of themselves. Consuming so much wine, flesh, meat, eggs, and drinking and smoking so much. They don’t care for God or to understand who they are and what will happen to them in the future. They are like donkeys and pigs and hogs. They are like animals. Animals cannot know all these things. Anyone may take any animal to the slaughterhouse and one by one they are going to be killed. But if some grass is given to them, then they will fight for that grass and that is why today we are fighting over so many things. We are thinking that we are the supreme controllers, “We should take this and that.” For this we are fighting amongst ourselves like animals. One party is invading one party and another one is fighting with another party only for some insignificant grass. But we do not know that we are all going to die.
[Spoken by Srila Gurudeva on December 18th, 1998, Bali, published as part of the Bhakta Bandhav Anthology, Volume 24]