Today is Moksha Ekadasi. It is cold (-6°C) and snowing heavily. I spend the day in the apartment that Vrajanandana Prabhu has rented for us (for just two days!) here in Tolyatti.
In the seven o' clock in the evening, we drive through heavy snow-filled streets to the auditorium at the Dvorets Kultury (Palace of Culture) where I give another lecture to a small crowd of about twenty people who have braved the cold and the snow.
I talk about the nature of the soul and how she becomes ensnared in this material world. I explain how it is the propensity to enjoy — the desire to exploit the environment and other living entities (jivo jivasya jivanam) — that shapes our consciousness and forces us to continually accept new and appropriate bodies in an environment conducive to that enjoying mood or mentality.
In other words, our consciousness has brought us here to this world, or, to again use Sripad Bhakti Sudhir Goswami Maharaj's brilliant scientific aphorism: "the body is the biological expression of the soul's delusion."
After the program, I have a long talk with Vrajanandana Prabhu (the leader here in Tolyatti) and Dinadayal Prabhu because we have to leave early in the morning for the final city on our current tour, and I will not see them again before I leave...
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