themselves to self-interested action. Under the influence of passion, acts cause distress, and from passion is born greed.

Those dominated by passion remain on the middle planets, terrestrial.

Ignorance, know that it causes the bewilderment of all beings. This guna causes madness, indolence and sleep, which enchains the embodied soul. It attaches the being to madness. When ignorance rises, then darkness, inertia, insanity and delusion are born. He who dies of ignorance is reborn in the world of beasts. Under the influence of ignorance, actions lead to foolishness. From ignorance is born madness, foolishness and delusion.

Those enveloped in ignorance go mad. Because their situation throws them into distress, they take refuge in intoxicants, and thus sink further into ignorance. Very dark is their future. They fall into the infernal worlds.

Sometimes dominating virtue and ignorance, passion wins, and sometimes virtue overcomes passion and ignorance. Still other times, ignorance in turn overthrows virtue and passion. Thus, never between the gunas does not cease the struggle for reign.

When one sees, in any act, that nothing escapes the three gunas, but that I, the Supreme Lord, transcend them, then one can know My nature spiritual. When the incarnate being is able to go beyond the three gunas, he frees himself from birth, death, old age, as well as the sufferings that they engender. He can therefore enjoy ambrosia, in this very life.

Souls conditioned by material nature engage in activities which lead them to put on various kinds of body over the course of their successive lives. In the material universe, these souls are thus entitled to various punishments and rewards. Their meritorious deeds can elevate them to the higher planets, where they can join the ranks of the many celestial beings. Their reprehensible acts can on the contrary precipitate them towards various infernal planets to suffer more there the torments of the material life.

Once upon a time, kings punished criminals by plunging them into a river, then bringing them to the surface for a breath of air, after which they plunged them back underwater again. Material nature rewards or punishes beings in an analogous way, by plunging them into the waters of suffering or by extirpating them for a time. The rise to the higher planets (Edenic, paradisiacal) or to a higher standard of life is never permanent, it is always followed by a new submersion. Thus material existence is perpetuated. We are sometimes promoted to higher planetary systems, Edenic, paradisiacal, sometimes thrown into hellish living conditions. Let us all listen to God, and do what He teaches for our good.