Let us realize that the material universe is a distorted copy of the real world, the spiritual world. Those who are aware of this truth want to free themselves from this confinement. It means being totally and definitively freed from the cycle of death and repeated rebirths or reincarnations. We have no memory of our past, because the material body in which we reincarnate plunges us into forgetfulness of everything, of our true spiritual identity, and of the data relating to existential truth.

It means achieving more than liberation from personal, social, or political constraints.

It means breaking the chains that hold us prisoner to our bodies and to the conditioning of matter in this material world. We are, in reality, souls incarnated in bodies of particular matter. It is the return of the embodied being, once freed from all material conceptions of existence, to his or her natural, original, spiritual condition as the eternal servant of Krishna, God, the Supreme Personality.

The true purpose of life is to attain this liberation, and the ultimate goal is to know God as He truly is, to enter His eternal kingdom, and to remain with Him forever.

Truly, liberation is regaining one's original spiritual form. It is the return of the being, once freed from all material conceptions of existence, to his or her original spiritual condition. It is to see the chains that hold us captive to matter broken, and thus to find true freedom.

This is true resurrection.

The Five Forms of Liberation.

To pure beings who have surrendered to Krishna, the Lord grants one of these five forms of liberation, based on their feelings for Him:

Oneness with the Lord. (*)

One that allows one to live on the same planet as the Lord.

One that gives one the same bodily features as the Lord.

One that allows one to enjoy the same opulence as the Lord.

One that allows one to live in the Lord's company.

(*) In reality, the saintly being, the devotee, besides rejecting mere sensual pleasures, does not accept for himself any of these forms of liberation, least of all the first, which consists of merging into the radiance of the Lord, as desired by the impersonalists (those who claim that God is a formless Impersonal Being, such as believers on earth), theoreticians, and practitioners of meditation.

For the devotee of Krishna, merging with the Supreme Being would be worse than hell, for this form of liberation is diabolical.