The Vedas say, "Wake up! Wake up! Realize the importance of the human form of life!" Let's forget these temporary things and move on to the real thing.
If you're not familiar with the corona virus, I don't know which planet you've been living on for the past several months but this virus has become a big deal across the global front. Countries are shutting down their borders, setting curfews, enforcing fines and patrolling the streets. Grocery stores are emptied as soon as they are filled and people are panicked, stowed away in their various residencies. The world is on lock-down.
It's so much hassle, stress and anxiety over a little piece of genome wrapped in a protein. We have, however, a far bigger, more worrying and deadlier disease accompanying us as we speak, and it's fever is ever increasing.
That disease is called the skin disease. Not a skin disease, the skin disease. The sickness of our perception that we think, "I'm white","I'm Black","I'm American","I'm a Muslim" or "I'm a father." The illness of thinking that we are the body. That disease is far more dangerous and infects incomparably more people than this little nonsense corona.
The disease of the skin pushes one man to hate another based on the outwardly appearance while ignoring the soul within. Krishna, the Supreme lord and source of all wisdom, says in his Bhagavad-gita:
dehino 'smin yatha dehe
kaumaram yauvanam jara
tatha dehantara-praptir
dhiras tatra na muhyati
The body and it's subsequent identities pertaining to the land of birth, religious upbringing and familial ties are all subject to change along with the material elements of the body, so what is the use of identifying with them? They come and go, and all that ever remains is the conscious observer within the material tabernacle, yet it is that part of our existence we unfailingly neglect. If mankind can realize his position as a spiritual particle of the supreme lord, the inebrities of material differences in skin color, religious identification and the land of birth will become redundant. When man learns to see that what he actually is, the unchanging eternally spiritual consciousness within the body, he will see clearly that every man is his fellow man, without artificially trying for such vision on the platform of the body, which consequently results in his killing of the cow and similar animals while claiming universal brotherhood.
This disease of the outward layers keeps man thinking that, "He is my enemy" to everyone who differs ever so slightly in tone of the flesh. The cause of so much conflict and strife is due to a poor fund of knowledge concerning the identify of the living entity. When he understands that he is the part and parcel of the complete whole, the supreme person, Sri Krsna, then he will realize that all other creatures are also part and parcels of the whole. The real interest is not to consider the differences of the body, and therefore serve the false object of service, the body, but to use that body in the blissful service of the complete whole, much like a finger is in it's healthy state, along with all other parts of the body, when it serves the whole body.
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