From Srila Prabhupada's purport to SB 2.5.24
Materialistic ego, or the sense of identification with matter, is
grossly self-centered, devoid of clear knowledge of the existence of
God. And this self-centered egoism of the materialistic living entities
is the cause of their being conditioned by the other paraphernalia and
continuing their bondage of material existence.
By the will of the Lord, therefore, the
impersonalist, even after knowing the Brahman and Paramātmā features of
the Lord, remains ignorant of His eternal personal feature as
ever-existent Nārāyaṇa, transcendental to all material creation.
The
cause of such gross ignorance is constant engagement by the
materialistic man in the matter of artificially increasing material
demands. To realize the Supreme Personality of Godhead, one has to
purify the materialistic senses by devotional service.
dravya sakti, kriya sakti and jnana sakti
The mode of
goodness, or the brahminical culture recommended in the Vedic
literatures, is helpful to such spiritual realization, and thus the
jñāna-śakti stage of the conditioned soul is comparatively better than the other two stages, namely
dravya-śakti and
kriyā-śakti.
The whole material civilization is manifested by a huge accumulation of
materials, or in other words, raw materials for industrial purposes,
and the industrial enterprises (kriyā-śakti) are all due to gross
ignorance of spiritual life.
In order to rectify this great anomaly of
materialistic civilization, based on the principles of dravya-śakti and kriyā-śakti, one has to adopt the process of devotional service of the Lord by adoption of the principles of karma-yoga, mentioned in the Bhagavad-gītā (9.27) as follows:
yat karoṣi yad aśnāsi
yaj juhoṣi dadāsi yat
yat tapasyasi kaunteya
tat kuruṣva mad-arpaṇam
“O
son of Kuntī, all that you do, all that you eat, all that you offer and
give away, as well as all austerities that you may perform, should be
done as an offering unto Me.”
From Srila Prabhupada's purport to SB 2.5.30
tamas is the full display of material creation under the spell of
the darkness of ignorance. Manufacture of the “necessities of life” in
factories and workshops, excessively prominent in the Age of Kali, or in
the age of the machine, is the summit stage of the quality of darkness.
Such manufacturing enterprises by human society are in the mode of
darkness
because factually there is no necessity for the commodities
manufactured. Human society primarily requires food for subsistence,
shelter for sleeping, defense for protection, and commodities for
satisfaction of the senses.
Human civilization is meant for purifying the senses, and objects of
sense satisfaction should be supplied as much as absolutely required,
but not for aggravating artificial sensory needs. Food, shelter, defense
and sense gratification are all needs in material existence. Otherwise,
in his pure, uncontaminated state of original life, the living entity
has no such needs.
The needs are therefore artificial, and in the pure
state of life there are no such needs. As such, increasing the
artificial needs, as is the standard of material civilization, or
advancing the economic development of human society, is a sort of
engagement in darkness, without knowledge. By such engagement, human
energy is spoiled, because human energy is primarily meant for purifying
the senses in order to engage them in satisfying the senses of the
Supreme Lord
The
Vedas instruct us to get out of the existence of darkness and go forward on the path of light (
tamasi mā jyotir gama). The path of light is therefore to satisfy the senses of the Lord.
