A body devoid of divine strength is equivalent to dust.(SSB 1974,p. 5)
To dream is just a play of one’s own mind. To be awake is again a manifestation of one’s own mind. Both these things are untrue. Man, unable to recognise this truth, mistakes truth for untruth and untruth, for truth. Truly this human body is one of ‘ananda’(bliss) and has been given to us in order that we may have the vision of the Paramatma. The main task of man is to recognise the secret and the truth behind life. We are wasting our time like a man does when he cuts out sandalwood for burning and using it as coal. With a golden pot we are trying to cook something, which is very inferior. The body that has been given to us for search of truth is being used for inferior objectives. Truly, we have to search for and find a precious stone in dust. A precious stone cannot be found on the top of a tree. In the same manner, the pearls of wisdom can be found only by searching for them in the human man body which is just dust. Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return.(SSB 1977, pp. 248-249)
Man is mortal; dust he is and to dust returneth.(SSS Vol.9, p. 45)
Our tradition has been that pregnant women should listen to only sacred and good stories. It is customary that as the pregnancy reached five months, recitation of sacred stories and festive celebrations were arranged. Unfortunately, today, it has become the practice among pregnant women to see many cinemas. In order to give her satisfaction, the people in the house would take her to two or three cinemas a day. Looking at the immoral pictures which have no good characters in them, the babies in the womb will also get such ideas. The young baby acquires such bad ideas even in the womb of the mother and as he grows older, he begins to add on to these bad qualities and grow from bad to worse. Unfortunately, pictures, which are intended to extol the sacred traditions, have become rare and the young people, not knowing what to do, go and see these bad pictures. If you go back into history and look at the sacredness of the women in India you will realise their greatness. Instead of learning from the sacred history of the great women in the country, we put our women for sale in the streets of the country. The culture and traditions of our country were such that they have protected the sacredness of our women all through the years that have gone by and such culture is being neglected and forgotten by us.(SSB 1976, p. 103)
Here is an episode from Mahabharata. Once, when his wife, Subhadra, was enceinte, Arjuna, not knowing that the child she was bearing was the future hero Abhimanyu, began telling her all about war-fare and the Padmavyuha, an intricate type of military formation. Krishna came in at that time and pointed out to Arjuna that the child Subhadra was carrying was being influenced by what he was telling her. It is an ancient practice in Bharat to relate to pregnant women stories about heros and saints so that the child in the womb may be influenced by the vibrations produced by such sublime stories and the thoughts produced in the mother. The ancient Rishis knew this truth. No wonder that the children born under such conditions had noble and heroic virtues. It was a common practice to relate stories of exemplary children like Markandeya, Dhruva and Prahlada. They provided the inspiration and ideal for the children of those days.
What do we find today? Pregnant women are engaged in seeing Television, Cinemas and other deleterious media which play up crime and sex. The result is the children who are born develop undesirable tendencies.
What Krishna told Arjuna might have been dismissed as meaningless previously. But today, scientists in the west are realizing that what was said in the Mahabharata is true. The Institute of Child Health and Human Development, attached to the California University in America, has been conducting studies in this Institute. Anthony Casper after various experiments, came to the conclusion that what Krishna had said was true, though our ill-equipped minds cannot fully understand the profound truth underlying Krishna’s statement. Anthony Casper announced the findings on 3rd January 1984 at a conference of scientists.Casper’s experiments showed that food taken by the pregnant mother, the thoughts she had and the words listened to had their impact on the child she was carrying. (SSS Vol.18, pp. 150-151)