My teacher, Prabhupāda, once told a story at a Rotary Club where prominent businessmen had gathered to hear about the spiritual goal of life. He told them:
Once there was an investor whose broker called about a stock that could make him wealthy. And so, the investor put all his money into the stock in the morning. By the afternoon, the broker called and said that the man had become a billionaire because the stock had risen so high. The man celebrated and held a party for his family. In the evening, the stockbroker called back and said, “I have some bad news. The stock went down to zero, you’ve lost everything.” And at home, everyone was weeping.
My teacher then told the audience that our lives are like this. Whatever material assets we develop in this lifetime, although giving some temporary sense of happiness, will all eventually be lost when we leave this world and this body. On the other hand, the wisdom literatures point out that whatever spiritual advancement we make in this life is permanent. We keep it even beyond the demise of this body. As non-material beings, we keep our spiritual assets permanently. That’s a matter of fact.
In and of themselves, material pursuits are not important. One should try to be successful in business and have harmonious relationships. However, they’re not fully satisfying if they’re divorced from a connection with our ultimate purpose in life, which is to serve the Supreme. Just as you may get assets and lose assets all in one day, at the end of one lifetime you also lose all material assets. But if you do something to advance spiritually, that is the part you keep, while the material assets will be dispersed. Therefore, success isn’t defined by accumulation of wealth, or even finding the perfect mate, but on advancing spiritually.
Ultimately, our superpowers are meant as offerings to the Supreme. When we improve ourselves so that we can not only be in harmony with the Supreme Pure, but also offer ourselves to Him in service, our life takes on higher meaning. This trumps all the other various pursuits in our life such as making a living, being a moral person, or doing good works for others, because we ultimately have nothing to do with the material world. That is, we’re only passing through–souls having a human experience, as someone aptly put it.
In the Bhagavad-gītā, Chapter 12, Kṛṣṇa mentions that those who gradually improve themselves and develop superior qualities like tolerance, satisfaction, purity, determination, etc., become very dear to him. When one becomes dear to Kṛṣṇa, one has nothing more to attain in this world, or the next. What’s more, unless our superpowers are linked in service to the Supreme, they will eventually again become contaminated by selfish desires, self-aggrandizement, and so on.
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