Guest (6): Prabhupāda, can you explain about taking a spiritual body after death?
Śyāmasundara: Can you explain about taking a spiritual body after death?
Prabhupāda: After death you take another body. Do you understand it? Similarly, you take spiritual body. What is the difficulty? Can you understand that you take another body?
Guest (6): Yes.
Prabhupāda: Then why do you don't understand another, spiritual body? What is the difficulty? You accept another body after death. Dehāntaram. So instead of accepting a material body, you accept a spiritual body. That's all. What is the difficulty to understand? Just like you have accepted now this body, American body or English body. You cannot say: "I have an Indian body" or "Chinese body" or "Russian body." In the same way, after giving up this body you can accept spiritual body. What is the difficulty to understand? There is no difficulty.
Just like if you take birth in the sun planet, you have to take a body of fire. There are different planets, and the climatic influence are different, but here the scientists, they are calculating from their own point of view. They do not know that God's creation there are different types of body, different types of atmosphere. Just like the fish, they are living in the water. But you take out the fish on the land, immediately it dies. So your body, you have got a particular type of body. If you are thrown in the water, you immediately die. But you can understand that within water there is life, on land there is life, there is body.
So when you go to a certain different atmosphere, you have to accept a different type of body. Similarly, when you go to the spiritual world, you'll accept a spiritual body. What is the difficulty to understand? Tyaktvā dehaṁ punar janma naiti mām eti (BG 4.9). One should be qualified to enter into certain association, atmosphere. That . . . if you spiritually qualify yourself, then after giving up this body you get a spiritual body and you enter in the spiritual world. That's all. It is very easy. You make yourself spiritualized in this life.
That example is . . . just like you put one iron rod in the fire: it becomes warmer, warmer, warmer, and at the end it becomes red hot. At that time it is no longer iron rod, it is fire. You touch that iron rod anywhere, it will burn. Similarly, by spiritual activities you can make this body spiritual so that there will be no more material activities. That is spiritual body. Just like in this body we are training our boys and girls . . .
They are young boys and girls, but they are no more interested to go to the restaurant, hotel or nightclub or cinema or dancing party. They are simply interested to Kṛṣṇa consciousness. How they have given up all these young men's demand? How it is possible? You can see. So when your material activities are stopped, that is spiritual body.
Indian man (6): It is written in Gītā the soul never dies. When the soul does not die, where does it go after that?
Prabhupāda: He goes as he likes. Yes. He can go to hell, he can go to heaven, he can go to God, he can go to China. Anywhere he likes. (laughter)
Lady devotee: Śrīla Prabhupāda, what does it mean practically to surrender unto Kṛṣṇa?
Prabhupāda: Yes. Surrender to Kṛṣṇa means you have to accept things which is favorable for Kṛṣṇa consciousness. Just like we restrict our students, no illicit sex, no gambling, no meat-eating, no intoxication. If you surrender to this process, that is surrender to Kṛṣṇa. Is it clear? If you don't surrender, there is no surrender, you are not surrendered soul. Chant sixteen rounds, and if you follow, that is surrendering to Kṛṣṇa. Don't take anything except kṛṣṇa-prasādam.
That is surrendering to Kṛṣṇa. So many we have got. So if you surrender to these principles, that means you surrender unto Kṛṣṇa. Just like a good citizen surrenders to the state. What does it mean? He abides by the law. That's all. He does not do anything which is against the will of the state. That's all. So you surrender to the principles; then you surrender to Kṛṣṇa. That's all.