If we were to enter a large empty warehouse and find in the middle of the large expansive empty floor a single man sitting in a chair, hands and feet tied to the chair with tape across his eyes and mouth, with captors standing around him holding guns to his head, and if we were to open the tape upon the mouth and asked the man to speak, we would be very surprised if he said:

"I am fully in control of my environment. I know what is going on and I desired everything that is going on around me. I know what I am doing. I know why I'm here. I'm in control."

It would be more normal to find him saying:

"I have no control over the future of my life at this point. My life is in the hands of my captors. I do not know what will be done with me. I am not in control."

And such is our situation. We are the tape people. Our eyes are taped shut in the veil of material nature. Time is holding a gun to our head. It is certain we shall be blown away. It is only a question of when. We cannot see our captor, for the veil of the material nature, the trees, the sky, the air, the Universe, it holds us in.

We are inside bodies and we were not on the panel that designed them. We do not remember choosing our parents, our land of birth, the sex of our body, the color of the skin. In deed for some of us, these things pose a great set back.

Indeed, we are the tape people. We are the enclosed. We are the captive. It is not amongst our choices to rebel and say, "wait, I want to choose another God. I do not like what divinity has done to me. I do not like nature. I do not like truth. Oh you who have created me. I give you up and I wish to accept another. That does not seem to be amongst the choices available to us. We are captives, like it or not.

The elders whom we choose as the speakers at our village fires at night should 1st start with this understanding. "Oh, people of the village, my friends, relatives, children, nephews and nieces. I tell you some grave news that we are captives here on this ball in space known as Earth."

Round about our 10th year we wake up and realize we are in a body made of flesh, which is mortal. When we witness the 1st death of a dear one that we shall ever witness, especially if it be brutal and not due to old age, we can't help but wonder, who has done this. Who holds us here? Why?

"My dear children of the village, we are captives, our eyes taped shut by the veil of the material nature. Who has done this to us and why? But my children of the village, there are many ways you can react to this reality and as you wander in the world, you will find many persons reacting in many different ways. Some will speak their philosophies to you and they will sound very educated. In deed they may recognize each of themselves and give letters unto their names such as B.A., M.A., Ph.D. They will shake each other's hands, slap each other on the back and congratulate each other, but know this, if they do not know that they are amongst the tape people, they know nothing.

"If their philosophy does not recognize that they are the captive, the subject, then they know nothing. Until the basic fundamental truth is allowed to become the foundation of all their knowledge in their heart they still know nothing. If someone says, "Have you seen God?" Then they still do not accept that they are the captive. My children, us tape people, can never test or tempt our captors with such boastful language. Our captors are in control. It is not wise of us to speak to them in any ill manner. Have you seen God? Can you see God? That is like a tape person saying, "I cannot see the gun to my head".

"No the tape is in place over your eyes, true, but you should know that you are the subject, you are the captive, can you not tell that much? Just the fact that you have tape on your eyes and that you are tied in the chair of this body, which has a limited life span in a place chosen for you, is that not enough to convince you? You want to fly, but cannot sprout wings. You want to live, but you are killed. You want to keep your loved ones, yet they die.

Can you not tell that you are a captive? Can you not assume that there is a captor? Everything that you have, even the mind with, which you think and the ears with, which you hear, the mouth with, which you speak, your emotions, your nervous system, your life span, everything, it has been given to you. As a conscious being, you, yourself, do not know how to create even a small fraction of just one of these attributes of your own body!

Your entire existence is coming from somewhere outside your conscious self. You do not know if you are eternal. You do not know how to create these wonderful things that make you who you are. So it is only right to say that every single aspect of your life and all that surrounds you is a grant, a gracious grant from divinity who ever He or She or It may be. That being the case, and since also you cannot switch divinity's, you cannot jump to another reality, therefore, is it not wise to assume that divinity is benefic towards you? Since you have no choice and you are nothing but a captive for whom everything has been provided as a gracious grant, should you not assume that that oneness, that great being that has made you is benevolent towards you? All that you love, He has given. And yes, all that you don't understand and therefore possibly loathe, He has also given.

The most logical conclusion to this amazing paradox is that He, She or It wills that you deal with those things, which puzzle you, which you loathe. Find a way through the paradox to perfect harmony. In that place where you can find perfect harmony between what you feel you love and what you feel you hate you will find the beginning of complete harmony with your creator who has created everything including you and everything you love and hate. How can you have peace until you accept your inevitable oneness with all the other brothers and sister items in this creation?

You are but one of his creations, every other atom is also your brother and sister in that it flows forth from that center. Your provincial interests while identifying yourself with your temporary body should be given up as a guide to what you love and hate.

Rather, you should learn to love everything. When you find that consciousness, which allows you to love everything, then it is only logical to know that you have entered the conscious area from, which everything has come or at least in, which everything can coexist.

And since everything is coexisting despite your hating some of it, we can know that finding that space of love where all things can exist in your consciousness without you rejecting or editing any part of it, that is indeed reality. For that reality already exists around you despite your hatred.

You are not allowing yourself into that reality because of your likes and dislikes. The reality does not care for your likes and dislikes. It does not change itself to fit you, rather in time it forces you to succumb. You can never free yourself from the reality that surrounds you. You are a child as much as the tree and the bumblebee. But you reject it with your likes and dislikes.

One byproduct of the true spiritual path is to attain that consciousness, which sees things as they are and the truth is that you are one small part only, equal to all other parts. You are not the center any more than any other part. When you desire to exert yourself upon other parts in a mood of exploitive arrogance, not only do you set yourself apart from the reality in, whom you exist, thus creating your own frustration and unhappiness, but you also offend the things around you. Your brother and sister, the tree, the Earth, the fence, the bee, the House, the fellow human, time, the Planets, the Universe, the creator.

This is why you are captive, because you have this mood. Because you have the mood of singular importance, because you feel that you are the center, this is why you are a captive here, for in this plane the captives are forced to change bodies periodically. Thus a place is set up where the folly of individuals is erased in time. No Hitler, no Mussolini, no Genghis Khan can live or reign forever here where empires are reduced to ashes in a very short amount of time.

From space, looking at the Earth no human body can be seen. Only vast masses of land and ocean covered by movable clouds. The humans that live on that land are like bacteria that grow on the surface of the Earth. In large patches of irritation such massive cities come and go in time, the Earth being there resting place while they exist, taking themselves so very seriously.

The mentality of a captive is self-centeredness. The Vedic teaching, the descended teaching, which the captive must come to eventually accept is that the all loving blissful Supreme Lord want these little Souls to come to the Spiritual World for eternal play. But, it must be willfully done on their own, each of those Souls must emotionally know deep inside the truth of so many important lessons.

This is accomplished by allowing Souls to go through many lives. When the lessons are finally learned these little Souls know that they are subordinate to a great, benevolent, loving divinity, the center of, which is Sri Krishna and Sri Radha, the Supreme male and Female who together are the divine couple, inseparable, eternally. They are the Supreme Enjoyers of all. Their land known as Goloka Vrindavana is the center or the whirl of the Lotus Flower of the Spiritual world.

In the Spiritual World there is no death because there is no need for Karmic lessons, the Souls there all have one quality in common, they desire to serve more than they take. They are not self-centered. They are centered on the true center, Sri Krishna and Sri Radha.

Knowing this you gain an eye in this world to judge religious conceptions and all other conceptions. If a conception leaves intact to any degree, the self-centered Ego of the small captive, then you can know that that conception, to that degree, remains false and imperfect. The superior conception is that one, which totally and wholly reverses the problem, which causes the Soul to remain captive here. A religious conception should teach the captive Soul the true nature of their origin here, why they are here and offer the map for moving beyond.