The Relationship Between False Ego and Knowledge

(written on May 8, 2020)

(References: SB 1.11.34)

In SB 1.11.34, Srila Prabhupada explains in the last paragraph of the purport about the nature of those with false ego, and their relationship with knowledge. Since these people are engaged in destructive and sense gratifying work, they are unable to accept the Supreme Personality of Godhead. It is said that although these people appear very knowledgeable, they are “robbed of all their knowledge,” as Prabhupada aptly writes. They don’t understand the value of spiritual knowledge and instead take to the material sciences which end as soon as the material body ends. Even after so much speculation, these kinds of people will never ever be able to reach the stage of knowing God. Such people are the worst source of knowledge and cannot give real knowledge to anyone, although they appear like pundits. Their main toxic quality is that they are tinted by the false ego, which says that I am the enjoyer, versus saying Krsna is the Supreme enjoyer. Because of this, they only propagate false knowledge. In the purport of the verse Prabhupada says, “They are all of the demoniac mentality, always challenging the supreme power of the Lord. Those who are very materialistic, always hankering after material power and strength, are undoubtedly fools of the first order because they have no information of the living energy, and being ignorant of that supreme spiritual science, they are absorbed in material science, which ends with the end of the material body.” This last point made by Prabhupada is really important. The materialistic people will never be able to give the correct knowledge to others because the knowledge which they have is all temporary as it is associated with the temporary body which dies.

A person like Prabhupada however, spreads the pure knowledge because he is aware of his identity as the soul, not the body. As it is said in BG 2.13, “As the embodied soul continually passes in this body from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. The self-realized soul is not bewildered by such a change.”