Prabhupāda: Yes. That is compared with the jaundice disease. Jaundice disease, for jaundice, sugarcane is the medicine. But they taste sugarcane as bitter. Sugarcane . . . one who is suffering in jaundice will taste sugarcane as bitter. That is the taste. So that is the medicine. So he has to take the sugarcane. And by taking, when he is cured he will find, "Oh, it is very sweet."
Puṣṭa Kṛṣṇa: So then he has to recognize that there is some problem living in this material world.
Prabhupāda: No. He does not find any happiness on account of his too much materialistic mind.
Brahmānanda: That is the disease.
Prabhupāda: That is the disease. So it has to be cured by this bhakti-yoga. So in the bhakti-yoga, in the beginning, it will taste bitter. Therefore they do not come. But if they take to bhakti-yoga, then the material disease will be cured and they will find it is very sweet.
Puṣṭa Kṛṣṇa: Yes. So the more people try to enjoy materially, do they become more and more unhappy?
Prabhupāda: We are in the material world means everyone is diseased, mūḍha, māyayāpahṛta-jñānāḥ, duṣkṛtinaḥ (BG 7.15). This is described. This is the material disease. I explained how they are committing sinful life: slaughterhouse, this liquor house and so many things, simply sinful. And they do not know they are going to suffer again in another body. He's going to be slaughtered next life, "Life for life." You are taking life, so many lives; you have to give so many times life. "Take birth and become killed. Take birth and become killed." There is no knowledge.
Puṣṭa Kṛṣṇa: Sometimes people ask, Prabhupāda, that if one falls down into lower species of life like plants or animals, how then do they come again to the human form of life?
Prabhupāda: Yes. That is nature's way. Give them again chance to develop. From trees they become flies. That is the beginning of movement. Then from flies to birds, birds to beast, and beast to animal, er, human being. This is great chastisement. You cannot move even. Suffer torrents of rain, cyclone, scorching heat, pinching cold. Stand up for hundreds and thousands of years. Then, when the punishment is finished, then he becomes moving. If there is scorching heat he can move to some shelter. But he cannot move. They do not study all this science, why there are so many varieties of life, of different grades, wherefrom they are coming.
Puṣṭa Kṛṣṇa: The living entity, then, in the tree is actually conscious of its condition of life.
Prabhupāda: Eh?
Puṣṭa Kṛṣṇa: The living entity inside the tree is actually conscious of its condition of life.
Prabhupāda: Not advanced consciousness, but he is conscious. He feels. He feels.
Harikeśa: It shocked a lot of people when they made the test of bringing a scissor to a plant, and they put some electrodes on it and they found that the plant was reacting with fear.
Prabhupāda: Yes. Yes. That machine has been discovered by Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose. He discovered this wireless telegram, radio. But Marconi took from him, and British government helped him.