While on tour of South India, Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu arrived on the banks of the river Godavari, where He met Sri Ramananda Raya, a great devotee of Sri Krsna. Lord Caitanya expressed a deep desire to hear about Sri Krsna from the lips of Ramananda Raya and requested that Ramananda recite a verse from the revealed scriptures concerning the ultimate goal of life. Ramananda then replied: "If a person performs the prescribed duties of his social position, he awakens his original Krsna consciousness." Supporting his statement, Ramananda then cited a verse from the Visnu Purana (3.8.9):
visnur aradhyate pantha
nanyat tat-dosa-karanam
"The Personality of Godhead Lord Visnu is worshiped by the proper performance of prescribed duties in the system of varna and asrama. There is no other way to satisfy the Personality of Godhead. One must be situated in the institution of the four varnas and asramas."
Varna and Asrama Jeopardized
Hearing this statement from Ramananda Raya, Lord Caitanya replied that the system of varnasrama-dharma was external and thus it was not acceptable. Lord Caitanya also rejected the statement of Ramananda because the system of varnasrama-dharma is now jeopardized by the influence of the present age of Kali, the age of quarrel and fighting.
In the Bhagavad-gita, the Personality of Godhead declares that the varnasrama system is created by Him, although He is aloof from such a system. Because the varnasrama system is a creation of the Personality of Godhead, it is not possible to do away with it. However, the nefarious activities of the people of the age of Kali can jeopardize the varnasrama system. We have purposely used the word jeopardized because the whole system still exists but in a reflected form.
In the varnasrama system of social management, the aim of life is to attain the favor of Lord Visnu, the all-pervading Personality of Godhead. Unfortunately, at the present moment the aim of life is to displease the all-pervading Godhead and thereby suffer perpetually under the laws of material nature. The goal of the varnasrama system is to peacefully perform the prescribed duties of humanity and thereby achieve the highest success, namely the favor of Lord Visnu. But when the aim of life is the planned exploitation of material nature, all life is jeopardized on account of the human race fighting with the laws of nature.
The arrangement of nature is so strict that even a slight violation of the laws of nature can do great harm to a conditioned human being. Human beings must always consider themselves to be living under the stringent laws of nature. They must always remember that their plans for breaking nature's laws will bring about tremendous hardship. Regrettably, human beings under the deluding influence of material nature want to lord it over the laws of nature, and, as such, they are more and more entangled in conditioned life. Foolish human beings do not see the defect of their so-called advancement of knowledge. The most difficult problems of life are birth, death, old age, and disease. These four problems are a permanent settlement for the conditioned soul. Human beings want to lord it over the laws of nature but their so-called advancement of scientific knowledge cannot solve these problems.
A continuous increase of world population to the proportion of three births in every second has puzzled the brains of the leaders of society. To solve the problem of birth, they put forward rascal plans of birth control under the name of family planning, yet the problem is unsolved. By the laws of nature, the population is ever-increasing in spite of all their scientific plans and schemes. On the whole, the problem of birth has remained unsolved.
Excerpted from Bhaktivedanta VedaBase 2011.