Question: I cannot understand this. I have a brother who is working on a legal case and there is a little girl she is like 6 years old, she was in a car accident and she is in a vegetative state, her seat belt ripped all of her body and her organs but she is alive. So my brother was telling me that there was a chance that probably she would live another 50 years on life support. Maybe even longer and that they brought in specialists from Canada who can communicate with people in vegetative state and they understand that the little girl, even though she cannot open her eyes, she cannot really do anything, she can respond, she is happy in that state. But the question is that she has a mother who knows that her little girl is responding, that she wants to win, she is happy. But then you have the insurance people who want to pull the plugs because she cannot live by herself. What is the right thing to do in a situation like that where she is mentally responding, that she does not want to die?

Jayapataka Swami: We don’t particularly give any opinion on these things usually. What we are concerned with is that where does the soul go after death? If you can read Srimad Bhagavatam or Bhagavad-gita to the person who is injured this way, if they can hear, they can, in the next birth assuming that they have to leave, if they pull out the plug immediately, if they stay for sometime. So the point is to help them to reach the next destination. But sometimes by hearing the Srimad Bhagavatam, they may get so purified that they can recover. We try to rather help a soul to reach a transcendental destination and that is our primary concern. We put Ganges water on the head, give them charanamrita, read the Bhagavad-gita and Srimad Bhagavatam, and this way try to help the soul to transcend the conditioned state that she is in.
07-JANUARY-2020 NEW PANIHATI DHAM, ATLANTA, USA