“Someone may say, ‘What’s wrong with taking birth in the material world? I’ve taken birth here, and I am happy.’ There could be some truth to that, but our pleasure here is always mixed with pain. In this physical body we cannot experience pure, unadulterated pleasure. Of course, the pleasure we experience from the senses’ contact with sense objects is a relatively low grade of pleasure anyway, compared with the spiritual pleasure that devotees experience. But even if you take sense enjoyment as pleasure, it is temporary. We want everlasting pleasure, and that can be experienced only in a spiritual body. We are actually the spirit soul; we are not the body. As long as the soul is in the body there is life. We say the body is alive, but the body is never actually alive, because it is just a machine, with us as the operators. If the spirit soul leaves the machine, it will not work any more. That spirit soul is by nature sat-cid-ananda vigraha — eternal, full of bliss, and full of knowledge. The body is by nature the opposite — temporary, full of ignorance and suffering.”
Srimad-Bhagavatam 2.1.11 (Right click to download)