A Lament of Misdirected Love – Avatara Sara song explanation

Love is lost.
Instead of being able to use that love, we love Krishna, we love material things and we lose our life for life time after life time after life time. So, Lochintas Thakur is expressing this lament in this song and he is using many graphic metaphors to express the folly and the tragedy of the misdirection of our love. So, we will recite one line we will discuss that, then we will discuss the next line like that.
So, let’s recite together. So, those of you who have songs, you can use them to refer to this in the standard English song book. This is on page 66.
So, Lochintas Thakur is directing this song to Lord Chaitanya. Generally, in the Gaudiya Sampradaya, those Vaishnavas who lived in Bengal had directed most of their prayers and songs to Lord Chaitanya, whereas those Vaishnavas in the Gaudiya Sampradaya itself who lived in Vrindavan have directed most of their prayers to Krishna or Radha Krishna. So, if we look at the Goswami songs, most of them are directed towards Radha Krishna.
Goswami’s prayers are there. So, Lochintas Thakur lived most of his life in Bengal. So, he is directing prayers to Lord Chaitanya.
He is telling that the principle is the same, whether Lord Chaitanya or Krishna both are the same person and the principle of the fragility of misdirected love is also common. So, avatarsaram gaunavataram. So, you are the essence of all incarnations.
You are the most wonderful, the most extraordinary, the most magnificent of all the incarnations. How unfortunate I am that I did not worship you. How foolish of me that I did not.
How could it have happened? What was it that made this happen? And why is it so bad? What is so wrong with it? So, he is giving an example to us to look at. So, he is giving an analogy that if somebody is living right next to a river and such a person lives a thirsty life. You say, what nonsense is this? How can a person who is living right next to a river live a thirsty life? You see, that is absurd, that is ridiculous, that is ludicrous.
So, how can it happen? But that’s what has happened with me. You know, you O Lord are the source of the supreme happiness but somehow I never devoted myself to you and so my heart is forever starved of happiness. And whom can I blame for that? It is I who didn’t go to the river and drink water from it although the river was ready to offer me the water.
So, you were always ready to give your mercy to me but I was not ready to take that mercy from you and therefore it is my own fault. It is my own stupidity because of which I was not able to actually benefit from the mercy that you offered me. And actually this is just the starting but actually it goes further.
First is, the first metaphor that he draws is that the nectar was available but I did not take the nectar. In the remaining verses he will describe that not only did I not take the nectar but actually leaving aside the nectar I went towards the poison. Leaving aside the source of happiness, I went towards the source of misery.
And this he will describe through six different examples and then seventh he will describe the principle underlying that example. What does it mean to do these things? So, let us recite this first line once again and then we will recite the second line. Satsang with Mooji Thorns I was always contemplating on these.
So, what are these? These are the sense objects. So, normally when we contemplate on sense objects actually that doesn’t give us pleasure. That torments us.
Because when we look at the good looking forms of this world we look at the various annoying sense objects when we think about them these sense objects are innumerable and unachievable. First of all, there are so many sense objects that one cannot achieve and even if one achieves one or two the mind will always hanker for more and more. So, as long as the mind is filled with images of sense objects every unachieved and unenjoyed sense object pierces our consciousness like a thorn.
It torments us. It doesn’t allow us to be happy. I was always again and again I wasted my consciousness in contemplating on the sense objects and all that I got because of the sense objects was agitation with the mind.
But what was I hoping for? I was hoping for nectar by that. So, how can somebody by say biting a thorn tree accept nectar? So, the Bhagavad Gita gives the example of a camel who bites on a thorn tree and its own blood starts coming out and I think that that is nectar. So, So, the idea over here is that that you are like the tree so the tree always continues.
You are a desire-fulfilling tree and you fulfil the innermost desire of everyone’s heart. Ultimately what we desire in the world is love. We want the things of this world so that we can get the love of people.
Why do I want the latest car? Because if I am driving the latest car everybody will turn and look at who is the person driving this car. So, I want attention and attention is a very basic level of or a basic beginning of what eventually hopefully will grow into love. The person doesn’t even pay attention to me when there is no question of love.
So, we all want love and we hope that we will get that love gradually and in the hope of that love we try to acquire things. But we say that you are the Kalpataru you can give everything and ultimately you will give love itself and all that I need to do is think about you. Why? Unfortunately, I look at it as if it were poison.
Poison means that somehow we may not think of Krishna as poison and we may not even consciously think about Krishna as poison. But if we look at it ourselves, we avoid Krishna consciousness as if it were poison. That means we think of everything except Krishna consciousness and suppose somebody were trying to give us poison to drink we would try to do everything possible to avoid drinking that.
So, similarly very often for example when we are chanting we for our practical purposes do everything almost to avoid concentrating on the whole name. At least when we are under the control of our mind our mind tries to do everything to avoid concentrating on the whole name. So, that is for all practical purposes like treating the Lord to be like poison, the Lord is something to be avoided.
So, this is my misfortune. That which was thorny I took that to be nectarian and that which was actually nectarian I avoided him as it was poison. The real nectar for the heart is the nectar not of Soma that is available in the heavens but it is the nectar of Prema and that who could have given me Lord Chaitanya I avoided him.
That is my great misfortune. Then he says after this So, So, So, in some renditions of this line there is So, either way the meaning is the same the meaning is that to inhale, to breathe So, I went to a flower and just as a lotus is fragrant, I thought this will also be fragrant. And what I tried to do was, I thought, Saurabhera, Pallasishtakki, Nashatepashilikki, so all that I got was, actually it was not a Saurabhera, it is not a Saurabha, it is not a lotus, it is not a Saurabha, another flower called Pallasi, Pallasi doesn’t have a fragrance, but it has insects inside it.
So, when I went there to smell it, all the insects went inside. Actually often we don’t think about these incidences, but all the 9 poles in our body can be sources of great danger. Suppose an insect goes into, suppose, imagine that a small ant goes into the ear, you can imagine actually, it is moving round and round around the tympanic membrane and the ant is frightened, the ant is miserable, and it is making us miserable, and then imagine if it eats, and if you try to pull it, if you try to do anything to pull it out, the ant may get more frightened, and then the ant may bite the tympanic membrane, and it can be such a scary prospect actually, and of course all of us have the experience of, say, some dust particle going into the eyes, and especially, dust particle is not so bad, but if some mirchi or something like that goes into the eyes, it is quite painful.
So, you may not have had the experience of an insect going into the nose, but you can imagine it, but it will be quite mortifying, quite frightening basically. So, the idea is that we are trying to get pleasure through the various sense objects, but the sense objects, when they come in contact with the senses, they actually give pain instead of pleasure. So, what I was telling you, the first we are talking about in terms of thinking, in the first verse he said, if you think about sense objects, they torment us, we think about Krishna, he gives us love, but still we think about sense objects, we don’t think about the Lord.
So, the first metaphor, set of metaphors that he talked about, that is in the second verse, at the level of thought. Now, we will talk about two senses directly, and those two senses will be the nose and the mouth. So, second he describes is, इक्षुदन्लभावि कातं चुषीलिमा, के मने पाईले मीठा, पाईबे मीठा.
So, metre is sweetness. So, इक्षुदन्लभावि is a standard example of mystical perception that is given in Vedic tradition. You mistake an ordinary stick to be a sugarcane.
So, both have some component of food in it, but what is remaining makes all the difference. Some component of food is fine, but what is there, actually you can call sugarcane as a form of, or at least the covering, is somewhat different in terms of composition. But some similarity might be traced out, but there is a lot that is different.
Similarly, the sense objects in this world that promises pleasure, they may seem externally to be sources of pleasure, but when you actually experience them, they lead to me, कातं चुषीलिमा, के मने पाईले मीठा. So, if somebody chews a stick and doesn’t get any pleasure from it. So, now suppose somebody is chewing a stick and then the person thinks, oh, there is no juice, let me chew more.
It tastes more bad. Actually, if you try to chew a stick, probably all that will happen is that our teeth will have to do overwork and if you keep chewing, your teeth may fall off, which would be horrible to think about. So, with all the effort, sometimes when you don’t get sense recognition, people think that you should do more effort.
But if our effort is not practically directed in the right way, then that more effort far from leading to pleasure for us can lead to greater pain for us, can lead to greater misery for us. So, therefore, we need to be careful, we need to be cautious about what we are desiring and the moral mentalist attitude is that if you don’t get a thing, be determined and work harder and then you will get it one day. But is it really going to happen like that? If I don’t get juice by chewing a stick, it is not that by chewing more and more, I’ll get juice one day.
First of all, the juice has to be there. Then I’ll get the juice. So, many times people talk of the great spirit of the human being and say, suppose some sports star is there and he has got cancer and he goes through a vigorous therapy and he gets cured of the cancer and then he comes back and starts playing sports again and that is considered a great success, how this person overcame the disease and he has so much grit and he represents the power of the human spirit to conquer our obstacles and to attain the ambitions of life once again.
Yeah, the fighting spirit can be appreciated, but we have to also see what the fighting spirit is directed towards. At the material level, all the effort that we put in, that unfortunately is not very productive. So, fighting on and on and on for something that is not even material in me, that is not going to give us happiness.
We may say that is the expression of determination and surely determination is required to continue on even at the material level when a person faces discouragement. So, to that extent, the fighting spirit can be appreciated. Of course, there was a champion cyclist who fought against cancer and who got cured and he became an icon for all people who are trying to fight against cancer.
So, actually after fighting against cancer, he won many cycling championships and he has a continuous gold medallist for several years and he became like a legend and then it was discovered that he had all along taken banned drugs for enhancing his performance. All the legends that were built around him, they all came crumbling down like a pack of cards. So, all the triumphing against adversities was not a triumph of the human spirit, it was a trick of chemicals.
So, sometimes it may not even be a triumph of the human spirit, but on the occasions when it is a triumph of the human spirit, certainly the human spirit has resilience. But that resilience has to be directed productively. If it is not directed productively, then a person may work very very hard, but what is the end result? So, imagine if we had a championship for deciding who can keep chewing a stick for the maximum amount of time and some person can keep chewing a stick for 5 minutes, somebody for 10 minutes, somebody for 12 minutes and then somebody who continues for 12 minutes and he breaks one teeth and still it doesn’t stop and other people say, oh what determination, you lost one teeth but still your will has not gone away.
Just see the power of the human spirit that the teeth go but the will remains and then somebody else comes along and two teeth fall off and still he keeps chewing the stick. Fine, you are chewing the stick and then somebody says, oh I will have more determination and I will, even if all my teeth fall off, still I will keep chewing and then people say, oh what determination, you lose all your teeth but you don’t lose the determination to chew the stick. How glorious and how ludicrous.
If this were just an anecdotal story, it would be comic but when it is a real-life story, it is tragic and people keep chasing after meaningless material achievements and they struggle and suffer and risk their lives to achieve something which is ultimately not really going to make much difference to anyone. At a material level, people can invent so many things that they can do and they can set records and I will make a record and he will break my record and somebody else will break that person’s record and this can go on and on and on for a long time but the question is at the end, what is the use of it all? Who is gaining anything from it if the end result itself is not worthwhile? So, the human spirit certainly has the power to persist and continue in its great great obstacles and we are not denying the power of the human spirit and what we are concerned is that the power of human spirit needs to be directed productively and if it is not directed productively, then all the efforts can be tragic. So, I thought that this was a garland and I put it around me and then what happened? This is a terrible snake.
So, imagine I put something around my neck and I find suddenly it bites me around my neck and actually from the neck for the poison to go to the heart will take and the brain will take very little time and if a snake bites around the neck somewhere, the chances of survival are very very less. So, what is this being referred to? It’s actually a reference to material honour. So, many times people chase after honour.
So, the tragedy of fame is that people long to become famous so that they can gain attention of others. So, they struggle all their lives to become famous and gain attention and when they become famous, they struggle to avoid the attention of people. There are many famous celebrities when they have to go out for any normal activity, they just can’t go out because they are crowded around by fans and it’s also torturous at one level.
So, there was a famous Indian cricketer who is considered to be the god of cricket and at one time he had a severe back injury and an upcoming important cricket series was coming up and he said that wherever he was, whether he would be able to play in that series or not, was not sure and he was the minister of the Indian batting lineup. So, everywhere in the media there was discussion, will he be fit enough, will he be able to play and then so anyone would meet him, that person would ask, how is your back, how is your back, how is your back and at one point, he got sickened by the whole thing. He said that when people would not even meet, they would not even say me how, hello, the only thing that they were concerned about is my back and then to some extent, some light awakened but of course, that light didn’t sit and he said that that was a time when it’s partially struck to me that actually people were not really caring for me.
So, when we become famous, when somebody becomes famous, do people love that person? Not really. No, people love their own sense gratification and if that person gives them sense gratification, then adulating that person is a means of facilitating their own sense gratification and when the person stops giving them sense gratification, then their only concern is, will you become fit to give me sense gratification again or not and if you don’t become fit, then there are no more moves to make. So, that is how it is in this world.
So, unfortunately, the very fame that we strive for, most people are not famous, they long for fame. When I was being born to feel that I should be so well-known and so well-respected that when I entered into a room, everybody should turn and notice me and appreciate me and if I’m a devotee of Arun, he should bow down to me. Those are some of the desires that they are lurking in our hearts somewhere.
But actually speaking, when we don’t have fame, fame seems very appealing but when there is fame, it can be quite disorienting. It can be very troubling. George Harrison is one of our escondido, Yogeshwar Prabhu’s proper disciple.
You should read about the biography of George Harrison and George Harrison was probably among the most famous persons on the planet during his peak in the Middle Ages times. And there he is paraphrasing George Harrison’s sentiments. He says that I felt after I became famous, it was like I was like a microbe living under a microscope of the world.
So, every single thing that I did, the world was going to observe and the world was going to talk and the world was going to do and on and on and all about it. So, I had no peace. So, actually speaking, living in limelight is quite miserable.
So, it’s like you take the fame as if it’s a garland and then when you put it on, you find it’s not a garland, it’s a snake. And of course, the snake is not just that the fans or admirers are constantly crowding around us and demanding things from us, but this is also because of the competitors that are there. Somebody or other is always trying to pull a top person down and to always be threatened by others is also not a pleasant life to live.
And similarly, he described another example, I thought it was very soft and soothing and therefore, what did I do? I entered into fire and what happened? I got burnt, terribly burnt. That’s how things work in life. Actually, things are so terrible that we try to get something and we get exactly the opposite of that, the misery of material existence.
And what is the cause of all this? That’s what he described in the last verses. Actually, I worship this material existence. I never worshipped Lord Chaitanya.
I just forgot about him entirely. And the sadhus, the saintly persons who are telling me to worship Lord Chaitanya, I never heard them, I never followed their instructions. So, actually speaking, to be misdirected in our love is natural in material existence because the whole of material existence is going to misdirect our love.
But the devotees are here to redirect our love towards Krishna. But if you don’t hear the devotee’s instructions, you don’t hear the devotee’s guidance, then what I hope is their guidance. So, actually I have lost myself in this life as well as the next life.
I have lost either way. Actually, in this life also I didn’t get any happiness and in the next life also I did not get any happiness because actually if I stay on material existence, I am not going back to go to Krishna. And if I am going to engage in just bodily sense gratification, I am not going to get a very auspicious birth in the next life also.
It’s like I have devoured myself. What should I do now? I am feeling so lost and desolate and miserable and self-condemnatory. But what can I do? So, of course, these songs may seem to be very negative.
But when I am within the negativity, because there is a prayer to the Lord, to that therein lies the seed of positivity. So, we have also misdirected our life for a long, long time. But at least if you can recognise that I have misdirected my life and express a desire to redirect our life again to Krishna, in that also there is hope for us.
So, actually the failure to acknowledge failure is the fatal failure. That means that all of us fail. All of us make resolves to try to practise devotional service and somehow we are not able to stick to our resolves.
Because our mind is extremely powerful and our mind doesn’t allow us to stick to our resolutions. But then when that happens, you have to recognise, oh my mind is tripping, this mind is very devilish. I have to be very careful.
I have to do what it takes. I have to make some plans. I have to take some guidance.
I have to make some resolutions and ensure that I never lose to Krishna. So, therefore, if I make a resolution like that, then I am protected. But if I don’t make any resolution like that, I don’t really try to face up to the situation.
When we fall prey to illusion, often our responses are one of denial and dismissal. Denial means actually it didn’t happen earlier. It’s not a sin.
We just deny it to the world and we deny it even to ourselves, as if everything is all right. And dismissal is, oh actually we need scriptural standards, we need practical. We are all Kalivas, we have to follow the rules.
We can’t follow the standards. So, basically we dismiss the scriptural standards as impractical or irrelevant. And in this way, we continue on the illusion that everything is all right.
And in this way, we fail to acknowledge our failure. And the failure to acknowledge failure is the fatal failure. The first failure is not so fatal.
Because okay, I failed, all of us fall, all of us fail. But we rise and we keep trying and we’ll succeed. But if we don’t even acknowledge that I have failed, if we don’t try to make some serious remedial measures to prevent that failure as recurrence, then how are we ever going to succeed? Therefore, failure to acknowledge failure is the fatal failure.
So, in this case, in these verses like this, actually Narottama Thakur, Lochinda Thakur here, he is actually acknowledging his failure. He says, my dear Lord, what should I do? By expressing my dear Lord, what should I do? He is connecting with the Lord. And by connecting with the Lord, therein lies the seed of all reform.
And of course, at a higher level, we understand that Lochinda Thakur is not like this. It is the exaltedness of his devotion that is making him feel lowly. Mr. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu says that I have no devotion for the Lord.
I have so much devotion that he is later on telling me. His tears are flowing down my eyes, what can I do about it? So, it doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t work like that.
So, therefore, the important thing to understand is that when the exalted devotees say that they don’t have devotion, their statement is very different from ours. They are saying that they are not creating a drama, but they should feel like that because when we understand the greatness of the Lord, then we understand in contrast to him, it’s like if everybody is wearing dirty clothes, then we notice our dirtiness. But if we stand and sit next to a person whose clothes are spotless and then our clothes are spotted and dirty and stained, then we start noticing it very much.
So, like that, when the exalted devotees see the purity of Krishna and they see the immensity of Krishna’s love for them, then they feel actually what love do I have for Krishna? Krishna is offering me so much love, I have nothing in front of him to offer him. And therefore, they feel I have actually not offered love to Krishna. So, actually speaking our situation is like we have not experienced Krishna’s love and we often stay among our equals or our juniors who often don’t have much more devotion than us or even as much devotion as us.
So, probably among the society of people wearing unclean clothes, ours are the least unclean, all the rest are unclean. So, maybe it’s fine, I am good enough or maybe better than others also. But when we actually contact the purity of Krishna, the spotlessness of Krishna, Krishna’s character, the selflessness of his love for us, then we will say I have no love for Krishna at all.
So, that lamentation is actually a sign of spiritual advancement because that lamentation is not born from hopelessness as happens in our case when we fall again and again to maya, maybe I can never practise devotions ever again. So, that is not the kind of lamentation that exalted devotees are talking about. They are talking about a lamentation that is born from experience of the immensity of Krishna’s glory and the unconditionality of Krishna’s love.
So, because of that, they feel I have no love for Krishna. But either way, whatever be the cause of their feelings, we can follow in their footsteps and we can also at least start to feel lamentation for the misdirection of our love and we try to redirect the love to Krishna. If we try to do that, we will over time experience that we will also experience that in the remembrance of Krishna, in the connection to Krishna, we will see the quality of formation and when we see formation, one day we will also start experiencing undistracted, pure, nectarean love for Krishna.
At that time, there is a desire to fulfil the ultimate desire for love.