No place in the world is pain-free – Wisdom on Wisdom 6

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful.
Fernando Pessoa. Hare Krishna. The human search for happiness is very intimately associated with physical locations.
We may think of hotels, dancing clubs, or gardens, or sports playgrounds as places of enjoyment. We think of say offices as places of hard work. Homes, depending on the kind of home we have, maybe places of relief or maybe places of conflict.
As we have certainly more emotions and emotional memories associated with certain places. Similarly, we also have certain subconscious or conscious conceptions of certain places as enjoyable or not enjoyable. Throughout history, people have often moved from one place to another in search for a better life.
This such searching was what led to the spread of colonial imperialism, where Europeans traveled all over the world and tried to dominate economically, politically, culturally other parts of the world. And not necessarily thought of the new worlds were better places, but they thought there will be better opportunities, they can earn more money by trading in those places. So, in today’s world, many people, especially from the third world countries, wish to go to America, or Europe, or Australia, the first world countries where they hope life will be better.
So, people are traveling. And here, the specific metaphor in this quote may be a little dated. Now, people mostly travel by planes.
In the past, people would travel primarily by ships, maybe 100 or more than that years ago. But the point is, many ships are going to many destinations. But no ship goes to a place that is not painful.
Everywhere in this world, there are problems. And when we are emigrating from one place to another, often the fond hope is that life will be happier there. So, people move from villages to cities, or they move from cities to metropolitan cities.
From metropolitan cities, they move to other countries. Now, in all this, they feel my present life is painful, and elsewhere life will be happier. Now, yes, it is possible, certainly, that some places may be far worse than others.
Say, for example, there is famine in some place, there is a war in some place, there is acute economic breakdown in some place because of some reasons. So, then emigrating to some other place can definitely help in providing a better material situation. At the same time, no place is free from pain.
Ultimately, the Bhagavata says that janma-mrtyu-jarā-vyādhi-duḥkha-doṣānudarśanam, that everywhere people have to grow old, people have to get deceased, and people have to die. And not only that, even before that, there are three kinds of conflicts that we all face. There are the adhyatmik, adhibhautik, adhidaivik.
The conflicts caused by our own body and mind, health issues, mind issues, there are relationship conflicts, and then there are the conflicts caused by higher forces of nature. Nowadays, especially with people, many people going as immigrants to the first world countries, there is an increasing sense of nationalism, racism, supremacism that is coming in the first world countries such as America, which where there is a lot of hostile sentiment against immigrants. So, these lead to relationship problems.
The specifics may vary, but the principles remain the same, that no place is pain free. The amount of energy and industry that we spend, many people spend in relocating from one place to another in the search for prospects. If we could spend a fraction of that energy in relocating internally to a better place, that would be far more fruitful.
Ultimately, we live not where our bodies are, we live where our minds are, we live where our thoughts are. And if we can spiritualize our thoughts, if we can make our thoughts more devotional, if we can find deeper shelter at the very core of ourselves, then that will make us much more peaceful, that will make us much more joyful. And spiritual growth, as contrasted with material growth, centers on this changing the locus, the center of our thoughts.
It means shifting our thoughts from the changing externals to the unchanging internal to the eternal. Bhagavad Gita in its 12th chapter 19th text says that, Aniketah sthir matir, bhaktimanya sametriya, aniketah sthir matir. Aniketah, the great spiritualists, the great devotees, they may not have any physical location where they live, but sthir matir, their consciousness is fixed.
Their consciousness is fixed on Krishna and by thus being fixed on Krishna, they experience sublime peace wherever they may be. So, if financial, cultural, other considerations require us to move from one place to another, that’s just the needful that we can do at the material level. But we shouldn’t imagine that this is what will make me happy.
If we are to be happy, we need to move internally, raise our consciousness from the world to the source of the world, from the changing phenomena in this world to the unchanging source of all phenomena, to the unchanging reality, Krishna. And the practice of bhakti yoga is the most efficacious way to raise our consciousness upwards. So, when we study scripture, when we meditate on Krishna’s message, when we study his wisdom, when we share that wisdom with others, by all that we can move to that place at the core of our heart where there is security, where there is serenity, where there is joy.
Thank you.