Seek self-affirmation through what you do for others not what others do for you

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
I seek the blessings of all the senior Vaishnavas that I can try to speak something today on the 10th canto. So here Mother Yashoda is calling Krishna. Come back and bid and give charity.
And Shri Prabhupada talks about celebrating birthdays and other celebratory occasions through the principles of Yarkidan Tapa. So I’ll talk about this in three parts. I’ll talk about first, how rituals are universal in our human culture.
Second is how materialistic or contemporary culture commercialises rituals, whereas a bhakti culture spiritualises the rituals. In the third part, I’ll talk about how the spiritualization of rituals helps us move towards self-realisation by changing our conceptions about our own self-worth. So rituals, sometimes especially people who are sceptical, people who are atheistic, people who are anti-religious, they often say, you religious people, you have so many rituals.
Those rituals don’t make any sense. Why do you do all these rituals? Actually, if you see, everybody has rituals. Rituals are simply ways in which we give structure and shape to our emotions.
When two people shake hands and they meet, a shaking hand is a ritual. It’s just a way in which we offer cordial greetings to each other. So say now in contemporary culture, birthdays are celebrated by cutting a cake.
But before that, there are candles are lit and candles are blown off. Now what is the significance of extinguishing candles? Actually speaking, there is no logic. What is a birthday celebration got to do with blowing off candles? It’s an ancient, not ancient, mediaeval Scandinavian myth that actually every year, as old as a person becomes, that many evil spirits possess the person.
And in the rituals, in Scandinavian culture, every culture has some belief in some ghosts and evil spirits and they have their own rights for exorcism to drive out those evil spirits. So in that Scandinavian culture, they believed that to exorcise evil spirits, we should blow off lights. So that’s why they had the ritual of having candles and as old as a person is, that many candles you blow off.
If we consider from today’s ultra-rational perspective, people, how does this ritual make any sense? Blowing off candles. It doesn’t, but still, people practise it. So if we are going to be critical about rituals, why not be critical about the rituals in materialistic life? So the fact is, no one can live without some rituals.
The problem is not the rituals, the problem is the unawareness of the purpose of the rituals. When the rituals are done superficially, sometimes they can even become pointless or they can become hypocritical. Sometimes two businessmen may be meeting each other and they will be shaking hands, but inside they are plotting the murder of each other.
So the shaking hands is meant to be a gesture of cordiality. Now it just becomes a gesture of hypocrisy. So rituals themselves are necessary in life.
Now, in today’s culture, rituals are taken and they are commercialised. Last month I was giving a class in a university on the day when there was when it was Valentine’s Day. So now, everyone in life has a desire to love and be loved.
And what does the Valentine’s Day festival does? It actually makes people believe that their self-worth depends on how many Valentine cards they get or how many Valentine cards they get. And that way, similarly with most festivals, even all religious festivals, there are Christians who are concerned that actually Christmas has been divorced from Christ. So it’s only the celebration that is there, which is quite mundane.
Or even in India, Diwali is a big festival. But for most people, it is just eating and blowing firecrackers. And actually the philosophical significance of Diwali, I was born in a pious Brahmin family, but actually the philosophical significance of Diwali, I came to know after I I was introduced to Sri Prabhupada’s teachings.
Otherwise, it was just we’re doing the ritual very nicely, but it was just a ritual devoid of philosophical significance. And then Diwali is enormously commercialised. Purchase this, get this, get that, get that.
So the rituals, whether they be secular rituals like birthdays or Valentine’s Day or religious rituals like Christmas or Diwali, they can get commercialised. And when they’re commercialised, then their purpose is lost. The purpose of the rituals was actually to, especially religious rituals, that is to take us closer to God, to reminders of God.
But that purpose is lost. In the Vedic culture, there is a spiritualization of rituals. That means that actually all of us, our present existence is binary.
We are spiritual beings who are existing in a material world. And in the material world, our consciousness tends to be materialistic. We tend to be conscious of matter and material things.
That’s, in a sense, unavoidable because we have to function at the material level. But within our routine functioning at the material level, if there are periodic occasions when we break the monotony of life and we do something which is enjoyable but which also elevates our consciousness, which reminds us of who we are, what the purpose of life is. So that way festivals or like celebrations, like birthday celebrations, these are meant to help us come out of the monotony of our life and remind ourselves of what is really important in our lives.
I was just in an aeroplane from, I think, I was going from Phoenix to Denver and there suddenly the air hostess, she announced that we have a girl and it is her birthday today. So everybody please offer your wishes. And the whole aeroplane started singing happy birthday to her.
And she was delighted. What happens in life is that we all need a sense, we all have a need for affirmation, self affirmation. We need to feel that my life counts.
I matter to someone. And now there are two ways in which, two broad ways, this sense of self affirmation can come. One is when others do something for me.
So in today’s culture it is how many gifts do I get? If I get this many gifts, oh, so many people love me, so many people care for me. So we can get our sense of self affirmation, which is a normal human need. We can get it from what others do for us.
But, if we are educated differently, if we are brought up in a different culture, or we change our thought process, we can also get our sense of self affirmation by what we can do for others. That is through contribution. So, sense of self affirmation is something what we essentially we can’t live without.
So the, here Prabhupada talks about yajna, dana, tapa. And these are three ways in which one can celebrate some occasions. So essentially if we consider a soul, which is living in material existence, the soul is encased in three circles.
There is the physical circle, there is the social circle, and there is the environmental circle. And, many times in traditional Hindu rituals, after the, or before or after the ritual, they often say, Om shanti, shanti, shanti, three times they say shanti. Why is it three times? Actually, all these three circles, they can make us ashaant.
Our body can give us trouble, our mind can give us trouble, it can make us ashaant. Our relationships, with people around us, they can give us trouble. And the environment, it can be too cold, it can be too hot, it can be a tornado, hurricane, that can make us ashaant.
And essentially, through these three circles, we get the three kleshas. So, adhyatmik klesh is what we get from the bodily circle. Adhibhautik klesh is what we get from the social circle.
And adhidaivik klesh is what we get from the environmental circle. So the idea is, three times, Om shanti, shanti, shanti, it is, adhyatmik klesh, shanti, adhibhautik klesh, shanti, adhidaivik klesh, shanti, let there be peace, let there be peace. So, that is the idea of shanti.
And this yajna, dana and tapa, these are actually meant to be our contributions to these three circles. We are, tapa means, we actually regulate what we are giving to the body. So, by regulating, we actually discipline the body.
Sometimes we feel that oh, if I have to fast, if I can’t eat much, that’s austerity. But often, fasting is what enables the body to become regulated. There is a, on one of the pyramids in Egypt, there is a saying written by an ancient physician.
He says that, you live on one-fourth of what you eat. On the remaining three-fourth lives your physician. So, often we tend to overeat and that causes problems.
So, the idea is, the tapa, the austerity that we do, that is the way we are contributing to our physical circle. Dana, the charity that we give, that is the way we are contributing to our social circle. Social circle means, there are people, there are brahmanas, there are other people who need and we give something to them.
So, we are taking from society, we are meant to give to society. So, what we give back to society, that is dana. And, similarly, when we do yajna, Krishna talks about yajna elaborately in the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gita.
He says, In 3.12 in the Bhagavad Gita, he says, that the Devas have given us our needs and we need to satisfy them by doing yajna for them. So, yajna is the way which we satisfy the environmental circle. Now, today’s world view sees the environment simply as a set of natural forces, according to, acting according to impersonal laws.
But the Vedic view sees nature as ultimately personal. Yes, there may be laws and forces which are acting, but they are governed by personal agents. So, when we do yajna, we satisfy the personal agents who are overseeing the environmental affairs.
In this way, what we do is, we contribute. So, we contribute to each of these circles, and by that we, in a sense, repay our debts. In the Bhagavatam, there is a verse which Prabhupada would often quote, that, That, we have various debts to various kinds of people.
But if we surrender to Krishna, then we become free from all those debts. We have no other debts. Now, what is the idea behind this? The idea is that whatever, whoever is doing for us, it is ultimately Krishna who is doing for us through them.
So, if friends around us, if our relatives, a family member, they are doing something for us, it is Krishna who is doing it through them. A mother, when a baby is born, she gives her breast milk. A mother does great service to the child.
It is one of the great, Prabhupada would say, it is the nearest we come to selfless love in this world. The way a mother cares for her child. At the same time, a mother, as an agent, is important.
At the same time, we understand that the mother does not do anything special to produce breast milk at that time. The same God who sent a child into her womb and brought that child out, that same God, for the nourishment of that child, sent milk in the mother’s breast. So, it is not that the agent who has delivered something to us, we neglect them.
We respect them also. But we don’t restrict our vision to them. So, when we surrender to Krishna, we are going to the source of all supplies.
When we satisfy that source of all supplies, we do not have obligations to environs. This does not mean that devotees neglect everyone. As a human gesture, we may reciprocate.
We should act courteously. But the principle is, we don’t see all these as separate sources. We see them as coming from the one integrated source of everything.
That is Krishna. And that’s why Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita says in 10.25, yajnana japa yajnans. Mangal yajnas and japa yajna.
Now, the idea is whatever we offer to anyone, we may offer money, we may offer physical service, we may offer various things like that. Ultimately, it is offered with our consciousness. The consciousness is the foundation for offering anything.
And when we do japa, when we are chanting the holy names, we are offering our consciousness to Krishna. Because our consciousness is our most fundamental resource. When we offer that to Krishna, we are doing the topmost yajna.
That’s why I am talking about the various opulences in the 10th chapter. Krishna says among all yajnas, I am the japa yajna. We are meant to offer our consciousness to Krishna.
So the whole process of bhakti yoga is actually a process of changing our conception of self affirmation. We all need to be affirmed. But how do I get my sense of self affirmation? So, there are some children whose parents may be very neglectful.
And then, the parents don’t pay any attention to the child till the child starts crying. Only when the child cries, the parents come and pay some attention. So the child, if the parents are neglectful like that, the child gets a sort of distorted conception of things.
The child starts thinking that only when I cry, my needs will be met. So, such children, when they grow up, they think that being unhappy is the way to have my needs met. There are some people, as soon as you meet them, they start talking about their problems.
Oh, this went wrong, that went wrong, that went wrong, that went wrong. And yes, sometimes we may share about our problems because, say, the other person can help us in solving the problem. Or that other person is close to us.
But if we just keep talking about problems, then we become like agents of negativity. And, sometimes people just elaborately tell their problems, they even exaggerate their problems. Because they feel that only when I tell people how suffering I am, then people will give me some attention.
People will give me some affection. So, to have our needs met by being unhappy, that is very unhealthy. All of us have some things to be happy about.
All of us have some things to be unhappy about. But, the healthy human psyche is where we make a contribution. We do something substantial and then that gives us a sense of self-worth, that gives us a sense of self-affirmation.
So, such people who, sometimes they become hypochondriacs. They pretend to be sick just to get attention. Doctor, nothing is wrong with you.
No, I am feeling sick. Nothing is wrong. No, I am feeling sick.
That’s a distorted sense of self-conception that has come to them. So, the process of bhakti is actually meant to elevate our self-conception. One of my favourite lectures of Shri Prabhupada is where in one lecture he says how can you know that you are Krishna conscious? Shri Prabhupada says that if you come in front of the deities and you feel that Krishna is saying to you, what are you doing for me? What are you doing for me? Then you are Krishna conscious.
Most people come to God with the opposite question. God, what are you doing for me? Isn’t it? I have this problem, I have this need, I have this desire, when are you going to fulfil it? What are you doing for me? If you are not going to do anything for me, then I’ll stop coming to your temple. So, that is the materialistic way of approaching God.
Krishna appreciates even that. Krishna says, whatever way we come to him, Krishna says such people as udaraha. In 7.17 in the Bhagavad Gita he says that all people who approach me, they are udaraha, they are large-hearted.
Now, Sri Ramamanujacharya in his commentary on the Gita, he has a very beautiful input to this. Normally, we would consider people who are so self-centred, they are approaching God for their own needs. They, we may say, they are just materialistic.
They are not spiritual. But, Ramamanujacharya says that Krishna is so hungry for bhakti, Krishna is so eager for bhakti that for whatever reason a person offers in bhakti, Krishna becomes grateful. Krishna feels, oh, at least you have come to me.
At least you have offered your devotion to me. You are so large-hearted. You are so udaraha.
You are so magnanimous. You are so charitable. So, Krishna is so eager for us to connect with him.
Even if we connect for materialistic purposes, still udaraha. He says, oh, you are charitable. Of course, Krishna says that at that level, our concern is not for God.
Our concern is for what God is doing for us in this world. So, to the extent we are concerned with the things of the world, to that extent our love for God remains conditional. Because that means we translate whether God loves us or not based on whether God does whatever we want him to do.
Just like parents, they may be providing so many things for their child. But the child wants a particular toy. And the parents say, no, you cannot get this toy.
Ah, you don’t love me. So, the child’s level of thinking is the whole worldview of whether the mother loves me or not, whether the father loves me or not, is based on whether I get this toy or not. But that is not the reality.
The parents love the child and they are doing so much for the child. But the child evaluates everything in terms of that toy. So, like that, when we are too attached to materialistic things, then we evaluate Krishna’s love for us based on that one thing.
If I get it, if I don’t get it, what is God doing for me? And as long as we are at that level, then our bhakti cannot be steady. Actually, Prabhupada is giving us a radically different way of looking at things. He says that actually, when we come to Krishna, what am I doing for Krishna? In the Chetan Charita, there is a pastime of Gopinath Pattanaika.
And in that pastime, it’s a whole elaborate pastime which I am not going to, but one point that struck me is that when Gopinath Pattanaika, because of his inappropriate some actions in the financial realm, in the material realm, he gets into trouble and the devotees come and please rescue him. So Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, his reaction is very surprising and instructive. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu says you know, all these actions of these people, these devotees, actions of people like Gopinath Pattanaika, they are simply causing a headache to me.
And therefore, if this continues, I will leave Jagannath Puri and go to Alalnath. And all the devotees say, no, no, Lord, we won’t trouble you anything about this anymore. We won’t trouble you.
So here, we see most people think that whatever headaches I have, whatever heartaches I have, I go and dump them on God. And God should remove them. But the Chetan Charita Amrit’s level of bhakti is so high that the devotee thinks that I should remove God’s headache.
I should not cause God any headache. Now, of course, this does not mean that if we have problems, we don’t go to God. We can certainly, if we have something burdening our hearts, we can certainly pray to Krishna for help, for guidance.
But we don’t make our relationship with Krishna dependent on His fulfilling that thing. I was giving a class in London. At that point, a devotee asked, a new person asked, he said, God is our father.
Then, just as a child is in trouble, child needs something, go to the father and ask. So what’s wrong in asking God for help? So I answered, actually, there’s nothing wrong in asking God for help. But, take the situation further.
Say, if a child is staying in a hostel somewhere away from home, and the only time the child calls the parents is when he or she needs money. And never else. Then what is happening? The relationship with the parents is reduced simply.
They’re treating the parents as money suppliers. Nothing more. That is not a very fulfilling relationship.
So it’s not that if we have problems, we have to divert the problems from our bhakti and think, I’ll not talk about my problems at all with Krishna. No. If we have some problems, we can definitely pray to Krishna for help, for guidance, for relief.
But we don’t, we don’t see Krishna’s love only in terms of his solving our problems. When we think in terms of contribution, I’m here to serve Krishna. And gradually, as this ethos starts coming more and more into our consciousness, we start feeling satisfied, we start feeling affirmed when we are able to do something for someone.
Not when someone does something for us. Yes, if someone does something for us, that’s wonderful. That’s their affection for us.
But if we are able to do something for them, that also gives us a sense of, oh yes, I’m able to do something. And actually, this is the essence of preaching, of sharing Krishna consciousness. Srila Prabhupada, he travelled all over the world, delivered millions of people.
And what was his aspiration? He, in his Jal Guta prayers, when he was on the ocean, he just got two heart attacks. He was recovering from them. At that time, an ordinary person would pray, oh God, please let me not die.
Please let me stay healthy till I reach a doctor. And then, please, basically, it’s natural at that time to ask for survival, ask for health. But what was Srila Prabhupada asking? He was asking, my dear Lord, please make me an instrument of your compassion.
Aniya chadi prabho amare nachaate, nachao nachao prabho nachao se maante, kashthede puttane jata nachao se maante. My dear Lord, if you brought me here, please make me dance. Make me dance just like a puppet.
A puppeteer makes a puppet dance, similarly make me dance. And dance for what purpose? Dance so that that by your arrangement, ultimately it’s your illusory energy by which everyone generates illusion. My dear Lord, please, if it is your will, help them come out of illusion.
So Prabhupada, he was going to America, he was coming to America for the purpose of giving Krishna. And the more he could give Krishna to others, the more Prabhupada felt enlivened, the more Prabhupada became energised. And by the practise of bhakti, as we keep serving Krishna, we will also become purified.
Purification, at one level it is, okay, how much you become free from lust, anger, greed. That is true. At another level, that is one way of looking at purification.
At another level it is purification means that we become less self-concerned about what others are doing for me, and we become more concerned about what I am doing for others. So the more we develop that ethos of contribution, okay, what can I do in this situation? How can I serve? How can I contribute? The more we will have always something to do. The more we have that idea that others should do something for me, the more we will be uncertain whether it will be done for me or not.
The more we’ll be insecure and the more we will feel dissatisfied. The more we develop this idea that if I can make a contribution in some small service, just a kind word, a small way of helping someone, whatever it is, if we do that, we get a sense of self-affirmation, we get a sense of affirmation from that. Then we will always be able to do something, have a purpose and get our affirmation from something which we can do rather than what something others need to do for us.
I was just thinking about all this before the class and I was talking with one Bhakta Maharaj and I told him about how his audio books, one of his audio books, one devotee heard it, one friend heard it, he just liked to hear audio books and based on that, he liked the audio book so much that he became a devotee just by hearing the audio book. So the Maharaj told me that, oh, you made my day. A devotee lives to hear about how his services help another person to become a devotee.
So I thought what I was going to speak in class, Krishna is demonstrating through what Maharaj said. A devotee actually gives contribution and when the contribution, when the contribution happens, the devotee feels vindicated, the devotee feels valued. So it is easy to speak all these things but I am also a struggling sadhaka trying to apply this, not looking for what others are doing for me but what we can do for others in the mode of service.
So I seek the blessings of all the senior Vaishnavas that I can also become purified and try to make some small contribution in Srila Prabhupada’s mission. So I’ll summarise, I spoke in three parts about first, rituals are universal, that there is the handshake as a ritual, there is a birthday, blowing of candles as a ritual and sceptics may say rituals are pointless but even the rituals in materialistic culture are also pointless from a rational or scientific perspective. The idea we need to exercise ghosts by blowing candles, that’s irrational from a scientific perspective.
But we can’t do away with rituals. What we can do is, do away with the superficial performance of rituals. If you understand their purpose and try to act according to their purpose, then the rituals become very meaningful.
Today’s culture commercialises the rituals, like valentine’s day greeting or birthday or even religious festivals like Diwali or Christmas, they become more buying and selling rather than meditating on the higher spiritual realities that are central to those festivals. The bhakti culture is meant to spiritualise rituals. I talked about how the spiritualization means we focus on making a contribution rather than taking from others, we give to others.
So we are in three circles, the body, the society and the environment. And these three can cause us three pleasures, adhyatmik, adhidaivik, adhibhautik and adhidaivik. But to pacify them, we do tapa, dana and yajna.
When we practise bhakti, we are going to the source of all suppliers and we are satisfying that source of all suppliers. Like a mother gives her breast milk, but it is Krishna who puts milk in the breast of the mother so that she can give it to the child. So through devotion, we satisfy the source of all suppliers.
And that’s why the japa yajna which we do, japa is called the most important yajna because we are satisfying the source of all suppliers with the most foundational resource that we can offer, that is our consciousness. And then I conclude by talking about how we all need a sense of self-affirmation that my existence counts, I matter to someone. Now we may get that by what others do for us.
How many people come and give me birthday cards? How many people value me? That’s one way. So if children are neglected, then they think only when I cry, people will pay attention to me. Some people have the idea that by being unhappy, my needs will be met.
That is a distorted self-conception. But bhakti purifies us. That means that it shifts our focus, shifts our need for self-affirmation from what others do for me to what I do for others.
Ultimately, what I do for Krishna. The Prabhupada said Krishna consciousness means we feel Krishna is telling us what are you doing for me? And that was Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s mood. He says don’t give me a headache.
That’s demonstrating the highest level of love. The devotee rather than dumping one’s problems on Krishna wants to do something for Krishna. So we certainly have problems in life.
We can pray to Krishna for relief, guidance, strength. But we don’t reduce our relationship to Krishna to simply asking for relief from problems. And we don’t think that just because Krishna is not solving this problem that Krishna doesn’t love me.
Our relationship with Krishna is much bigger. And the more we can follow Srila Prabhupada’s example, even when he had nothing, he had been on the verge of heart attack, he’s thinking Krishna, I want to serve you. I want to give you a message to others.
As we develop that mood of contribution, then we will feel lesser and lesser uncertain, dissatisfied because we will always have something to do. In any situation, we can contribute in a small way. And that way, we can spiritualise our need for self-affirmation through changing it from what others are doing for me to what I am doing for others.
By this way, we can all, whatever situation we are in, we can attract Krishna’s mercy and make tangible contributions with whatever we have in our life. Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.
Hare Krishna. Do we have time for questions? 8.20, isn’t it? Thank you very much.