Can people with an empty stomach practice bhakti – shouldn’t material needs be fulfilled first?
So, is there a certain threshold of material needs or material comforts that need to be fulfilled before people can practice Bhakti? Say, the stomach is empty and I cannot do bhajan. Yes, it's true at one level.
But then we can see the converse. There are so many people with filled stomachs. How many of them are practicing Bhakti? So, it's not necessary.
But there are two different things over here. There is social welfare and there is spiritual welfare. And both should be taken care of.
That means it's not that people should be materially deprived and we expect them to just practice spirituality. Not at all. There should be arrangements for material welfare also made.
Now, in the traditional spiritual culture of India, there are Brahmanas and there are Kshatriyas. The Brahmanas would minister to spiritual welfare and the Kshatriyas would minister to material welfare. And both of them would go together.
Now, in today's world, some states there are welfare organizations. There are welfare states where they provide for citizens. Some states are not like that.
So, social welfare is a big need in today's world. Now, there are some spiritual organizations who focus primarily on social welfare. So, social welfare is important.
Spiritual welfare is also important. And some organizations they start seeing that social welfare itself is spiritual. That's not necessary.
Social welfare is important. Feeding the body alone is not nourishing the soul. They are two different things.
So, both can go on in parallel. And as far that's from the social, from say those who have some resources, those who have some facilities to share. Some people feel inspired to do spiritual welfare, some people do social welfare.
And number of people who are inspired to do spiritual welfare are often far lesser than the number of people who are inspired to do social welfare. So, it is not necessary that all those who are doing spiritual welfare should also start doing social welfare. Because this is, not many people doing this.
Now, this is from the people who are doing something. Sometimes people such people who are doing spiritual, trying to do spiritual welfare, they are saying what are you doing practically for people? But actually changing people's consciousness is among the most practical things that we can do. Before I was introduced to bhakti practices, I mean I was in college and that time I was involved in the social welfare organization.
So I used to go to slums near my college and I used to teach students over there, free tuitions for the students, English, History, Mathematics, slums like that. I found that most of the children, they came from families where the fathers were alcoholics, it was domestic violence and I started feeling that just by teaching them these subjects, how much am I really helping them? So then at that time our organization diversified into de-addiction, into anti-alcohol campaigning also. Then there's a small village which we took up, one of my friends was more active in that.
He went to that village and we got actually all the people over there to give up alcohol, like a big success for our organization. Then one evening my friend came back from that village and he was looking shattered and he told me that recently there had been the local panchayat elections and one of the political candidates in order to get the votes from people had brought three truck loads of liquor and given free to everyone and not only the fathers but even the children had got drunk. So then I started thinking, I had a lot of faith in the power of education that by education we are opening doors for people, which is true, but I realized that we also need to provide people the self-control to walk through the open doors and it is not just the uneducated people who went into alcohol.
I was in one of the top engineering colleges in India and there was a senior of mine who had been a university topper throughout and he had got the highest-paying job in the history of our college and I had met him and he was a chain smoker and he got that job and within six months of working in that job he was diagnosed with lung cancer and six more months he died. So I realized that here there are self-destructive forces operating not just in the uneducated strata of society, even in the highly educated strata. So we may want to help others, but are people in a capacity to receive help? In many welfare states, the state provides people money and people use money not to get food, clothing, shelter, they use it to get drugs and go high, get stoned.
So if people don't have basic level of self-mastery, then offering them material help is like pouring water in a leaking bucket. Our intention is sincere but the water bucket will never get filled. So it's not that spiritual welfare needs to wait till material welfare is done.
Sometimes the absence of spirituality is what prevents material welfare from actually having the desirable effect. So when both go in parallel, when we practice and share spirituality, those people who are wealthy, people who have resources, when they ultimately understand I'm a spiritual being and what I want to carry with me, the material things I'll not carry, but the good that I do, the results of that I'll carry. So those who are wealthy, they become inspired to become more charitable.
So among the haves, spirituality can infuse more charitable spirit. And among the have-nots, spiritual practices can help them to become more self-controlled. Now wherever devotee people have practiced spirituality, people who have practiced bhakti, they become free from bad habits.
Many bad habits people struggle to give up. The practice of bhakti, they're relatively much easier to give up. So then people become more equipped to receive help.
So yes, a certain threshold of material well-being is important. Otherwise the mind is always filled with anxiety. But that does not mean that sharing spirituality has to wait till people are in that threshold.
Rather, both can go in parallel. We shouldn't be insensitive about material needs of people. Yes, material needs need to be taken care of.
At the same time, many people are in a situation where even if we provide for them materially, they'll not be able to benefit from it. There are many beggars, not all, there are people in need and if we have the capacity to help them, we should help them. But it is not that spiritual practices have to wait till one comes to the spiritual level, till one comes to a particular level of material prosperity.
Even if one is not there like that, spiritual practices can help. What should not be done is that people should not be, people's material side should not be totally neglected or rejected. We are either present or existence is multilevel.
We are spiritual beings existing in material bodies. So we need to help people in an all-round way. Does that answer your question? Thank you.