Why do devotees sometimes die in ghastly accidents?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.
So, why do devotees sometimes die in ghastly accidents of terrible ways? Especially when even the parents are going through such, must be going through such trauma, and they are also great devotees, they are called the spiritual mentors. So, how do you understand? Sincere devotees die in very painful ways and it causes trauma for others which shatters, shakes the faith of others. So, how do we face it? Yeah, it’s a difficult question.
I gave a class, I was, that event happened after that I was supposed to give a class, that was probably the most difficult class I gave in my whole life. But I’ll try to make some essential points out of that. First of all, we all have to make choices.
Either we accept that things happen by chance or things happen by plan. So, if we consider some people say, Oh, God doesn’t exist, science has all the answers. But science also provides us answers based on the presumption that things happen in an orderly way.
Last year, I was invited to Cambridge University to give a talk on science and spirituality. We went by the tree where Newton saw the fruit falling. So, now, Newton saw the fruit falling, he asked, what made the fruit fall? And that question’s answer led to the theory of gravity.
But that question itself has an assumption that things don’t happen by chance. There is some plan, there is some purpose, there is some cause. So, all knowledge is based on the assumption that there is some order out there.
Now, if you say there is no God, then what is the result? Okay, why do plants fall? Why do fruits fall? That’s because of law of gravity. So, how are birds able to fly? As a result of thermodynamics. So, why are we living? That’s for no purpose.
So, we get sentenced, if we remove God, then we get sentenced to looking for islands of meaning while drowning in an ocean of meaninglessness. This makes sense, this makes sense, this makes sense. But life, it makes no sense.
So, that makes no sense. And science also, when it finds something that doesn’t make sense. So, for example, Newton’s theory of gravity development, then they found that subatomic particles didn’t make sense, how they were working.
And they didn’t reject the science or the theory of gravity or reject the principle of orderliness. They came up with a deeper theory, quantum physics, theory of relativity, whatever. So, the point is that when we see disorder, either we can see it as disorder or we can see it as an order at a level that we don’t presently understand.
So, now to understand Krishna’s love for us, we have to appreciate both the length and the breadth of our existence. The length means this life is not all that there is, that we have gone through many lifetimes and our life extends beyond this life. So, what happens in this life or what happens at the end of this life, that is not the final story.
And beyond that, the breadth of our existence, breadth means we are not just the body, there is a body, mind and soul. Sometimes something may be, conversely, some people may be very comfortable physically, living in a very comfortable AC house. There, they come at two sides.
So, the body is comfortable, but the mind is miserable. They are comfortably miserable. So, the point is that our existence has various dimensions, body, mind and soul.
So, these two points, the length and the breadth of our existence that we see, then what happens to us during this lifetime at the physical level is not the complete reality. So, it is just a part of the reality. And yes, death appears to be very distressing because there is an irreversible finality to it.
But then, you know, why talk about only death? So, devotees sometimes get terrible diseases, devotees sometimes go through upheavals in their life in different ways. So, why does this happen? This is the broad understanding is that, actually, what will be beneficial for the soul’s spiritual evolution may not appear beneficial at the level of the body in this lifetime. When Abhimanyu is killed, at that time, Arjuna is devastated.
Before Arjuna, Yudhishthir is devastated. Because Yudhishthir feels that, in order to save himself, Chakravyuh was meant to capture him, in order to save himself, I send this 16 year old boy to his death. He gets so upset, he says, I can’t face Arjuna.
He says, I will charge into the Kaurava ranks, either I will avenge Abhimanyu or I will die myself. And he is charging in over there. At that time, Vyasadeva comes.
Yudhishthir, despite his being agitated, he has his culture, so he gets down off his obeisances and then he breaks down, sheds his heart. So, Vyasadeva says three things over there. First is that, no one, no matter how virtuous they may be, can ever escape the law of death.
Secondly, he says that, in this world, no matter how virtuous a person may be, because this world is a place of temptation, one can be pulled down anytime. From however high a pedestal one may be. But Abhimanyu has now gone to the arena of human temptation.
So, rather than lamenting his death, he should lament the fate of those of us who are here, still one is going to be in temptation. And then, he says, okay, if he had to die, why like this? Which is unfortunate, isn’t it? And he says, inscrutable below the Lord, is surely for the good of all living beings. How it is so, you will understand, if you do his will.
If you do his will, if you do his will, in due course, you will understand it. So, the material world has its uncertainties, has its anxieties, has its miseries. Jatayu was killed brutally by Ramana.
Why? Jatayu’s death was heroic, because he fought trying to save Ram, and Lord Ram was there holding him in his laps when he departed from his body. So, his death was brutal, but it was still glorious. You could say, why wouldn’t have Lord Ram arranged in some way that Jatayu could have survived? Jatayu is the example of a person, he lost the battle against Ramana, but he won the war against Yudhishthira.
He, by dying in the presence of the Lord, for the service of the Lord, he actually transcended all illusions, he attained the spiritual world. So, sometimes, what exactly may be needed for him to grow spiritually, we don’t know that. So, the why question is simply the pathway to frustration.
I keep asking, why did this happen? Why did this happen? Why did this happen? The why question just has no answers. But instead, we just change the question to how. Krishna, how can I serve you now? How can I move forward now? So, the how question opens doors.
So, as devotees, if we have these twin faiths, first is that, whatever happens, we all are servants of Krishna, I am a servant of Krishna. And by living in the mood of service to Krishna, I will find that my life, even in this world, is better than by trying to live in the mood of a controller and enjoy. You can see that qualitative difference.
And secondly, that Krishna is our Ganesha. That Krishna wants the best for us. So, sometimes, the way he arranges for some devotees to depart from this world, that may be very brutal at the physical level.
But in that also, Krishna, you shed the interest. So, we see only a part of the picture. We see only what is happening at the bodily level.
But then, if we just rely on the bodily level, if we just rely on the prateksha pramana, then ultimately, you can’t even see God. So, why practice anything at all? At a more fundamental level, we can say that. We, at the physical level, there can be as many reasons for believing in God as there are for not believing in God.
But for us, we are practicing bhakti, not just because it is benefiting us physically, there will be benefits, but because it is benefiting us emotionally, it is benefiting us spiritually. So, even in this life, we see that, if we can look in our own hearts, what is it that is the basis of our conviction for practicing bhakti? Is it, okay, physically there have been some changes? That’s primarily internal changes that have happened for us. We’ve got a better sense of life.
We’ve got a better purpose for life. We’ve got better self-mastery by which we can pursue the purpose of life. So, that’s why, as devotees, we have sometimes to accept that at the prateksha pramana level, at the level of the body, at the level of the senses, the world will sometimes give us evidences that will increase our faith, and sometimes the world will give us evidences that will damage our faith.
I was just in America, in Fort Lauderdale, and there, I was speaking about how we look at the present and plan for the future. Krishna looks at the future and plans the present. So, Krishna’s vision is very different, and that’s why, what is good for our future, He will do.
So, after I spoke this, one Dakshin Mataji, she came and talked with me after the class, and she said that she was in New Vrindavan, and it’s an isolated place, so she had to go back, and there was one devotee who was going next morning at 10 o’clock. So, I can take you with me, I can take you to the nearest town, from where you can take a bus or something. So, then she was waiting there, 9.45 she came, 10, 10.15, 10.30, 11, 11.30, and she was trying to call him, but it was a very remote area, there was no range, and by 11.45, she got a call.
She was able to connect with him, and he said, oh, I’m sorry, I forgot about it. Now, I have got almost more than three-fourths of the way, I have a very urgent meeting, I can’t come back, and the range went off. Phew, I was burning, I was wasted, you should have told me, how could you forget like this, I was waiting for you.
And then, and she was going, she was in the temple in the evening, she was in Kirtan, and then another Mataji came and told him, do you know that devotee, who was there yesterday, that yeah, she was still feeling angry with you. He said, no, this car had a bad accident, it was hit by a drunken driver, and the passenger side of it was completely destroyed. She was in the hospital, but the driver’s side was also damaged.
So she, she had been, if she had been in the passenger side, she would have been killed, she saw the pictures of that car. So the point here is, that this is an evidence, which at a particular level, can boost our faith. So sometimes we will see that Krishna has a plan, and we will, so in her case, in six hours, she saw what is the plan of Krishna.
In some cases, it may take months, years, decades, to understand what Krishna’s plan was. So for us, when we are trying to practice Bhakti, we need to, there is Shabda, which is what we get in Shastra. There is Praptaksha, what we experience in this world.
And normally we talk about Hanuman, as something which is speculative. But Hanuman, when it is directed according to Shastra, it is called as Vichar, it is scripture-based thinking. So when we are going through this world, the way we need to function is, that we need to do the Vichar, the Vichar by which Praptaksha will be harmonizing with Shabda.
So some Praptaksha, some things that we see in life, they will seem to be damaging our faith. Some things we see in life, they will be enhancing our faith. So at a Praptaksha level, we will get both kinds of evidences.
So it is our Vichar, it is our reasoning, it is our scripturally-guided intelligence by which we need to harmonize the Praptaksha with the Shabda. So then that means that sometimes we see things which vindicate, which strengthen our faith. Yes, this is what but sometimes when we don’t see it, at that time we have to say that Krishna has some other plan.
It’s a long-term plan which I am not able to see at my level. But based on the fact that Krishna Bhakti has transformed us in our own life at a mental level, at a spiritual level, you see that Krishna is real and Krishna really benefits us. So even if something as disastrous as that is happening at the physical level, you see that at the emotional level, at the spiritual level, Krishna is there with the devotee.
So we know that famous fasting of Ramanujacharya, when he asked Kanchipurna, what if a devotee dies suddenly and is not able to remember Krishna. So Kanchipurna was a spiritual master and he asked Varadaraj. And Varadaraj said that, I will remember the devotee and I will give my remembrance and I will give Shabda.
So with that understanding, we see that in such situations, there are certain plans that Krishna has which we can’t perceive at our level. But by looking at other occasions in our life and other devotee’s life, where Krishna’s plan was revealed to us, we can have faith that Krishna did have a plan. And that way, we can perceive it in our bhakti.
It’s certainly distressing and it’s not that we are meant to somehow deny our emotions. One thing which I speak very categorically is that it’s not that everything that happens is good. Bad things happen in life.
When Draupadi was dishonored, nobody told her, jo hua wo achcha hua. Everything happens. Everything that happens is not good, but everything that happens can be for good.
Bad things happen in life. And when bad things happen, we will be distressed. And to have emotions of grief, to have many emotions of anger or doubt.
Draupadi, when she met Krishna, after the whole incident happened, in the Swayamvar, when Draupadi, sorry, not in the Swayamvar, in the Asat Sabha, when Draupadi would be dishonored, all that happened was her saree became inexhaustible. Sometimes in movies, when we see Krishna over there, sending the saree. But Krishna was not there.
Nobody saw Krishna over there. So that’s why at that time, Draupadi, when she met Krishna, Krishna came in the forest of anxiety. Draupadi was so upset.
She said, Krishna, you know, I’m your friend, I’m your devotee, I’m your relative. I called you for help. Why didn’t you come? I was not there.
Now Krishna doesn’t say, you know, I’m God. I’ve written my perfect plan. Krishna understands.
Krishna says, I didn’t know. So I was fighting with Shalva. He was destroying, destroying our car.
I had to protect her over there. As soon as I came to know, I came here. So Draupadi, you are very virtuous.
And those who have wronged you, they have done a grievous mistake for which you stick to dharma. So to have some flicker of doubt, to feel anger, to feel fear, to feel horror, all these emotions, you don’t have to suppress them. These are just natural reactions.
But rather than letting our faith be decided by just this one incident. So one incident like this can definitely disturb us. But if we look at the broader picture, then we acknowledge the emotions that we feel, but we don’t necessarily act on those emotions.
And we pray to Krishna, Krishna, how can I serve you? How can I make sense of things? How can I move? And that way, we’ll find that even in such situations, by harmonizing or protecting each other, then we will be able to move forward and maintain our faith. Hare Krishna. Okay.
Do we have time? Yeah, we’ve got lecture at seven.