Understanding Krishna’s love 2 – Experience
[Congregation program at Perth, Australia]
Video:
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
I spoke today about this theme of how we can see a bigger plan in life and therein we can see Krishna’s love for us started by speaking about how when we go through life we all set some purposes for ourselves and what purpose we set is based often on what knowledge we have, what abilities we have so the difference between humans and animals is that animals come with and live on with inherited characteristics.
Humans get inherited characteristics but we can also get a lot of learned characteristics and the inherited characteristics can help us to take care of basic bodily functions. The learned characteristics can also help us to do that. But learned characteristics can help us to do more.
Animals may live in the same nest. We can learn how to make better and better houses but beyond that we can also learn does life have a bigger purpose? For animals they are simply driven by their basic bodily drives but for us making sense of things is opportunity, a privilege that we have and just as when we learn language then a whole new vista opens for us, for communicating for learning, for interacting, for experiencing. Similarly when we open ourselves to a bigger purpose in life then we will find that a bigger picture opens for us.
So we all have our subjective purposes which we set for ourselves and they give us the direction the motivation to move forwards but apart from the subjective purposes is there an objective purpose to life? If two subjective purposes come in collision with each other like Arjuna’s warrior duty and his Kshatriya duty or sometimes one subjective purpose is just frustrated by a terrible problem in our life or sometimes some problem then we have ourselves made a purpose so big that when it is frustrated we feel what is the point of my life? If somebody makes a relationship as their goal of life and they experience rejection in that relationship they may want to commit suicide. If somebody makes getting a particular level of grades in their exam the purpose of their life, they don’t get that they feel what is the point of my life? So if we have a purpose that is bigger than our problems then that can give us the power to always move on and that big purpose the Bhagavad Gita describes is the purpose of our spiritual evolution. We are souls and we are meant to develop eternal love for Krishna and to find eternal satisfaction therein.
We all want to be to love and be loved and this longing is supremely fulfilled when we learn to love Krishna and with that purpose in life even if we face reversals we can persevere. I talked about how Abhimanyu Abhimanyu’s death devastated Yudhishthira with feelings of immense guilt taking responsibility is positive but blaming and beating ourselves up is negative. So when he started going in that direction of beating himself up in guilt and impulsively rushing off to fight the war alone Vyasadev stopped him told him that nobody can violate the law of death that Abhimanyu has gone beyond the arena of temptation and that the inscrutable will of the divine is for the good of all living beings.
If you do that will how it is good will be revealed in due course. So when we look back at our life often we will see that something that seemed to be bad at that time led to something good later. Just as a pattern may not be seen by someone who is just caught in the particular stitches.
Just as a multi-act play its purpose may not be appreciated if you just see one phase of the play in which the hero is being beaten. Similarly if we fragment the present from the bigger picture we may get overwhelmed by what is happening. But if we patiently persevere in our service to Krishna then in due course his plan, his pattern will be revealed and he will guide us to supreme auspiciousness.
When we are brought down to nothing Krishna is up to something. Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.