Narasimha Chaturdashi – How Hiranyakashipu and Prahlada reside in our hearts

[Talk at ISKCON, Toronto, Canada]
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_5o_WTdi3Mx

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Jai! Gaur Premam. Hare Krishna! Hare Krishna! Grateful to be here on the occasion of Narsingh Adhodarshi. And the story that we will discuss today centres on two broad kinds of people.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says, in the 16th chapter, there are two kinds of people. Some are wise and some are otherwise. And quite often, it is not so easy to understand who is wise and who is otherwise.
So of course Krishna doesn’t use the word wise and otherwise, what word does he use? Divine and demoniac. So, when we live in the world, all of us at every moment make choices. So right now, this evening you chose to come for this programme.
Even now when you are sitting at this place, you know you are making choices whether to focus on what the speaker is speaking or what else is going on in the background or what is going on in your own mind. I am also making the choice. So we all have to make choices and the choices as we keep making them one by one by one, they keep accumulating.
So generally, we atheists sometimes ask this question that so many bad things happen to good people. Where is God? That the problem of evil is the ultimate question they feel. That so many bad things happen, there can be no God.
But actually, we could turn around and ask them the question, why should bad things not happen to good people? Why should good things happen to good people? What do you mean? That’s how it should be. But why? If everything were operating simply by chance, then there should not be any correlation at all. Anything can happen to anyone.
And in fact, if you look at a purely materialistic worldview, the idea of good and bad itself is non-existent. Because everything is just matter interacting with matter. So in general, we all expect that if I do good, good results will come.
And even if we do bad, we want to somehow get away from the bad results. It’s said that success has many parents and failure is almost always the orphan. Nobody wants to take responsibility.
So normally, what we expect, if I do good, I should get good. If I do bad, even then I should get very little bad results. But sometimes the scriptures themselves depict, the same scriptures which glorify God, they themselves depict almost the opposite of what would be the normal causal connection.
That means, that if we do good, and then we get bad as a result of that. That becomes unbearable. And there can be different degrees of that.
We see in the Srimad Bhagavatam, Parikshit Maharaj does a small bad thing, just offends the sage. And because of that, he is cursed to die. So that’s bad enough.
A small mistake and a big consequence. But it’s worst is, there is no mistake and big trouble. And that is the story of Prahlad.
So, Prahlad is a simple, sweet boy, who is devoted to the Lord. And it is because he is trying to do good, because he is trying to be a devotee, that’s the sole reason he gets into trouble. If he just stopped being a devotee, instead of saying, Om Narasimhaaya Namaha, he started saying, Om Hirannikashipaya Namaha, everything would have been fine for him.
So, what is going on over here, when somebody who is trying to do good, is getting into a lot of trouble. So, normally, when I talked earlier about wise and otherwise, at one level we may think that a wise person is a person who does that which is intelligent to do. So, we see the causal connection of things, and then we choose to act accordingly.
Okay, this will lead to that, so therefore I should never do that. So, there are short term, very short term is where we just don’t think about the causal connection at all. We just do whatever our impulses tell us to do.
It’s like some people speak to express their thoughts, and some people speak to discover their thoughts. They speak and they think, hey, what did I say? I didn’t want to say that. So, at one level, if somebody is very impulsive, that is in the otherwise category.
They are foolish, they are short sighted. They just do things and then they regret it afterwards. But people who think of their actions and their consequences, we would call them wise.
Now, in the case of Prahlad, he was just a small boy, and for him, the consequences of actions were such that whatever good he was doing, that was getting him into trouble. And it’s one thing when there is a number of people who are trying to do something good together. Say, if there is a, in the history of the world, we have had dictators, and there are uprisings against the dictators.
So, if there is a whole group of people who are opposing it, then, although there is fear of retribution, but still there is some courage. Oh, we are all grouped together. But when somebody is alone, and nobody else is resisting, so much so that Prahlad, he at that point, even the gods were terrorised by Hiranyakashipu.
And the gods were also not obeying. The gods were also obeying Hiranyakashipu completely. And not to speak of gods, even Prahlad’s own guru, Narad Muni, at that time was offering subordination to Hiranyakashipu.
So, at that time, he was utterly alone, completely alone. So, there is loneliness. There are different kinds of loneliness.
I was in Phoenix in America, I gave a seminar on loneliness there. So, loneliness can be when we, at one level, we are completely alone. But the most painful loneliness is when we are with people who don’t understand us, who don’t share our values.
So, then we are surrounded by people, but we just don’t connect with anyone at all. And that can be extremely painful. If there are conflicts, if there are some people or opponents, they criticise us.
Anybody who criticises us, that hurts us. But the most painful attacks of our opponents don’t hurt us as much as the silence of our supporters, silence of our friends. So, for Prahlad, he was utterly alone.
He not only was the person opposing him, Hiranyakashipu, this is the unchallenged ruler of the whole universe. But even the people who were supposed to be virtuous, all of them were silent. So, he was completely alone.
And being alone is a physical state. Being lonely is an emotional state. So, being alone can be good.
It can be sometimes solitude is helpful for deeper contemplation. But being lonely is very painful. Because you just feel isolated.
We all need some kind of social interaction if we are not to go mad. Because our mind can present us hundreds of options at each moment. And it is to some extent how people react to what we are doing that keeps us in check.
Sometimes I give a class and when I am giving a class, I feel as if, or the audience, it seems like they are looking at me as if they are watching a foreign language movie with no subtitles. Then I start understanding maybe what I am speaking is irrelevant or it is becoming too incomprehensible. So, actually if we start doing something which is inappropriate, then the feedback from others keeps us on track.
And to keep doing something when everybody is disapproving that, it is extremely difficult. In one sense, social feedback works to keep us on the right path. But if the social feedback is preventing us from doing the right thing, then to keep doing the right thing is very, very difficult.
On top of that, Prahlad, he was just a small child, just a five-year-old child. Now, how can a five-year-old child have such courage of conviction? Where does it come from? Bhakti is not a function of age, of anything material. Later on, it is described that when, we will come to that past time, that part of the past time, but it is relevant over here, that when Narasimha Dev appears and the devatas start praying to him after he has put Hridayakashipu to rest, at that time the devatas start offering great prayers.
And the Lord is not pacified by that. So, why is that? They are offering prayers. The Lord is not pacified because he is still angry with the devatas.
He is saying that when my devotee Prahlad was being tortured, threatened, at that time, you neither protected nor protested. And therefore, whatever prayers you are offering to me, they are not touching my heart. Because when the test came, your devotion was not seen.
So, Hridayakashipu, he had such power that he had terrorised even the gods. Now see, there are some parts of some cities where the underworld rules. And if somebody goes in that part of the city and they are robbed.
And then you go to the police and complain. The police will say, why did you go there? Even we don’t go there. Even we don’t go there.
So, that means, what has happened is, those who are meant to have the rule of law, they are also controlled. They are also fearful. So, the situation was like that for Hridayakashipu.
That he had such power that even the gods were fearful of him. And at that time, for Prahlad to continue on, how does one go about doing that? So, I said earlier that, devotion is not determined simply by age. It’s not just because he was 5 years old and he was reckless.
There are some people who are fearless. And normally you might think fearlessness is a virtue. But there is a difference between fearlessness and foolhardiness.
Fear can sometimes be a healthy thing. If a child starts peering down from a 10-storey building and doesn’t feel any fear, then the mother will feel great fear. What are you doing? So, fearlessness is not always healthy.
If that fearlessness is foolhardiness. And Prahlad’s fearlessness can seem to be like foolhardiness. When Hridayakashipu has tried again and again to kill Prahlad, it’s shocking how a father can kill his own child.
But, all of us have certain values. And values are not just abstract, ethical, moral things. Some people say, even if somebody is immoral, but still they also have their values.
So, our values simply reflect what we consider valuable. When we say somebody has no values, what it means is, let’s say, if they are ready to betray someone just so that they can get some money. Or they are ready to backbite against someone just so that they can get some game.
That means, you see, they have no values. But what it means is, that particular money or position, that is their value. So, what we consider valuable reflects our values.
And normally, nature has arranged in such a way that parents value their children. And parents are often ready to sacrifice and lay down their lives to take care of their children. But here, the values can get so distorted that a parent is ready to kill his own child.
So, how does this happen? Now, we could say that, oh, he was a demon. But, that’s true, but it’s an oversimplified explanation. What the Bhagavad Gita tells us is, being a demon, it’s not just a physical bodily form.
It’s a state of consciousness. It’s a state of the mind. And that state of mind is a spectrum.
When we say that somebody is demoniac, that is not just somebody who is ready to kill their own child. This is brutal. It is horrendous.
But, it’s a sliding slope from a demonic nature, which is there in every one of us. When we are at a, say, if there is a mountain from which snow has fallen. Now, at the top of the mountain, what is there is not even a snowball.
It’s a snow pebble. But, as the snow pebble keeps moving down, down, down, down, it starts becoming bigger and bigger. Till it becomes a snowball.
And then, by the time it comes down, it becomes a snow boulder. And, it can just knock over a person. So, going back to the earlier point of, why do bad things happen to good people, if you ask.
So, Prahlad is an example. A good person doing a good thing, and horrible things happening to him. So, what happens is, some people say, oh, this God is responsible for this.
But, no. There are three factors which broadly shape actions. When people act in a particular way, there are three broad factors.
And, they are illustrated in the story. There is God’s will. There is free will.
And, there is evil. There is God’s will, free will, and evil. Now, evil is not some abstract being or some concrete being like a Satan.
Evil is basically the repeated misuse of the free will, that becomes accumulated in the consciousness. And, once it becomes accumulated in the consciousness, that person starts doing that same thing nonchalantly. Nonchalantly.
So, a parent, a father wanting to kill one’s child, this is reprehensible. This is unconscionable. But, what has happened is, that it’s a continuum.
I was at a drug addiction and spirituality conference. And, there, I was talking with a counsellor, those who are caregivers, as well as some of the care seekers who were there. So, basically, what happens when somebody starts getting addicted to something? The point I am making is, Hiranyakashipu is not just some demoniac being who exists at all.
The demoniac tendency, at a minor level, is there within us also. We are trying to see how this story is relevant to us in today’s world. So, somebody who, say, starts taking drugs or any addictive substance, it’s not that they are perverted kind of people.
The same person who wants drugs, they might just lie. Somebody, I’ve never taken drugs, why not take drugs? They say they lie about it. But, from the lie, they maybe start robbing about it.
They steal some money so they can get their drugs. So, what has happened, when they lie, it’s a snow pebble being formed. And, as that snow pebble starts going down, down, down, it starts becoming bigger.
They may rob, they may steal from someone. And then, eventually, they may become so crazed by that craving for drugs, that they may even not only steal, but if somebody stops them and they are trying to steal, they may even kill that person. So, when they become so bad that they are ready to kill someone, that means, that evil tendency, which was just a snow pebble, has grown, not just to snowball, but it has become a snow boulder.
So, for Hiranyakashyapu, his addiction was to power. There are different kinds of addictions people may have. So, drugs are like a very physical substance that is addictive.
See, for the mind, addiction is formed not just based on the physical interaction. Normally, if somebody is taking drugs or taking alcohol, it’s a physical substance going in, that makes them addictive. But, for the mind, whether something goes into the mouth or into the skin, or simply into the eyes, or something just gets impressed on the brain, on the mind.
If something gets impressed on the mind, it becomes addicted to that. So, for the mind, what happens essentially is, that somebody, that person gets some power. And when they get some power, they feel that, I am right and you are wrong.
In general, sometimes there are ego battles. In Australia, I did a seminar, a retreat on burn anger before anger burns you. So, it is interesting how different people have different psychologies.
So, there is one person, there is one particular leader in a particular community, everybody was feeling very short-tempered. So, many people came and expressed some concerns. So, I was talking to that person and he said, So, I don’t have any anger management issues.
I don’t need to learn how to manage anger. People just need to learn how to not make me angry. So, actually, to the extent we outsource responsibility for self-management.
So, what happens is, that when they do like that, so initially in their anger, they might just yell at someone. And if they don’t check it at that time, then they might not just yell, but they might use extremely insulting words. Yelling is in volume, but insult is in content.
It is not just how you speak, but what you speak also. And then they might even become not just verbally abusive, they might become physically abusive. Not only physically abusive, nowadays, I came from America, people have access to guns.
Someone might just take a gun and shoot someone. So, what is happening over here, that particular tendency to get angry, that is there in everyone. But we all have certain limits of how much or how we will express the anger.
But if somebody keeps transgressing that limit, then that limit gets very worse. And generally, the worst thing that can happen for somebody when they do a wrong thing, is that they don’t get the result of that wrong thing. Like if somebody, I was in Las Vegas, and I was reading about gambling, and I was talking about it, the worst thing that can happen for somebody who gambles is to win.
Because if they lose, they learn, I shouldn’t do this. But if they win, hey, I can do this. I can do this.
And eventually the consequences are going to be there. Say, if somebody slips from a, say, somebody sitting on the sofa, I’m sitting here, I slip and I fall. Just a little jot.
Nothing will be hurt except maybe my pride. I fall down. But somebody falls from, say, 10 feet, they’ll be hurt more.
Somebody falls from 100 feet, they’ll be hurt even more. But somebody, if they fall from, say, maybe 1 kilometre or 5 kilometres or 10 kilometres high up in the sky, and now, the higher they are up there, if they don’t look at the ground, they won’t even notice they’re falling. Anyway, I’m just enjoying my flight in space.
So what happens, some people, if they have done a lot of good, if they have some karmic credits from the past, then they do wrong, but they get no reaction for the wrong. And to not get the consequences for our actions is the worst thing that can happen to us. Because then, the tendency to do that action, wrong action, keeps getting solidified, solidified, solidified.
And then, by the time it becomes worse and worse, it can become so bad, that somebody lies and takes some drugs, and they’re immediately caught in the lie. I’ll not do this again. Somebody lies and gets away.
Somebody steals and gets away. And they steal bigger amount and they get away. And eventually, when they kill someone, they are caught.
So what happens is, the snow pebble, when it’s stopped at the level of snow pebble, if you just flick it with your toe and break it, but by the time it becomes a snow boulder, it can knock over a whole person. It can kill a person also. So in the case of Hiranyakashyapu, his hunger for power, it had become so manic, so obsessive, that normally for power, somebody might insult someone, somebody might push somebody aside, somebody might bang mic.
That’s at the level of snow pebble. But for him, anybody who was challenging his hunger for power, he was ready to kill that person. So that’s why something so horrifyingly incomprehensible, like a father wanting to kill one’s own child, that can become entirely possible if one becomes obsessed with one value.
So for him, it was not that he had no values. Nobody can have no values. Everybody has some values.
But whether the values are divine values or demoniac values, his value was, I want power. Everybody should bow down to me. And if my own son is not ready to bow down to me, I will destroy that person.
So there is a dark side within every one of us. And to the extent we recognise that this dark side, if it is not controlled, if it is not regulated, it can darken my entire life. So the scriptures often provide us these two trajectories.
Like we have Ram and Ravan. We have the Pandavas and the Kauravas. We have Prahlad and Hiranyakashipu.
Now often when the scriptures depict the story, they depict characters in their extremes. So Prahlad’s level of devotion might seem incomprehensible for us. How can someone face against the whole world? Earlier I said that he was completely alone.
Standing for principles that would even cost him his life. So the divine side is depicted in an extreme way in the story. But conversely, the demoniac side is also depicted at an extreme level in the story.
Now usually we are neither that demoniac nor are we that divine. But the point is, that by gradual accumulation of our choices, if we keep doing one wrong thing, one wrong thing, one wrong thing, the snow pebble can become a snow boulder and we might end up doing things which we never thought we would do. So Hiranyakashipu is not present in a full-blown form within us.
But in an infinite form, that Hiranyakashipu is also there. And recognising its presence helps us to stay on guard. I don’t want to get carried away by this.
But Prahlad, as I was talking earlier about, foolishness and foolhardiness. So Prahlad’s… Sorry, fearlessness and foolhardiness. So Prahlad was fearless, but in some cases he can appear to be foolhardy.
When his father asked him, What did you learn in school? Now for him, the school, this whole educational system was just a tool for ideological indoctrination. What is that? Everybody should learn the glory of Hiranyakashipu. That is all that he had to learn.
What did he learn in school? And Prahlad gave answers which outraged his father. I have learned the best thing is that you should be a devotee of Vishnu. Being devoted to Vishnu is the best thing that I have learned.
He got angry at that time. So once this happened, he sent his back to his teacher and told him to teach him properly. It again happened.
He got extremely angry and decided to kill him. And he couldn’t kill him at all. None of his ways to try to kill him worked.
And then he asked Prahlad, What is the source of your power? So now Prahlad’s answer can seem like deliberately provocative. What does he say? He says, the source of my power is also the source of your power and also the source of the source of your power. Your power is coming from Amma but the source of my power is the source of the power of Brahman also.
Why is he provoking like this? His point is not to provoke. His point is to educate. So Hiranyakashipu had this vision of competitive hierarchy.
There is a pecking order and I have got nearly to the top of the pecking order. Now one step above is Vishnu. If I just knock off Vishnu, then I will get to the top.
Some people think that there is a hierarchy of beings and God is the best of all beings. So if I can become more powerful like in tennis or sports, there is a player who is number 1, number 2, number 3. The number 5 player keeps performing better and better, they will become number 1. So Hiranyakashipu had that idea, I will become more and more powerful, I will become number 1, I will become God. But Prahlad wanted to free Hiranyakashipu from that notion.
God is not just the best of all beings. God is the basis of all beings. God is the basis of all beings.
God exists in a category different from everyone else. Whatever power anyone has, all that power comes from God. That’s why if you see the sequence of verses, after that what he is saying is that don’t think of Vishnu as your enemy.
You have no enemy except your own uncontrolled and misguided mind because of which you are thinking Vishnu to be your enemy. Vishnu is not the enemy of anyone. So Prahlad, his courage of conviction, his utter fearlessness in even the presence of Hiranyakashipu, it came because he did not see Hiranyakashipu as an independent source of power.
Hiranyakashipu’s power is also coming from Vishnu. So if Vishnu wants me to die, then Hiranyakashipu’s weapons will hurt me. And if Vishnu does not want me to die, Hiranyakashipu’s weapons will not hurt me.
And that’s why in the first canto when Arjuna is offering prayers, he is saying, Krishna, in the Kurukshetra war, you protected me just as you protected Prahlad. Just as no weapons could hurt Prahlad, Siddhartha said no weapons could hurt me. Now externally speaking, you could say Prahlad and Arjuna are exactly opposite.
Prahlad never raised a single weapon. No matter how many weapons were hurled at him, Prahlad has closed eyes. He embodies, he represents the bhakti form of devotion.
In contrast, Arjuna was as famous as the winter of the Gandiva. He was a champion archer. So Arjuna was vigorously fighting against his opponents, whereas Prahlad was doing nothing to fight against his opponents.
So externally the two might appear to be entirely different, but internally both of them understood that all power came from Krishna. So in that particular situation, Krishna chose to not give Prahlad any power to fight against his opponents. But Prahlad was not affected.
Arjuna had been given phenomenal power to fight against his opponents. But Arjuna was acknowledging that I was protected not by my power, O Lord. I was protected by your power.
So Prahlad’s devotion is exemplary because he is a model of having complete conviction that all power, my power as well as other’s power comes from the Lord. And Arjuna also had that conviction. So sometimes we may have to practise bhakti like Prahlad.
Whatever happens, I accept it. Sometimes we practise bhakti like Arjuna. Fighting against the bad things that are happening in life.
But the important thing is to understand that our power is not our power. Some people say that I have many hidden talents. The problem is they are hidden even from me.
So what is happening over there is we want to think that I have a lot of powers. But I don’t know what those powers are. The fact is whatever talents we have which are known and whatever talents we have which we may not know, all of them come from the Lord.
And that is the example of devotion that Prahlad demonstrates. And eventually when Hiranyakashipu comes, when Lord Narasimhadev comes, and Lord Narasimhadev delivers Hiranyakashipu, at that time there is a Bhavatu commentator Vamsidhar. He asks this question that how is the Lord equal to everyone? Hiranyakashipu was killed, Prahlad was blessed.
So is God really equal to everyone? So he says God is equal to everyone. But God is also reciprocal. He was equal in the sense that both Hiranyakashipu and Prahlad, both of them got to be on the lap of Hiranyakashipu, of Prasimha.
Both of them got to be on the lap. But what happened on the lap was very different. So what happened? We have a Bhaktivan hospital in India, where in the operation theatre they have a picture of Narasimhadev.
So when one person had come there, he says what is that picture? That is the original operation. Really? What happened in that operation? Operation successful, patient liberated. So what happened over there to Hiranyakashipu was different because his attitude was different.
The Lord reciprocates. The Lord is equal to everyone in the sense that he gives equal reciprocity towards everyone. As we approach him, he reciprocates.
So for us, we may not face challenges like Prahlad had to face. But whatever small challenges we are facing, if we determine that I will stay fixed in my bhakti, I will stay fixed in my bhakti, then gradually what applies to the negative tendencies also applies to the positive tendencies. Just as our devotion right now might look like a snow pebble, but if we keep practising bhakti steadily, our devotion can also become like a snowball and a snowboard.
If we keep choosing Krishna in small, small, small ways, all of us may have difficult situations where practising our bhakti might also seem very difficult. But within whatever situation we are in, if we strive to do the right thing, if we strive to serve the Lord to the best of our capacity, we can’t have the power of a snowboarder, but we can have the power of a snowboarder. What we can do if we do that, Krishna will empower us gradually.
I conclude with one last point. Sometimes we feel ourselves completely helpless. I am in such a difficult situation.
I can’t do anything right now. Have any of you felt like that? I am completely powerless. There is nothing I can do.
At that time we can ask ourselves, OK, this is a very bad situation and I feel powerless, but can I make things worse? Who wants to make them worse? I am bad already. Suppose I slip and fall down and I get a fracture. I am on a bed and I am immobilised, but still I can take a hammer and crack my other leg also.
No matter how bad things are, we always have the power to make them worse. And if we have the power to make them worse, that means we have the power to make them better. We are not as powerless as we think.
So in every situation, even if we can’t change the situation at all, we just remember our Lord, we chant the holy names, we remember past times like that of Prahlad. That remembrance is what we can change. Instead of worrying about the problems, resenting the problems, we can focus on the Lord.
What the story of Prahlad tells us is that greater than what faces us is what graces us. We may face big big problems, but bigger than what faces us is what graces us. So that Lord’s grace is available to us, just try to remember Him.
So we can pray to Prahlad and pray to Lord Narasimhadev, blessed Prahlad, that we may all be able to remember the Lord and stay fixed in His service in a small way too. The way Prahlad was always devoted. And if we just have that, make that small micro choice that we can in our situation, with the blessings of Narasimhadev, with the blessings of Prahlad, we all will find our inner power increasing.
And we will get a momentum to move forward positively in our lives. Narasimhadev Bhagwan ki, Jai! Srila Prahlad Maharaj ki, Jai! Narasimha Chaturthashi Mahamahotsav ki, Jai! Shri Prabhupada ki, Jai! Jai Gaur Premanand! Thank you very much. That was an amazing class, very important concepts