The painkiller of entertainment is easily available, but does the cure of enlightenment needs to be given by someone enlightened

Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna so pain killers can be very easily taken entertainment is always available to us but for the antiseptic we need a prescription from a doctor for enlightenment we need someone to give us well every metaphor has its intent and it also has its limitations it is definitely true that entertainment is far more easily accessible to us than enlightenment but the fact is that entertainment sooner or later becomes unfulfilling and that’s why if we start relying on it as a default then eventually we will want more and more and more so as I said pain killers are not bad in themselves in some cases I was just giving this example in a talk and after that talk there was one doctor who mentioned that in some cases actually pain killers can help in healing also because if somebody has got a very painful injury and then the body is so caught in responding to that pain that all of its energy is in trying to deal with that the whole body muscles become tensed and whatever and then you just give a pain killer although the pain is not cured but the body relaxes and then the body’s energy can shift towards healing antiseptic can work faster so in some cases the pain killer can help in the healing also but the real challenge is when the real danger is when the pain killer becomes a substitute for the main medicine, for the curative medicine so Krishna also in the Bhagavad Gita says Yukta Ahara Viharasya be regulated in your eating and in your recreation he is not saying reject recreation but be regulated in it so broadly what I find is that this is what you said about this being easily available that’s universal but it is good if we could find out some entertainment that also points towards enlightenment that means if you like music try to see if you can find some spiritual music if you like to read about something and try to find out something which is if not spiritual directly at least something wisdom centered so we don’t necessarily have to see that these two are non-intersecting they are definitely not identical circles entertainment and enlightenment but there is overlap also in them so we could situate ourselves in the overlap and then gradually move towards enlightenment so keeping that regulated and also trying to have it in a way that is pointing towards enlightenment that can help so another thing which we could do is that try to keep that which is uplifting easily accessible say for example if you are feeling bored now there might be some spiritual apps which also contain some stimulating we have for example say a darshan app which has beautiful pictures of Krishna and now keep that on your phone home page and then sometimes we have to sometimes trick the mind see the mind wants something new so what we do is like this one video I am working to make an app it’s basically we have so much spiritual wisdom to read the Bhagavad Gita is there, the Bhagavatam is there, so what happens is it is there but it is so big that we hardly ever read it, so what we are working on is that you create apps which will be like random extract generators, so you open that app and some random words from the Bhagavad Gita will come up, some random text from the Bhagavatam will come up, so then what happens the mind wants something new, oh this is new let me read it so we have to find out with our mind how we can in a sense trick it so we have to learn how the mind can learn the best so the we could say that the mind our own mind which is habituated to certain things it is, you could compare it to a child with dyslexia now such children are not untalented they may also be brilliant in their own ways but the parents and the caregivers have to learn how to help their child to learn sometimes they can’t see letters, so then you have to have something else, so it requires time so similarly we observe ourselves, don’t just condemn ourselves oh I just waste so much time on this we can’t be too hard with ourselves on this, but at the same time we can’t be too lax with ourselves also so learn how we can help ourselves to learn ok, thank you