Going back to godhead 1 – Three ways to cultivate spiritual desire – RAP acronym
[Bhagavatam class on 4.12.15 at ISKCON, Perth]
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Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.
Hare Krishna. Grateful to be here today, sweet to the lordships, go on with I and so today, tomorrow and on Sunday and the next three days classes which I'll be giving, I'll take this theme of going back to Godhead. This is the chapter Guru Maharaj goes back to Godhead and I'll take this in three parts.
D.E.P. Desire, Eligibility and Process. So, today I'll talk about the desire, tomorrow in the next class I'll talk about the eligibility and the last will be the process. So, it's just like if we want to immigrate from one country to another or immigrate to another country, then first of all we need a desire to go there.
So, okay, maybe life is over there better, maybe comforts are better, finances are better, security is better, whatever. So, then first we have to have the desire. But just the desire is not enough, then we have to check whether we have the eligibility.
Generally, countries have certain criteria which need to be met and then just having the eligibility is not enough, after that we have to follow a process. So, we will similarly talk about this process of going back to Godhead in those three terms. So, we will talk today about desire.
Now, I'll talk about this in three main parts. So, this particular verse says that Dhruv Maharaj understood that this world is like a dream or a phantasmagoria and Gandharvapura, like the Nagari of Gandharvas. So, the idea is Gandharvas are real beings, they exist at the celestial level and they have comfortable palaces, ancients to live in.
But if somebody is wandering in the forest and there they see some big palace, that is quite likely to be the product of the exhaustion and the imagination. I just desperately want some relief and comfort, maybe there's something over there. It's like we might see a mirage in a desert, so like that we might see something imaginary which we think will provide us relief.
And Dhruv Maharaj understood that this world is like an illusion. So, first point I'll talk about is how this reasoning is the exact opposite of the materialistic reasoning. The materialistic reasoning is that the idea of God is an imagination.
In fact, as Karl Marx famously or infamously said, religion is the opium of the masses. So, their idea is that God is like a fairy tale, a fancy character imagined by people who are afraid of the dark. Oh, they are afraid of life, maybe there's something better over there.
But actually speaking, this logic here is, he understood this, so the materialistic argument is that the idea of God and spiritual world, that's imagination. But here what Dhruv Maharaj is saying is that this world is an imagination. This world, now the world itself is not an imagination, but rather the idea that this world is the ultimate reality, that this world is the source of the ultimate pleasure, that is an imagination.
So, we could turn this argument around, if religion is the opium of the masses, then irreligion is the methamphetamine of the masses. Meth is a far stronger drug than opium. So, irreligion is also an intoxicant, because ultimately everybody has to live in the world, and everybody has some operational beliefs by which they live in the world.
So, if you say that, okay, theism is an idea thought about, is a fairy tale of those who are afraid of the dark. You could turn that around and say atheism is the fairy tale of those who are afraid of the light. Now, what do you mean by afraid of the light? You say, who is afraid of the light? Actually, if there is light, then we will see what is ahead of us.
If there is light, then we will understand that our actions will have consequences. If I hit that wall, I will suffer. So, if there is dark, that means we don't see anything at all.
So, the basic point which I am driving at here is that we all have to choose what we believe, and based on that, we have our desires. Now, sometimes our choices are made consciously, sometimes our choices are made unconscious. Say, for example, if we live in a society that is broadly religious, then we might acquire the belief of our parents and of our social circle, or we also believe in God.
You might not critically examine it. Conversely, if somebody is brought up in an atheistic setting, then they might grow up to be atheists and they may rarely examine their atheism. So, we all have certain operational beliefs.
But we all aspire for a life better than our present life, whether it is materialist, whether it is materialist or spiritualist. So, even in, I just came from America, in Silicon Valley, one of the schools of thought that is becoming immensely influential is called as transhumanism. Humanism is co-humanity.
Transhumanism is, it's fascinating, their philosophy is that life is filled with distresses. Old age, disease, death, birth, these are all great distresses. Now, of course, from their point of view, birth means not the suffering in the womb.
Their idea of birth is that population explosion. And the pain which the women go through while they are going through having pregnancy and delivering. So, basically, these are problems which humanity is afflicted with.
And their idea is that by technological advancement, we will create a paradise that will be free from all these. So, in fact, now there are aggressive attempts going on. You know, sometimes when people are not able to conceive, there are test tube babies.
So, you get the seed from the man and the shelter from the woman, the necessary ingredients and unite them externally. So, what they are trying to do through technology is that they are trying to say that maybe a few decades down the line, that can be made in the standard way of conceiving children. So that there is no pain of bearing a child.
So, they are also trying to get rid of the distresses of life and try to create a better life. So, gerontology is the whole field where people try to see how to deal with the problems of old age in a way that those problems do not afflict us so much. Same way with respect to disease.
And ultimately they are saying that if we can find out which are the genes which cause cells to die, then by genetic mutation, we will turn off that gene and then we will no longer die. So, of course, there is strong opposition to these ideas that these are untenable, they are unrealizable, even in scientific grounds. But the point I am making over here is that we all have an innate aspiration for a better life than what we have.
Now, we could raise this question, where does this aspiration come from? One way you could say is that it dismisses aspiration just imagination. But it's so deep-rooted within us. Whenever we encounter death, in terms of a loved one or somebody in our social circle exalts us.
Why? Because you could say that there is nothing, there are few things as common, as widespread and as unavoidable as death. But still the encounter with death jolts us. Why is that? So, we could say, oh, it's painful, it's a matter of survival.
Okay, but there are so many things which are painful, isn't it? Cold weather is painful, hot weather can be painful. But the kind of jolt that we get when we encounter death, we feel this is wrong, this should not be happening. That could be a pointer, this is not a decisive conclusion, but it's a reasonable pointer that maybe death seems unnatural because it is unnatural.
Maybe there is something to our core which lasts forever. And this is what the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita and in the teaching of most of the wisdom traditions of the world is, that we have some core which is indestructible. And if we consider the world before the scientific revolution, the 16th, 17th century onwards, almost every tradition across the world had this idea that this world is a place of a journey, and there is another world beyond this world, and that is our destination, that is our home.
Jesus famously said that this world is like a bridge. Don't build a house on the bridge, cross over it. So, the idea that there is some other world beyond this world is universal in human traditions.
Now, we could say that that's just an imagination. In the pre-scientific age, people were imagining such things. But, okay, but all that we have done with our scientific knowledge is replace that, you could say, spiritual paradise, the longing for a spiritual paradise with a technological paradise.
We're creating promises, oh, life will be wonderful over here. Now, certainly, in some ways, comforts have increased in life. But, the distresses also have increased.
Life in the past, if we accept the modern mainstream version of progress, and so we have far more comforts today than people say 100 or 500 years ago had. And yet, we have more people committing suicide today than in the past. So, if life was tougher in the past, why were people not quitting? But, now people are quitting in far greater quantities.
So, therefore, what we could say that people today, technology has made people comfortably miserable. Technological advancement, it has provided a paradise at the physical level, we could say. But, at the mental level, we need meaning, we need orientation, we need purpose in life.
And that is as deep a need as is food. We want to be happy, but we want to be meaningfully happy. So, what do I mean by meaningfully happy? How many of you like humor? Anyone who says, I don't like humor? Very rare, you know, that itself will be humorous.
Why don't you like humor? So, suppose somebody told you tomorrow that from now onwards, you have no financial obligations, you have no family obligations, you just watch comedies all day for the rest of your life. Would you enjoy that? Maybe for a few hours, but we want to do something. We want to be happy, but we want to be meaningfully happy.
We want to do something meaningful and through that we want to get happiness. But, what the atheistic world view does is, it strips life of meaning. We exist and we die and that's the end of it.
And you may say, no, but while you are existing, you can create a meaningful life. You can do something worthwhile in life. That's good.
At least some meaning is there, but our existence can end any moment. So, the greatest toll that the atheistic or the materialistic world view takes is on our sense of meaning. I have a class on this topic of how social media makes finding meaning tough and being mean easy.
Finding meaning, what is the meaning of life? That becomes very difficult to find out. But being mean, normally on social media, people troll others, people make abusive comments, the kind of comments which you would never make if the person was in front of us, because we can perceive their emotions. I can't speak like this.
But on emails, on Facebook, on Twitter, we just pass such rash comments about others that it's horrible. So, the point is that the promise of technological paradise is not being fulfilled. Definitely, technology has improved the physical comforts of our life.
That's undeniable. And credit needs to be given where it is required. We have to give the devil its due.
But at the same time, the point remains that our aspiration has led only to, directing the aspiration in the direction of materialism has led to frustration. So, what we are trying to do is that say there is this world and there is some other world. So, the idea that there is some other world was deemed by materialistic thinkers as imagination.
And then we try to make this world into a better and better place. It has become physically better in some ways, but in terms of meaning and fulfillment, life has become far worse. So, can it be that the idea that this world is the ultimate world and that this world is all that there is, could that idea itself be an illusion? So, like I said, the idea that there is no world other than this, that is also an intoxication.
For example, entertainment, escapist entertainment, where people can just spend hours and hours and hours, days just surfing on the net, watching this movie, that movie. That's also like an intoxicant. It makes us escape from the world.
So, it seems that we all have a strong desire and even a need to escape from the reality of this world. Now, at one level, that progress can be through physical technological progress, where we make our life comfortable by providing heating and air conditioning and cars and planes. That's one way, in fact, one social critic has defined technology as the art of shaping reality so that you don't have to experience reality.
It's freezing cold, but through technology we reshape the world around us so that we don't have to experience the world. So, there could be physical transformation, but where physical transformation is not there, what technology is doing is, it is providing us psychological transformation, in the sense that entertainment, the whole internet, social media, what is it doing? It's a way of escaping from the world. So, it seems that the desire to escape from the world is very deep rooted within humans.
So, either through technology that transforms the physical world around us or through technology that provides us entertainment that gets us to escape from the world. So, the longing to escape from the world is a deep rooted longing within us. So, in the past, people directed this longing to escape from the world toward a spiritual world, toward a higher world.
Whereas now, if you consider this is a physical world, the spiritual world is over here, the above, and you could say the technological world, the fictional world created through technology, that is over here. And people madly go over here. It's like mad, it's mania.
In fact, say if you consider any fictional characters, whether it is He-Man or Batman or Spider-Man or whatever, or even Harry Potter or whatever, people adore and worship them with the same fervor that in the past people would have, the saints would have worshipped God. So, essentially what has happened is redirected. So, if we tell people about Narsimhadev, half man half lion, people say, it's imagination.
But then they will sit and watch for hours a half man and a half bat or half man and a half spider. Why is that? We say, no, we don't consider it to be religious, it is for enjoyment. Well, why do we have to withdraw from reality for enjoyment? Because reality is not that enjoyable.
So then, if the physical reality is not that enjoyable, either we can withdraw into a technological unreality or we can withdraw into a spiritual level. So, what the great saints have told us is that this world is unreal. And unreal not in the sense that it doesn't exist, but in that it doesn't fulfill us and it can't fulfill us.
It's not a, the idea of a spiritual world is not a sentimental longing. It's based on philosophical reasoning. All that I did right now is philosophical reasoning.
And so this has to be very clearly understood, this difference. As long as we think, oh, this is a sentimental longing, maybe it exists. Then our, even if we practice bhakti, it won't be steady.
But when we understand that it's based on a philosophical reasoning. Siddhanta baliya chitte na kare alas, Iha haithe Krishna lage sudhrudhe manas. The thing is, if you don't think that this is philosophy, I'm not interested in philosophy, it's all abstract and dry.
I just want rasa. I want Krishna rasa, bhakti rasa. That's good.
We all want Krishna rasa, bhakti rasa. But if we want to be steady to the, steadily seek that rasa, then we have to understand Siddhanta. Then by that what will happen? We'll understand this is the reality.
Otherwise, we might be attracted to the rasa of Krishna bhakti for some time. But then if some novel character comes up, if some movie comes up, and some superhero comes up through that, we are attracted to that also. So people sometimes say, in India, there are many people who are sentimentally attached to the Bhagavata.
Bhagavata Katha is quite a popular thing in India. So now there are channels also which talk about Bhagavata Katha. So people may sit and watch the Bhagavata, and they may hear about how Parikshit Maharaj passed away being bitten by the snake.
And they may seem to have very great exalted emotions. And then the next moment, they turn on the TV channel. So at one moment they're crying, apparently in separation from Krishna.
Like say Parikshit Maharaj was absorbed, the Gopis were crying. And the next moment they turn on, change the channel, and a cricket match is going on. And say some star like Virat Kohli gets out, and they start crying there also.
So what's happening? There is no real redirection of the heart. So anyway, so the point I'm making, first point was, how do we get the desire for the spiritual, to go to the spiritual world, go back to Godhead. It is by philosophical reasoning.
We understand that there is a world like that. This world is unreal, in the sense that it is unfulfilling. It is temporary.
And while it is there, it may appear real. But it is temporary. That is the first way we can make the reasoning.
The second way, we could create that desire. So to go to the spiritual world, just like say, if somebody lives in a remote part of, I met one person in America, who was an immigrant from Africa. And he said that, when I was in Africa, you stand at a bus stop, and you never know whether a bus is going to come and when a bus is going to come.
Just wait and wait and wait. Sometimes the bus comes after five minutes, sometimes it does not come for five hours also. He said, but when he came to America, at many places, where they have metropolis, there is a bus.
Of course, it is not America, it is Europe. America does not have so much good public transport. But in Europe, he was telling me that, you stand at a bus stop, and there it tells you on a panel, how much time a bus is going to come.
And in two minutes, if a bus is going to come, that bus will come in two minutes. He said, I was stunned by this. How do they coordinate things like this? He said, when I told my friends in Africa that, the bus transport is so well coordinated, that's impossible.
So, for somebody who has only experienced chaos, for them to experience this kind of order might seem unbelievable. So, similarly, for us, the idea of a spiritual world where life is eternal might seem unbelievable. But it is something, just because we think it is unbelievable, doesn't mean it is unbelievable.
Just because we think it's impossible, doesn't mean it is impossible. So, if somebody, say somebody in Africa, they can't experience Europe or America while they're in Africa. But if they meet someone who has gone there, now, those who are in Africa, the person in Europe cannot immediately bring Europe to Africa.
But if the person from Africa has to go to Europe, then they have to have faith. So, that is the second point. Now, that is association.
How does somebody who lives in great physical discomfort, desire to go to some place where there's a lot of physical comfort? It is by associating with those who have gone there. Now, even if somebody watches movies about that place, that's also a kind of association, because they're associating with the imagery of that place. So, for us to cultivate the desire, first is reasoning.
Second is association. And the great saintly people across the traditions have talked about this higher world, which is a place of unending, unlimited joy. And it is that joy that we are all seeking.
Suppose somebody, nowadays many people feel very lonely. In fact, the UK government has appointed a minister for loneliness. Now, whether a minister for loneliness can actually minister to loneliness, that is a question in itself.
The family bonds are broken down, people live alienated lives. But if somebody's feeling very lonely, there's a simple way to remove loneliness. What is that? You know, just decrease the lights in your house, and then start watching a horror movie.
When you watch a horror movie in the dark, after a few minutes, you will stop feeling lonely. That is a way to get rid of loneliness. But that's an unpleasant way to get rid of loneliness.
So, your loneliness itself is an unpleasant feeling. But a thing, maybe there is some shape-changing monster somewhere is going to attack me. That is a horrible way to get rid of loneliness.
So, the point I'm making here is that our desires will be directed according to the kind of people around us. So, if people feel lonely, and their solution to loneliness is, okay, just pick up your phone and do something on social media, watch a movie. And that's what we will do.
Now, with respect to watching a horror movie when we are lonely, it's easily understandable. That's often many of the ways we try to deal with loneliness also not a wise thing to do. So, it's like if this world is a dream, often through escapist entertainment, we are retreating into a dream within a dream.
We are creating another dream within the dream, so that we can have a better life. But instead of that, why not go towards the reality? So, by association with those who are either absorbed in the reality or who are aspiring for that reality, we will get that desire. And for Srila Prabhupada, many times when his disciples would be with him, Prabhupada, it's called that the pictures, the Krishna pictures which were painted, so many beautiful pictures, you see, these are like windows to the spiritual world.
And when Prabhupada would look at these pictures, there are several occasions when Jesus gets absorbed in them, just beholding them, getting absorbed in them. And once a disciple saw Srila Prabhupada absorbed like this and he was looking at Prabhupada and then Prabhupada noticed him and Prabhupada said, would you like to go there? So, for Prabhupada, it was not just a picture, it was actually a portal, it is a portal to another world. So, by associating with those who have that conviction or at least those who have that aspiration, we can ourselves develop that aspiration.
So, the desire for the spiritual world is most important to have. Because desire for spiritual growth, for attaining the spiritual world, it is said that, I will talk tomorrow about eligibility, but we could say at one level, the eligibility is the desire itself. Without the desire, nothing is going to happen.
You say, somebody is in China or India, they want to come to Australia, then the eligibility comes later, but you could say desire is the first eligibility. Rupa Goswami says that, krishna rasa bhavitamati kriyatamiti kuto pilabhyate, that krishna rasa bhavitamati, that the desire, krishna rasa bhavitamati, Prabhupada has translated that in short as krishna consciousness. So, krishna rasa, that is taste for krishna, releasing the joy of krishna, bhavitamati, mati is consciousness, bhavita is inclined towards, the consciousness that is inclined towards releasing krishna.
So, that is, you could say it is like a big word. So, Prabhupada crunches it to krishna consciousness. Just like Prabhupada had this bhakti rasamrta sindhu.
So, technically, if you want to translate it, the precise translation would be that bhakti is devotion, rasa is mellow or taste, amrit is nectar, and sindhu is sea or ocean. So, technically, the literal translation of bhakti rasamrta sindhu would be the nectarean ocean of the mellow of devotion. That becomes quite a complicated name.
So, Prabhupada made it nectar of devotion. So, like that, consciousness directed toward releasing the taste of krishna, releasing krishna. It is complicated.
Prabhupada makes it krishna consciousness. But the point is, krishna rasa bhavitamati, kriyatamidi kuto pilabhite. If you can get it anywhere, get it immediately.
And tatra laulyam api maulyam ekalam. It is intense craving, intense desire. Greed, in fact.
Greed, desire is one thing. Greed is like a very strong desire. Here, the word greed is used in a positive sense.
Normally, when we talk about greed, it is like a disproportionate, excessive craving. But here, it is used to convey the extraordinary intensity of the craving. So, tatra laulyam api maulyam ekalam.
The prize is greed. And this, janma koti sukrutair nalabhite. Even after many, many lifetimes of piety, one cannot get that desire.
So, this is second point about how you can get that. First was reasoning. Second is association.
And third is purification. And of course, this will come more in eligibility. But even the desire itself, how it will come is through purification.
It is like, you see, the nature of the mind is that when everything is impure, nothing seems to be impure. It is just like, if the whole house is a complete mess, and then somebody throws one more thing into that house, you hardly notice it. So, when our mind is filled with hundreds of trivial desires, one more trivial desire does not make any sense, does not make any difference.
And when we are filled with casual desires, to have any serious deep desire becomes very, very difficult. People who given to say casual relationships, for them to develop committed relationship becomes very difficult. Because the mind develops its own momentum of one person to another person to another person to another person.
Similarly, when we are filled with casual desires, we cannot have a serious desire, we cannot have a deep desire. So, to some extent, purification is what strengthens our desire. So, when the impure desires decrease, say for example, if somebody is an alcoholic, then the desire for alcohol is what defines them, it is what drives them.
And then even if they understand about Krishna and the spiritual world, that desire would not stay for long within them. But if they are relatively purer, if somebody is living in, not in ignorance, but in goodness, then at that time they can do the reflection. And if the desire comes, then the desire will become stronger, desire will stay longer and become stronger.
So, a purification what we mean is that for the desire to emerge, what is the ground of our consciousness? So, if say the ground is completely dry and barren, then even if a seed is sown, it won't stay for long. If the ground is a little wet, then the seed may stay for a little time. But if there is abundant water over there, then the seed will stay and germinate and fructify.
So, now, for us the ground of our consciousness might sometimes be dry and sometimes be abundantly watered, depending on whether it is a desert or it is an oasis. So, at one level, we need to work to cultivate pure spiritual desire, the desire to go back to Godhead. But at another level, if we just learn to live more purely, then the purer desires will grow stronger.
So, that is why we have the regulative principles. The regulative principles themselves are not spiritual. They are material.
They conduce you to spiritual life. The regulative principles, you could say, broadly bring us to goodness. And then, the magic of bhakti can work much faster.
So, by these three things. So, as I said, if we are impure, then what happens? So, somebody in a mode of passion and ignorance, they will think this world is real and any other world that is imaginary. But as we come to goodness, then we start seeing this world is temporary.
It cannot be real. There has to be some reality. When we come to goodness, when we are purer, then we can start seeing things in a bigger framework, in a better framework.
So, by these three things, as our desire for Krishna and desire for the spiritual world becomes stronger, then we can progress along that journey. So, I will summarize what I spoke today. I spoke on this theme of going back to Godhead and D.E.P. What are the three things anyone remembers? Yeah, thank you.
So, today I talked about desire. And in desire, I talked about these three things. R.A.P., D.E.P. that is the overall acronym.
R.A.P. is the subordinate acronym. R was, anyone remembers? Reasoning. So, that was what I spent the most time on.
Is there something called a spiritual world? Isn't it just long imaginational sentimental longing? It might be, but then this longing is so deep rooted that even those who reject the spiritual world long to create some paradise in this world. So, either you create a physical paradise or we try to create a technological paradise. Of escapist entertainment.
So, throughout history, almost all traditions have believed that this world is a place of transition and another world is a destination. So, with the scientific materialism, the idea of another spiritual world was rejected. But technology essentially is the art of rearranging reality so that we do not have to experience it.
Because the reality of this world is at best unfulfilling. And rather, but we see that how technology has not really fulfilled its promise of a paradise. At a physical level, maybe we are more comfortable.
But at a psychological level, we are horribly miserable. So miserable that we are ready to end our own lives. So, meaning, if there is no world beyond this world, then life becomes meaningless.
Because we live for some time and we die and it is all over. So, rather than having such a meaningless life, we can at least be open to the idea that maybe there is some other world. So, because we have such a deep rooted longing for something which is not found in this world, and then we should try to create in a technological world, maybe there is some other higher world.
So, that is philosophical reasoning, not sentimental longing. So, the spiritual desire what we have will become strong if it is founded in philosophical reasoning. It won't just be sentimental longing.
Then second was association. I talked about how somebody might find, in Africa might find that a well-coordinated, timely public transport system is unbelievable. But somebody who is actually there, they say it is not unbelievable, it is actual.
And then by their association, that desire will come. So, similarly, anything about a spiritual world might seem unbelievable for us. But if you associate with those who have experienced that or are at least aspiring for that, then that association will also create the desire within us.
I talked about how our desires are what drive us and for us the association shapes our desires. And the last P was purification. Even our desires are shaped not just by the specific object that we are desiring, but also by our overall consciousness.
If we are too much in rajas or tamas, then even if we get some spiritual desire, it won't stay for long. Because all other desires will crowd and cloud our consciousness. But if we try to come to sattva, then it is like we make the ground, the soil of our consciousness not barren, but fertile.
And then our spiritual desires will steady, will stay longer, will become stronger and stay longer. And then they will propel us on our spiritual journey back to Godhead. Thank you very much.
Hare Krishna. Any questions or comments? Reasoning, association and purification. So, thank you very much.