Going back to godhead 2 – We are unqualified, but not disqualified

[Bhagavatam class on 4.12.24 at ISKCON, Perth, Australia]
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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. This morning is a beautiful verse where the representatives of the Supreme Lord from Vaikuntha they have come to personally escort Dhruva Maharaj back to Godhead and in this verse they are informing him of his mission, of their mission. Now, Parashidau Iha Sampraptau, that you have attained the position of being a Parashid, of an associate of the Lord.
Who is that Lord? Tasyakhila Jagad, Jagad Dhatu, one who is the sustainer of the whole world and that Lord who is the carrier of the world, Saranga, and that Lord Netum Tuam, now to take him, to take you to his abode, Netu is to take, Bhagwat Padam, his abode, we have come here. So, this we could say is the perfection of the aspiration of a devotee, that the Lord and his associates themselves, the Lord associates come personally to escort the devotee and this is a, this is a privilege that is accorded to the rarest of special souls. Everybody dies.
Now, the challenge of human life is to die in such a way that we don’t have to die again, that this, in this life, death we can’t avoid. But in this life or by the end of this life, we have developed enough love for the eternal, for God, then there is nothing to get us back into this world and then we will attain the eternal world. So, that, the challenge is that how do we develop that much love for Krishna during the journey of this life.
And we have been discussing yesterday and today now that how do we go back to Godhead. Yesterday I talked about first desire, does Godhead really exist? First we have to have that philosophically reasoned conviction, then by association we create the desire and then by purification the desire becomes stabilised. So, I talked about R.A.P. yesterday and today overall I am talking about the D.E.P. desire, eligibility and process.
So, today we will be talking about eligibility and here Prahlad, Dhruva has become so eligible, R was for reasoning. So, now Dhruva has become so eligible that personally the Lord associates have come to take him back, to escort him back. So, if you consider the metaphor of say immigration or emigration, depending we are immigrating to a country or emigrating from a country, whichever way.
So, normally how it is that, say with respect to first world country like say Australia or America or Canada, New Zealand, many people from third world or less developed countries want to come here. Now, when they want to come, they make an application. Now, depending on, I was just in New Zealand a few months, I was a few months ago in New Zealand.
There is one devotee doctor, he told me that he applied from India and when he applied within like three days, the New Zealand embassy personally called him and told him that, we will give this benefit, this benefit, this benefit, please come here. So, that was almost like maybe 30-40 years ago. So, at that time, you could say that the government there needed qualified doctors and that is why they were personally called.
Now, the situation has changed and people want to immigrate and they keep applying, keep applying, especially in America. There are lot of Indians who are on H-1B visa, their work visa and it is just not getting, they are not getting any permanent residency. So, there is a huge upsurge in Indians from there immigrating to Canada.
In fact, there are many devotees who do international travel everyday. They live in Canada and they work in America. So, they keep travelling.
So, for most people in most situations, immigration to another country is quite difficult. And if a country itself sends its representatives to come, please come to our country. Then that means that person is very specially qualified.
So, if you consider, there can be two extremes. If somebody is a big underworld don, a very great criminal and that person is going from place A to place B, then if that person is on their own, they will have probably their bodyguards. If that person is under arrest, then there will be police with them.
Similarly, if the head of state, the Prime Minister is travelling, then again the Prime Minister will have bodyguards, the Prime Minister will have associates. So, we could say these are two extremes. If somebody is a very degraded person who has done horribly wrong activities, then when they depart from the world, at that time there will be Yamdutas who will come to escort them.
And for those who are extremely pure devotees, for them Vishnudutas will come. So, like that for hardcore criminals and for very big shots, there will be escorts. So, most of us when we travel, we travel unescorted.
So, like that at the end of our lives also, most of us we go unescorted. So, even within this there are degrees. It is said that those who are higher beings, they manifest at our level based on how pleased they are with us.
So, for example, if a great soul departs from the world and even if they are going back to the spiritual world, on most occasions there is nothing miraculous that is seen at this level. Generally, if we consider a parallel, that when in the Vedic tradition fire sacrifices, yajnas would be performed, at that time the yajnas would have different markers of success. First marker is that if somebody is able to just perform the yajna without any interruption or contamination, that itself is a success.
The fire sacrifice has been done and then finally the oblations are made into the fire and the smoke rises up. And it is understood that because the sacrifice was performed properly and it was completed, the devatas come in an invisible form and accept the offering. If the sacrifice is done very well, if the sponsor of the sacrifice, the yajman is a very special person, then the devatas appear visibly.
But if the yajman is extremely special, then not only the devatas but the Paramdevatas, that Paramdevata Vishnu himself appears. So, Vishnu appearing in a sacrificial ceremony is very very rare and the devatas appearing is rare. So, if we consider in the same canto, we will have later Prithu Maharaj’s pastime.
So, Prithu Maharaj wants to do 100 yajnas and he completes 99 and then when he is to do the 100, Indra keeps interrupting repeatedly. And finally, at the request of Brahma, Prithu has been ready to punish Indra, abstains, abstains. And when he abstains from both doing the 100th yajna and as well as punishing Indra, now you could say Indra was wrong and Brahma is and Prithu is right.
Prithu was pious and with his resources performing a yajna. Indra was insecure that Prithu will take my position. So, that insecurity is Indra’s problem, not Prithu’s problem.
But there is right and there is right beyond right. Right beyond right means what? Technically speaking, this is right and this is wrong. But sometimes arguing what is right and what is wrong can itself become such an endless discussion that maybe some people just have to rise above the issue.
The right beyond right is, okay, I am right and you are wrong in this issue. But this is not that big an issue that I want to keep fighting on this. I have a bigger purpose.
So, the right beyond right is to not let the right action come in the way of the right purpose. Normally we would say that the right action will lead to the right purpose. Say for example, if we are having some philosophical discussion or if somebody is giving a class and then somebody makes a point which is apparently, say the speaker makes a point which is philosophically objectionable.
Now somebody in the audience may feel, no, no, this is a wrong point. It should not be spoken. Now, okay, it depends on what kind of point it is.
Sometimes the audience may be a very responsible person. They may feel, okay, you know, this point if it is spoken, the audience will get a misconception and that will be bad. Yes, that is bad.
But sometimes in life we don’t have a choice between good and bad. The only choice is between bad and worse. So, for example now, if in a class, say between the speaker and the member of the audience, there starts becoming argument and it becomes nasty.
Then most people would have forgotten the wrong philosophical point. But they will not forget the nasty confrontation. And that will send more unpleasant vibes than the wrong point that might be spoken.
Even if it is a wrong point. People’s ideas about Krishna consciousness are not formed just by one point that they hear somewhere. If that point makes sense, they will have it.
But if they clarify if it is an important point, they can learn from other sources. So the point I am making is that Pruthu, he didn’t try to be right. He tried to be right beyond right.
That means when the right action came in the way of the right purpose, then he put the right action. If somebody is speaking wrong, it is right to contradict them, to point out their wrong. But then if that is going to cause greater alienation, don’t do that.
So why I am making this point is, by this he could not perform the 100th yajna, but Vishnu was so pleased that Vishnu appeared after that. Vishnu had not appeared after the 99 yajnas he had performed. But when he let go, that is when Vishnu appeared.
And just as Vishnu’s appearance is very special, similarly here Vishnu’s appearance in the yajna is very special. Similarly Vishnu’s appearance in the fire, at the time of departure of a person, that is very special. And the way this is described, Vishnu has appeared and they did not just appear to the perception of Dhruva.
They appeared to human perception. And we will see later, it is described that the sages who were observing, they started all worshipping Dhruva also. That is glorious, but Dhruva did not accept the worship, rather Dhruva sought their blessings.
That I am going on this momentous journey back to Godhead. So how did Dhruva become so eligible that the government sent his representatives, please come and immigrate to our country. From the Vaikuntha, the Vishwamitras are coming.
So it is a very very special situation. So if we consider, what did Dhruva do? Now, Dhruva Maharaj, if you look at his life, it had its ups and downs. It was not that he was a pure devotee from birth.
Now you could look at it from a transcendental perspective and you say that every soul in the Bhagavatam is special. And you could say they are just pure devotees and they are doing a leela over here. That is one way of looking at it.
But if you want to learn some lessons for our life, treating everyone as transcendental pure devotees simply doing a leela does not teach us much lessons. So if you look at it from the perspective of the evolution of Dhruva Maharaj, so what happened? I will talk about the evolution specifically in tomorrow’s class when I talk about the process. But today I will just go over the thing and come to the conclusion.
So Dhruva Maharaj, he was born in a pious family but from piety to spirituality that journey happened because of adversity. When his step-mother insulted him and his father neglected him, that’s when he went and as Prabhupada says in the Purport, he performed intense austerities. That’s how he saw Vishnu.
Now it was great benediction and at that time he lost the desire to gain a kingdom bigger than his father’s. But still Vishnu gave him that kingdom. And then after that he was living virtuously but when his brother was killed by the Yakshas, again he lost his temper and he overreacted.
He started for the action of one Yaksha, he started slaughtering many many Yakshas and again Manu had to intervene and then he abstained from that violence. So you may say if he is a pure devotee, how did he get overcome by anger? That process of what pure devotion means and how it is not such a lofty ideal that it is unattainable, we will talk about that again in tomorrow’s class. But the point is that throughout, not tomorrow’s, Sunday’s class, so throughout basically he remained persistent in the practise of Bhakti.
And by the persistent practise of Bhakti, although there were distractions, but he came back, came back on course of distractions. And he was now, by the time when death came, he was ready. He was detached from the world.
His focus was only on the Lord. Oh Lord, wherever you want to take me, I will go. So when he was detached from the world and from his plans of what all he wants to do in the world, the Lord sent his devotee.
So we could now turn this question. So basically it was his lifetime of devotion which we could say was his eligibility. Now there is a difference in concept, not so much necessarily in language.
So you could say there is qualification and there is eligibility. And the two words, they can broadly be said to mean the same thing. But here we will use the two words in slightly different sense.
See eligibility means that you are eligible for this, that you can participate in this. But qualified means that you can enter into this. So for example, if there is a competitive exam for entering into a particular university, so now if it’s a postgraduate course, then the eligibility itself is that you have to have a graduation degree.
If you don’t have graduation, you can’t get into it only. But just graduation alone is not the qualification. So eligibility means that allows you to participate.
But qualification means what you get inside, what gets you inside. You can get into the arena, get into the competition, but to get entry, that’s a further thing. So what we can get by our endeavours is eligibility.
We never get qualification. So the way you could summarise this is that we are always unqualified, but we are never disqualified. Because always unqualified means nobody can claim that I am such a pure devotee, Krishna, you have to take me to audit now.
Bhakti Shastri Thakur would say that you cannot gate crash into the kingdom of God. Sometimes if the gate is closed, some people might come in a big truck and they just bang through, break the door down and charge inside. Since we cannot do like that.
It’s interesting, in the Bhagavatam, the 8th canto, we will see that apparently Durvasa Muni gate crashes into the kingdom of God. That means when he is being chased by Darshan, Chakra, he first goes to Brahma, then he goes to Shiva and then he even goes to Vishnu. So how is he able to reach Vishnu and Vaikuntha? See the point over there is, Vaikuntha is not just a geographical area.
Of course, it is a place, but it is not just a place. It is also a level of consciousness. And the level of consciousness that takes us there is the consciousness of absorption in service to the Lord.
Unless we have the desire to serve the Lord, even if we get there, we are not actually there in terms of consciousness. So that’s why he got to see Vishnu, he reached Vishnu. But his concern was, save me from Sudarshan.
And Vishnu said, I can’t. You have to go to Ambarish and you have to ask him for forgiveness. Then immediately he ran away, ran back again towards.
So he might have got to Vaikuntha, but he did not get in Vaikuntha consciousness. And that’s why he couldn’t stay there. So, sometimes we may have this oversimplified conception of the spiritual world and for the purpose of depicting, in the Bhagavatam first canto we have the depiction that this is the material world and this is the spiritual world.
So when we have that kind of depiction, we might think that, ok, it’s almost like say, if you are on the world map, this is America and this is Canada. Or this is India and this is China. So they are like in geographical continuity.
So you go from here to here and you get from one country to another country. But the material world and the spiritual world, they are not like in geographical continuity. In fact, material geography, that concept itself does not apply to the spiritual world.
So although for the sake of depiction, you might say the material world is here and the spiritual world is there. But the spiritual world and the material world, they are not like two levels in a building, lower level, higher level. The spiritual world exists at a different level of reality.
And so to get there, it is not just relocation that is required. It is transformation. It’s not just physically going from this place to another place.
It’s rather transformation of consciousness that is required. And only by the transformation of consciousness one can go to the spiritual world. So now, if we consider this point of eligibility, that a devotee, by the practise of bhakti, tries to direct the thoughts and the consciousness toward Krishna, tries to live a life devoted toward Krishna.
So when I said we are never qualified but we are never disqualified either. We are always unqualified in the sense that nobody can claim I am so pure that I can attain Vaikuntha. Krishna has to get me into Vaikuntha.
Nobody can claim that level of purity. But we are never disqualified. In the sense that, Krishna will never say that you are so fallen that you can’t practise bhakti.
So each one of us has the potential to attain divinity, to attain the spiritual world. So there is the potential and the potential has to be developed. So for example, in Prabhupada says, nitya siddha krishna prem sadhya kabunai, shravanadi shuddha chitta karaya udai.
So that love for Krishna is present in everyone’s heart. Nitya siddha krishna prem. Sadhya kabunai.
What does it mean? There are different ways of understanding this. Now Sanskrit, it’s very difficult to translate into English. So sometimes we just have to use the approximate words.
So now those words might have slightly different connotations also. Say for example, there is the concept of avatar. Now how is that translated into English? What is the word for avatar? Incarnation.
Now if you consider literally speaking, Incarnation, what it means is karna, is a carnivorous animals or carnal desires. It refers to flesh. So incarnation literally means to come in flesh.
And the word incarnation comes primarily from Christianity where the divinity of Christ is said to manifest in the humanity of Jesus. So they consider Jesus to be both God and human, God and man. And so now Jesus came in a physical body.
And that’s how he was crucified and everything that happened. So the term incarnation itself is something which is come from a western theological context. And avatar, one of the tenets of the Vaishnava understanding is that when God comes to the material world, he does not come in a material form.
So incarnation, when that word is used, that might give that notion that actually that the Lord has come in a material world. Now Prabhupada uses that word incarnation but then he clarifies that actually the Lord doesn’t come in a material world. Now of course we can say the word incarnation also has a secondary meaning.
Like we can say the incarnation of this idea, the incarnation of the spirit of the country, something like that. But that’s a very secondary use. The primary use of incarnation is to, like we have reincarnation, to come again in flesh.
So why I am making this point is that when we talk about love for Krishna, so Prabhupada uses the word dormancy over there. That love for Krishna is dormant in everyone’s hearts. And by the process of hearing and chanting, it will be activated.
So this dormancy is not literally in the sense of we are asleep and we wake up and everything is there. It is, like yesterday we had the example of a dream. So we are talking about how the pure devotee understands, the spiritually realised person understands that this world is like a dream.
And now this dream metaphor is something which has to be carefully understood. Sometimes some devotees say that, like once a devotee gave a class, I was in a temple, a devotee gave a class, how death can come at any moment. And in fact he showed a video, and on YouTube you can find videos of how there are like almost 25 clippings of people doing normal activities and they die.
Say somebody is in a shopping mall and offers the cash to someone and suddenly they get a heart attack. And they die. And somebody is driving a bike and while driving a bike they get a stroke.
And they die and the bike runs over someone and they also die. So there are horrible scenes. And then his point was that death can come at any moment.
And then after that one devotee asked, we should always remember that death can come at any moment, that we may die today, we may die the next moment. So then this devotee asked the question, if I start thinking that I will die today or die at the next moment, then I won’t feel like I should go for a job, I won’t feel like taking care of my child, I won’t feel like doing any of my family responsibilities. That is the point.
Nothing needs to be done. Now that is not exactly the point. Ok, I am going to die, so what do I do? I live constantly in fear of death.
Now the understanding that I am going to die, what should it lead to? It should lead to an awareness that there are important things and there are less important things. And I need to focus on the most important things. So death will come and it is not just by giving up our job or giving up our family responsibilities or whatever, we will be able to deal with death.
It is we have to cultivate absorption in Krishna. And we should not neglect the process of cultivating absorption in Krishna to later time. Now how exactly we cultivate absorption to Krishna? Not everybody, even if they are given full time and opportunity, they can say constantly chant 64 rounds or 128 rounds.
Everybody has to find out how they can progress towards absorption in Krishna. And again that I will discuss in the last class, that progressive level of practise. But the important thing is that we cannot take a philosophical concept and apply it arbitrarily.
So okay, this is like death can come at any moment, but there is a process to transcend this. And the awareness that death can come at any moment, that should make us urgent in practising the process of absorption in Krishna who exists beyond death. Not that we just give up everything in the material world because of the fear of death.
So similarly, the world is a dream. But this is normally a normal dream. You shake someone and the person wakes up.
But for us to wake up from this dream, it requires a process. And we need to follow the process by which we will awaken to higher reality. So similarly, it is said that it is dormant.
So dormancy is more in the sense of fertility. It’s like the soil is fertile. The soil of our heart, of the soul’s consciousness is fertile.
But in that fertile soil, it’s not that the fertile soil innately will itself develop crops. In the fertile soil, seeds have to be put. Seeds have to be sown and then the crops will grow.
So similarly, in our heart, in our consciousness, Brahmanda brahmite kona bhagyavan jeev Guru krishna prasade paye bhakti lata bheej So bhakti lata bheej. The seed of the creeper of devotion has to be planted by the mercy of Guru and Krishna. And then that can grow.
So in one sense, we are all eligible because the soul has the potential for developing love of God. So in that sense, we are never disqualified. Even if somebody is born in a very degraded family, somebody has lived a very degraded life, no matter how fallen they are, the soul has the potential for manifesting its divinity.
So in that sense, we are never disqualified. But it’s not that we are ever qualified enough. So the eligibility is that at one level, just by being parts of Krishna, we all have eligibility to practise the process that will take us back to God.
So if somebody for immigration doesn’t have the eligibility criteria itself, then their application itself will not be considered. But just because your application is considered, that doesn’t mean you are going to get into the country. So when we are talking about eligibility, it’s like, is our application considered? Yes.
Nobody, no matter how many wrong things they have done, it’s not that they are ineligible for the practise of bhakti. In that sense, bhakti is universal. Krishna does not reject anyone.
Guru at one level started the process of bhakti out of, you could say, materialistic purpose. It was all material emotions. He had been insulted.
He wanted vengeance. But it doesn’t matter. एनकेन प्रकारेन मन कृष्णने वेश एथ? Somehow or the other, fix the mind on Krishna.
So we are eligible always. Because just by being parts of Krishna, just by being souls, the potential for pure devotion, the potential for manifesting our divinity and attaining the supreme divinity are there within us. But along with that, once we start getting into the practise, what does it mean that we are always unqualified? We are not disqualified, but we are unqualified.
That means nothing that we do can oblige Krishna to take us back to Him. Why is it like that? Because Krishna’s mercy is causeless. Now, what does causeless mercy mean? Does it mean it has no cause? Well, yes and no.
That means that it has, that it is not dependent on the cause. So Prabhupada gives an example that once he was on a morning walk and while on the walk he saw some man, he was by a pond and he was throwing some food crumbles at some ducks who were in the pond. Of course, nowadays it seems that people are told if there is a pond, then the ducks don’t feed the ducks because the food may be contaminated and the ducks may die.
So probably things were not so regulated 40-50 years ago. But, so what happened is that now these ducks were coming and quacking, quack, quack, quack. And when they were quacking, at that time there was one duck which was quacking a lot and this man was throwing a little more food crumbs at that duck.
So Prabhupada said, this is how we should call for Krishna’s mercy. That if we call out desperately for Krishna’s mercy, if we call out more, Krishna will give us more mercy. Now it is not that the person’s calling out itself, the duck’s quacking obliged the person to give that mercy and give that extra mercy.
The person is completely independent. But the quacking is the way the duck expresses the desire. And then the person is free to reciprocate.
So we can’t say that, oh, I fasted on Nirjala Ekadashi. Nirjala, Krishna, give me mercy. We can’t do like that.
But by our endeavours we try to call out to Krishna. And then Krishna is free to reciprocate. In the Bible there is a nice story which illustrates this principle of causeless grace that there was a man and he was going in a marketplace early in the morning and he saw that there are many people who were just standing there and they were looking very destitute.
He said, what happened? He said, we lost our job, we don’t have any money. So he said, come to my field and you work all day, I will pay you. And then all of them came and they started working on the field.
And then this man came later in the afternoon around lunch time and again he was going through the marketplace and again he saw many more people over there. And then he saw, what happened? He said, oh, we don’t have any money. Come to my field, I will pay.
We work on the field and I will pay you. And then the evening came and in the evening came at that time, what happened? He, this man, this landlord paid everyone. And those who were working from morning to evening and those who were working from afternoon to evening, he paid all of them equally.
And actually what happened? What do you think happened? Yeah, those who had been paid, those who had worked from morning, they said, hey, but we worked more. Why are you paying them the same amount? He said, that you were jobless. You were getting nothing.
And I have given you what I promised to give you. Now if I give someone else, what has that got to do with you? Now today’s labour laws will say it’s unfair practise. But the point is, it’s illustrating that God’s grace does not depend on the magnitude of our endeavour.
So sometimes we might do a lot of service and we might get some grace and somebody might do a little service and they might also get grace. And we see this variability of the grace in the sense that, in the few verses later it will describe that Dhruv Maharaj’s mother also goes back to God. Now, at one level we can say because Dhruv remembered the Lord, remembered his mother gratefully and that’s why the Lord arranged for his mother also to be taken back to God.
That’s true. But if somebody wants to be like an argumentative person, they say, okay, Dhruva performed austerities. Dhruva went to the forest.
What did his mother do? Apart from just being related to him and guiding him. The Lord’s grace is reciprocal but it is not necessarily proportional. Reciprocal, we have to do something.
The Lord will not force us to come to Him. He will not take away our free will and forcibly drag us back to God. So we have to take some steps towards Him.
So His mercy is reciprocal but it is not necessarily proportional. So somebody might do a lot and they will get the Lord’s mercy. Somebody might do a little and they might also get the Lord’s mercy.
So our eligibility is not what determines whether we go back to God. Our eligibility simply starts the process. And how that process works and how we can make it work in our life, we will discuss in a future class.
So I will summarise. I spoke today on this theme of the eligibility for going back to Godhead. So we see that Dhruva is so eminently eligible that the Vaikunthas are coming personally to escort him.
It is like the government of a prosperous country personally sending its emissaries, please come to our country. He must be a very special person. So I talked about how normally souls who are outside the normal spectrum, both extremes, those who are very grievous wrongdoers, they will be escorted by the Yamadutas and those who are glorious right-doers, we could say, they will be escorted by the Vishnudutas and most will be in between.
They will go unescorted. I talked about the personal vision of higher beings is special. I talked about the past time of Dhruva, of Pruthu Maharaj and just the yajna being performed is success.
Just the yajna being performed, devatas becoming visible is the greatest success. Yajna being performed, Vishnu becoming visible is the greatest success. So Pruthu got the greatest success because he was right beyond right.
That means he did not let the right action come in the way of the right purpose. So rather than pointing out that somebody is wrong in a class, we maintain the mood civility of the class and that way the right purpose is maintained. So I talked about the point of what was the eligibility of Dhruva.
I talked about Dhruva had a, you could say, he did not start with, he was not born a pure devotee. If you look from the evolutionary narrative of Dhruva’s consciousness, and he was motivated by material desires and later on also he succumbed to some material anger but still by the end of his life he was ready because he lived a life of devotion to the Lord. So what was his eligibility? His eligibility was that he, we could say at one level, he was devoted to the Lord throughout.
I talked about how eligibility, so who has the eligibility? Everyone. Just by being souls who are parts of the divine, each one of us has the potential to manifest, to attain Krishna. And so I talked about the difference between eligibility and you could say, if you want to use the word qualification in that sense, that eligibility means we are allowed to participate.
Qualified means we are allowed to enter into the final thing. So we are never qualified in the sense that, none of us can barge into the kingdom of God. But at the same time we are never disqualified also in the sense that no matter how fallen we are, the Lord always gives us the opportunity to come to Him.
And there I talked about Nitya Siddha Krishna Prem. So that is dormancy, but the dormancy is more in the sense of fertility. But there is a process to be followed for that potential for pure devotion to be manifest in us.
I talked about how words need to be carefully understood. Just like somebody says I am going to die, that does not mean we just leave everything. So that life is just a dream.
That does not mean we just can wake up. There is a process for transcending that. There is a process for waking up.
And it is commitment to the process that is required. And I conclude by talking about the Lord’s grace is reciprocal but not necessarily proportional. So I just said that the duck’s quacking inspired the person to give more food crumbs but not obliged to do that.
So it says the person may pay a person who does half work, day work and full day work also the same. That is the nature of the causeless grace of the Lord. So we do not question the Lord’s grace but we beseech the Lord’s grace.
And how we can beseech that grace, we will talk in the next session on Sunday. Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.
Any question or comment? Okay. So what happens in between to the souls who are not yet purified? Basically this is quite a grey zone. In the scriptures it is not very clearly described.
And it cannot be also because each soul has its own karma and each soul has to go through its own trajectory of spiritual evolution. But broadly speaking we could say that if the soul is devoted to the Lord, ultimately the Lord will not do anything that will interrupt our spiritual journey. So Krishna gives two possible trajectories in the sixth chapter.
If somebody has a lot of material desires still remaining, but they are practising bhakti also, then they will be taken to heavens where they can indulge in their material desires within a pious context, religious context. And then after that they come back to this world and they continue in a pious family or a wealthy family. The others if they are already very spiritually strong and they do not have material desires so much, then they will be born in a family where they will get spiritual environment and they will grow from there.
So those two are the broad trajectories. But essentially the principle is that the soul will never lose the opportunity to practise devotion. Prabhupada also said that there are trajectories of person who has not attained pure devotion but not that the person has grievous wrongdoings.
So if a person does, while practising bhakti somehow does repeatedly grievous wrongdoings and Prabhupada said that those who are born as animals, maybe hogs or something like that in Vrindavan, they are also great spiritual people. The hogs are also spiritual. But he said they did something wrong and that is why they were born in that.
Not in the exalted place but in the lower body. So that can also happen. So it says that, in the fourth canto it is said that if somebody is low born but they are chanting your holy names, that means that they must have already done piety in the previous life.
Now you might say, the question might come, if they have already done piety in the previous life, why are they low born? Isn’t it? So the point of that verse is that sometimes somebody might have lived a life of piety but then they might have also done something terribly wrong. So we could say that there are two different things over here. There is the material law of karma and there is the spiritual principle of grace.
And these two both will work. It’s not that the material law of karma will not work. Even if somebody is a pure devotee and they are chanting and they are remembering Krishna but they are absent minded and they come to the edge of a big wall or a big building and they step off.
Now just because they are pure devotees doesn’t mean the law of gravity will not act. Isn’t it? It will act. So similarly the law of karma is like that.
And we see this demonstrated. Both these dynamics are demonstrated in the Jadavharat pastime or Bharat Maharaj pastime rather. So because he had a spiritual attraction towards the Lord, so if we have strived to practise Bhakti, the opportunity to practise Bhakti has been taken away from us.
But because he had become attached to a deer, so at the material level, because his consciousness was directed over there, so he got the body of a deer. So at the material level, the law of last thought, whatever we think about at the time of death, that’s what we applied. But at spiritual level, what consciousness we have cultivated towards Krishna that is never lost.
So how were the two reconciled? That was through the fact that Bharat Maharaj got a deer’s body, but he did not get deer’s consciousness. Within the deer body, he had the consciousness of not just human consciousness, but advanced human consciousness. So he was also very spiritually inclined even in the deer body.
So how exactly things will be reconciled that the Supersoul will direct based on our consciousness and our karma. But broadly we can be sure that the opportunity for practising spiritual life will never be lost. So thank you very much.
Pranthana, you spoke. It is said that it is reciprocal but not necessarily proportional. Then how do you understand the Krishna statement? Yes, that’s true.
Actually, yatha maam prapadyante tam sathayi bhajaam yahaam is talking about the reciprocity. That’s reciprocal. I reciprocate accordingly.
But is the reciprocity proportional? We see that if we consider the example that Ajamil, he lived a terribly wrong life. But still, we can say that just by chanting one name of Narayan, he was saved from the Yamapasha. Conversely, we have the example of Chota Haridas.
He lived a life of virtue, but one mistake and he was grievously punished for that. So now, it was not that the Lord rejected Chota Haridas. Although externally it appeared like that, but Chota Haridas, whatever body he came in, people thought it was a ghostly body because they couldn’t see it.
But actually, he was chanting the names of the Lord and he was pleasing the Lord by that. So basically, although he ended his body, it was not that he became a ghost. He attained a higher destination through that.
So sometimes the Lord might, to make an example, take a small mistake and give a severe reaction to that. And sometimes, a big mistake also, there might be no result of that. Or a small right thing, there might be a big positive result of that.
So, if we consider the principle that the Lord is independent, so then, he deals with every soul in a way that is best for that soul’s evolution. But, it’s not necessarily proportional. I have done this much, that’s why you have to give me this much.
In fact, the Vishnu Sahasranama says that So Nimisha and Animisha. Nimisha means the one who blinks his eyes. Animisha is one who never blinks his eyes.
So what Baldev Dev Ji explains in his commentary on the Vishnu Sahasranama is that this refers to that if the devotee does something wrong, the Lord blinks his eyes and overlooks the wrong. But, if the devotee does something right, if the devotee does even the smallest service, the Lord unblinkingly keeps his eyes open and notices and rewards that service. So, the example is of Putana.
Putana came with a malicious attitude to kill Krishna. But because she offered her milk, what did Krishna do? Krishna closed his eyes. At a material level, she got the result that her soul had to be separated from that sinful body that she was in.
But, she was made into the ahobakiyam sthanakalakutam. She was made into the hatri, the nurse of Krishna. So, where is the proportion in that? There are sages and seekers who lifetime practise sadhana.
And Putana just comes once and offers, not even milk, she offers poison. So, Krishna’s grace is not proportional. It’s reciprocal.
Krishna saw that small spark of the desire to serve. Actually, the Acharya has explained that in the previous life. She was Krutamala, the sister of Bali Maharaj.
And when she saw Vamana, this small field swan, nice boy, attractive boy coming over there, then she was attracted. Oh, such a nice boy, nice child, I wish he was mine. And I would have taken care of him.
But, when he turned and took away everything from Bali Maharaj, she got angry with him. So, in her next life, that desire for service was there, but also the anger was there. So, she became Putana.
So, we see that in the case of Putana’s liberation, it’s definitely not proportional. So, yatha mam prapadyante is the principle of reciprocity. But, it is not necessarily the principle of proportionality.
Proportionality is, the Lord is, there is the Lord’s fairness and the Lord’s mercifulness. So, mercy is not bound by rules. And proportionality means it is bound by rules.
Now, we could say that if we take one step towards the Lord, the Lord takes thousand steps towards us. Now, that is reciprocal. But, is it proportional? It’s not exactly proportional, because it’s only one step from us, a thousand steps from him.
Now, how much is one step from us, we say that for him, three steps can span the whole universe also. So, thousand steps would span such a big distance. So, it is reciprocal.
So, yatha mam prapadyante talks about reciprocity. But, if you look at other instances, where sometimes, for a small mistake, a big punishment can be done. Or for a small good thing, a big reward can be done.
We don’t see exactly proportionality over there. Prabhupada also gives the example of how mother-in-law may teach the daughter-in-law by chastising the daughter. That the daughter-in-law is not serving the food properly.
And because the daughter-in-law is new, the mother-in-law doesn’t criticise the daughter-in-law. She just criticises the daughter, why are you doing like this? Now, she is not actually doing like that. But, she is using an instrument by which the daughter-in-law says, I am not meant to do like this, I should do like this.
So, that is how sometimes a devotee may not have done anything wrong, but the Lord may use the devotee and the devotee may go to some difficulties so that others will learn how to deal with difficulties. So, in that sense, the Lord is reciprocal but not necessarily proportional. Does that answer your question? Anything else? Can you talk one to one? Thank you very much.
Gantra Shrimad Bhagavatam ki, Shila Prabhupada ki, Gaur Bharata Vinda ki,