What was the purpose of the celestial prophecy before Krishna’s birth?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Akashvani in common, and what is the purpose of that Akashvani? Without that also Krishna could have been born. It’s not so easy to isolate one particular incident from a chain of incidents and to assess what would have been the impact of this. If this had not happened this way, that had not happened that way.
There is a whole, we call it history and contra history or alternative history. If in this war, this person had, instead of attacking, he had attacked me, what would have happened? Maybe more familiar to us is contra cricket history. Say India recently lost in the semi-finals in the World Cup and so many people become self-appointed commentators.
Only if this batsman had come earlier, only if this bowler had bowled like this, only if this person had come before. Would that have changed? Well, maybe, maybe we don’t know. Some other batsman will come before, but that batsman also gets out, who knows.
So it is difficult to isolate a particular element from a whole narrative, but still broadly we can see a couple of things that is the celestial voice common? Well, you could say it’s not unheard of. It’s not that it happens every day, but we see in the first canto also, Narada Muni hears a voice and he’s been performing, he’s a Narada boy and he’s performing austerity, he sees the Lord, he’s delighted on seeing the Lord, but then the Lord disappears. And after that he hears a voice that because you are impure at heart and incomplete in service, you cannot see me now, but this glimpse you have been given so that you can long for me, you are longing for me, we will free you from all other longings and then you can come to me, you’ll attain me, I’ll take you.
So we see that, but we don’t see that very common. Basically the idea is that this is the terrestrial realm, the celestial realm and interaction between the terrestrial and the celestial realms do happen, earthly and heavenly realms do happen. You know uncommon devatas sometimes appear on the earth, sometimes in yajna, sometimes at other times, sometimes say Arjuna goes to the heavens.
So the specific modes of interaction between the terrestrial and celestial may vary and in each context, it may be for a particular purpose. When Rama is fighting with Ravana, towards the end, Indra sends his own chariot to charioteer. That is Indra only who has in a sense, who has gone to Brahma and through that Vishnu has been invoked and Rama has descended.
So that has been earlier done already, but specifically the visible way that interaction happens is before the final war. So celestial-terrestrial interactions do happen. In the form of Akashvani, they are not that common.
Now in this particular case, as rightly pointed out, what all does it serve? Yes, it does serve to accelerate, to dramatize and accelerate the appearance of Krishna. So basically, now Krishna could have come and killed Kamsa, but how would the, it could just have appeared to be just killing someone. The person’s demonic nature, if it had not come out, Krishna’s killing him wouldn’t have been justified.
So normally, in ordinary situations, anybody can behave like a nice person, but if they are provoked, what do we do? All of us, even when we are provoked, we might deviate from our normal behavior. Some of us may be a very gentle, nice person, but when they get angry, they become a different person. But all of us, even within our anger, have limits.
Some of us, even when we get angry, we might never speak certain foul words, certain bad words we never speak, or no matter how angry we get, we might not take some physical weapon to hit someone. So we all have our limits. But some people have no limits.
And their normal behavior and their provoked behavior are so different that somebody who has not seen their provoked behavior will not be able to believe that this person can behave like this. So then for the world to know the extent to which they can go when they are provoked, sometimes there is a need to be provoked. So Krishna does this very often.
Krishna makes that arrangement through various people for that to happen. So Kamsa’s cruelty becomes visible to the world when the Akashvani comes and then his behavior alters radically. The same sister whom he is very affectionately carrying as the charioteer in his chariot, he suddenly turns to kill her immediately.
That’s the extent of his evil disposition which comes out. So at one level you could say that the Akashvani happens just to expose to the world how demoniac Kamsa is. And then thereafter yes Kamsa killed all the previous babies and it is brutal, but that was the way also those babies got liberated, got delivered from being born here on the earth quickly and leaving.
As you said that was a whole story behind that. So we could say there are multiple, generally see the idea is for one incident you could find explanations at various different levels. Say if I am speaking right now to you and you can’t hear what I am speaking you could say that is because maybe this mic volume is low.
You could sometimes say that my speaking volume is low or you could say maybe your hearing has gone down or maybe you could say the acoustics of this room are bad. So you could have various explanations. So generally we go toward the most obvious explanation, the most immediate explanation as long as it makes sense.
So we could go to various levels and other explanations can also be true. So in this case as you rightly said explanation about those six children are also true. But immediate context is that Akashwani that heavenly voice actually revealed Kamsa’s hellish side.
Thank you.