The Monk’s Podcast 72 with Krishna Kshetra Maharaj – Churning the Bhagavatam – Dashavatara 1 – Matsya

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So it was a very broad ranging discussion and so we started by talking about how we can appreciate the Bhagavatam especially the Dashavataras you talked about the Yantra four perspectives the Vedic perspective how the Bhagavatam is the ripened fruit then the Gaudiya perspective how our Acharya elaborated on it then we could talk about the religious or spiritual perspective how we can see from various traditions and then we as we are individual seekers and we bring our own conceptions and our own thought process to it so these are different ways we could appreciate then we talked about how in our tradition so in some ways our discussion went that way in our tradition we looked at how Bhaktivinoda Thakur has equated this with in some way with the Dashavataras it’s more of a correlation rather than an equation then Bhaktivinoda Thakur talks about various levels so literal metaphorical and then aesthetic so then there he talked about he also mentioned about from the other religious perspective where Prabhupada correlated for Joan of Arc and St. Francis of Assisi that they also seem to be great saints and it’s the Bhagavatam and there is this correlation in between Matsya and the nose arc where there are some significances some similarities that at least a boat is there and there is a flood so and I mentioned about how there seems to be this that nature sometimes overwhelms humanity and that’s when humanity seeks something higher and you mentioned in the Bhagavatam nature is shown as both attractive and dangerous and that parallels the depiction of women also in the Bhagavatam and then there is the idea of human choices or human good choices that come through samskaras that can prepare humans to access the divine when the divine intervenes or when nature overpowers and one needs the divine then we talked about with the Matsya avatar itself we went into the past time how he grows enormously and there is the inversion of Vatsalya Rasa at first he is protected and then he protects and this is somewhat this is the opposite of the way normal God consciousness may go that God is our protector and then some devotees they perceive as their protector as being the protector of God and then specifically with respect to Matsya avatar we discussed two three points about how fish is considered the lowest but Krishna appeared in the lowest species to help us see that species as sacred and then we talked about talking animals how they don’t seem to startle anyone so it seems that either the that the Vedic it’s not that people are irrational but they were open for super rational for explanations about rationality which are beyond our paradigms contemporary paradigms of what rationality is there are higher powers intervening and then you mentioned that talking animals is also talking with animals is a feature of say Krishna’s omnipotence and or Krishna’s training and the inability to talk with animals could convey the degradation of human consciousness that because of that because human consciousness is not that broad or receptive so we can perceive only our level of reality not the celestial level not even the animal level and then toward the end discussed about how the Kurma Matsyahi appears in a small form and expands so like that God can manifest in a diminutive or inconspicuous form that’s what happened to Prabhupada in a small opportunity to go to the west by just a casual suggestion from somewhere but from that the Krishna consciousness movement has manifested and expanded and this is a source of wonder so which is the Rasa, the Bhagavatam ultimately entered into through Rasa and we can appreciate how just as Prabhupada sheltered his scorn and Prabhupada was in a sense sheltered by his scorn on his final day just like Satyavat Muni was so did I leave out any points or you want to add something Maharaj his conclusion? No, I’m just impressed with your sharp memory