When we lose something vital for both material and spiritual life, what can we do?

Podcast:

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Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI and may contain occasional errors or inaccuracies.

Summary

When facing severe health issues or the loss of vital resources that threaten our professional and spiritual service, feelings of doubt and betrayal are completely natural. Here is a guide on how to process these emotions and navigate deep personal trials without losing your spiritual anchor.

Understanding and Processing Loss in Spiritual Life

• Embrace Your Authentic Emotions: Feeling hurt, angry, or betrayed when expectations or service are disrupted indicates a real, personal relationship with the Lord rather than artificial veneration.

• Recognize Precedents in Scripture: Great figures like Draupadi, Prabhupada, and Arjuna all faced devastating losses and moments of deep dejection, proving that circumstantial emotions do not have to override overall devotion.

• Separate the Practical from the Spiritual: Understand that the world operates with unavoidable limitations, and the true test is whether you will let a lost resource become a barrier or a chance to offer your consciousness directly.

• Take Action at a Practical Level: Do what you can materially to regain your health or find alternative methods, just as Prabhupada made strategic, real-world adjustments when facing obstacles in his outreach.

• Deepen Your Connection Internally: When external facilities for service are removed, view it as an opportunity to connect your consciousness directly with Krishna on a deeper, more resilient level.

• Move Forward with Greater Conviction: By functioning within your limitations while maintaining your internal connection, you pave the way to eventually resume your service with heightened authenticity and potency.

Key Takeaways

• Don’t feel guilty about feeling negative or frustrated with the Lord; these are understandable human emotions in a serious relationship.

• Work on two distinct levels simultaneously: make practical, material efforts to heal or adapt, while keeping your spiritual focus active by offering your consciousness directly to Krishna.

Full Transcription

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Question, if after serving the Lord systematically, dedicatedly for many years, we start facing some health issues which severely impede our services, say, we develop some speech limitation or some stammering or something which interferes with our, not just interferes but almost obstructs and paralyzes both our service to the Lord and our professional life, as well as it impedes our nature, what do we do at such times? How do we avoid the perception that the Lord is cruel and doesn’t protect us? He wants our service but doesn’t want the responsibility of protecting us.
Answer, these are perfectly understandable emotions and every relationship which has to be real, it will have a range of emotions within it. It’s like when we love someone, we have expectations from that person and if those expectations are not fulfilled, we feel hurt, we feel angry, we feel betrayed. When Draupadi went through her harrowing suffering, when she was dishonored, afterwards when Krishna came to meet her, Draupadi broke down and in a mood of censure, she asked Krishna, why did you not protect me? Krishna said, I am your relative, I am your devotee, I am your friend, I deserve your protection.
Now Krishna does not take a holier than thou attitude and say, how dare you question my perfect plan? Where is your faith? You are questioning me, do you want to go to hell like this? Krishna understands where Draupadi is coming from and he takes on a very human role, he says that. I didn’t know what happened. I was in Dwarka, there was a demon, Shalva, who had attacked.
I was busy protecting Dwarka. As soon as I came to know about what happened, I immediately come. He says, I have heard about how you stuck to Dharma during all the difficulties and as you, your conduct was exemplary.
It was not, it was the assembly that failed previously and all those who caused you tears will be punished. Stay strong, O Draupadi. So Krishna, in one sense, did not try to get himself off the hook by saying, trying to make her believe that what happened was not bad or somehow it was all perfect.
Yeah, it was a terrible thing and Krishna appreciated her for, he did not condemn her for doubting or questioning or feeling angry. He appreciated her for how she conducted herself during the assembly, the post-gambling match assembly in the court. So, if you feel hurt, if you feel angry, if you feel betrayed, if you feel negative with the Lord, just understand that indicates that our relationship with the Lord is a serious relationship.
It is not an artificial relationship where we just maintain some stereotypical veneration and gratitude and overflowing of positive emotion. No real relationship is like that. There is, of course, an overall denominator of positivity, appreciation and joy in being with the other person.
But within that, there can be annoyance, there can be anger, there can be dismay, there can be shock, there may be even a feeling of betrayal. This can happen with anyone. This can happen with our close friends.
This can happen with our family members. This can happen with our spiritual guides. Even our spiritual master, maybe at an individual level, is our greatest well-wisher.
But at an institutional level, the spiritual master functions within certain limitations and then they may make certain decisions which we may not be able to digest. At that time, we may feel hurt. What we need to know is that while God is unlimited and God’s potency is manifesting in the spiritual world through the spiritual master, the spiritual guides can take us towards the unlimited world.
Certain things are happening within this limited world and that means there will always be some limitations which are unavoidable. If Prabhupada was not able to complete his path of commitment, Prabhupada worked so hard to build the Juhu temple and he couldn’t live long enough to see the Juhu temple. That didn’t make Prabhupada bitter.
Would Prabhupada have been disappointed? My understanding would be that it would be very surprising and strange if Prabhupada had not felt somewhat disappointed. But his overall devotion to Krishna didn’t get diminished by that. It was not that there were no circumstantial emotions.
But it was not that the circumstantial emotions overrode his overall relationship. In Tamal Prasad Maharaj’s diary, he sees this just going on and on and on. Prabhupada had a prolonged sickness before he departed.
Prabhupada, Tamal Prasad Maharaj, said that why is this happening to me, Prabhupada? That is not the question of the Mahabharata. But the point is that Prabhupada completely missed Krishna’s ultimate plan. At that particular point, what was he to do? Did Krishna want Prabhupada to fight on for his life? Did Krishna want Prabhupada to do more service? Or did Krishna want Prabhupada to leave from the world? So, Prabhupada, as a devotee, may feel perplexed.
And perplexed about how to serve. There will be confusion. There will be disorientation.
All this I understand from the devotions. So, for Draupadi, the sense of betrayal could have been even greater. Because it is that her husband failed to protect her at that time.
Normally, she served with her husband. But in that particular case, when her husband failed, she was disappointed naturally. But she did not see the silence of her husband, or the failure of her husband to protect, as a reason to reject Krishna.
Those who are supposed to be great devotees, those who are supposed to be my protectors, if they can stay silent on something like this happening to me, what is the point of following Dharma? What is the point of being my husband? What is the point of even being a devotee? So, when that particular support, the support system was taken away from her, she took wholehearted shelter of Krishna exclusively. Similarly, if you consider the Bhagavatam, our scriptures are not just about how Krishna protects all the time. At the end of the Bhagavatam, Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says, Yatra Yogesh, as I have just said, the prophecy comes out, Yatra Yogesh, wherever Krishna is, there will be victory.
Well, there was victory for Arjuna in the Kurukshetra war. But the nature of the world is, eventually, Arjuna also faced a crushing defeat. Not just a defeat, a morale-crushing defeat.
Arjuna, in one series of events, first lost Krishna, and then he lost his archery ability. You can barely imagine anything that could be more devastating. To lose the person for whom we are living, and to lose the very ability by which we are living.
Krishna losing his archery skills is far worse than, say, a cricket batsman losing both arms for batting, or a musician losing his voice. It is worse in one sense because, it’s just that a surgeon won’t be able to do their job. But in the case of a warrior, if a warrior can’t fight, it’s not just the warrior can’t fight, there are others who want to fight with the warrior, and they will attack and kill the warrior.
So, Arjuna had all reasons to be shaken, and he was. Yudhishthira notices that he was seeing Arjuna’s kind of dejection that he had never seen before. So, that’s understandable given the gravity of the situation.
But then Arjuna remembered the message of Krishna and Buddha, and he became immersed in Krishna. Ultimately, for each one of us, the thing we have to offer the most to Krishna is our consciousness. And usually, our resources are the means by which we offer our consciousness to Krishna.
So, for us, for a person who is a teacher, a mentor, their speech is generally the way by which they engage in Krishna’s service, and they offer their consciousness to Krishna. But sometimes, Krishna may take away that resource from us, the very resource that we absolutely need for serving Krishna, and that time we have a choice. Will we attempt to offer our consciousness to Krishna without that resource, or will we become resentful that that resource has been taken away? And we start letting that become a barrier in our relationship.
That is the ultimate choice that every one of us has to make. Krishna tells Arjuna that Abhimanyu that terrible things happen to everyone in this world. The wise people and the unwise people, the virtuous people and the vicious people.
The key difference between the two categories is that when terrible things happen, the unwise people, the unvirtuous people, they act in ways that make things worse. And the wise people, the virtuous people, act in ways that make things better. So, for us, some vital resource has been taken away.
At that time, we can broadly work at two distinct levels. One is the practical level, the other is the transcendental level. The practical level, we make efforts to try to regain that resource.
Somebody has lost money, they try to do what they can to earn the money back. We lost our health, we try what we can to gain our health. We lost a body function, we lost a particular service, we may try to get that service back.
So, we work at a material level and we work at a material level, we try as much as possible to find out some material cause for it. What exactly happened? I overworked and because of that, this particular health issue came up. Now, sometimes we can find a cause, sometimes we can’t.
But to the extent we can find a way to address that at a material level, we try to address it. So, don’t mix the material and the spiritual. Prabhupada was completely dependent on Krishna and yet when his outreach in India was not successful, Prabhupada made a material adjustment.
A material adjustment is that he decided to go from India to America and he decided to preach to the western people and then bring them to India. Now, we could say Indians are in maya, Americans are in maya. But Prabhupada noticed that one particular brand of maya was especially obstructing his bhakti and he thought that that particular illusion created by maya could be used to bring people to Krishna.
Indians were infatuated by the west. And he said, therefore, Indian infatuation with the west is also a maya itself. But Prabhupada decided to use that particular illusion of maya to help people come out of maya.
So, in one sense, Prabhupada and his faith in Krishna that even Americans could become devotee, western people could also practice bhakti. That was laudable, that was incredible. So, the fact that Prabhupada chose that strategy, he materially relocated himself at great effort and great risk to his safety, to his health, to go all alone.
In the western some would say even to his spirituality, for sannyasi to go to the materialistic west, all alone. It was a great challenge. So, Prabhupada worked at a practical level to see what adjustments could be done.
And simultaneously Prabhupada worked at a spiritual level. Wherever he went, he was focused on glorifying Krishna, on speaking about Krishna. Similarly, at a practical level, we do what we can to deal with that particular challenge.
At a spiritual level, we continue offering our consciousness to Krishna in whatever way is possible in that situation. Sometimes it may be possible by serving Krishna directly. We just remember him, hear about him.
Within the limitations created by that particular challenge, we can find some way to connect with Krishna. Just do that and then function within the limitations at a practical level as much as we can. And we will find through this eventually that our consciousness will become more attached to Krishna.
That we will realize that Krishna is always with us and we can always be with him. Even when what we think is vital for our service to Krishna is taken away from us. Ultimately the highest pastime in the Bhagavatam is the pastime of the gopis.
The gopis gave up everything for Krishna and then Krishna gave them up. And actually the gopis felt angry, the gopis felt violated, the gopis felt betrayed. And they did ask Krishna.
Krishna said that it was out of my love for you to elevate your love to the highest level that I left you. So what happened was, in the absence of Krishna, so we could say here, for the gopis the personal presence of Krishna was the facility, the resource by which they could serve him. They wanted to feed him, they wanted to please him directly.
But when Krishna disappeared, they realized that for remembering Krishna, they didn’t even need Krishna externally. Of course, Krishna being there was wonderful. But that realization, that not rejecting Krishna when Krishna departed from their presence, but connecting with him at an equal level, showed an extraordinarily high level of surrender.
Such a lofty level of surrender that Krishna himself said that I cannot repay you for your devotion. So for us, an external is taken away from us. What is vital externally is taken away from us.
That is an opportunity for us to connect ourselves internally with Krishna at an equal level. And over time, with that reinforced internal connection, when we get the external back, when we resume our service to Krishna, we will be doing so with greater authenticity, greater conviction, greater potency. So to summarize, first point is, don’t feel guilty about feeling negative about Krishna.
It’s just an understandable human emotion. Second point is that, rather than letting that negative emotion define our relationship with Krishna, give a place for that emotion. And focus on the bigger picture.
How can I act to make things better? And then within that, third point is, work at a practical level to do whatever it takes. And then at a spiritual level, see that just because the resource through which I was offering my consciousness to Krishna has been taken away, doesn’t mean that I can’t offer my consciousness anymore to Krishna. Try to offer the consciousness directly to Krishna.
That will deepen our connection with him.