Bhagavatam-daily 117 – 11.08.33 – Contemplate the body’s nature to get a illusion-countering cerebral jolt

In her consciousness and in her actions will be depicted in the subsequent verses thank you so this is pingala speaking reflect giving reflections about the illusoriness of sensual pursuits and she’s speaking here she’s referring to her own body in the previous verse she has said that actually i mastered sanket the art of addressing and moving and behaving and decorating in a way by which i could provoke others so i i devoted myself to beautifying my body by which i could get pleasure from others but he is saying that so in the previous verse she has said that the previous two verses in fact she has said that those lovers were incompetent the lovers were useless they were pitiable pathetic she’s mentioned the previous previous verse and in the verse before that she has meant insignificant so it is not only are the people whom i was serving through whom i was hoping to get pleasure not only are they insignificant but even the very body through which i was going to attract them and through which i was going to hoping to get pleasure that body is also useless so she’s now giving a sobering analysis of the nature of the body so astibhir refers to asti is bones so the body is made of bones means constructed made so the body is like a house which is made of bones and there are bones on the there is the back side where the spine there is the backbone there are the bones over there and then there is the front side there are the ribs just like there are horizontal beams and vertical beams in a house so like that there are bones which are like the beams in a house and sthunam sthunam are refers to the bones of the hands and the legs so basically thinking of the body as a house which is made of bones and looking at think of the bodily parts as just beams within that house it suddenly brings a joltingly detached perspective what is there to be so attracted okay this house has got this kind of beam this house has got this kind of beam what is there to be attracted in that and then what is there to be attracted that it is people get attracted because there is a that structure of bones which is covered over attractively so so where is there is a skin above that and and then there are hair and then there are nails it’s covered now if you see okay the skin the hair the nails these are there on the body and females in general or people in general females specifically but people in general they try to decorate so women you know they may use creams or something to make their skin look more shiny more attractive in whatever way is the current cultural fad whatever is considered the standard of beauty and then they decorate their hair in various ways and then there is nail polish or there are designs or other kinds of things by which nails are decorated so basically the internal content if we see it is not at all attractive but because the covering is there the covering is decorated so it looks attractive but then even in that covering which no matter how attractive it may look there also the unattractiveness periodically pops up as an undeniable uncomfortable but undeniable reality and what is that so this is how house has doors so this also has a doors and from all these doors what happens so out of this house means to come out to ooze out practically speaking so what so now what comes out of all this this body actually there are all sorts of terrible substances which come out now through the body skin itself sweat comes out and a sweaty person is never attractive if somebody is sweaty he said can you just go and take a bath or something you do not want the sweaty person to come very close to us so sweat keeps oozing out of the body and sweat is the least of the um false substances that come out there is so now she is saying that actually inside what is there in the body now something cannot come out of the body unless it is there inside so what is there inside she says there is there is stool and there is urine and like that the substances inside the body are not at all attractive that’s why sometimes if cross-section of the body is done in sometimes in some movies or not in some movies some medical textbooks the cross-section of the body is given and the same person who looks very attractive at this surface level you know when the face may look very attractive but then if you just remove the mm of skin and then below that we see the flesh and the blood and the arteries and everything now there’s nothing attractive about it so now literally speaking the body may not be filled with the stool and urine there are other substances but the point is that none of those internal substances in the body are attractive now we may say that i love a person but then if that person’s body is open and the heart comes out and the heart nobody will want to take that heart and embrace that heart so what is because we ourselves may feel a little apprehensive to see our heart if if of course we will not be conscious if our heart is if the surgeon is being a heart comes out but my point is that what the body contains internally is not attractive at all and then so now just to jolt us out of the illusion that the body is source of beauty or pleasure is saying what is there inside the body and the great illusion of material existence is that the very holes that give out these things often they are themselves considered sources of very of great beauty and people fancy dream dream about seeing those holes touching those holes and doing all sort of thing with them so what is this vimutra puranam this body i thought that by decorating this body i will get pleasure but madhupaitikanya who apart from me could have been so foolish that by decorating a body like this one would get pleasure now of course in this world all of us are foolish like that we all think that we can attract others and we want to get pleasure through the body and we do imagine that we will get pleasure through it but she is saying that she’s basically emphasizing her foolishness madhupaitikanya and she may be thinking of other people who are other women who are living more chaste who are living chaste lives and they are not so flagrantly exhibiting their body they did not do sankhye tyabatti and they did not try to seek pleasure through the body in one sense it’s a natural human instinct to look good there’s nothing wrong with that it’s not that when we say the body is abominable so we have to look abominable we have to be clean and we have to be tidy so the natural human instinct to want to look good is not to be denied but to think that looking good is the source of pleasure and to make one’s life devoted to looking good and seeking pleasure thereby is wrong now all human beings you know even chaste women it’s not that they have to look ugly they will also dress themselves decorate themselves but she’s saying that oh alas i have occupied i have made a profession out of this and how imagine this will give me pleasure how who could have devoted oneself totally to the body and the pursuit of pleasure through the body like i so religious people they have they have the dharma dharma artha kama moksha so kama when it is within the framework of dharma then it is accepted it is legitimized although it is still distracting but then gradually it is integrated into the overall progression of life and one grows beyond that transcends that eventually but she is saying that i have devoted myself just to karma and i who could have been more foolish so so foolish like this so sometimes when we get too infatuated with the body we can contemplate about the true nature of the body our own body and even other’s body now other’s body is that we don’t want to hate anyone but just recognizing the nature of the body helps in it becomes like a cerebral jolt a shock treatment what is this i am fantasizing that will give me so much pleasure oh there’s nothing over here let me not get carried away by this now at the same time as devotees now we shouldn’t hate the body if you start thinking oh this body i am carrying around if you start hating the body and that can lead to a whole sort of negative complexes the body if we think it is a source of pleasure then that is an illusion but the body itself is also the source of dharma we want to keep the body healthy so that we can pursue dharma and in fact in in the buddhas in the stories about buddha there is a incident quite a jarring incident where buddha told his disciples to meditate on the abominable nature of the body and he told them how to go about meditating on the body and then afterwards when he came back he found that this ashram the number of people had greatly decreased and he asked what happened so people who were there after they are the survivors they are very sober and they said that actually when people heard when they heard when these people started meditating on the body’s foulness they became so disgusted that they committed suicide immediately he said stop all this meditation then he told them to meditate on the prana so for us we shouldn’t meditate on the negative our focus should be meditating on the positive meditating on krishna his beauty his pastimes his name his service and while doing that we can also meditate on when when we get distracted from this meditation by thoughts about the sense objects then by by beautiful forms then we can and that to disabuse ourselves of that illusion that this is beautiful we can meditate on the nature of the body on what the body is beyond the covering and thereby thereby create a sense of detachment and again return to the meditation on krishna meditation on krishna so our meditation should not be on the negativity of the body but should be on the supreme positivity of krishna and we will see that as pingala’s thoughts also move forward she will focus on