Bhagavatam-daily 212 – 11.11.17 – The wise act as foolish to avoid being entangled with the foolish

Thank you Atma Ramo Anaya Vidya Vichare Jada Vannu Nihi Nakurya Navade Kinchi so here the Srimad Bhagavatam, Uddhava Gita Krishna instructing Uddhava about symptoms of deliberated soul Nakurya Navade Kinchi the person does not do anything and does not speak anything and does not contemplate of things in terms of good and bad, especially in terms of material conceptions of good and bad Atma Ramo Anaya Vidya being self satisfied and living in this way, Vichare Jada Vannu Nihi, the person moves around as if Jada Vannu, as if foolish now this is quite a shocking recommendation if you think about it objectively that normally nobody wants to come off as a fool nobody wants to appear retarded and even if say someone has a relative who is retarded then usually the recommendation is that try to change it try to change it means try to get things cured try to avoid the conveying to people the impression that somebody is retarded the person who is mentally challenged may be taken to a doctor and that way whatever problem of retardedness is there, that is countered, but unfortunately often such images don’t help and the person is retarded and often the relatives they often keep the person concealed it may not necessarily because they are embarrassed, but they don’t want that person to feel hurt when others look scornfully and there is a whole genre of say if somebody has a disease like say down syndrome where person is not exactly retarded, but is just slow then other people make fun of such a person and becomes very distasteful, so to avoid such a thing from happening often lot of care is taken, so the point which I am making overall is that normally a retarded the state of being retarded is either cured or it is covered but where do we hear in normal life of someone who is not just normal, but who is wise, as it is said Muni a saintly sage such a person acting as Jadavath what would make a wise person want to act foolish so now we know that there is one example in the Bhagavatam earlier in the fifth canto of Bharat Maharaj acting foolishly in his next life as Jadavath, because he did not want his relatives to engage him in materialistic activities so that’s one thing that the problem with this kind of attitude for common people to understand is, common people not only they may not entangle such a person in materialistic activities, but they may actually lose the opportunity to gain wisdom from such a person because of neglecting such a person as foolish that’s what happened in Trahuguna till Jadavath so that he was not all Jada, he was actually Vidya he was very wise he was Buddha so now that emerged due to one fateful conversation and here is that a similar consideration that one should not one doesn’t want other people to entangle such a person in materialistic inclinations and engagements not necessarily, that’s definitely one feature but here primarily the point is about oneself not getting emotionally entangled, when we speak about something, when we talk about something we naturally feel emotionally enamored by it we feel emotionally engaged by it and thus we get bound so if you are not to get bound if you are not to get involved then better to avoid praising things, better to avoid speaking things about subjects about which we are unconnected now we will see that in the tradition at least whatever remnants we have of the traditions products generally the acharyas, they have written on spiritual subject matters but they haven’t commented on social subjects so for example Vishwanath Krivathakur and he writes his commentary that was in Vrindavan on the Sita Bhagavatam or the Gita, that was just very soon after he had tried to bring Vrindavan back under control, back to a fragment of its pristine glory after that glory had been distorted, lost because of a lot of ravages by the Muslim rulers especially Aurangzeb and others, so now Vishwanath Krivathakur doesn’t even make one mention of them in his commentaries now that is one way or that is more or less a standard way in which the acharyas have dealt with situations, another alternative way is what is seen in most prominently Ishwara Prabhupada’s writing Ishwara Prabhupada in his bid to show the relevance of Krishna consciousness to various issues did comment on a wide variety of issues, social, political cultural, scientific now Prabhupada Prabhupada’s focus was on primarily seeing Krishna in everything and showing Krishna in everything that is a transcendental purpose and especially in a culture which has divorced itself from God largely the precision of the attempt is not as important as the purpose that means that social commentary in which say an acharya judges something as good or something as bad a social commentary is always based on some level of social information and if that information is not accurate, the social commentary may also not be accurate but the point is, the important thing is that we have to look at the purpose rather than the precision, the purpose is to show how the light of Krishna consciousness can help, can illuminate various things so for example now say Prabhupada might have said that Hitler was actually a gentleman who was spoiled by the bad publicity of the Britishers now Prabhupada did not actually study European history he did not know much about the sheer amount of atrocity and murders that were done during the holocaust he lived in the Bengal that was very favorable to Subhash Chandra Bose who had allied with Hitler and the Britishers were ruling and often who were responsible in Bengal for one of the worst famines you know people were dying in India because of droughts as well as because of mismanagement by the British government and nothing was done to relieve it so at that time the social perception was that the Britishers are very bad people and with the help of Germans we will drive out these evil Britishers so the point is that things cannot, so this is from the social situation in which Prabhupada made certain comments so the point is that the holocaust did happen and Shila Prabhupada was not going to conspiracy theories just denying the occurrence of the holocaust but his point was much more much purer that point was that we should look at Shastra and see how the principles in Shastra can be applied to the situations in today’s life so Shila Prabhupada with respect to social situations often was ready to change his stance and his principle Yukta Vairagya once quoted from the Aquarian Gospel talking about how Jesus had come to India and when some devotees Rangasurpa and others told that Aquarian Gospel was a questionable book it was not really a gospel and it didn’t have authority then Prabhupada stopped quoting from it so so the point is that we need to be there are two levels of dealing with the duality of good and bad one level is what Krishna talks about here that transcendental means that one just doesn’t speak about these things asadu sadhua well whatever is good whatever is bad don’t bother about it that was the standard used where they focus primarily on transcendental subject matters the other stand is that we take the principle and we try to show how the Shastra is relevant even in today’s times now of course Shila Prabhupada was careful not to align the Krishna consciousness movement with any political party because he felt that it would be important for us to recognize for us to stay universal, non sectarian so these are to be done very carefully devotees live in the material world to pursue transcendental purpose and we need to focus on that purpose and not get ourselves too intellectually emotionally entangled in worldly ups and downs