Bhagavatam-daily 81 – 11.07.71 – Devotion protects us from the frustration and destruction of lamentation

Bhagavatam-daily podcast:

Thank you. Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 11.7.71 So, the story of the pigeon is being told by Dāvādītī Brāhmaṇa to Mahārāja Yadu. And here the pigeon is succumbing to a suicidal loss of intelligence.
तामस् तथिवा वृतान्शिक भीर तामस् means, referring to his wife and his children. The children were described as, in the previous verses, as more dear than himself. And his wife was declared as equal to himself.
We consider equal in every way. तामस् थिवा वृतान्शिक भीर So, they were आवृतान्, they were surrounded, trapped in the शिदभीर, the net. बृत्युग्रस्तान् विचेष्टतः बृत्युग्रस्तान्, they were in the clutches, the jaws of death.
विचेष्टतः, when he saw like this, सोयं च कृपणः शिक्षू So, he himself became अकृपणः, he became overwhelmed by weakness, he lost his intelligence. He fell, शिक्षू, into the net. While he was watching, he became overwhelmed by weakness, कृपणः, cripple-mindedness, he was fractured, unfortunate.
अभुधो is unintelligent, बुधा is intelligent, अभुधो is unintelligent. So, he unintelligently, foolishly, fell into the net. Here, we see, the tragic ending of the कृपणः story.
He, in the previous verse said that, what is the purpose of living, if my wife, my children are not there with me. And, as he was thinking like this, he just lost his intelligence and fell. Now, birds often seem to fly effortlessly in the sky.
Even if they have to put in an effort in terms of moving their wings, but still, they seem to glide along effortlessly. In terms of, we humans, we can’t even imagine flying like that. flying seems to be like, it’s a natural instinct for them, you don’t have to think about it.
But the fact is, that they also have to keep flapping their wings and they have to maintain their balance. Just as in this world, when we are overwhelmed by emotions, in movies often they show you some, people hear some bad news is heard and say, a woman is there, she is carrying some plate and he just falls. The plate falls with a big noise and she falls on the ground in a swoon, fainting.
So, that sort of scene happens when a person is overwhelmed by emotions. If the emotion that one is undergoing is so severe, so unbearable, then, by a subconscious response mechanism, not being able to bear that severe stimuli, the body just shuts down. And a person swoons, falls down.
So, sometimes the falling down can be severe and a person becomes unconscious. Sometimes the person may not become unconscious, but the bodily limbs stop working. Now, Arjuna described something similar at the start of the Gita, when he said, he himself was not falling, but, he said that, the Gandiva is slipping from my hand and my limbs are quivering.
So, what Arjuna was describing over there was also a gross physical reaction to a severe mental emotion, mental emotion of agony on thinking about the imminent death of his relatives that overwhelmed Arjuna and he felt that, how can I fight? And his his body responded to the agony of his heart and of his agony in his mind by just weakening and the bow started slipping. So, similarly, in this case over here, the agony, the devastation that the pigeon was going through on seeing the he and she, his family on the verge of death, Mithyakrishtan, and he himself helpless to do anything, just lost breath and he collapsed. Now, he is flying above the net, flapping the wings and watching, crying.
The previous verses have also described his lamenting, his fleece filled with severe lamentation and this verse continues that and describes that after his lamentation, he just crumbled here. So, show Chiti. Now, there is grief, there is lamentation.
Now, it is natural that when something terrible goes wrong, we will feel bad and that is grief. Now, grieving is a process which is often necessary and healthy for the release of the emotions. It is not that if we are struck by agony, we have to bury all those emotions in our heart.
Sometimes expressing those emotions may may be the healthiest way to purge ourselves of their harmful effects. But if we let the emotions completely take control of us, then they can break havoc with our system. Maybe Asudev tells Yudhishthir Maharaj, when he is lamenting at the death of Abhimanyu, that grief does nothing except sap the energy of those who indulge in it.
Especially here grief is used in a negative connotation of lamentation. So, Maa Shuchaha is such an important message of the Bhagavad Gita. Jiv Goswami explains that in Sandarbhas, while analyzing the message of the Gita, he says that we can look at the framing passages of a book to understand what its essential message is.
So, framing passages means that it’s starting and it’s ending passages. So, the Bhagavad Gita starts with do not lament. That’s an indirect instruction when Krishna is telling that the wise people you are lamenting but the wise don’t lament.
That means the implication is do not lament. And the Bhagavad Gita ends in the last instruction in one sense of the 18.6 is Maa Shuchaha do not fear, do not lament. Shuchaha can mean doubt.
It can mean lament also. Shochati, Shuchaha, it’s similar. So, the framing narrative of the Bhagavad Gita says that do not lament.
That is the message. Now, how one can overcome lamentation? Somebody can just give a pep talk. Somebody can just go and see some cartoon show.
Somebody can go and see a comedy show and try to give up grief. They are very superficial. But the Bhagavad Gita rather than offering that sort of pop therapy, it goes deep into the fundamental questions of life, the meaning and purpose of existence and offers us a purpose that raises us above lamentation.
We direct our love towards things and people of this world and when those things and people are lost, we become frustrated. The Bhagavad Gita offers us an eternal object of love, Krishna. When we direct our love towards him, then there’ll never be any frustration.
In fact, there’ll always be the opportunity to serve him. He’s there in our heart and we can always remember him and we can serve him in some way or the other. Even if we can’t serve him in the way that we had planned because of things going wrong externally, but there are always other ways in which we can keep serving him.
So, loving Krishna and serving Krishna is the path to freedom from frustration and the whole point of this story of the pigeon is also to not let our love get caught and stay restricted at the material realm where it will sooner or later lead to frustration and it is not only going to lead to frustration for the pigeon but also to destruction or just destruction but of self-destruction. So, his family members are destroyed but because of being overwhelmed by the grief, the lamentation just overpowers him so much that he loses his energy and his intelligence and far from trying anything to rescue his loved ones from the death trap of the net, he himself falls into it and dies similarly. So, if we are to protect ourselves, equip ourselves to fight against such dangerous attacks of weakening emotions, then we need to connect strongly, connect firmly with the supreme source of strength, Krishna and by the power of spiritual emotion, by the power of devotional fulfillment that comes in our relationship with him, we equip ourselves to fight back the blinding storms of worldly emotions that may otherwise fell us as they have fell this pigeon.
So, bhakti helps us to weather these storms and ultimately go beyond the jurisdiction to the spiritual world where there are no such storms of blinding worldly emotions that frustrate and devastate.