CC daily 129 – M 6.181 – Rationalization enables us to believe what we want to believe

Thank you Chaitanya Mahaprabhu Madhya 6.181 Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is speaking with Sarovar Tacharya and now he is giving the scriptural and historical antecedents for the appearance of Shankaracharya and his specific mission Agama actually means literature or secular literature so Agama means your own literature Kalpita, Kalpita is Kalpana imagine, Tvamcha, you should make the people averse to me Tvamcha Gopaya Tvamcha Gopaya that in this way cover Yena Srishti, Esho Uttara Uttara and then there will be more and more material growth Uttara Uttara let it happen more and more point that is being made over here is that Kali Yuga is the age of materialism and materialism of godlessness, of iniquity of materialism and such materialism cannot spread unless people give up whatever reservations caused by conscience or culture that may keep them from becoming materialistic so how will people give this up only when they understand that actually that this is the right thing to do there is this one important point that on very very few occasions do actually criminals believe that what they did was wrong quite often many criminals who even commit ghastly crimes believe that that was what they had to do and that they were justified in doing it now of course the way they might come to such a conclusion the way they might justify their idiosyncratic beliefs may vary from person to person but the fact is that most people do go through such a situation where they actually rationalize to themselves and to the others that whatever they are doing is the right thing to do that actually so even now for example the most extreme example of this could be jihadi terrorists who believe that actually they are doing the will of god when they are killing innocent people in their terrorist attacks in that case there they have rationalized their actions by some sort of twisted logic which is claims to have religious basis but similarly whoever does anything wrong usually those people come up with some kind of rationalization for it usually their rationalization centers on letting themselves believe that this was the only way they could have lived there was no other way that they could have managed to do things so nobody likes cognitive dissonance cognitive dissonance means within one's cognition, within one's intelligence, within one's perception having two different ideas going on simultaneously everybody finds it difficult to deal with such a thing and people try to deal with this cognitive dissonance in different ways so one way that many people deal with it is by assuming that there is nothing to be done about it that they just they just convince themselves that this was the only thing there was no other way to go ahead so a criminal who is a serial killer may say that's not what I had to do now why such a person may claim that and how such a person may believe that is something which we may not be able to at all understand but the fact is this is how people think and they act so rationalization is a tool used by wrongdoers to dull and silence their conscience and it is this rationalization that is being talked about over here which is rationalization now for Kalyuga to spread onwards people need some kind of rationalization so that rationalization is provided by the lord so this is an example of yatha maam prapadyante taam siddhaiva bhajaan meha but as all people surrender to a person the lord rewards accordingly so now what happens is in this world no one can actually get away from worldly situations merely by imagining oneself to be happy but has to actually work towards making oneself happy by the practice of steady bhakti so only when the soul offers oneself to Krishna does the soul find lasting happiness in all other situations there can be lesser or greater degrees of wrongdoing that the soul does and these kind of wrongdoings especially they become grievous when the soul really believes this is the only way I can be happy in life once the soul believes that the soul becomes ready to do whatever it takes to move onwards in its conceptions but the important thing for us as spiritualists is to realize that Krishna facilitates our desires so Krishna allows us if we so desire if we so insist to believe we believe whatever we want to believe and he even sends his representatives to perpetuate that belief so people want to be materialistic while having a religious facade around their materialism and impersonalism offers them that and when impersonalism offers this to them they accept it and by accepting it they actually attract people to Krishna they actually attract people towards maya they themselves become attracted to maya and they attract others to maya so when the lord Krishna is telling Shankara to come and do something like this the purpose is not that the lord wants to mislead people not that Shankaracharya wants to mislead people but that when people want to mislead themselves, people want to do wrong and want to want to dumb their conscience so that it doesn't seem like wrong to them then they used to think wherein they believe that they can be happy without paying attention to God without paying heed to God without paying heed to morality or scripture while putting on a facade of these things the lord's plan is a response to our own desires so rather than so when we are misled then it is we who desire to be misled and as I said the world is a place of cheaters and cheated so actually the lord is not a cheater but for those who are to be cheated the lord makes necessary arrangements and in that way rather than blaming others when we are misled we can look within our hearts and see, try to purge ourselves of impure desires and the more we cultivate a pure desire to know the more the lord will bless us with pure knowledge by which we can find the right path and move onwards swiftly on that path towards the supreme destination that will grant eternal happiness that is Vishnuprem.