Confront how bad we can be to become how good we can be

[Bhagavatam class at Hawaii, USA]

Hare Krishna so I am grateful to be with all of you today in the morning and today I will speak broadly on the theme of we need to confront how bad we can be to become how good we can be we need to confront how bad we can be to become how good we can be I will speak this in three broad parts so after each part if it is possible then I would invite you to make some comments or ask some questions also the three parts I will speak is first is that good and evil are co-eternal with existence second is that we are products of our past but not prisoners of our past and bhakti can raise us above our past these three points I will speak so here the first point is good and evil are co-eternal with creation so here in this fourth canto of Srimad Bhagavatam the outline of how the universe came about is given and this starts from the third canto where the process of creation is being described and the Bhagavatam spends a lot of time on the first Manu, that is Swayambhu Manu so here he and his various descendants are being described and this actually the descendants of Swayambhu Manu and the narration goes on till the eighth canto and in the eighth canto there is a fast forward covering seven Manus and then the Vaivasuth Manu and what is happening during the Vaivasuth Manu the appearance of Krishna which happened in this particular Salkalpa that is described also so here while going along with the story of his various descendants one point that comes up is the description of the various descendants who were evil there are multiple levels to the universe and different kinds of beings exist at different levels as described in the Bhagavatam and here Srila Prabhupada writes in the purport that how with the combination of good and evil that Rambhaji not only produced virtuous sons like Sanat, Sanat and Narada but also Nirukti, Adharma, Dambha and falsity so falsehood, hypocrisy irreligiosity all these were also produced thinkers throughout history have pondered the nature of creation and especially the nature of the human person each one of us has our own potentials to do good or bad and this potential where does it come from as it is said that there are some people who are wise and some people are otherwise so we could put it as the divine and demoniac nature which Krishna talks about and it is interesting that Krishna says that that this is the nature we are born with so Prabhupada explains in the purport that creation is cyclic and therefore where we ended in our previous life we begin in the next life and where we ended in a previous universal manifestation even if the universe gets destroyed in the next universal manifestation we begin over there begin from there so that now in the first canto of Srimad Bhagavatam it is described how Brahmaji, how Narada became Narada boy became the saint Narada so it is described that he lived on after becoming detached after the death of his mother he went northwards and sat in meditation, he had a darshan of Vishnu and then of the lord and then the lord disappeared and he continued his penances till eventually he left his body and then in the next manifestation he became Narada so the idea is that he had attained an exalted level of purity and then he manifested as the great soul Narada in a subsequent life so all of us have histories that go far far beyond what our knowledge can, our knowledge systems can know nowadays with immigration being a big concern the immigration, the governments want to know what is the past history of a person has this person got any criminal record, has this person been involved in any kind of violence before so they people's history is preserved quite carefully and people who want to cover their tracks they try to cover their history but even if somebody has a spotless history in this lifetime that doesn't mean that they are spotless our history exists far beyond this life and when it is said that good and evil are co-eternal with creation now when it is said that Brahma had good sons as well as bad sons like this that doesn't mean that God wants to create evil rather we are all given free will and very necessity of free will is because only with free will is love possible if a boy proposes to a girl and the girl says no and the boy takes a gun at her head and says if you don't love me I will shoot you then even the girl says yes that's not love so love requires free will and free will has no meaning without the arena for the exercise of free will that without there being a possibility to exercise the free will the way one wants free will itself doesn't have much meaning so that exercise of free will requires a world where people can choose to act virtuously and people can choose to act viciously so just as there are higher beings the gods who can facilitate us if we want to live virtuously and there are lower beings also who can facilitate us if we want to live viciously in the Mahabharata it is described that Duryodhana was empowered by the daityas that daityas wanted to daityas are demoniac beings and they wanted to take over the earth for taking over the earth they performed austerities and got one of them to be born in the human ruling dynasty this is the example of what today's language may be called as womb warfare that means enemies can infiltrate in different ways into another kingdom so the demoniac beings infiltrate into earth even through womb so of course the gods also infiltrated the Pandavas were godly beings the Kauravas were ungodly beings previously so when we say good and evil is there on the earth from the beginning what it essentially means is that souls with good and bad facilities good and bad mentalities need to be facilitated and for facilitating them there has to be a certain amount of empowerment for whatever they want to do generally we use the word empowerment in a positive sense but there can be empowerment in all the three modes sattvic empowerment, rajasic empowerment, tamasic empowerment so somebody who comes some researcher who comes with making up how to make a nuclear weapon it requires great intelligence to make that but its intelligence used for a greatly destructive purpose so there can be empowerment in tamas, tamoguna in the mode of ignorance which is very destructive and there can be empowerment in sattvaguna which is constructive and there can be empowerment in transcendence which is usually which is ultimately liberating so whenever anybody is able to do anything extraordinary the bhagavad gita 10 chapter describes that it is the vibhuti of Krishna vibhuti opulence of Krishna now one way to understand vibhuti is that the one above the many manifests as one among the many the one above the many is the supreme lord but he manifests as one among the many that means some extraordinary power in this world which somebody has that person appears to be like another human being but there is something higher which is manifesting through them when Hanuman first saw Ravana in his royal court Hanuman's first thought was this person is so powerful, this person is so so skilled at warfare if only he had been virtuous he would have been a great protector of dharma, he would have been a protector even of the gods so he saw the potential for good even in a person who was evil.

The point I am making here is that just like Ravana was empowered by the blessings of the gods but that empowerment he used for terrible purposes so empowerment itself can be of different kinds and depending on people's mentality they may use it differently so good and evil exist co-exist from the beginning of creation as we described over here because living beings with good and evil mentalities also exist from the beginning of creation having got their mentalities from their past history and the world is a reflection of the mentality of people broadly speaking depending on the kind of mentality people have, that's how the culture, the world gets shaped broadly speaking so I just came from Australia yesterday so in Melbourne I was asked a question that that why is it so easy to do bad things and why is it so difficult to do good things why are the bad options so many and the good options so few so I explained that that's how always it is in any multiple choice exam in a multiple choice exam the wrong options will probably say out of 5 choices 4 will be wrong and 1 will be right now all the options have come from the teacher but that doesn't make the teacher responsible for the failure of the student in the Vishnu Sahasranam Kamada, Kamya Kamaha, Kamada Kamya, it is described where various names of Vishnu are given so it says Kamada and Kamaha, that he is the fulfiller of desire and he is also the destroyer of desire and he is also the supreme desirable being this is a beautiful way of analysing that he is the fulfiller of desire in the sense that it is the teacher only who gives all the options so all the options come from the teacher so all choices all the worldly objects all the various options that exist in the world they come from Krishna but everything although everything attractive comes from Krishna everything attractive doesn't take us to Krishna so just like all the options come from the teacher but all the options don't take one to the teacher, you could say they take one but not in a happy sense the teacher will punish the wrong option is chosen so the wrong options are there in this world because we ourselves have desires to act in undesirable ways in evil ways and the world facilitates that but the world also in the world tradition there are also scriptures given there is God given guidance from within and without by which we can make the right choice so the Bhagavatam reveals through as Dhruv Maharaj's pastime which will be told soon how Dhruva he ultimately made the choice of Vishnu as his supreme desirable choice even when he had the facilities of flourishing kingdom which is what he had wanted but he chose chose Vishnu so that's what is described in this particular section that good and evil coexist from the beginning of creation and it is up to us and they exist because that facilitates our particular desires for good or evil so any questions or comments about this is it as I said I will speak three points and after each point we can have some comments or questions all I got to say is that that was a fantastic analysis does anyone have a comment or a question on this part pretty crystal clear to me yes I love the example of on a multiple choice exam most of the answers are wrong and the teacher created those answers but the teacher is not responsible for the wrongness of those answers that's excellent thank you yeah this is a strange question but so someone is chosen to become a devotee he can still choose wrong correct yeah but now if somebody is chosen to be a devotee can they still choose to be wrong when we say chosen to be a devotee that simply means that they are chosen to have the opportunity to become a devotee say it's not that anybody can be forced to become a devotee there are broadly we could say two ways of course specific and multiple but there are probably two ways we can say that somebody comes to bhakti one is they have practised some bhakti in a previous life and the other is that they haven't practised any bhakti so in his in his talks about this that shraddha, faith can be of two types swabhaviki and balenudpadita swabhaviki is natural so that means he refers to somebody who has practised some kind of spirituality in their previous lives and therefore they are naturally attracted towards transcendence krishna talks about this in 6.43 and 44 when he says purvabhyasena tenaiva riyate yavasopisaha so by previous practise almost like helplessly they feel attracted so even if they are having a normal happy life they want something more and they start go exploring and then they find something so that they are almost pulled towards transcendence that is in one sense we could say that they are chosen in the sense that there is a force beyond themselves that grips them and pulls them towards transcendence the second sense of chosen could be that somehow devotees come in the life of such a person even if they don't have much spiritual interest and simply by the association of devotees and the powerful influence thereby a person gets an opportunity to practise bhakti and prabhupada quotes the famous verse from chaitanya chagrita amrit brahmanda brahmite konna bhagyavan ajiv guru krishna prasade pae bhakti lata bheej that all of us are wandering in this vast universe and those who are fortunate get the seed of devotion, seed of the creeper of devotion and there he says in a lecture that actually it is the devotee's business to make people bhagyavan it is the devotee's business to make the unfortunate fortunate that means even if people have no spiritual practise from the past no spiritual inclination also still simply by the association of a devotee they might get so attracted to a devotee that they start developing spiritual inclination so this is we could say by the force of association some attraction is kindled in people so in general those who have practised spiritual life in the past so both these categories we could say they are chosen but in a different sense one is there is a irresistible attraction which even they themselves can't explain and second is some forceful association transforms them so but even then Krishna says that even if somebody has pure practise still in this life also they have to practise rigorously so in 6.45 he says prayatnāgita-mānastu yogī-saṁśuddha-kilviṣaḥ aneka-janma-saṁsiddhas tolyāti-parāṅgatiṁ then he says the yogi practises determinately and becomes purified and in this way the multi-life spiritual evolution attains its culmination in liberation so there has to be rigorous practise even if one has practise from a previous life or no practise from a previous life so that rigorous practise means we have to choose Krishna, choose transcendence in this life and if you don't choose Krishna then we will be we will gravitate towards maya because that is the force of the world so the free will is never taken away so we could say that for many people especially if they live in a very materialistic society the only options for them might be rajasic and tamasic with sattva not being much of an option at all or it will be a very small option and bhakti for people who are born in a very godless environment, bhakti is not an option at all because they don't come to know about Krishna but for some people when we say that bhakti is an option and they take that option but it is not that we can it is an option that we have to keep taking constantly like a choice we have to keep making on a daily basis we could say when in a moment to moment basis we have to choose Krishna and not maya so we may choose Krishna as a as a life option and then we dedicate our life to Krishna but even after choosing Krishna as something we dedicate our life to on a moment to moment basis, hour to hour basis day to day basis we might still choose something other than Krishna and to that extent we will get we may get deviated so the free will is never taken away does that address the question? yes thank you so let me move on to the past second point, the first point I spoke was that good and evil are both co-eternal with creation I was going to make, second point is that we are products of our past but we are not prisoners of our past most of us know a little bit about ourselves but there is much about ourselves that we don't know and if we look from a material perspective and look at the vastness of nature we human beings are the most complicated beings that are known to humanity with its current ways of knowing our brains are the most complex and beyond that are our minds science can't even empirical science can't even perceive what the mind is what to speak of beyond the mind if something is there or not so we ourselves are very complicated beings consciousness is still a extremely illusive concept for people to understand, for even the best brains to understand the reason I am saying all this is that that within when we say we are very complicated beings means within us there are multiple forces that are present and these different forces come for they become forceful at different times and that is why it is often difficult for us to behave consistently in the same manner and now to understand this let's take an example say that there is a some kind of house or a cellar and say there are some criminals or some fugitives, some hostages who are there inside, so there is a criminal who has taken some people as hostage and they are all in a house which is completely closed now there is only some kind of speaking system through which the police outside can talk with the people inside now sometimes the criminals they are speaking from inside and sometimes for sometime the hostages they can push aside the criminals when they speak, now from the outside perspective we have only, there is only the voice coming out from inside and sometimes that voice may seem very conciliatory very eager for reconciliation yes please rescue us from here, we want to come out please help us and the other times the voice coming from inside may be unless you let us go give us a free passage, we want to go our way we will destroy, we will destroy what is inside, we will destroy what is outside so now the police unless they understand this dynamic that there are both hostages and criminals and say abductors inside they may just get completely confused why why are these different voices speaking in such different tones with different intentions so similarly we could say that we are like that house and inside us there are different voices there is broadly speaking our higher side and our lower side and we may with our higher side make a commitment to practise spiritual life make a commitment to be virtuous but sometimes even without our conscious awareness our lower side may start speaking or lower side may start acting and then sometimes people get shocked how could he have done like this, how could she have spoken like that how can a devotee do like that but the thing is that even when we become devotees our devotion is only one voice within us and the other voices don't go away the other voices still remain so that means that sometimes the voice of lust, sometimes the voice of greed sometimes the voice of anger they might come forth and when they come forth at that time at that time we might behave completely out of characteristic with our normal behaviour what we think of is our normal behaviour and thus we may end up acting in very contrary ways, sometimes our lust or our anger or our greed can make us unrecognisable not just to people around us but even to ourselves that's why we sometimes ask, how could I do that what made me do that, in fact that was Arjuna's question in 3.36 in the Bhagavad Gita when he said what impels one into wrong actions and almost as if by force and against one's own desire so Krishna described that it is karma now when he uses the word karma or lust he uses it not just in a specific sense of sexual attraction, he uses it in a generic sense of any kind of self-destructive desire, the desire which makes us act against our own better intentions and against our better intelligence, so we have this multiplicity of we could say voices inside us and sometimes we might end up behaving in terribly wrong ways so we have to in that sense, the title of this talk was that we have to understand we have to confront how bad we can be so that we can become how good we can be, that means that we if we just let the voices within us get a free rein, we might end up doing things which we would never have thought that we would do so all of us are capable of capable of grievous evils also if you look at the history of the 20th century on the historical perspective it was the bloodiest century known in human history, especially recent history so more people were killed in that last century than were killed in wars throughout the previous 19th centuries one reason of course was technology which enabled weapons of mass destruction but that was just one factor another was more than technology it was ideology coupled with technology whether it was a Nazi ideology which killed about anything between 12 million people or more or whether it was the communist ideology which led to over 100 million corpses in Russia, China and other places the point is that people did unspeakable evil it is not just murder itself is bad but cold blooded murder is systematically planned and people are subjected to heartless kinds of I can pain so where it is pain is systematically planned and brutally executed that how did people come to do something like that you could say that people are so influenceable by ideology but it is not just one person's charismatic influence of course a devilishly charismatic influence that did that but basically there were many people who just went along with it ok this is what is happening in society they either consented passively or they they consented actively you could say they conspired actively but well if we hear say how the nazi guards did horrendous things to the jews during the holocaust we may think it is inhuman how can anyone do that but actually the forces of illusion attack incrementally they don't just take over suddenly it is like sometimes by instalments we have to pay for something we might be paying a million dollars but you have to pay say a thousand dollars a few thousand dollars a month and we can pay that a million dollars doesn't seem to be much we can pay like that but similarly by instalment the forces of illusion take over our consciousness and then at the end of that instalment you know we might never intended to pay one million dollars for something but we end up paying a million dollars so like that as maya incrementally takes over our consciousness eventually we may end up doing things which we thought we would never do so there are dark forces inside us and if we listen to them if we give in to them incrementally we start doing darker and darker things till we end up doing things which we would never have thought we would have done so we have to in that sense take ourselves seriously take ourselves seriously means that we are capable of doing serious harm if say suppose somebody has a automatic gun now a days there is a lot of concern that people have guns and some terrible shootings can happen because of those people because people are trigger happy people are crazy even in Australia the Christchurch shooting that happened in the mosque created created outrage and shock so basically if somebody owns a gun and not only they own a gun but they are constantly carrying the gun with them then they have to be serious that that if some impulse comes over them they get angry with someone and they pick up the gun and shoot they might normally not even want to slap anyone they might not even physically raise their hand against someone normally but with the gun available to them they might actually give in to their impulses they might shoot someone and that would be horrendous not just for everyone else but even for themselves so we could say that we are all like that person carrying a gun and not only a gun but it's a loaded gun so if our impulses come upon us then and we let them overcome us then we can do terrible things of course it's not that suddenly one day the person is good and the next day the person becomes bad it's external perspective the person might be acting good and one day suddenly they act in a terrible way but internally they have been accommodating the forces of illusion the dark desires within them more and more in the second world war the British Furnace Chamberlain he accommodated Hitler for a long time and that's why there is a Chamberlain school of thought that he accommodated evil more and more thinking that is how it will contain but the more we accommodate it then that evil takes us over dominates us and destroys us so if we take ourselves seriously in the sense that there are seriously dark forces within us and they can make us act in grievously wrong ways then we become earnest about the task of controlling of countering the dark forces within us and not just countering the dark forces within us but also channelling the good forces within us so we are products of our past means that the dark forces within us are very much present and we are not prisoners of the past means that the dark forces don't necessarily have to take control of us we can break free from the dark forces but to think that there is no dark forces within me to think that those who think that they are not prone to vice are actually the most prone to vice those who think that they are not vulnerable to temptation are the people who are most vulnerable to temptation and it's not just temptation it can be perversity, it can be we may not harm ourselves but we can harm others also so that was the second point I was trying to make the first point was that good and evil are co-eternal with creation and we if we are not guarded can end up doing far greater evil than what we would even contemplate or to speak of actually do because evil can take us over incrementally and make us act in act in act heinously any comments or questions about this point is that associated with anger sorry controlling anger cursed lust leads to anger ok but controlling the dark forces wouldn't that be anger ok so would controlling lust lead to anger and anger is also difficult to control yeah that's true it also depends on how we try to control it's like say there is a very strong water flowing in a particular direction and then we put a wall over there we put a dam over there the dam may check the flow of the water but if the water is not given some other channel to flow the water keeps hitting against the dam then sooner or later the dam will break and then all that accumulated water will flow up and it can be far more destructive than the normal flow of water that's why at one level a dam can be a very big blessing because water can be channelled and utilised in various directions but if the dam breaks then it can cause far greater destruction than the normal water flow would have caused because before the dam because the dam accumulates far more water than what would otherwise have been there in the river in that place so similarly for us we definitely need to create a dam so that the water of our consciousness does not flow in evil directions but then simultaneously we need to create a channel for the water to flow in another direction and that's why just restraint alone is not enough we need redirection of our desires and the Bhagavatam says that that the great sages sometimes they cross over the vast ocean of lust but then they fall into the puddle of anger and they sink over there that's why they might be able to control lust but this is primarily being talked about people who are not practising bhakti transcendentalists who by sheer will power overcome lust but because they have not channelled their energy elsewhere eventually some provocation comes they may not get lusty but they get angry and then they lose their tapobal, the power of their austerity so we could say that the river of our consciousness has to be channelled in a constructive direction so even as devotees if we have strongly invested ourselves in some plan some service and if that becomes thwarted then we will also feel angry but instead of simply vegetating over that frustration and whatever the cause, if you can channel elsewhere, ok this service didn't work out instead of trying to instead of feeling resentful or revengeful towards those who blocked this service if we channel the water of our consciousness in some other direction then that resentment won't come up Prabhupada was trying tirelessly to share Krishna Bhakti in India but somehow he didn't have much success and even his God brothers although they had influence they were caught up in just maintaining their mathas, not really they didn't have the spirit of outreach and when Prabhupada came to America even in America he just wanted some help from his Indian God brothers, just they go to the government and sanction some transfer of foreign exchange Prabhupada himself got a donor but his God brothers were not ready to do that also so when that didn't work out, Prabhupada did not become resentful of his God brothers Prabhupada just recognised that he would have to start the Krishna Consciousness movement on his own with no assistance from India whatsoever and then he focused his efforts entirely on his potential followers in America and that's how the Krishna Consciousness movement started so for Prabhupada also like a particular channel might be a particular pathway might be blocked completely, sometimes that blockage may be by our own voluntary restraint sometimes it might be by an external limitation that is put but whichever way the blockage comes, we cannot we cannot let the water of our consciousness keep hitting that blockage repeatedly because eventually that blockage will break, we need to simultaneously work to redirect the water of our consciousness so that once the water that is accumulated in the dam is channelled elsewhere then its force on the dam decreases Does that address the question? Yes Is there a point at which or maybe it's gradual that these negative Brahmanic qualities disappear? Okay, yeah that's actually my third point then I'll move on to that Bhakti can raise us above our past so what does this mean practically that there are in the qualities of our Brahmana described in the 18th chapter of the Bhagavad Gita from 42 to 44, 45 Krishna talks about the qualities of the different people in the Varanas, four Varanas so he says so he says Shama and Dama Shama is translated as peace of mind Dama is translated as sense control so these are two interesting things that first is that that we don't let our mind get agitated by temptation itself so it's said that the best way to deal with temptation is to not deal with temptation that means just don't put any energy on it so we keep the mind peaceful by not dwelling on temptation itself, but if somehow temptation comes in then Dama Dama is sense control, okay the mind has got agitated but at least I will not act in the physical level so the mind will get agitated when there is some impure desire inside it but if there is no impure desire inside it then the mind will not get agitated there are two people who go by a bar and somebody, one of them is a regular alcoholic, the other is never drunk and then the alcoholic might feel tempted the non-alcoholic the teetotaller who is never drunk may not feel tempted at all so similarly for us if we have never indulged in a particular desire then there is no no impression within the mind so you could say for that particular thing there is no evil voice inside us so this is one way there can be purity, there is no impurity so there is purity naturally, but the other way is also that if we consistently keep saying no to something lower then gradually that lower voice starts getting receding so much into the background that it almost disappears that's why I say many of us might have been eating meat before but now if somebody tempts us with meat most of us would not even consider taking it we would, what Yamanacharya famously says that that when I think of sensual pleasure my lips curl in distaste and I spit at the thought now we might not be able to do it for the temptations coming from lust, but at least with respect to meat many of us might be able to just turn away from it quite effortlessly so this means that at least with respect to that temptation of meat we have got to a point of purification or a point of purity where there is no temptation at all so that means we could say that when the desire is there but the determination is there I am not going to indulge that is where the struggle comes, so you could say that inside us there is the desire for indulgence and there is a determination for transcendence, the desire for indulgence comes from our past impressions that are there and the determination for transcendence comes from our spiritual knowledge, from our spiritual association, from our spiritual commitment and in the initial stages the desire for indulgence can be stronger than the determination for transcendence and that is why we succumb or we relapse but with the practise of bhakti the determination for transcendence becomes so strong that we keep repeatedly saying no to the desire for indulgence and eventually the desire for indulgence declines and disappears so some things may not tempt us at all and even when we expose ourselves to those things we feel no desire for that at all, so that is where we could say that we have attained purity but in general a devotee doesn't presume that I have become pure and a devotee doesn't deliberately expose oneself to temptation to check whether I have become pure or not so it was even when Haridas Thakur was tempted, Haridas Thakur did not go to the prostitute, the prostitute came and Haridas Thakur continued his chanting so a devotee does not deliberately provoke the forces of illusion to check whether they are dead or not, it's like we are passing by a forest path and we see a tiger lying motionless on the ground the tiger might be asleep or the tiger might be dead it's best that we just walk along and let the tiger do what it is doing, but suppose somebody just for the sake of checking, they go and pinch the tiger now the tiger may be dead and nothing may happen but the tiger may be awake and then we will be dead so it's best not to pinch a sleeping tiger, so it's best not to put ourselves in provoking situation just to check whether we have gone beyond provocation but sometimes life puts us in provoking situations and we find that we are not provoked that could be a good indication that we have attained a purity beyond return it's like say a satellite wants to take off from the earth and as long as the satellite is within the gravity pull of the earth, the satellite will be pulled, but eventually satellite can go beyond the earth's gravity pull and then the satellite does not need that conscious acceleration to move on, the fuel expenditure is not so much required because there is no gravity pulling it down so that's how when we come from Vaidhi Bhakti to Raga Anuga Bhakti from conscientious devotion to spontaneous devotion so in conscientious devotion the desire for indulgence has to be conscientiously rejected and the determination for transcendence has to be consciously cultivated but once we get to the point once we get out of the gravity pull of a sense object then that determination is no longer required to resist because the gravity pull is no longer there so yes by the gradual practise of Bhakti we will attain the dark forces within us will decline and disappear so that is our ultimate this was the last point I was going to make that is our supreme hope and if you keep practising Bhakti by the steady practise of Bhakti our attraction to Krishna will increase and as our attraction to Krishna increases then our attachment to worldly things starts decreasing and that's why in Bhakti the focus has to be more on connecting with Krishna than on disconnecting with illusion in the Bhagavad Gita's seventh chapter there is a dramatic shift in tone whereas till the first six chapters Krishna is talking about virakti, being detached, being equipoised, not getting carried away by happiness and distress, learning to detach oneself from the sense objects the seventh chapter the very first verse and the first words of the first verse begin with a very different theme mayy asakta manah partha Krishna says mayy asakta manah that make your mind attached to me so what that means is Krishna is now talking not so much about detaching ourselves from temptation and illusion but attaching ourselves to Krishna so Bhakti is centred more on taking up spiritual desires than on giving up material desires sometimes the struggle to give up something can be quite tiring because whenever we give up something there is a sense of deprivation that comes because of that oh I am losing this but when we take up a sense of connection comes up so even if we have some desire that we are not able to give up we don't become disheartened by that we focus on taking up service for Krishna, connecting with Krishna Prabhupada's greatest qualification was not that he was the most scholarly among his god brothers there were others who had a whole lifetime to study, Prabhupada had his household responsibilities, he did study he was very learned no doubt and its amazing how despite having a family and a business Prabhupada was able to study so much scripture and quote so much scripture but he did not have that luxury of a life devoted to scripture study alone so there were others who might be more might have been more scholarly than him but Prabhupada's greatest qualification was that he had the strongest desire to share the Krishna Bhakti across the world and it was not his scholarship but it was his spiritual desire that took him across the world for preaching missions so similarly we focus not so much on giving up the connection with illusion as taking up a connection with Krishna so we conclude with this point that even if we can't resist our urges we can persist between our urges that means if we consider a graph of say time versus temptation that we may not feel constantly tempted by lust or anger or greed or envy or whatever but sometimes that graph shoots up the desire suddenly surges up and when it surges at that time it may be almost impossible to resist actually even when it surges it is not going to grow infinitely it's like say in Hawaii there is a beach and people go surfing now when they are surfing actually when a wave rises if one can surf with the wave, one goes up with the wave and then one comes down with the wave then the wave doesn't hit the person because the person is going up and coming down with the wave so our desires our urges we could say lower urges they are also like waves when it's rising sometimes we feel this is so strong how long can I resist it even if I resist it now eventually it's going to be there, it's going to grow stronger and it's going to overpower me but the urges don't grow like an infinitely growing line infinitely rising line the urges grow like waves and this wave has its crust and then it has its trough so similarly our urges when they are growing they may seem to be irresistible but they are not going to grow infinitely, they will hit a peak and then they will go down so if we resist till they hit their peak then eventually they will go down but still if suppose when the urges rise very strongly and we are not able to resist them, at that time we might feel disheartened, oh I succumbed over there, but the important thing is that what do we do in between the urges even if we can't resist the urges, we can persist between the urges, that means during that urge this happened but immediately after that I take up my practise of bhakti wholeheartedly and if we have some committed services, if we are committed to our sadhana if we have taken up some spiritual desires then that spiritual desire will fill up the space between the urges and because through that spiritual desire we are connecting with Krishna, we are getting purified and next time when the urge hits us, we will be better equipped to resist it and even if we don't succeed next time but instead of simply beating ourselves up for having succumbed to the urge if we focus not so much on giving up that worldly desire but taking up a spiritual desire and that taking up spiritual desire we can do in between the urges and through that connection we become purified and eventually by that purification we will become strong enough to resist the urge which too will become weaker over time if we are connecting ourselves with Krishna and thus we can overcome our lower side by persisting in bhakti even if we are not succeeding in resisting our urges. So thus I will summarise, I spoke on we have to confront how bad we can be so that we can become as good as we can be I spoke three points, first was that evil, that good and evil are co-eternal with creation talked about how Brahma when he creates, there are saintly sons and there are also vicious qualities that arise as I described in fourth canto so good and evil, the world is arena for us to exercise our free will and by our free will because we have lower desires so there has to be facilitation for those lower desires also, so good and evil paths are there in this world to facilitate souls who have good and evil propensities from their previous lives so it's like a teacher giving a multiple choice exam, all the options come from the teacher but it's not the teacher wants us to choose all the options so everything attractive comes from Krishna but everything attractive doesn't take us to Krishna Krishna tells us to which attractive thing we should become attracted so that we can come to him, that is where scriptural guidance comes up so the second point I talked about was that there is a dark side within us if we don't restrain it, it can make us do terrible things, we are products of our past, although we are not its prisoners temptation and evil they take our consciousness on an incremental instalment basis that's why it's not so noticeable that huge areas deposit of our consciousness are going into illusion till suddenly some terrible action happens and then people ask how did I do that so we are very complicated beings in the sense that we are like a closed house with multiple voices inside us hostages as well as abductors are there the outside police cannot make out who is speaking at a particular time and so contradictory voices might come in so we are like that house and within us there is virtue and there is vice also and if we are not guarded then vice may take us over and with technology now giving us access to far greater power than what we had in the recent past we see the last century there were more deaths than in all the previous centuries combined together that's because people had a dark side and then dark ideologies combined with technology facilitated people dark side to come out in horrendous ways so for us we need to recognise that we are like a loaded automatic gun if we don't take ourselves seriously then we can we can do seriously terrible things but if we take ourselves seriously then we can bring out the good within us and for that I talked about the third point how bhakti can help us rise above our past that there is there is regulation and there is purification regulation means the mind gets agitated but still at a sensory level we maintain control and purification means the mind itself doesn't get agitated like somebody who has never drunk alcohol doesn't feel agitated near a bar or somebody who has given up alcohol for such a long time that again when going by a bar they don't feel agitated so for us if we keep practising bhakti steadily then we will become purified that means the temptations will no longer tempt us just like a satellite goes out of the gravity pull of the earth then it doesn't have to exercise that same so much fuel doesn't have to expand it it will just keep moving similarly when we become pure enough that there are no worldly impressions left then we can move from conscientious devotion to spontaneous devotion so we may not at all feel tempted by meat although we might have eaten it before that indicates that bhakti does purify us and we can attain a point of purity beyond return but while that may happen with meat that may not happen with other temptations and best that we don't put ourselves in provocative situations to check whether we get provoked or not that's like pinching a sleeping tiger it's best to just walk by the tiger without checking whether it is dead or sleeping similarly we try to avoid provoking situations as much as possible those who think that they are not vulnerable to vice are probably the most vulnerable to vice but so if we focus on bhakti centres on taking up spiritual desires not on giving up worldly desires Ravaka's greatest qualification was not just his renunciation or scholarship but it was his burning desire to share Krishna bhakti with the world and for us even if we can't resist our urges we can persist between our urges when our urges start rising within us we may feel that this is so strong it will keep getting stronger how can I resist it so you may think that it is like an infinitely rising line but it is actually like a rising wave which will fall it will be an eternally recurring wave but it is not a constantly rising wave so if we can surf the wave of our urge then it will decrease and we may not have to succumb to it also but even if we somehow succumb to it instead of centering our devotion simply on resisting our urges we can centre our devotion on persisting between our urges okay that thing happened but now I want to practise bhakti whole heartedly and if during the period between the urges if we are taking up a serious commitment to Krishna then that connection will purify us gradually increasingly till we become better equipped to not only resist the urges but eventually even transcend the urges thank you very much Hare Krishna any questions or comments Mahesh Prabhu you wanted to say something? yes yes Hare Krishna Prabhuji thank you very much well I would like to thank you very much for your class I think it is very wonderful what you said you raised very interesting points it just reminds me of an experience I just had recently with a guest that is coming to our Sunday programmes and meditations and she was causing a disturbance here with another guest so I invited her to come to you know one of our private meditations with myself and my wife and then I said yeah I need to talk with you please come so we can discuss the issue separately from other people so she came and she said she started asking me questions how do you get rid of all these problems that I have how do you control the mind so I brought my japa beads and explained to her how you chant japa and how you chant the holy names and she said well how long do you have to do this and I said well I do it every day about an hour and a half or so that is what it takes and then she said you have to do that every day and I said yes I do that every day every morning I get up I get my beads I chant my rounds I chant Hare Krishna and she said then you are not free you are not liberated because you have to do this every day basically she was I guess trying to challenge my ego I don't know what she was trying to do but she said you are not free you have to do this in order to be free from your tendencies from your lower self basically and then I said yes but that is where the fun is I actually enjoy doing this I like doing it it is kind of really a nice thing to do and besides that I am not really interested in liberation anyway from my lower self I don't care if my lower self is there or not it doesn't matter to me I just like chanting Hare Krishna I like chanting in the morning because for me this is medicine this is the thing that I am supposed to do and that is the way I think about the holy names it is my medicine sometimes you know I get up in the morning and I don't really want to chant but I know it is my medicine if I don't take this medicine I am going to get sick later I don't know if my ego will ever be destroyed or if I will not have an ego I don't know but I don't really care because I really like chanting Hare Krishna and also I know it is my medicine if I don't take it I am going to get sick so anyway that is my take on this yeah our meditation protects us from our lower side but then over a period of time our chanting also in itself becomes joyful so once it becomes joyful then we do it not because we have to but because we love to do it so both ways are there sometimes when we don't love to do it we motivate ourselves by knowing that I have to do it this is my medicine but there are times when we love to do it we do it because it gives us so much joy thank you for sharing that I have a question maybe one of the kind of questions that we are not capable of understanding yet but you spoke a lot about the dark side our dark side the question just crosses my mind is why do we even have this awful dark side I mean everything comes from Krishna in so many ways Krishna says it is all coming from Krishna you talked about how Krishna for there to be love that there has to be free will and there has to be an alternative or a place to go to exercise that free will why can't we be separate from Krishna for those that want to be separate from Krishna without such a horrible dark side where did that come from why did Krishna let he create it did we create it it bewilders me this awful dark side you are saying potential that we all have in this world yeah so where does that dark side come from even if somebody wants to enjoy separate from Krishna why can't we just enjoy it without really succumbing to dark desires see the nature of the nature of the soul is that the soul wants pleasure and we just don't want pleasure we want unending pleasure we want increasing pleasure and Krishna has unending attraction to him increases then we can get increasing joy in that but a soul who is seeking pleasure away from Krishna because we are driven by the desire for unending increasing pleasure so when something promises us pleasure but doesn't deliver as much pleasure as we thought we would get then we seek more and more and more eat some food now eating is necessary for nutrition eating is necessary for bodily maintenance and eating is also an activity of pleasure we like to eat good food but so in eating there is there is both nutrition and satisfaction combined but if somebody separates the two and seeks only the pleasure then they will go down a track where they will eat more and more unhealthy food till the food that they eat starts becoming like poison poison they are taking which is going to kill them sooner or later so we all want pleasure and whatever if our life doesn't have some purpose higher than simply seeking pleasure then in the pursuit of pleasure we start crossing all boundaries whether it be of like even if somebody doesn't believe in ethics with respect to eating but still even boundaries of common sense and intelligence I was in Australia and I met a doctor this doctor told that he was called to an emergency ward once and what happened there was this person who had eaten so many chicken that his whole alimentary canal had become filled with chicken like dozens and dozens of chicken he had eaten and he said actually I had to anaesthetize that person and open his mouth and like put a prong inside put my finger or put some device inside his throat and literally pick out chicken from there which he had eaten I said that's ridiculous how can somebody eat like that but just sometimes if the desire for pleasure can grip us so much that in seeking more and more pleasure we might just keep doing more and more darker things so like nowadays with respect to internet somebody starts surfing and you can surf for pleasure reading something good and getting some pleasure also over there but from there we can start surfing more and more inappropriate things so when that urge comes up people start surfing with more frequency with greater duration and with increasing perversity so that surfing can degrade more and more because the pleasure if the search for pleasure becomes divorced from some higher purpose then that search for pleasure can easily degrade us so our dark side it's not that Krishna has given it to us it is just that our search for pleasure if it is not connected with some higher purpose then that search for pleasure can degrade us and then what happens is that if the search for pleasure is frustrated then so not only the search for pleasure can degrade us but obstruction in the search for pleasure can also degrade us like say lust leads to anger so anger, resentment is also a form of anger and so for example the Germans after the first world war they believed that not only believed it was true that the treaty of Versailles after the first world war was very humiliating and they were resentful about what had happened and how their economy had tanked and they were in great distress and somehow Hitler came along and created a story that the Jews are responsible for your distress and then they just directed all their wrath towards the Jews so when when the search for pleasure becomes our sole driving motive in life without any higher purpose then the search for pleasure itself can degrade us or the obstacle in that search for pleasure can also rationalise us in doing whatever it takes to remove that obstacle so in that case also we might do dark things so that darkness is we could say not a result of anything Krishna has done but it is a result of the divorce of our search for pleasure from a higher purpose in life it's the people who devote themselves to some higher purpose even not necessarily devotional self but even some humanitarian cause some literature some art their search for pleasure may not bring out the dark side within them they might just write more, draw more paint more or whatever but if pleasure becomes the sole driving purpose in bhakti it's not pleasure that is our driving purpose, it's service that is our driving purpose and pleasure is a by-product of that service but if pleasure becomes the driving purpose then it can bring out the dark side within us both ways, in the very search for pleasure or within the because of the obstacle in the search for pleasure and that's how we might that darkness will manifest ok thank you very much thank you can we stop here please Chaitanya Chaitanya Leela in the chat Chaitanya Leela Prabhu had a question, maybe this can be our last question do you see it in the chat or Chaitanya Leela do you want to go ahead and speak this let me see this sure I you see the question ok just a comment, is there a question well it is just a comment, I really appreciate the fact that you were stressing the positive I mean we can get so overwhelmed with struggling trying to practise bhakti and I like how you're stressing the positive just focus on bhakti and almost more the negative do your best to the bhakti that's kind of what I yes thank you actually I write on the Bhagavad Gita everyday at my website GitaDeity.com so one thing I say that one article I wrote over there we may fall down but we don't have to fall away so fall down is when our urges overcome us but fall away is when we stop ourselves we may fall down but we don't have to for some reason your voice has really gone down I don't know why I'll go upstairs and check is it better now yes now it came back so all that I said was that we may fall down but we don't have to fall away that I wrote an article on my website on GitaDeity.com on this theme that sometimes our desires may overcome us and we may fall down but fall away means we become so disheartened that we give up the practise of bhakti itself so we fall down but we don't have to fall away but can't sometimes our fall down be offences that cause us to fall down and then because of those offences we are sort of driven away it's almost like we don't have a we don't have a choice it's kind of like the reaction of the offence makes us go away it's almost like we don't have a choice because we've done something so offensive so terrible yeah, sometimes our offences can cause us to fall down and then go away yeah but it's very difficult to know at that time what offence have I committed and how is it happening so offences do take our taste away, take our taste for Krishna Bhakti away and then it becomes easy it becomes very difficult to resist the taste of illusion but then it's best if we can recognise that I have committed an offence to seek forgiveness and to not presume that if our desires are increasing they are just because of offences because offences are very it's a at one level it's a very strongly stressed point in our culture at another level what exactly comprises an offence can be very difficult to because during the normal functioning in the world there will be some interactions which will be unpleasant and for getting some service done sometimes we have to displease some devotees now that might be considered an offence but that does not make a very serious or a grievous offence a serious offence is where something is done with the intention of holding down some devotee because we don't like their success so yes offences can make us lose our taste in Krishna Bhakti they can make us succumb to illusion but still if we seek forgiveness and we try to come back to Krishna that will help us to come back to Krishna so thank you very much Krishna Prabhupada Ki Thank you very much Thank you so much Ok, Jai Krishna Prabhupada.