Don’t reduce scripture to your conceptions of what scripture should be teaching… Gita 07.21

Hare Krishna don't reduce scripture to your conception of what scripture should be teaching expand your conception to understand what scripture is actually teaching many people those who are generically spiritual or consider themselves to be pious generically they often say that scripture teaches us to be good to do good and scripture is a book of moral of useful moral values while morality is taught in scripture but scripture also teaches spirituality and profound and often specific spirituality so if we want to study to understand scripture properly we can't impose our own conception on scripture sometimes when we come with our particular conceptions then we focus only on those conceptions and we don't let anything else grow further in our lives we don't let ourselves grow we don't let others grow and in that way we end up trapped we end up terribly trapped because our conception doesn't expand and we reduce scripture to our ideas what we need to do is that yes I may have some intelligence and I may have some understanding of what the good life is but scripture is something much bigger if I want to understand what scripture is teaching then I need to move forward toward understanding what scripture actually offers that means I need to look at what is scripture teaching so for example in the Bhagavad Gita some people think of the broad dharmic traditions as polytheistic and especially people who have grown up in a monotheistic tradition they consider polytheism to be a naive primitive kind of religious system but what the Bhagavad Gita offers is much more profound what it offers is that polymorphic monotheism that there is one divinity and there are multiple manifestations as well as multiple levels of manifestations so for example in 721 in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna when he talks about the various other gods it is not that like in polytheism there are many gods and they are competing with each other but there is one supreme and there are other gods who are surrogates, who are assistants who are representatives and who are empowered by that one supreme god so this is as Krishna says so that with that faith if we work then we all can grow individually and collectively and that is what we should be seeking in our lives and we can understand the immense compassion of the lord and appreciating that compassion that if those who can't worship him directly they can connect with him through other gods who are his representatives so this is a profound system of theology which does not fit neatly into our preconceptions of monotheism and polytheism and that's why we need to understand scripture on its own terms not in terms of our own preconceptions thank you.

Hare Krishna.