Gita 17.01 Worldviews are meant to be vision-enhancers not vision-diminishers

Transcript

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thank you that if somebody rejects shastra and still has some faith where do you classify the faith of such people you know scripture is not meant to deaden our experience of reality is it meant to deepen our experience you know when we hear one thing in scripture and we see something in life that seems to contradict what we see in scripture then we need to it is not that we are meant to deaden ourselves to what we experience in reality or we are meant to deny our experience of reality rather we are meant to deepen our experience of reality so that we can perceive the truth of we can acknowledge the reality of what we are experiencing and also see that reality in the light of what scripture has taught us so scripture is meant to be like a like a spectacle which enhances our vision it is not meant to be like a filter that decreases or blinds our vision so for example there are people from certain religious traditions in the world today who are aggressively against any form of image worship they consider all such worship to be like idolatry which is considered to be one of the greatest sins against god because when idols are constructed those religious traditions they believe that actually those idols comprise competitor to god and as a competitor to god they need to be destroyed but with this vision they actually come to a temple and they see the sincere devotion with which the deities are being worshipped initially with their skepticism with their cynicism they may try to deny the reality of what they are experiencing and they may say that actually all this is simply an illusion that actually whatever whoever is experiencing that experience is not reality that experience is simply an illusion and you just can’t accept that these are still devil worshippers but if they associate even with a little bit of open mindedness then they will see that actually that actually there is so much sincere devotion with which the deities are being worshipped that not only is there devotion in the worship of the deities but often those who are having the devotion also have many virtuous qualities they are not mindless brainwashed, indoctrinated idolaters but they have a philosophy they have a whole elaborate world view based on which they are actually worshipping this deities when they understand that then they will be able to actually move onwards more steadily towards acknowledging, towards recognizing towards purifying, towards elevating our own consciousness upwards towards Krishna their own consciousness towards God in whatever conception that they may have so they experience the simplicity, the spirituality the gravity with which the deities are being worshipped they try to see they see that they evaluate that with the filter of the conceptions about of idolatry, the condemnations of idolatry that they have learned in their traditions and reconciling the two becomes becomes impossible for them they suffer from cognitive dissonance cognitive dissonance is what happens resonance is when two sounds reinforce each other and it creates a deeper sound or two sounds join each other and they create a sweeter impression but dissonance means when two sounds are saying two different things and they are both great, they jar and neither of them makes sense so when such a thing happens when we are not able to make sense of what we experience then we need to recognize that there is something seriously wrong with whatever we are doing that now ideology whichever ideology we have the ideology darkens our experience of reality not deepens our experience but then even if we claim that ideology is coming from scripture if at all it is a god given scripture it is a revelation then probably what the ideology that we have acquired is a distortion of of that scriptural understanding and thus if our experience of reality is becoming darkened not deepened so just as if we wear some specks specks should help us to see better but instead that specks causes us to see lesser sometimes when we go to go for eye check up at that time when the doctor wants to wants to check our eyes or they want to check one eye at that time the doctor may put a vision blocking lens in the other eye so that we see with only the eye whose vision is to be checked so if we have a specks with both glasses which are vision blocking or vision darkening then we then our vision gets impeded or even stopped sometimes ideology can become vision blocker not a vision enhancer and that happens then we are actually in the process of being indoctrinated in the process of being misled in the process of fooling ourselves by capitulating to realities that are actually detrimental by capitulating to not realities to conceptions to mentalities that are detrimental for our experience of reality for our growth towards reality our experience of material reality our experience of material reality is meant to energize us to experience spiritual reality not distract us or incapacitate us in our experience of spiritual reality so when the ideology becomes a filter then when it becomes a blocker it becomes a darkener of our vision then that ideology needs to be rejected ideology whichever we have it should stand the test of reality it should enhance reality not force us to deny reality with this understanding we need to use our intelligence scripture is to be studied and understood with intelligence Krishna also says this in Bhagavad Gita towards the end he doesn’t say that whatever I am speaking it is my word as God whatever I am speaking is scripture and you accept it his approach is to appeal to intelligence so whatever world views we accept we need to ensure that they stand the test of reality and that means they enable us to deepen our experience of reality where they don’t darken our experience by forcing us to deny what we are experiencing