Growing through love and loss in relationships, The Monk’s Podcast 121 with Garuda Prabhu

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna, Gurudev Prabhu.
Welcome back to the Monks Podcast. Thank you. Thank you.
Always happy to be here with you, Chaitanya Charanjee. So it’s one of the highlights of my month to be with you. I would say one of the top highlights and it’s such a joy to interact in many different topics and in many fresh, as well as you could say, I thought of freshly traditional perspectives.
So I had thought of a topic of grieving, but since you suggested a beautiful title, love and loss in relationships with living and departed Vaishnavas. So I’ll just give a bit context and then we can take the discussion further. Recently, I had a podcast with Rajivihari Prabhu and he mentioned something quite scary.
He said that probably the next decade could well be a decade of tears for ISKCON because many of the they are already quite advanced in their age. So, of course, separation from devotees is also very, it’s heart-wrenching. At the same time, it is also inspiring to see how they leave their bodies gracefully.
But it also has a lot of personal emotional trauma, as well as we could say social or institutional ramifications, which need to be dealt with. So in that context, even in this COVID times, we have had at least two senior leaders, Bhakti Chaharu Maharaj and Poonka Jangri Prabhu departing, and of course, many others also. So how do, and loss can come in many different ways.
It’s not just the loss in terms of departure. Loss can come in terms of we lose relationship because of misunderstanding and conflicts. We can lose relationships because of sometimes questionable behavioural lapses, moral lapses in someone who we respect or care for.
It could be both ways, a subordinate losing an authority figure or an authority figure losing a beloved subordinate. So in general, how do we deal with this loss? Sometimes some devotees go to the attitude that better focus only on our relationship with Krishna. And I will just practise my bhakti and not get better.
I don’t know whom I can trust, whom I can connect with. But then that also makes us quite lonely. And sharing our heart and connecting with devotees is an important limbo bhakti.
So that was the broad background. Because if you had some other points in mind, also, we could discuss that. But this is where I’m coming from in this discussion.
Beautiful. I think it’s important to start, Chaitanya Charanjee, with the a priori assumption, the beginning point that all relationships that we have here in this world are to teach us how to love. It’s so beautiful.
All relationships, as imperfectly as we may pursue them, or perfectly, and anything in between, they’re meant to teach us about pure love. Now, the bhakta especially understands this. Because we are a tradition of the heart.
We are a tradition that focusses on the purification of the heart. And that purification may take place between you and me. Because you and I have a relationship.
And you have other relationships. And I have other relationships. In our kshetras, our extended kshetras, right? Our persons in relation to other persons.
We have a sphere of interactions with other persons. And it’s in those relationships within that sphere that we are either exercising our pure loving hearts, or not. Now, beautiful.
So what you’re saying is that, I love the way you connected the two points. First is that we are, relationships are meant to teach us how to love. And in order to, if you want to love Krishna or purify ourselves, it is how do we express that love and make it purer? It is through the relationships, through the interactions.
Because otherwise, love is just an abstract conception, unless it is expressed. And where are we going to express it? It is, you know, it’s ultimately want to express in relationship with Krishna. But realistically, right now, we have to express it in our interactions with the devotees around us.
Yes, but don’t separate those two. Okay, a good point. Yeah.
See, Chaitanya Charanji, there is the embodiment of Chaitanya Charan. So I’m in a human form, and Chaitanya Charanji, he is in a human form. And so we interact on the basis of our situations here in this world.
And Chaitanya Charanji as an embodied being, is a unique, you know, dividual, that’s my own word. I don’t like the word individual, because that sounds like you’re caught in the dividual. You know, we are portions of the undivided absolute.
As chapter 13 in the Bhagavad Gita explains, we are little individuals, infinitesimal individuals, related and part of the unlimited, undivided Supreme. That undivided Supreme appears as individuals of his non-divisible self in each of us. So in Chaitanya Charanji, there is an embodied being, but there’s also the instrumentality factor.
Chaitanya Charanji is a being unto himself as a individual of the undivided absolute, but he’s also someone through whom Krishna speaks. He is an instrument. Krishna is present in his heart.
So this is, you know, extraordinary. This is sarvasya caham hrdi samna vistaha, right? You know, he has entered fully, samna vistaha, entered deep, ni, okay, entered deep and deeply and completely into Chaitanya Charanji’s heart. So when I’m speaking to you, the you is dual.
I’m speaking to you, Chaitanya Charanji, but I know Krishna is also, he’s also listening. Beautiful. First of all, I love this.
It’s not just a play of words, but it’s very striking point of individual and the individual is both a individual as a person in their own right, but also an instrument for the Supreme Person. That’s right. Yeah.
And yes, a individual in and of itself, but also a kind of, how would you say, what would be a good word for that? An extension, an extension of the divine. There’s no sparks without a fire. So true.
You know, just yesterday, I just completed a seminar on grief, three-part seminar on growing through grief. And it’s talking about how we may have two extreme attitudes toward relationships. So if you can permit me, I’ll just share a PowerPoint slide, which I had made, which I think reflects this point.
So, you know, holistic attitude toward relationships. So one extreme is where we treat human relationships as ultimately fulfilling. You know, that’s the romance novels and romance movies.
We find the perfect person and then we are happily ever after. Right. So that is one extreme.
But the other extreme is to treat all relationships as ultimately meaningless, where we just become dismissive. But the more balanced attitude is actually what you were saying, that human relationships, and I just put it as pointers to divine relationship, but the way you put it is beautiful. All relationships are meant to teach us how to love purely.
So, yes. So we could say to some extent that within the materialistic society, I don’t have a better word. I sometimes don’t like that materialistic society.
But this is, we often go toward this extreme. But sometimes in the devotee community, we go towards the other extreme. Yes.
Of treating our relationships as ultimately meaningless. So there’s, I loved the way you talked about both. You have to see the person as an individual and see them also as a channel through which Krishna is expressing his love for us.
Krishna is speaking to us and also Krishna is receiving our love. Krishna is receiving our service also. Yes.
Yes. Beautiful. I like that chart.
Yes. Our love for one another cannot be possible without Krishna’s ultimate love. And this applies even if there is no Krishna in the relationship at all.
That’s right. That’s right. The advantage the Bhakta has is that he or she knows that Krishna is involved and that makes it all the more delightful.
That makes it really, you know, to Shanti cha, Ramanti cha, you know, that makes it just so fulfilling. Beautiful. But all love, all true love, actually nourishes and grows the heart in each of the individuals.
So if you were suddenly to leave this world, Chaitanya Charanjee, Krishna forbid, but I’d like to have you still around, Chaitanya Charanjee, you know, so, but let’s just say, suddenly you should disappear. Are you dead to me? No. You have made contributions to my heart.
I will always carry a bit of Chaitanya Charan right here in my heart. And hopefully I, with yours, now I can’t say that that’s the case. You would have to say that.
But the idea is that if love is love, we receive affection and we give it. And that’s a part of us. So even when a Vaishnava may depart from this world, they cannot completely depart.
It’s interesting the word depart. Well, first of all, it means that their part, their individual is displaced. But the effects of that individual on other individuals is permanent.
If it’s pure love, because the love coming from one individual to another is something that nourishes, ultimately, the spiritual body, especially, you know, when we’re talking about bhakti, we’re talking about growing a spiritual body, which is the ultimate individuality, not individuality, dividuality, a little dividual in the whole context of divine Leela. So we are individuals with one another, seeking the undivided supreme reality. And when you and I get together, we have what is defined in the Bhagavad Gita between Arjuna and Krishna.
We have dharmyam samvavam, sacred conversation. And through that katha, kathiyantas ca mam nityam. I mean, you and I have a hard time.
Stop talking. I mean, that’s true. That’s a hard that we have to discipline ourselves with the clock.
But kathiyantas ca mam nityam, constantly sharing in conversation. Then there’s the Ramanticha, Tushanticha Ramanticha. So there’s something that is indelibly etched in our hearts from the pure love coming from other Vaishnavas.
Now, the loss of living Vaishnavas, where relationships break, where there are broken connections between Vaishnavas. Well, the reason they were together at one point in the first place was because of affection. So even if it breaks, there is still something that they have been nourished by.
Beautiful. So if I may just interrupt you, or you want to complete the talk? No, you can react, please. Okay, thank you.
I think react is a better word than interrupt. It’s even, you don’t really react, you respond. Yeah, that’s true.
That is even better. Yeah. Yeah, definitely.
So I love this, the way you phrased it that our interactions, especially if they’re pure, they nourish our spiritual body. So let’s start with the first point, and we’ll move forward. So you said no love would be possible without Krishna, between two people, even if they are not aware.
So are you referring there to the point that, like Krishna says in 10.41 in the Gita that everything opulent manifests the spark of my splendour. So whatever it is that two people find lovable in each other, that is a spark of Krishna in them. And in that sense, without the two people seeing some kind of spark of Krishna, there would not be any love possible? Or is it something else that you are saying that no love would be possible without Krishna between two people? Because in one sense, many times, what people call as love, it may often take them away from God, because of infatuation or whatever else.
But even within that, if a person is attracted to somebody’s beauty, that beauty is also a spark of Krishna’s supreme beauty. So is that what you are referring to broadly? Yeah, yeah, I mean, you have the right idea. I mean, worldly love, love that is tainted by some selfish need, or for some conditions, as Krishna describes three kinds of love, or our three different relationships to love itself, he explains in the penultimate chapter of the Rasa Panchayati, he explains there are some who love because they desire to have love reciprocated.
There are others, and that’s worldly love. If you love me, then I’ll love you. Now, it’s not that that can be utterly impure, but that there is a sense in which it is more fulfilling, some kind of selfish need.
And so there’s love, you know, mixed with lust. Some kind of, what is lust? Lust is this kind of need to have yourself pleased, rather than to please another. Where does that all begin? What is the root of lust? It is the ahamkara.
I am making myself, literally, I am making. Okay. Oh, I never thought that’s what ahamkara means.
That’s what it means. Ahamkara. I’m busy making myself.
You’re there, Chaitanya Charan, only because I’m busy making myself. You are useful to me, because I need to make myself. I’m going to use you.
That’s ahamkara. So I made up a word. I made up a word to be the antonym and the antidote of ahamkara.
Anyakara. Anyakara, you mentioned that earlier. Right? That’s right.
So rather to be centred upon another instead of myself, right? So real, the purer the love, the more purely we can centre ourselves on the thoughts and feelings of another and serve them. Now, if we are a bhakta, if we’re bhaktas, we are aware that Krishna is in their hearts. So we’re serving Krishna through their hearts, as well as serving them in their hearts.
Sarvasya caham, right? It’s in the heart, you know, Krishna’s there. So worship of Krishna. Bhaktas find out when they move from the kineshta level, they realise that actually, I can serve Krishna in whomever I meet.
The body is a walking, talking temple of Krishna. That’s the 13 markings of the body. And there’s a temple.
So when you meet another person, you’re effectively going to the temple. You’re meeting the pajari. That’s this jivatma.
And you’re observing how that jivatma is connected to the paramatma. Now, in a devotee body, in a devotee being, they’re loving Krishna. So this temple is very active.
In worldly persons, it’s almost as if the temple has been closed down. You’re trying to, it’s almost like a condemned building. You’re trying to revive the condemned building.
It’s like a deserted or even a desecrated temple. Something like that. That’s right.
That’s a beautiful metaphor. And in the third canto, I think Kapila says this, that the yogis see the Lord, not only in the Deity form, but they see the Lord in the hearts of everyone. There you go.
So that is a more advanced stage of yoga. But the way you phrased it is beautiful. So when we meet anyone, actually we are going to a temple.
We’re going to a temple and we’re supposed to worship at the altar of their hearts. So when it is said that pure devotees are like tirthi kurvanti tirthani, they are moving places of pilgrimage, that is like an active temple where the sanctity is very visible for us. But the other places are where we actually may have to uncover the sanctity.
That’s right. But everybody is connected with Krishna. I think this is not just beyond Kanishka.
This would be almost like a uttama level, isn’t it? Yes. You meet a worldly person, this is a chance for us to build a temple. When you meet a bhakta, this is a chance to attend the temple.
So when we talk about spreading the movement, it’s already spread. It’s almost like we Prabhupada said that there are devotees and there are temples, they’re just going to manifest and just time is separating us. So we could say that is also a reality for every soul because every soul is ultimately will be delivered by Krishna’s love.
Yes. Maybe we can accelerate their journey in some small way. Exactly.
You know, Prabhupada used to always quote that phrase from the Vedanta Sutra, that there is something fundamentally ontologically embedded in the nature of things, of being, of existence. It’s ultimately a loving place. The bhakta is the one that brings that out.
The bhakta exemplifies that loving place. The bhakta manifests that loving place. The bhakta celebrates with others that loving place.
That’s our job. That’s what we do. It doesn’t matter who, you know, Chaitanya Charanjee, I, you know, go to the grocery store.
I never take anyone for granted there. I look at everyone moving around, oh my gosh, look at all of these, you know, condemned temples or all of these somewhat open temples, you know, they’re all moving around. It drives me crazy.
And then when I finally am at the register, cash register, and the young man or young lady is helping me, right? And I look over at them and I see their name tag. I say, good afternoon, Emily. She says, oh, good afternoon.
And I tried to connect with her or him in a way that is, that delivers something special. I can’t even describe it, particularly. I may even say something funny, like you must see a lot of crazy people come through here every day, right? And invariably she’ll laugh, right? She says, yeah.
And I said, I’m going to try not to be one of those for you. Okay. Now they don’t normally have people connecting with them.
You know, it’s sort of, you know, the little, you know, beep, beep, you know, the, the electronic, you know, reader of the barcodes, beep, beep, you know how many beeps they hear all day long. They’re a sort of an extension of a machine that can bagging the groceries, bagging the groceries, bagging. This is a very mechanical, you know, way to make money.
They’re doing it because that they need to, that’s fine. But I want to bring them out of that and connect with something a little, a little joyful, a little friendly, a little loving. And I do it every time.
If there is a, a temple that’s inactive, an inactive temple in front of me, I will seek to build up the temple a little bit at that very moment, that spontaneous building of a temple, spreading the movement, the movement of what, what are we moving? Chaitanya Charan, we’re moving hearts. That’s what movement means. Seriously.
Otherwise, what else are we moving? You tell me. I’ve been doing this for 50 years. It’s the movement of the heart.
That’s what we’re moving. You move my heart, Chaitanya Charanji. I find you to be a very affectionate and realised soul that moves my heart.
Otherwise, I wouldn’t waste my time. Well, I can say today at least my heart is moving so fast that I’m losing track. Okay.
I’m still, how should I put it? I’m still trying to process that vision of what you said about a grocery store. Yeah. I remember His Holiness Radhanath Maharaj.
I was one time in Pune temple. He was in the guest reception department. So I had heard a talk by Maharaj.
He said that you should treat every person who comes to the temple as a personal guest of their lordships. And that was a very remarkable conception. Yes.
And recently I was talking with one devotee who was a pioneer in online outreach. And he told me something which I had never thought of that he said that every person who visits your website, you should treat them like the website is the manifestation of Krishna they are coming to. So treat them like a guest who is coming to a temple.
I never thought of a website visitor like that because often we treat it in terms of statistics and number of views and things like that. But that is the manifestation of Krishna that is attracting them. So it’s a beautiful image to actually contemplate.
Yes. I’m just developing this thought. So if we could have that much of a devotional vision with those whose temples are not active, then we need to have a far more of that vision with those who are active temples in a sense.
Yes. So if I may just, I was considering why this doesn’t happen. There could be many reasons, but I thought of three reasons.
One is because we have too many things to do. Even in bhakti, we have projects to achieve and deadlines to meet and something like that. Another is that we have different opinions about practical things as well as philosophical things.
And third is that we often don’t think that as a sufficiently important part of bhakti. So we think that, okay, it’s like we take vows for chanting a particular number of rounds and we take vows for avoiding certain anti-devotional activities, but we don’t really take any vow for spending time with devotees. So sometimes it gets undermined just by the fact that we are, that we think this is something which I know it’s important, but I can do it later also.
So as one of my devotee friends, he said that if I had started this Monks Podcast 20 years ago, the only thing I would have got is chastisement. Why are you wasting your time and others’ time? Do something productive. So in many ways, I can say that our movement has evolved.
So these are what I thought are the obstacles to this happening. But what are your thoughts about this? I think that what you’re saying is really true. I think that there is, you know, this time is the right time for Chaitanya Charan’s podcast.
The kinds of things that you discuss with devotees, the way you are probing, you want devotees to ponder deeply and carefully and affectionately the great gifts that Prabhupada has given us and the way each of us is attempting to process them. And I think this is really, you know, a wonderful Seva. I really do.
And it’s not going to be for everybody. Not everyone is able and willing to ponder these things deeply. But for those who are, what a gift you’re offering here, Chaitanya Charanji.
So to invite so many wonderful Vaishnavas to share what is so deeply moving in their hearts. That’s what the movement is about. The movement of the toward other hearts.
But, you know, if we go back to the Bhagavad Gita and we look at what it means when our hearts are moving freely and without obstruction, when our hearts have been relieved of a lot of the pain and hurt and trauma of the past, when our hearts have been lifted up by Krishna’s love and the devotees love, then this is wonderful. But what happens when we have a shattered heart? The phrase is shattered heart. In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna experienced a shattered heart.
What was it that was painful for Arjuna? What I call the Arjuna syndrome is something that invariably all of us will have in this life. Arjuna was, he asked Krishna to move the chariot in between both the armies. And Arjuna did not realise what he would experience.
But he realised that on the opposing side of the battlefield, on the side of the Kauravas were relatives, friends, and even his guru, people for whom he had reverence, people for whom he had a great deal of affection and love, but people who had another side that was representing and promoting evil. This is what shattered Arjuna’s heart. This is what caused him grief, shoka, shoka.
You know, Chaitanya Charan, we experience persons that, persons have many sides to them. You know, sometimes we discover the side of a person that has done bad things, even criminal things, even evil things. And this is very painful.
This is very painful. It’s not about forgiveness. I know this is a catch-all word all over the place.
It’s really not about forgiveness. It’s about being real about what’s in front of you. Now, Arjuna could have said to Krishna, oh, oh, wait a minute.
All my friends and relatives are over there. Drag me over to the other side. I want to fight with them.
I want to join the evil side because, frankly, those are my friends. So, you know what? I’ll join them. No.
Then he’s not being true to his heart. Then he’s being repressive. Or he could have said, I hate all those people fighting for Dhritarashtra.
I hate them. I don’t even care who they are. I hate them all.
And I’m going to kill them. Don’t even take me into the middle of the battlefield. I don’t even want to see who’s there.
I’m going to kill them. That’s the other extreme. Arjuna had the heart of a bhakta.
He wanted to be real. And the reality of the situation, Chaitanya Charanjee, was he was to kill in battle those whom he loved. And the second half of the chapter, 18 and a half verses were spoken by Arjuna to Krishna, dumping the contents of his shattered heart onto Krishna.
Krishna said nothing. He listened. And that is exactly what Krishna wants to do.
He wants to hear our hurt. He wants us to share our pain with him. He wants us to dump the contents of our shattered hearts onto him.
Because then we will all do what Arjuna did. We will completely give ourselves even more to Krishna. And Krishna will reveal himself even more to us.
Chaitanya Charanjee, without Arjuna’s shattered heart, we would not have the dharmyam samvadham, the great conversation between Arjuna and Krishna. That shattered heart produced the Bhagavad Gita. I studied the Bhagavad Gita and of course you have studied deeply, but it is delightful to see something so profoundly, I would put it profoundly practical.
Yes, come alive. It comes alive. It comes alive.
I was thinking of two things. One is that, Arjuna chose voluntarily to come into the middle of the battlefield. And then he saw things very differently from what he would have seen from one side.
That’s right. He did not have to come to the middle of the battlefield. That was his choice.
It wasn’t Krishna saying, hey, Arjuna, I think you better see what’s going on here. He didn’t say that. Yeah.
So sometimes, you know, we do that ourselves. Sometimes we are forced by situations to do that. We are just going about our functional way of living.
And then suddenly sometimes we see see that those whom we loved, as you said, they sometimes have a dark side, which can be disturbing. So it seems that sometimes like situationally we are forced to confront it. Like suppose we are in a position where we have to, as you said, dispense justice, not just forgiveness.
Or sometimes it just comes upon us as gossip. So I would say that this person did this and this person did that. So it’s like if it’s coming as, if we are getting into gossip, we could say it like Arjuna choosing to go in between the two armies.
But sometimes we are forced by our duty or by situation to go in between the two armies. So we are forced to see the dark side of those whom we care for also. And then.
Yeah. You know what, Chaitanya Swaraj, I would say that it’s not like. I would like to use the example set by Arjuna is not that.
We are forced. You see, it was Arjuna’s idea to get real on the battlefield. You see, sometimes I’m too much of a coward to actually go in the middle of the dualistic situation in which I find myself.
Do you see what I’m saying? Arjuna chose to do this. This is to his credit, Chaitanya Charanjee. Most of us say, I don’t want to go in the middle of the battlefield.
I don’t even want to see what’s going on on the other side. I don’t want to be sensitive to the situation in front of me. I am scared to go into the middle of the battle.
And did you notice no one else went into the middle of the battlefield? Everyone preferred to stay in their dualistically alienated situation. You are, you know, pro-mask, I’m anti-mask or, you know, some silly, you know, you know, there’s these dualisms, these dualities that Krishna speaks about. Endless dualities in this world.
And what does duality mean? It means alienation, one side alienated from the other and tension, Kali, you know. Beautiful. So Prabhu, this is also the way I have heard this first chapter explained is that Arjuna’s wanting to go in the middle was his wilfulness.
Yes, his bravery. Yeah, it’s bravery. But I mean, sometimes explained as it was a mistake.
It was unnecessary. If he had not gone there, he wouldn’t have become bewildered. But that’s not the only way of looking at it.
Because he went there, he saw the complexity of the situation. And that’s how the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita became necessary for him. Yes.
And I give him credit for that. Hmm. I give him credit for being able to sit with his grief and not to try to cover it up.
Chaitanya Charanjee, this movement suffered greatly by not really going through a period of grieving Prabhupada’s departure. You will have to unpack that. How would, how would, what would grieving have meant and how would it have helped? I mean, in one sense, devotees have now started getting a lot of memories of Prabhupada and started relishing his presence that or relishing his pastimes that way.
Is that what you are referring to or is it more about, you know, how to actually carry on his mission and to live on in his absence? What do you mean exactly? What we did in the movement is we moved too fast and not with our hearts. That was the movement that occurred. We moved way too fast and we moved away from our hearts.
It’s as if Arjuna went into the middle of the battlefield and said, hmm, I’m just going to join the other side. I’m not going to look at the grief that’s welling up in my heart. I’m going to ignore that and I’m just going to join the other side.
I’m going to focus on the institution. I’m going to focus on becoming powerful, but in weakness we find strength from Krishna. In strength that’s falsely taken up, we become truly weak.
Arjuna became strong because he brought his broken heart, his shattered heart to Krishna and he took the time to process that grief. Oh, okay. So what you’re trying to say is that in one sense, bhakti is actually about inward development of connection with Krishna and with, of course, Prabhupada.
But after Prabhupada’s departure, we continued on aggressively with the externals of bhakti, like building temples, distributing books. Imitating Prabhupada. Yeah.
And in that sense, we made the material markers of success as our definitions of success in bhakti also. So in that sense, we unwittingly joined the opposite side. Is that what you’re trying to say? That’s right.
We lost our hearts. By realising that our hearts were shattered, we could regain our hearts in deep connection to Krishna’s divine heart. By ignoring the shattered heart, our hearts become flattened and we become heartless.
You know, the great lesson, one of the great lessons about grief is there in that beautiful, beautiful prologue of the Ramayana. And please, everyone listening to this, please don’t say Ramayana. Please say Ramayana.
Please. That is the correct pronunciation. Now, in the beginning of the Ramayana, there’s a prologue of how Valmiki’s Ramayana was written.
So one day, Valmiki was performing his ablutions in the Tamasa River. Very beautiful day. And he noticed, you know the story, you noticed the crane, these two loving cranes on a branch, high up in a tree.
And a hunter came along, drew his bow and released his arrow into the heart, through the heart of the male crane, whose body dropped to the ground. The female crane alighted to the ground and was just in absolute grieving hysterics. Valmiki watched this senseless, senseless act of violence on these loving cranes.
Cranes are known to be particularly loving birds, by the way. Valmiki was furious. He was angry.
He was hurt by the crane’s hurt. And he cursed the hunter to never find a home all the days of his life. He would never find himself at a home all the days of his life, something like that.
And I always wondered, you know, Chaitanya Charan, why that curse? He killed something. Maybe he should be killed or something like that. You know, where did that curse come from? Well, I’ll get to that in a minute.
But Valmiki’s curse was spoken in a certain metre in Sanskrit, where his shoka turned into shloka, his grief turned into poetry. He didn’t turn and say, oh, there goes a hunter. And I’m not going to, you know, this is not not something I want to be involved with.
He didn’t do that. He felt deeply about this. He felt the grief, empathically felt the grief of the female crane.
Well, I realised why the hunter cursed what he cursed. I mean, I’m sorry, Valmiki cursed the hunter with the curse that he gave. It’s because he was not punishing the hunter in terms of the dead.
But he was punishing the hunter in terms of the suffering that the living would experience. Because never again, would that female crane ever be able to land on a branch without looking over her shoulder. She was traumatised.
For her, a branch meant a place of loving. Now, she could never find a home in nature because of that hunter. Valmiki said, now you, hunter, will never find a home all the days of your life.
You will wander without a home, just like you did to that crane. Symbolic, of course, of Ramlila and Sita’s position. So grief, shloka.
So we, devotees, Chaitanya Chandji, need to figure out how to turn shloka into shloka. Grief into poetry. Shattered heart into full heart, as Arjuna did with Krishna.
Beautiful. I’ve read the Ramayana so many times. This aspect, of course, that from shloka came shloka.
So from shloka came shloka. That is quite a well-known phrase of play of, I mean, phrasing of the situation. Right.
The way you analyse it is beautiful. So what you are saying is… Look what Arjuna did. His shloka brought out so much divine shloka from Krishna.
So just going back, you’re saying that, I mean, completing this Ramayana point, when you said that it foreshadows what happens to Sita is that she experiences the grief of being separated from Ram and she doesn’t have a loser, she loses her home. Is that what you’re saying? Or what, how is it foreshadowing exactly? So we’re talking about loss, love and loss, right? So that’s really sort of our theme today, love and loss. So here, the royal marriage, there was so much love between Sita and Ram.
Sita was coaxed to leave her circle of protection and to ultimately be disconnected from Ram. Ram sought her out with the help of Hanumanji. She was saved.
She was brought back. But was she really ever? No. You see, Ravana is the consummate terrorist.
He’s what every terrorist wants to do. A terrorist doesn’t mind dying. You see, we celebrate the death of Ravana every year.
And that’s the defeat of evil, goodness over evil. But you know what? In my opinion, Ravana won. Ravana broke the royal marriage forever.
Sita had to disappear and go away. Nothing would ever return. Just like the crane would never have a home.
The royal marriage would never be the same. Now, this is, of course, a beautiful viraha kind of, you know, right? It’s a beautiful kind of, you know, but because these leelas are eternal, of course, Sita and Ram’s royal connection and their royal love of one another, that’s always eternal too. And that’s why we go to the temple and we see Sita, Ram, Lakshman, Hanuman together in their loving relationship.
But eternally also is the eternal broken, the brokenness of their love. And that, Chaitanya Chakji, is exactly what terrorists want to do. They don’t care about dying.
Their evil is so, so great that they’ll do anything, even die to destroy the happiness of the living. Just as, you know, in one sense, even if a terrorist mission doesn’t succeed on many occasions, still it creates a scar of fear in people’s mind. Like one explosion, he leaves a shadow of fear that goes on for maybe a whole lifetime.
That’s it. So life is never the same again. That is success.
That is what a terrorist sacrifices himself or herself for. I hate so much how you are happy, Chaitanya Chakji. And I will do anything, even sacrifice my own life to make you miserable.
That’s a terrorist. And that is what Ravana demonstrates. And then in the beginning, the hunter also demonstrates the same thing.
Just as the male and female crane were in the forest and they were together and they were happy, the hunter ended their, I mean, ended their loving relationship. Similarly, Ravana ended that relationship between the divine couple. That’s right.
And never would that female crane, ever, ever, the quality of life, the movements of her sweet heart would never be the same ever again. That’s what this world is about, Chaitanya Chakji. It’s about the impoverishment of the heart that hits affluent and poor societies the same.
As humans, we break one another’s hearts. The Bhakti movement is to be the antidote to that. If we’re not breaking each other’s hearts in the movement, the antidote to that is to move everyone’s hearts.
That’s the way I translate movement, as you know, after today’s dawn. I love blowing your mind, Chaitanya Chakji. I really do.
It’s one of my perverse pleasures in life. It really is. It’s not just blowing my mind.
It’s paralysing my tongue. And that’s unusual. That’s unusual, isn’t it? Yeah.
So in one sense, like you said, it’s our existential predicament that love is always tied with loss. But we can say it is only Bhakti that resolves that predicament by linking us with a love that will ultimately never be lost. That is the love for Krishna.
Precisely. Beautiful. Beautifully put.
And so if we could again, like I talked about that pendulum. So if we say that we expect only love in this world, even in our relationship with devotees, that’s not going to happen. That’s unrealistic because devotees are also a part of this world.
And the other extreme is like if we see only loss and think, you know, devotees may let me down or devotees may depart. And so we don’t open our hearts. Then also our heart will not blossom.
So in one sense, if we focus only on the love part, we will be jolted. We’ll be shocked and we’ll be betrayed. But if we focus only on the loss part and fear, then our heart will never grow.
Yeah. So this also brings us back to the point which you said about Arjuna. Arjuna seeing the complexity of reality.
For us, when we relate with devotees, we also have to recognise the complexity that there is both love and there is loss. So, yeah, you know, there’s one metaphor, if I may just continue this thread of thought. That it’s like a child when the child grows up, like for a baby, the parents are perfect.
The parents are like God. Then the baby grows up and becomes a teenager. And then the parents are like prison wardens, practically.
Then they can see all the ways in the parents are restricting them, all the faults in the parents. But then as the teenager becomes an adult, then they are not blind to the faults of the parents as they were in the infancy or childhood. But they are not obsessed with the faults as they were in the teenagers.
They have a more mature, enriched understanding of the parents and they’re grateful for what the parents have done for them. So in one sense, I felt that our relationship with devotees also goes through those stages. Like when we come to the temple, initially we think, oh, every devotee is a pure devotee.
And our devotees are so loving and so kind. And they are. But then once we come into our teenage phase in our spiritual life, it’s almost like after 10-15 years in spiritual life, it’s like devotees experience, I could say, like a peculiar kind of turbulence.
Just when they think that now my spiritual life should be stabilising, that now I have practised bhakti, I have gone or got over some of my basic gross anarthas. But a different kind of turbulence comes in. And then it’s later we get to a more balanced understanding that, yes, in the devotee circle, I may have my heart broken at times.
But it is only in the devotee circle that ultimately my heart will be healed and I will be able to learn to love Krishna. Yes. Well put.
Well put. Thank you. So this loss and love we were discussing.
So can you now maybe elaborate a little bit on the love aspect we understand, but how to process the loss in a mature way? You said earlier one point that the person is never lost in the sense that their affection, their influence, their shape, the impact in terms of shaping our heart, growing our spiritual body, that is always there. Yes. But despite that, the loss is also real.
That’s right. If we are to face what is real, as Arjuna did, then how can we face that loss? Yeah. You know, part of the reason why humans find it very difficult to face loss, because facing loss means to face one’s heart.
And remember, we are all here to escape from our true hearts. What’s in our true heart is Krishna. That’s our true heart.
So we’re all here, you know, to run away from our hearts. This is the problem. It all begins there.
Krishna Bahirmukha, our facing away from Krishna. We’re all Krishna Bahirmukhis. So we have to face toward Krishna.
So part of the problem with grieving, Chaitanya Charanjee, is we will tend to repress it. We’ll tend to, sometimes it’s so overwhelming that, and it’s natural that sometimes this will happen, we will become numb. And this is the emotional system shutting down.
It’s a little bit like if you have an electrical storm and the lightning hits the electrical system of a house, the circuit breaker goes on. It cuts off the circuit. So you won’t blow all the, you know, appliances and the rest of the house.
Humans have circuit breakers. And at a certain point, that kind of makes sense because it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming.
I remember when Prabhupada left. It was just inconceivable that we would not have Prabhupada. And he was so much a part of all of our lives.
I mean, he was our life in the physical manifestation. I remember that was my first semester at Harvard. When Prabhupada departed, I stayed in my room next to the temple for two weeks.
I didn’t even attend class. I was numb. I had to figure out how to deal with this.
Now, the movement was no help in this. They were busy trying to replace Prabhupada because they felt that without replacing Prabhupada, we would still be, there would be a gap or there’d be a problem. But of course, we found out that doesn’t work.
So I was pretty much on my own with other, a few other very close devotees to process this grief. And one of the things that one can either, you know, one can either take sedatives, one can take drugs, one can drink, one can go on Prozac, could, you know, Arjuna could have chosen those ways. I mean, the, the, that Prozac, I’m sure there was the herbal equivalent to Prozac at the time.
Okay. But he chose, like I said, 18 and a half verses, he spoke to Krishna, just reeling. He was just reeling in grief.
And he was even a little angry toward Krishna. You know how I know he called Krishna Madhusudana, which means slayer of the demon Madhu, which is if to say, you don’t even kill people you love. You kill demons, but you don’t, you’re asking me to do something that you don’t even do.
Ouch. Oh my, oh, you know, Arjuna was even upset with Krishna. You know, you’re asking me to do, you’re God, and you don’t even do this.
But I have to interrupt you here. I’m ecstatic. Actually, yes, I told you, I had the three-part seminar on grief.
You know, devotees ask questions. And one question that came up was that sometimes if we lose someone who’s very dear to us, you know, we may feel angry with God. We may feel betrayed by God, you know that.
So, is it sinful to have such feelings? No. So, you know, I said no, but I didn’t really have like clear pramanas. I gave the example of how when Abhimanyu passed, Abhimanyu was killed, Arjuna actually lashed out at his brothers, and then he turned toward Krishna.
Krishna, you must have known this was happening. Why didn’t you tell me? And similarly, Draupadi also, when she met Krishna in the forest after they were exiled, she said, Krishna, I deserve your protection. I’m your friend, I’m your relative, I’m your devotee.
Why didn’t you come to protect me? So, those were two examples I gave. But this is beautiful. This Madhusudana and Arisudana.
There are two words which comes over there. You kill Krishna, you don’t kill your relatives. So, I never thought of that as an expression of anger.
But it is. Yeah. At least he’s talking back to Krishna.
Yes. That is the expression of anger. Yes.
He’s upset. And I can give you a verse from the Rasa Panchayati. Desire, anger, fear, and certainly loving attachment, intimacy and affection should always be directed toward Hari.
By doing so, or by so doing, persons become fully absorbed in God. That’s my translation of chapter 29 of the Dasa Maskanda, 15th verse. There you go.
Beautiful. You know, I mean, it’s a wonderful Pramana. But I would say that many devotees may feel that this is only for the gopis who are purely loving Krishna.
For Krishna’s sake, our love is not pure. Our anger maybe is because of our frustrated attachments. But… And you know what? Even if that’s true.
That means even if we have to be angry toward Krishna, still we are relating with Krishna. Yes. So, you know, I was explaining this point, but I really love this example that says, if we have to have a real relationship with Krishna, then a real relationship will have a whole panorama of emotions.
Yes. If we like legislate out some emotions. Yes.
We’re not having a real relationship. You could be angry with someone that you love. Yeah.
And also, of course, there would be a certain amount of regulation in our anger. When we love someone, we are not going to physically absolve that person if we are angry. We’re not going to destroy that person.
There are limits to expressing that anger. And those limits also express love. That’s right.
But repressing the anger is not necessarily expression of love. No. Repressing the anger is retreating.
Repressing the anger would be Krishna, I mean, Arjuna retreating back into the Pandava army and just say, I’m not going to talk about it. Feeding the ego and trying to overdo it. Another way to suppress the grief is, let me join the Kauravas.
There are all kinds of ways, Chaitanya Charanji, that we humans can escape from our hearts. The Hare Krishna movement is to move back into our hearts. So, you know, this is amazing.
I love this phrase that you said earlier that we are here to escape from our two hearts. That’s right. Sometimes there is this term spiritual bypassing, where the idea is that we can use God to stay away from God.
That’s right. So we can say that, you know, I have such unshakeable faith in Krishna that I will never question Krishna’s actions in my life. Right.
But in that process, actually, we are, as you said, retreating. We’re not connecting with Krishna. Right.
That’s right. Amazing. So you’re saying, we’re talking about processing loss.
So one way to process loss might also be expressing anger. And you said that that numbness, you give the example of that numbness. So that was as a, and you further elaborated, you were two weeks, you were retreated.
So you’re saying that even that numbness that comes after a loss, the shock is also a part of the healing process, is a part of the process. Well, look what happened with Arjuna. What did he do at the end of the, in the 46th verse of the 47 verse chapter, the first chapter? He fell to his knees.
He sat down in his chariot. He collapsed. If that isn’t numbness, I don’t know what is.
He collapsed. Grief makes us collapse, Chaitanya Charanjee. So we have to allow ourselves to collapse.
And you know what? If you have loved, you will lose, but you will gain. Wherever there is true love, there will always be loss, but there will always be miraculous gain. Can you explain that gain part? It’s very well illustrated in the Christian Leela, right? The passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, right? The loss of Jesus precipitated, and his death and the grief, all of that precipitated the resurrection.
Let’s take the Ras Leela. Krishna disappeared from the Vrajagopikas at the end of the first chapter, the 29th chapter of the Dasamaskanda. They went crazy.
They started imitating Krishna, trying to remember Krishna’s movements and his behaviours. And then they started asking the large, you know, plant life of the forest, have you seen Krishna? They were talking to the trees. Then they started talking to the plants and they got so desperate, they got into the ground to talk to these little tiny plants that maybe they found themselves under the lotus feet of the Lord.
And no one responded. And then they just, of course, then they found Radha, who also had been deserted, apparently. And then the Gopi Gita comes in the middle chapter, right? After following the second chapter, the Rasa Panchayat, the Gopi Gita.
And this is where they are, you know, in some sense, devastated. The loss there is fully displayed in 19 verses. And this is where they are calling out to Krishna.
And they are remembering Krishna, even in his Aishwarya manifestations. Whereas when they’re with Krishna, the Aishwarya is not something they relate to much at all. Arjuna also had to relate to Krishna’s Aishwarya manifestation in trying to find his way back to Krishna, who is still right in front of him, love is right in front of us.
But we can’t find it. Just like Arjuna, he was gradually coming back to his heart. But Krishna felt the need to give him special vision to see the Aishwarya of the Virata Rupa.
And that would allow him to appreciate what was actually right in front of him all the time. So that’s what we have to do. We have to go through this process of collapsing in our own chariots, that our bodies, we collapse in our bodies.
Then someone comes to us and helps us bring us back to our hearts gradually, something, some events, some people, some whatever, some Shastra. Then we need to see the big picture, the Virata Rupa. Sometimes people will go out into nature, like the huge ocean, something much bigger than our little picture of pain.
Go into the forest, go into the mountains. Humans do that naturally, to get the bigger picture. Well, Krishna was right there.
You give them the bigger picture right then and there, the Virata Rupa. But that ultimately doesn’t do it either. Why? Because you have to return.
You can’t stay in the big picture. But finally, Krishna delivered to Arjuna the secret, the greater secret, and the greatest secret of all, as you know, I like to speak about. Hmm.
Yes. And the ultimate secret is Krishna has been embracing us through, without, within, and everywhere. And he’s right in front of us as Bhagavan waiting for us to return the embrace.
When we return the embrace of Krishna’s embrace, when we return the call of Krishna’s call through the Maha Mantra, then all grief is gone. It all makes sense. And all loves come together.
Amazing. So we’re just going back a little bit. I mean, I would love to come to this conclusion.
Yes. This Virata Rupa, this big picture. So if we consider, there is this, in Sanskrit, there’s a concept of Smasha and Vairagya, that the renunciation in the crematorium.
Right. Sometimes seeing that big picture can horrify us so much that we can, we can just think that I just want to do nothing with the world. I don’t know.
That’s, that could be another way of numbness, another form of numbness. Yeah. Because it’s not so much numbness as fearfulness.
Right. So I like that point that, you know, we have to see the big picture, but we can’t live in that big picture all the time. No.
Because we have our small part in the world and we have to function here. That’s right. And I think this is, I mean, this is also a big subject which maybe we can discuss that some other time that, you know, we say that we should remember death so that we can get an impetus to remember Krishna.
But then, you know, constantly remembering death and being afraid of death is no way to live. Right. It can be, I remember one devotee, one devotee, Mataji met me in Australia and she had said that she saw several traumatic deaths in her early childhood and she had a paranoia of death and she had to take a lot of psychological treatment to heal from it.
And then she came to a Bhagavad Gita class where the devotee was speaking on death. And not only the death can come at any moment, but he had a video montage of people dying in all unexpected situations. Somebody is in a shopping mall and suddenly they get a heart attack and they die.
Somebody is, you know, they’re just enjoying life in Disneyland or whatever. She said that traumatised her so much and her psychologist told her that, you know, don’t attend such classes. It’s psychologically damaging for you.
So, she was asking me, you know, is hearing Bhagavad Gita psychologically damaging? Yes. So, I explained to her that the Bhagavad Gita is not psychologically damaging, but, you know, some aspects of the Gita’s wisdom can rub off negatively on us. So, and, you know, if we are already psychologically wounded in a particular way, then the remembrance of death is not meant to create fearfulness in us.
So, remembrance of death is meant to create that conviction to connect with Krishna urgently. That’s right. And if somebody is, say, influenced too much by the mode of ignorance for whatever reason, then thinking about death is not going to help them.
It is going to create only fear in them. So, unless a person is, you could say, psychologically well-formed enough to see death positively, it requires a certain level of goodness. So, in that sense, we can’t, again, I’m reinforcing that point that we can’t live constantly in fear of the big picture and the fear of that big picture.
Yes. So, but still, are you saying that seeing the big picture is also a part of the healing journey? Yes. Essential part? Yes, I would say so.
Yes. It’s part of placing our small pictures into an acknowledgement that there is a bigger picture in which our small picture fits. But we can’t, as you said, and as I said, we can’t stay in the big picture, but it helps put things in perspective with the small picture, the small painful picture, because the big picture is ultimately loving and embracing and fully absorbing.
But, and especially in the liberated stage. But our small pictures, we have to address the elements that are moving within that smaller picture. So, it’s about putting things in perspective.
So, you could say that the Virat Rupa is a big picture and Krishna’s love is the biggest picture in a sense. And to go from our small picture to that biggest picture, we need to go through that big picture, that otherwise we won’t get the necessary impetus. That’s right.
Or we, even if we, I would say not only impetus, in one sense Krishna value, Arjuna valued Krishna’s loving threefold bending for more after he understood that actually that Virat Rupa is coming from this form. Precisely. So, in one sense, after we understand the futility and mortality of worldly existence, we value Krishna’s love more.
Otherwise, I think that’s in some ways a difference between like something like a cultural or ritual practise of bhakti and actual spiritual practise of bhakti. So, it’s a, you know, I never thought of so much that the Bhagavad Gita is actually a journey for healing. Absolutely.
Healing from grief and loss and wounds. It’s a grief. It’s a grief narrative.
Amazing. Yeah. And, you know, see, Chaitanya Charanjee, you never know what’s going to come out of my mouth every time you talk with me.
So, again, that’s one of the fun things about our talks. We discover these things together. True.
That’s amazing. So, can you maybe as we talked for a long time, maybe for conclusion, how does one practically come toward that realisation that, you know, I am always been embraced by Krishna and now it is time for me to return his embrace. So, because when we are in the throes of grief, when we are even say questioning God’s existence or questioning God’s benevolence to actually feel his love.
So, one answer, I was asked this question, one answer I gave is that that’s why we need loving relationships. Yes. Where, you know, although we may have lost one relationship, there are other relationships through which you not only feel the love of those individuals, but we feel God’s love through them.
Yes. But. So, what all would you suggest back to me? We have to do again.
Arjuna is the perfect model. He had to sit with as he collapsed in his chariot, which is metaphorical for the body collapsing, rendering us frankly fairly useless for anything else. We have to sit with our grief.
We have to feel not try to run from the pain, run from the loss. We have to sit with it. We have to hurt.
We have to feel the pain. The further you go into the shoka, the more you will get from the shloka of Krishna’s presence. The deeper you go into the grief is a way of going more deeply into one’s heart.
And the deeper you go into the heart, the more deeply we connect with Krishna. So, it’s all about the shloka and the experience, not running from the shloka, but experiencing it, acknowledging it, not, you know, embracing it, and did not stop until the shloka appears, the poetry of Krishna’s presence, his loving presence. That’s what shoka does.
It brings up the shloka of Krishna’s loving presence even more in our lives. This is so amazing. So, it’s rather than thinking that if somebody is grieving, that it’s not that they are ignorant and they are attached and they are lamenting as a sign of their ignorant attachment, rather than seeing it that way.
So, we see it in a different way that actually this person who loved me and I lost this person, it is actually Krishna who was loving me through this person. And in that sense, when I go deeper, to go deeper, sit with that grief and to go deeper into that grief means to actually understand that it was Krishna’s love coming through that person and then that Krishna is still there with me. That’s right.
Beautiful. And ultimately, such a loss will be something found, a love newly found, because the connection that we actually had with that person was something conducted by Krishna’s internal potency. And then we can travel to that person’s heart when they’re not in their embodied form.
So today, Chaitanya Charanjee, happens to be the anniversary of my father’s departure from this world. On May 31st at 1108, I was there and he departed this world. He stopped breathing right in front of me.
And I had a wonderful relationship with my father, but I still do. When the body departs, the body disintegrates, the body goes away. The love that was really there stays.
And that’s permanent. So you find new ways of relating to that loved one just as powerfully as when they were here. And that is why many people engage in ancestral worship, the Shraddha, you know, ceremonies and so on, because the powerful presence of the departed, they depart, but they leave a part.
Leave a part. OK, beautiful. When they depart, they leave a part of themselves.
That you would never be the same person. I would never be the person I am today. If I did not know my father, he has left a part of himself with me.
That’s permanent when he departed. Beautiful. So, Prabhu, what I am gathering over here is that, and many things, but one thing is that sometimes when we separate worldly love and spiritual love very radically as opposed to each other, we are actually doing injustice to the universality of love.
I mean, we are fragmenting ourselves. Ultimately, it is so. But still, you said that all our relationships, even if they are not directly centred on Krishna, they are conducted through the internal potency or we have the opportunity to experience the internal potency in all relationships, even if they are not themselves directly under the internal potency.
How would you put that? Well, you see, there are shades, as the Bhakti Sutra explains, there are shades of love in this world. There’s still love, but it may not be as prominent and as dominant as ideally we would like. So even in worldly relationships, they are unwittingly participating in a love that finds its source in the divine.
That’s why ultimately everyone seeks the divine, because they finally realise Anandamayo Vyasat. They realise the Hladini potency, the Hladini Shakti. They experience a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of that as individuals when they no longer become individuals, bhaktas become individuals.
In fact, that’s what bhakta means, an apportionment, a division, a individual. So as bhaktas, we are connecting ourselves to this source of love. And that is the perfection of life.
We seek it whether we know it or not. It’s just part of who we are. It’s our nature.
It’s our swaroopa. So while we process the loss of a loved one, the very intensity of that loss, in one sense, points us to our heart, which is made to love. And then it points us to the one whom we ultimately love.
So that’s how, through the grief, we can move toward Krishna. But is it actually possible, I mean, this is a concluding question, but for some, is it actually possible to move through grief toward Krishna without expert guidance at that time? Because when one is grieving, it overwhelms the person. And we may still chant our rounds and we may do kirtan, we may go through the motions of bhakti, but the heart is numbed.
So is it like a phase, like you said, two weeks was the time which you took to process. So is it something that happens with time? What can a devotee who is either going through this heart shattering loss, or a devotee who is wanting to assist somebody who’s gone through that loss, what can they do to ease or accelerate that journey toward healing? Of course, in our bhakti process, as you and I both know, the guiding, loving hand of a Vaishnava is irreplaceable. In some sense, Krishna gives us examples of the way to interact with grieving brothers and sisters.
However, there, of course, is a difference. You’re more like a friend reflecting something of what Krishna did for Arjuna. So you’re not trying to solve their grief.
The way that Krishna does. Krishna is already solving our various griefs by what he teaches Arjuna. But what we can do is be loving and comforting and pointing devotees in the direction of encouraging them to sit with their grief, to go deep with their grief, to find the loss fully, to dwell in that loss.
And the more they do, the more they will find, paradoxically, the more they will find an extraordinary deepening of the heart, which is our goal. This is what we’re here to do. Ramananda Roy does say, when Mahaprabhu asks, what is the most painful thing in this world? He said, it is the loss of a Vaishnava, the loss of a devotee, the loss of a bhakta.
It is so painful. And yet, at the same time, it’s so celebratory as well. It’s one of those paradoxes.
It just is so painful, but it’s so wonderful at the same time. Full of wonder, full of pain. What does that do? It softens the heart to be able to love and contain more love than ever before.
And eventually, our hearts will become so full and so abundant with love, that it will burst out of this body and cause our own death. It will cause our own departure. As our hearts fill up with so much love, that this body is no longer a suitable vessel to contain it.
A bhakta’s love is so overflowing that, have you ever tried to put on a shoe that didn’t fit you? It just doesn’t work. I remember you mentioned this last time, that the devotee’s body is no longer enough. But in this context, it’s amazing.
And that’s what happens. The more we deepen the heart through our various griefs and we do the work, and we don’t run from the work of the heart, then we will contain more love than we could have ever conceived. And then, of course, there is Mahaprabhu’s example, that he could not even maintain a body at all.
And that’s the example of a bhakta. He or she can no longer contain the love. And they must, a death becomes a kind of bursting out from this mortal coil to something far more adequate to contain their hearts.
So now, I challenge you to summarise everything. Because I have to leave in a few minutes. Thank you.
So we discussed on the topic of love and loss in our relationship with living and departed Vaishnavas. And we started with the, I said the context that you lost so many devotees. And I think the unifying thread of all we discussed was Arjuna, how the Bhagavad Gita is a grief narrative.
And then also, we drew several insights from the Gopi Gita. And basically, Ananmayo Bhyasati, we are all, our hearts are meant to love. And it is a part of our very existential nature.
And ultimately, we are meant to love Krishna. And while we are in this world, we basically find ways to escape from our hearts. And sometimes, loss is what forces us to confront our heart.
So, if we consider that when we are going to love, we started with, anyone we love, that wouldn’t be possible without Krishna. Because their lovability comes from the spark of Krishna. And they are all living, moving temples of Krishna.
So, some are the devotees or exalted devotees are like temples where they are visibly, actively temples. And those who are worldly-minded, they are like deserted or desecrated temples. So, we either build a temple when we are interacting with people or we are visiting a temple and relishing the temple.
So, interacting with people in a loving way is with everyone, not just devotees, is actually a part of our devotion, our bhakti. And then, when we start with that ground vision, then we think, just like Arjuna, for him, things became complicated when he came in the middle and faced the reality of how things are. So, when we want to love, for us, there is always the fear of loss.
Because the person whom we love may go away or the person whom we love may not turn out to be what we had thought they were, because they have a dark side. And again, there is that loss. So, we could live with a blinkered view where we only look at the lovable part and neglect the dark part, but that will eventually shatter us.
Or we could look at the dark part and we will think I will never love, but that will also dry up our heart. Just as Arjuna confronted the complexity, so we need to confront the complexity of love in the world, of loving the real people in the world. And that means that, so then you talked about the grief of, I think two things, one was the grief of, we didn’t process the grief of Prabhupada’s departure.
And then we got caught in the external markers of success while not growing internally. So, we tried to replace Prabhupada instead of actually connecting deeper with him. So, in acting strong when we are weak, we actually become weaker.
And in admitting our weaknesses, we can actually connect with the ultimate strength of Krishna. So, similarly, that beautiful point of shloka to shloka. So, the Ramayana is also in one sense a grief narrative in which from seeing the agony of that crane, she crane on the loss of her partner, from that agony, the Ramayana shloka came out.
And just as that bird, that hunter was cursed to, hunter was cursed to never find a home because he had stripped the sheep bird of the home, of her home. So, and in the bigger sense, the whole Ramayana narrative is reflecting the same thing that Ravana came and Ravana, the hunter who shattered the loving relationship between the divine couple. And that things never came back to the same even when Sita was returned.
But through all that trauma of separation, the shloka of the Ramayana and the beautiful love between the divine couple came about. So, for all of us also, we have to confront our shloka till the shloka, till the love will emerge. And that means sitting down with our grief and ultimately seeing that you talk about the individual and the indivisible ultimate reality.
We see that this person, as a person, as a individual, they loved me, but at the same time, they were also instrumental for Krishna’s love to come through. So, when we actually process that grief, that person may be lost to us, but they depart, but they leave a part. So, all relationships are meant to ultimately teach us to love purely, to love.
So, the part of us that influenced us, we learn to love through them. And ultimately, if we see that their love is coming from Krishna, then we actually learn to love Krishna more. We showed the Virata Rupa.
And that is like from our small picture of pain, we see the big picture that pain is a part of the world, but that doesn’t satisfy the heart. So, just like that, it will really pacify Arjuna. So, there might be some renunciation or sense of meaninglessness that might come temporarily when we see misery, but people may withdraw from ordinary life, go to some forest or something like that to process the grief.
But after we go to that big picture, then we need to come to the biggest picture, we can say that is ultimately the most Krishna’s love for us. So, Krishna has been embracing us always through the person who was there with us and through the person. And even if that person is gone, Krishna’s embrace is still there.
And then we also talked about this point of when we are going through this grief journey, it’s important for us to find the ways like loving guidance of devotees by which we can actually perceive Krishna’s love. So, and you talked several points about the Gopi’s love for Krishna that we talked about three kinds of, not just three kinds of love, but three kinds of relationship with love. That’s a nice point.
Then, when we are processing our grief, there might be even anger toward God. And Krishna is ready to accept that. Krishna doesn’t see that as a sign of faithlessness.
We talked about the Gopi saying that even anger in the Gopi Gita that, in the Rapa Das Panchadya that, even anger should be directed toward the Lord. So, that means that if we feel let down, if we feel angry, that also we accept and we move through that. Then toward the end, you also mentioned about your father’s departure and how still the part of him lives with you.
So, when we don’t see ourselves as somebody’s grieving, it’s not that we solve their grief problem. Rather, it is Krishna who will solve that grief problem and we can act as pointers or assistants in helping them move toward Krishna. And when we do that, that’s how we actually, they grow and we also grow through that.
So, ultimately, rather than say, separating love, separating love into say mundane or say sacred in terms of devotees or separating love in terms of love with devotees and love for Krishna, we see that it’s all connected. That there can be higher and higher levels of purity that we come to. But if we see that ultimately, all of existence is ultimately meant to, through love and through loss, it is meant to take us toward Krishna.
Then we can act. So, Bhakti, there are 2-3 points which you made about Bhakti. Bhakti is like working on the heart.
It’s the movement. So, movement is actually meant to move our hearts ultimately toward Krishna. Move our heart towards each other in love and towards Krishna.
So, if we are really going to be bhaktas, then we don’t run away from the work of the heart and grief sometimes forces us to do that work of the heart. And just as Arjuna voluntarily came forward to confront the reality of the situation, similarly, we can also come forward and we emerge till we… and we move ahead till the last point as for a devotee, the body is too little a vehicle to contain the love that they want to offer. And that’s how they get elevated to a spiritual body.
So, thank you very much. This is inspiring and I’m sure that this will really enrich many, many devotees in this discussion. And thank you so much for your time, Prabhu.
Well, thank you for yours and wonderful connecting with you, Chaitanya Charanjee. And I’m happy to serve your heart and anyone else’s heart. That’s what we’re here to do.
Amazing. Thank you. Look forward to association again in the future.
Will do. I also. Thank you.