Has God ordained the future trajectory of all living beings?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Actually Krishna knows the future.
Krishna has ordained the trajectory of life for all living beings. When he wants people will come back to him. I think that we have free will as an illusion.
I would say that there are three distinct factors in the way we act. There is God’s will, there is free will and there is evil. So, now if God has programmed everyone to act in a particular way, then that would mean that God is responsible for everyone’s suffering.
That would make God a terrible sadist. If people act in terrible ways in this world, then it’s like some people smoke, some people drink, some people do terribly self hurting habits. So, it’s like a mother who has a child and the mother makes the child beat its head against the wall, beat its head against the wall, bleeding bitterly.
So, if everything that has happened is ordained by Krishna, then he is responsible for all the suffering and that would make God not merciful but heartless, heartlessly cruel, utterly sadistic, who gets pleasure in other’s suffering. Not only that, there are different people who act in different ways. People act in brutal, unspeakable ways.
So, all those actions which are done by different people are also done by God. That would mean that God not only does things which make people hurt themselves, God also makes people do things that hurt others. So, there is no meaning to karma because what is bad karma is also done by God.
So, it is God is making me do bad things and then God is making me suffer for doing those bad things. So, that becomes, such a person is not God, such a person is shaitan. Such a person is the worst demon that any living being can imagine.
And the world would be better off without believing in such a God. So, Krishna is surudam sarva-bhutana. If we consider logical implications of seeing that God is the doer of everything.
See, God is the doer of everything in the sense that He is the sanctioner of everything. But He is not the impeller of everything. If somebody wants to do something, if that person has the karmic endowment to do that, God allows him to do that.
I will give you an example from the Mahabharata that Duryodhana wanted to fight the war and Krishna himself went as Shantinath. Don’t fight the war. Krishna offered him peace on the most accommodating terms.
Now, Duryodhana refused. Krishna is God, Duryodhana is just one soul. Krishna appealed to the intelligence, appealed to the common sense, but Duryodhana did not listen.
And the result was when Krishna told him, if you are not ready to listen, Krishna offered him, he told him just give five images. But Duryodhana did not listen to that also. So, here Krishna himself is appealing to Duryodhana.
So, Krishna is telling Duryodhana don’t do something. So, if Krishna having a perverse sense of drama that he tells him don’t do it. Actually, if you see, Krishna is a Shambh, Dham, Bhed and Danda.
Everything to try to persuade Duryodhana to not fight the war. And yet, Duryodhana fights the war. So, what is the point of Krishna appealing to Duryodhana? If he is only making Duryodhana do everything, then, as I said, the idea that God is responsible for all the unspeakable atrocities that happen in the world.
That makes God into the worst demon that a human being can imagine. So, God is the sanctioner of what the human beings want to do. If the human beings have the karma to do that.
Hitler had the karma by which he would have become extremely powerful. But he used that power to kill millions of people. He could have used that power to administer over a kingdom and do good to others also.
So, God, he sees, he is present in our hearts and he sees our desires and based on whether we deserve, he allows the desire to be fulfilled. So, yes, you could say the seed is present in a particular place by God’s arrangement. The weeds are present in another place by God’s arrangement.
But when we talk about God’s arrangement, there are two things in it. There is God’s plan and there is God’s purpose. So, if there is a school, in that school there is an exam and some students fail in the exam.
Some students pass in the exam. Now, the school’s plan includes both. If the student fails, there is an arrangement.
You can appear for the exam again, you can do this course again and you can move onwards. So, the students failing or passing, both are included in the purview of the school’s plan. But the students failing is not the purpose of the school.
The purpose of the school is the student’s education, student’s elevation to the next standard. So, we could say students passing, students failing, everything is within the arrangement of the school. But the students failing is not the intention of the school.
So, there is a difference between God’s plan and God’s purpose. So, even when Duryodhana acts in an evil way, that is within the purview of Krishna’s plan. That means Krishna’s plan is so inclusive and dynamic that even if a person acts in a wrong way, teachers want the student to pass, the school wants the student to go to higher grade.
But if the student fails, the school has the plan to accommodate them and help them move on. Similarly, Krishna’s plan includes different living beings choosing differently and getting the consequences accordingly. But Krishna’s purpose is like the school’s purpose, to elevate the students to higher and higher level.
Similarly, Krishna’s purpose is that we all make wise choices, we all renounce the illusion of freedom, we all use our free will to harmonize with his will. And thus we unite with him in pure love. The idea of individuality and the idea of separateness, they are two different things.
I would say both of us are talking about the same thing, but we are just coming from different frameworks. The idea that we are separate living beings who can do whatever we want, whenever we want, the idea of absolute separateness is an illusion. The idea of individuality in the sense that we have to choose to acknowledge that I don’t have freedom, that is something which we have to do on our own.
So everything that happens is Krishna’s arrangement. But that doesn’t mean everything that happens is what Krishna wants it to happen. The school doesn’t want the students to fail.
But if the students fail, the school accommodates that. So when we say God knows the future, that does not mean that every one of us is a programmed being who is meant to act accordingly. The whole idea of future, let’s take it and I’ll give two examples to illustrate this.
You know the well known story of when Krishna’s appearance is forecast. At that time Kamsa is driving the chariot of Devaki after she is just married. And then he hears the Akashvani saying that, oh, a child of Devaki will kill you.
Now that Kamsa becomes so angry, so fearful that he catches the hair of Devaki and is about to lop off her head. At that time Vasudev tries to protect his wife by using various strategies. One of the strategies he uses at that time is, he says, oh Kamsa, life and death are destined and nobody can change destiny.
So why are you doing this terribly sinful activity of killing a woman, killing your own sister, killing your own sister on her wedding day. This is like you can say sin, sin square and sin cube. Terribly sinful activity he is doing.
Why are you doing that to avoid something which if it is destined is going to happen. Now at this point Vasudev could have turned the reasoning around and he could have thought that if Devaki’s death is destined then what am I doing trying to stop Kamsa. Why am I trying to stop Kamsa at all? Because the Vedic culture, the Vedic wisdom is not destiny centered.
It is duty centered. It is all of us have a particular duty to do. And Kamsa as a Kshatriya he had a duty to protect but he was giving up his duty.
So he was told it is destiny. Don’t give up your duty to avoid something which is destined it is going to happen. Whereas for Vasudev his duty was I have to protect my wife.
So even if her death is destined that’s fine. That’s not fine with me. That will happen.
But I have to do my duty to protect her. So I would say that destiny is a whole different subject. Destiny refers to that which is ordained.
But broadly speaking now what is ordained? What is ordained is certain events in our life are ordained. Destiny is like a weather forecast. It forecasts that okay today is going to be cold, today is going to rain, today is going to snow.
Now none of us can change. If it is going to snow, it is going to snow. But what we do that’s up to us.
I can go out into the snow and I will get frozen without any preparation. I will get frozen. I can stay at home, I will be protected or I can go out with protection and I will not be so much damaged.
So destiny determines what happens to us. Destiny doesn’t determine how we respond. Destiny doesn’t determine our actions.
It determines our situations. The situations that we encounter in our life journey they are determined by destiny. The actions that we choose in those situations are up to us.
So when Krishna says he knows the future, what that essentially means is that he knows the various trajectories, the various options. It’s like there is a big road map. So I at right now can only see the road here.
Okay, I can see the straight road or I can see this fork. But somebody who has the whole picture, they can say take this road, you are going to meet big traffic over there. If you take this road, you are not going to see the traffic and go clearly.
So Krishna can see the whole map. Krishna can see the whole map. In that sense he knows everything.
But when we come to a fork, it is up to us to choose. God’s knowledge of the future is like our knowledge of the past. I repeat God’s knowledge of the future is like our knowledge of the past.
Our knowledge of the past is knowledge without intervention. I know I woke up and I did this. Yesterday I did that.
So I know that but there is no intervention. Now for us, we can’t do any intervention. For God, he can do intervention but he chooses not to do it.
So God’s knowledge of the future, if you want to say that if God knows the future, then there would be, if God knows the future in the absolute sense, in the sense that everything, every single thing about the future he knows, then there would be a contradiction in the definition of God itself. Why? Because there are two defining attributes of God. God, he can do anything and he knows everything.
Omnipotence and Omniscience. So now if he knows the future in the sense that the whole future is mapped out completely, then does he have the power to change the future? If he has the power to change the future, that means he doesn’t know the future. If he knows the future and the future is completely mapped out, that means he doesn’t have the power to change the future.
So this is one of the standard atheistic arguments which they use. They say that the very definition of God is self-contradictory. Because the two defining attributes that he knows everything and he can do anything.
These two are contradictory. But the fundamental understanding is that God is Omnipotence is Omniscience. These are not attributes that he is stuck with.
It’s like somebody is a very tall person. Now they are stuck with their tallness. There is a load over, they are still stuck with their tallness and they have to come out and they have to go from there.
So God is Omnipotent, God is Omniscient. But he is not stuck with his Omnipotence, he is not stuck with his Omniscience. Ultimately underlying all his attributes is his loving nature.
That is his Omnibenevolence. Omnibenevolence means he wants the good for everyone. And for fulfilling his Omnibenevolent nature, sometimes he will manifest his Omnipotence and sometimes he will manifest his Omniscience.
So when he is fighting, when he is on the Kurukshetra war field, at that time he tells Arjuna that if you don’t fight this war, by my arrangement the enemies are already dead. But you become an instrument and then you will get the credit. So he is given two options.
Arjuna, you have to choose. If you become my instrument, I will act through you and you will get the glory. But if you don’t do that, even without you, they will be killed.
So his Omnipotence is that he can do whatever he wants. But he gives us the free will to choose how we act. And if we use our free will properly, then he accommodates things so that we get benefited by that.
So God’s Omnipotence and his Omniscience, they are harmonized by his Omnibenevolence. So it is his Omnibenevolence that is absolute and his Omnipotence and his Omniscience are used to serve the purpose of his Omnibenevolence. So God is our greatest well-wisher and he wants us, wants the very best happiness, the very best joy for us.
He doesn’t want and he certainly won’t make us do the things which will bring suffering upon us. He wants only that which is best for us. But if we make certain choices which will bring suffering upon us, he includes those choices within his plan and he keeps, he has like a plan, a good manager has plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D. So like that Krishna has many plans and he knows which choice will take us into which plan.
Whichever choice we make, Krishna will accommodate that choice within his ultimate purpose of getting us back to him. But if we, if I take the right road, I will get to the decision immediately. If I take a wrong road, still my Google map is flexible enough, it will tell, now turn left, now do this.
Even if I take another wrong turn, still Google map, now you do this. If I still take a wrong turn, still it will tell me. Now that means, however many wrong turns I take, Google map is there to guide me to the right destination.
But the more wrong turns I take, the longer it will take me to get to the destination. So there is a plan which includes all my wrong choices. But the purpose is not that I make the wrong choices.
So in that sense, everything is known to Krishna. Like whichever path, wherever I go, Krishna will adjust his plan and give me a way to come from there back to him. But that doesn’t mean whichever choice I take is determined by him.
He knows the connection between choices and consequences. And if you take this choice, you will have this consequence. And from there to come back, you will have to take this choice.
But if from there also you take this choice, you will go here. From there to come here, you will have this choice. So Krishna has the whole map mapped out, so that whichever choice we make, still he will be there to give us a path to come to him.
So in that sense, the future is ordained. Like the various choices which may happen, what consequences may happen by that, that’s mapped out. But within that, which choice we take, that is up to us.