​How can a visually challenged person practice bhakti?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
aren’t programmed for that question, how can a visually challenged person advance in bhakti actually we are all visually challenged because the biggest visual challenge is to see the supreme object of all vision, that is Krishna that Krishna is the nectar who is meant to be drunk with our eyes however we are caught at a material level of reality wherein we can’t perceive that higher reality and if you consider visual challenge as not being able to see normal reality, what is day to day reality, but to not see the highest reality that is a far more crippling visual challenge, so from the bhakti perspective, anyone who is not able to see Krishna they are all visually challenged now of course from a practical perspective, a person who is visually challenged has a lot of issues which other people don’t have a lot of difficulties and challenges in doing the many activities that other people just do normally so while dealing with the situation now there are certain forms of bhakti which are said to be done with the eyes for example when Parikshit Maharaj described that with the eyes he beheld the beautiful deities of Krishna and with the eyes they also recognized that we can behold, we can see devotees we can have darshan of devotees, we can have darshan of Krishna both and of course we can do many services practically also for Krishna when we have eyes at the same time if we see the eyes are also the source of the strongest temptation in this world it is by the eyes that we get attracted to the sense of objects and it is by the attraction to the sense of, primarily by the eyes not exclusively, but primarily by the eyes that we get attracted to the sense of objects and then we may get bound by that so what is what is from a normal perspective deprivation may also turn out to be actually a protection how the world views of materialists and spiritualists are opposite Krishna says that what is night for all living beings is day for the self-realized so of course if we have eyes we should use them in Krishna’s service and we can see them as blessings but if we consider it from the spiritual perspective inability to see can also save one from a lot of temptation and agitation and that can be a blessing the practice of bhakti requires us to be able to devotionally reinterpret reality whatever is happening we try to perceive it analyze it in a way that is favorable for our bhakti so that is the art which we all need to learn and with respect to big visual challenge we can find out what all services we can do within our limitation what are the services that we like to do what are the services we are good at doing and we focus on them especially for someone who is habituated to a particular kind of physical challenge after sometime it just becomes a part of life and it’s not something which has to stay prominently in one’s consciousness constantly usually it doesn’t stay also so if we are repeatedly feeling deprived that oh I am not able to do that I am not able to do that we need to remember that one definition of surrender is also to not one definition one aspect of surrender is that accepting whatever situation we are in and not putting conditions for our service to Krishna yes certainly if we had eyes we could have served Krishna better maybe if I had a healthy leg I could have served Krishna better if somebody else had more wealth they could have served Krishna better somebody else had greater intelligence they could have served Krishna better yes we all can say that with some more facilities we could have served Krishna better but bhakti also means that we accept whatever situation we are in ultimately it is by Krishna’s will and we strive to serve Krishna in that situation surrender means to do what we can with what we have now and once we start using what we have in Krishna’s service we actually start experiencing higher spiritual satisfaction and that enables us to resist that enables us to neglect the temptation which you might get to feel sorry for ourselves and another advantage that we can have when we are visually challenged is that we can become more alert to other senses for example sound sound is a primary mode through which we learn we all learn and shabda is very much influential in spiritual growth so usually people who are visually challenged their other senses often become quite sharp because those are senses they use for functioning so we can hear more and of course for practicing bhakti we need gyan chakshu we need to see with the eyes of knowledge and quite often the eyes of flesh and the eyes of the head the eyes of the head means gyan chakshu we could say they give conflicting perceptions so gyan chakshu tells us that this world is not a place of pleasure the seeming pleasures are actually ways to misery but the charma chakshu the eyes of flesh they tell us that no there is so much pleasure who says that there is no pleasure over here why should we deprive ourselves by believing that there is no pleasure so in this way there is a conflict which most of us have to face and believing in the charma chakshu is natural because the eyes are required for navigating and we unthinkingly use the eyes for navigating so even when it comes to perceiving aspects which we should be perceiving through philosophical vision we just focus on the sensory vision so that conflict can be avoided if we understand Krishna and the truth that Krishna is going to reveal they are primarily perceived through the intelligence buddhi grahayam atindriyam when Krishna talks about samadhi in 6.20-23 at that time he says that state of samadhi and the happiness thereof is perceived by buddhi grahayam atindriyam sukham atyantikam yathat buddhi grahayam atindriyam sukham atyantikam it is ultimate happiness that is experienced and it is buddhi grahayam it is experienced with the intelligence atindriyam it is beyond the senses so by focusing on the fact that the ultimate blessing is actually available through spiritual vision and we progress towards spiritual vision by cultivating an intellectual vision and quite often the sensual vision it it deprives us of spiritual vision and it distracts us from the intellectual vision by contemplating this we can actually free ourselves from any feelings of self pity or self deprivation or that we may have had and we can see that what we lack may be a very big challenge in material life but actually in spiritual life what we lack may well be a can be transformed into a blessing by which we can minimize the distractions and focus more firmly on the path to transcendence by operating in the world through jnana chakshu and thus progressing about the practice of bhakti towards prema chakshu so by jnana chakshu we can understand how to act more and more and by prema chakshu we start perceiving Krishna with our spiritual vision once the love for him is awakened does it answer your questions? thank you