How can bhakti help me when my grandfather is suffering terribly with a terminal disease?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna certainly a distressing situation and what bhakti tells us is not that there will be no suffering in the world but that suffering will not have the last say in life bhakti tells us that love and service are eternal and they go on beyond the sickness and the suffering of the body and the inevitable destruction of the body so when we have a spiritual vision we understand that beyond the suffering condition that a person is in there is a soul that is pure the soul is sacred and the soul is holy and that soul has a brighter life beyond the body in the future without a spiritual vision there is no point for that person to live and for us to care for that person but whatever be the situation of suffering that a person may be that is not never final because that is something which relates to body which is definitely a source of suffering right now but it is not going to last beyond that there is a life of spirit that is available in the future and for us also the service that we are doing for such a person who is in suffering condition is not just something that often without a spiritual world view it is just something which is a burden that we have to do till the inevitable happens but we understand that this is a way we express our love and service to that person and through him to God and that is something which is through our eternal credit so anyone who promises that there is no suffering in the world or there will be no suffering in the world is not telling the truth but what Bhakti tells us is that the suffering in this world is not meaningless it can become purposeful and it can take us to an auspicious end if we persevere in the right way so what makes suffering especially intolerable is not just the suffering but the meaninglessness of the suffering when a soldier goes to a war field at that time the soldier knows that he may die but the soldier is happy in a sense to go on the battlefield to defend the nation because he knows that the suffering is meaningful on the other hand somebody just meets with an accident on the road and then suffers and dies such a death is especially painful because it seems so meaningless so what primarily aggravates our suffering is not just the suffering but meaningless suffering so when the suffering is meaningful for example if we just get an accidental cut while shaving or while cutting something that’s meaningless but when we get a cut during an injection or surgery although the pain is the same that suffering is meaningful because it leads to a positive end so without a spiritual world view the suffering in the world ultimately becomes meaningless and especially when the suffering comes from a debilitating terminal disease where there is no hope of the recovery of health then the suffering just becomes entirely meaningless but when we understand that all of us are souls and the body is just outer shell then we understand that at a spiritual level there is hope and grace that is always available and that can be accessed so the situation is very unfortunate, very sad and we recognize that we need all the support that we can get and that we can give to a person who is sick in this way at the same time without a spiritual world view this whole situation just becomes an exercise in suffering for oneself and suffering for others but the spiritual view helps us to understand that everything has a purpose and that purpose is everything has meaning and purpose and that is that suffering in this world ultimately gives way to a higher and long lasting happiness that is there at the spiritual level so what can we as individuals do in such a situation you know when we have a spiritual world view if we do not have a proper philosophical understanding then we expect that our spiritual practice should remove the suffering but that is not that is not essentially the promised result of spirituality when the child is born the parents try to shield the child from all the suffering the parents may have some financial difficulties but the parents don’t talk about that in front of the children so one way of expressing love is to shield the person from suffering but as the child grows up then the parents may tell about whatever challenge is there and the child joins in facing those problems and that is a more a deeper love, it is a reciprocated love so one kind of love shields us from suffering other kind of love helps us to share the suffering and to grow closer to that suffering so if we expect that our spirituality should forever shield us from suffering then we are staying in an infantile state which cannot last for long but what spirituality does is it helps us to grow closer to each other and to grow closer to God through suffering so it helps us to understand that at this level although there is suffering, beyond this level there is a lasting hope that is there there is so immediately speaking there may not be any solution but at a physical level for the health but when we have a long term view of our life and long term view of others life, long term means beyond this life then we understand that by the way we deal with the person who is sick right now we can through that suffering be helping that person to move closer and closer towards the higher happiness, towards the brighter future and not only that through the service that we are doing we can help that person go closer towards God also so one of our devotee doctors Vishwagoprabhu he got a daughter who whose childbirth was extremely sick and constantly suffering and the doctor he was a doctor but he was helpless and the prediction was that, the prognosis was that she will live for a very short while and throughout her life she will be under great suffering then he went to his spiritual master Raghunath Maharaj and he said that we were trying to serve Krishna throughout our life and then although he did not ask the question, the question was very much there so Raghunath Maharaj replied and he said at this stage you have two choices one is to think that everything happens by chance and that you just got by luck and the other is that you got there is God and he has some plan for this so the devotee said that yes I believe that there is God and he has a plan but he just can’t hold on the plan then Raghunath Maharaj told him that you know in this world whenever we offer love to anyone, it is always to induce some selfishness we want something from that person even the parents love their children they expect that the children will grow up and expand their glory and fame so the whole process of growing in life is to ultimately grow in selfless love and through this child who will never be able to fulfill any of your dreams so God is helping you to by giving you an opportunity to grow in selfless love so if you have the right vision you are seeing that God has made this arrangement for you in this life then you can see that this is an opportunity for learning selfless love and every single care that you offer to this child, actually you are offering to God to this child and he is accepting and he is helping you grow and then this vision completely transformed the family’s view of the child when she had an older daughter and this younger daughter she would always constantly cry and she would be saying so our older sister observed that sometimes when birds would fly in the sky and birds would chirp this baby girl would become a little silent so in order to help her baby sister, she went to a nearby desert park or where early morning she would hear the way that the birds chirp and she would try to imitate them and she came and started singing those bird sounds for her and not only was the younger sister pacified by that, the baby was pacified by that but through this whole process this devotee she became a very good singer and now she is a very very prominent singer in the devotee community and she sings beautiful songs and tracks many people so not only that they found that through caring for this kid girl, they brought the whole community together they realized how ultimately although science with all its technology cannot touch this baby but now when simply and emotionally expressed, it can touch even this child so the parents over the years they said that although having this baby was a great difficulty but what we learn through that is something which we cherish throughout our life this is an example of how suffering which seems pointless and hopeless when we see from a spiritual perspective it can help us grow and grow in a way that will help us not just in the future eternal life but also in this life so how specifically we can deal with the situation of a grandfather who is terminally sick that if we pray to Krishna Krishna Krishna can give us inspiration but rather than expecting that bhakti should just remove the problem we can pray that we can get guidance of how we can help the person who is sick through the situation and how we can ourselves learn what is to be learned over there through the situation so rather than seeing God as apathetic or not helping we should see how God is giving us the opportunity to learn something which will be of lasting value and if we pray towards the situation if we make our prayers conditional that this situation should be solved by healing this disease then that sort of prayer closes us to other forms of guidance and insight that God can give us so although it is not easy in such a situation to offer a prayer for an open heart but if we can offer that we will find that there are ways in which we will be enriched and we will be able to help that person in ways that Krishna will reveal in our heart so my prayers are with you and I hope that you can help your grandfather in this situation and you can yourself