How can killing for one’s country be considered love?

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Transcript

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How can war really be love when we are going to kill? Yeah, the nature of love at the material level is that when we love someone that love also implies excluding someone else.
What that means is that, let me talk from a very broad example. Say, a lion loves its cub. For the sake of loving its cub, the lion will have to go and kill a deer.
The lion kills the deer and gives it to its cub. So, the nature of life in this world is that there is competition. Darwinian evolution possesses that there is the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest.
So, there is the struggle. And when our love is expressed within this arena of struggle at the material level, so loving one, loving one people, loving someone often means excluding someone else. And not just excluding someone else, from this example of nature, it can even mean killing someone else.
Now, that is not ultimate love. That is not real love. Now, we may say that war is bad and that is true.
But often to avoid war, we have peacekeeping forces. So, peacekeeping force. Yeah, that is not very beneficial either.
That is not sustainable. Anytime we are telling somebody else what to do, it is not loving. Exactly.
Yeah, I agree. But suppose there was a mother who said, you know, my child can do whatever she wants. And the child goes and stands in the middle of a street with all the traffic going here and there, all around.
And the mother says, I love my child. I will not tell her anything to do. Then the government will come and say, you know, you are not fit to love your child.
Well, teaching until, you know, guidance that someone is capable of, you know, that is the point of being a parent, like teaching them how to make the right decisions, you know, whatever, right, wrong, whatever. But I do not know. There is a lot more to it.
I agree. I agree with your point that there is, in today’s world, war is often a tool for rationalizing one’s own control over others. And even the idea that we can tell others what they should do, that also smacks of something like patriarchy.
So, there are all these geopolitical realities today which are unpleasant. But although war is an unpleasant, not just unpleasant, horrible feature of the world, but even as I said, peacekeeping force. Even to keep peace, sometimes force is required.
War or violence cannot be entirely eliminated. The attempt to eliminate it can often subject oneself to more violence. Anyway, my point was, I was not defending war.
I was simply giving from conventional, contemporary conceptions of love. I was using that as a launching pad for talking about a spiritual understanding of love. So, love for the nation is something which is commonly talked about.
In every country it is talked about. I am not here making a statement about whether it is right or wrong. I am not even making a statement here that if somebody goes and fights a war, whether that is necessarily a right thing or a wrong thing.
In many cases, it might be a wrong thing. My simple point is that this is often thought of as an act of love. A person, say in India, when India was supposed to gain independence, one of the political leaders, Gandhi is very famous for having been an apostle for non-violence.
Yes, and he was an apostle for non-violence. But at the same time, there was also an attempt for getting Indian independence through political uprising, through violent means. So, one of the leaders at that time, he said that, India, if you come and join me in the army, the only thing I promise you is sweat, hunger, thirst, blood and death.
And still people responded. There was a, I don’t know, an American patriot, maybe some of you might be knowing. He said, my only regret in life is that I have only one lifetime to serve America.
So now, the point which I am making is not either these are right or wrong. Simply point I’m making is, these people genuinely believed that they were loving. So, I am taking the point, sorry, possibly, possibly, I’m not denying that.
See, there is an original longing for love. And that can be expressed in various ways. Some of those ways may be right.
Some of those ways may be wrong. That’s perfectly possible. I’m not talking about the specific ways, those specific ways in which love is being expressed right now.
I’m talking about the underlying longing for love. And we are trying to understand that where does it come from and how it can be fulfilled. The specific expressions are given just to underscore that there is something which is a universal longing for love.
The love can be often expressed in a very perverse way at times. That’s very much possible. So, just like the Bhagavad Gita itself explains that the soul can get covered in various ways.
There can be white soothing light, which if it is covered with, say, a red film, then that light can become a jarring red. So, similarly, the soul is originally pure, the soul is noble, but it can be covered by various misconceptions. And those misconceptions can distort that original longing of the soul in very perverse ways.
So, this is called, especially in Sanskrit, Bhagavad Gita calls this Tamoguna. Tamoguna or the mode of ignorance. So, in the mode of ignorance, that which is good is considered to be bad.
So, buddhi, Krishna uses the word intelligence. Intelligence, normally we think intelligence is a good thing, but Krishna talks about intelligence in ignorance. That means, people, even when, say, somebody makes a bomb and makes a plan, a terrorist attack and becomes a suicide bomber and, say, blows up something, to do that also intelligence is required.
But that is a perverted intelligence, where it is being used for destructive purposes. So, adharmam adharmam itiya. That which is right, a person thinks to be wrong.
That which is wrong, a person thinks to be right. So, in every way, it gets distorted. So, it is definitely possible and the Bhagavad Gita does acknowledge that intelligence also can be perverted.
So, we are not talking about the perversions. We are talking about the original root. So, love, the longing for love is at the very core of our being.
And different people understand it differently, express it differently, but we are going to the core and trying to understand where it comes from and how it can be fulfilled. Does it address you, Krishna? Yeah, I think we have to love ourselves. You know, I think that’s what we need to be telling people, like, it starts from within, you know,