How to Speak Effectively & Resolve Conflicts part 1 By HG Chaitanya Charan Prabhu

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
i’ll just explain this verse so i’ll take this verse i’ll take one more verse let me see if i can open both of them together we’ll just i’ll explain the verse we’ll decide a few times and we’ll discuss this is knowledge in the mode of ignorance so here can can you see this also from there so yet to krishna what a kasmin krishna is saying over here that yet to those who think krishna but krishna is everything a kasmin those who take one thing and equate it with everything yet to krishna vadhi kasmin can you recite it so karye karye is action saktam is attached oh i to come is here and it’s it’s not causeless in the sense of ahaituki bhakti here it is ahaituka in the sense of not considering the full picture not considering proper cause and effect karye saktam ahaitukam so then a tattvaarthavad so tattvaartha is the proper understanding of the truth tattvaartha the meaning of the truth alpamcha alpa is there is some knowledge but it is meagre knowledge a tattvaarthavad alpamcha that tamasam udaharitam that is known as to be in tamoguna so krishna is talking here about knowledge in the mode of ignorance the tamasam udaharitam so yet to krishna vadhi kasmin karye saktam ahaitukam a tattvaarthavad alpamcha that tamasam udaharitam yet to krishna vadhi kasmin karye saktam ahaitukam a tattvaarthavad alpamcha that tamasam udaharitam so let’s try to recite it together now not this not responsibly but collectively together yet to krishna vadhi kasmin karye saktam ahaitukam a tattvaarthavad alpamcha that tamasam udaharitam two more times yet to krishna vadhi kasmin karye saktam ahaitukam a tattvaarthavad alpamcha that tamasam udaharitam yet to krishna vadhi kasmin karye saktam ahaitukam a tattvaarthavad alpamcha that tamasam udaharitam thank you so disconnected connected again so today in this first part we’ll talk about broadly how conflicts originate and then in that itself we’ll talk how to minimise the possibility of the origination of the conflicts and then in the second part today evening we’ll talk about how conflate conflicts escalate and then how to prevent that escalation now broadly speaking i was with uh i was just in one city and then it is said about shila prabhupada it is said that he built a house in which the whole world can live so this is what you’re selling that shila prabhupada built a house in which the whole world can fight what he meant by that was it was not sarcastic what he was saying is that if somebody comes to spiritual life so they have to have a strong inner compass because practising spirituality means to some extent going against the way of the world and once we have a strong inner compass then when we start practising spiritual life also it’s not that inner compass will go away it needs to be there and because of that just as we may have differences with people who do not share our values in terms of this spiritual values versus material values even within the devotee community also it may happen that we may not be able to share or not everybody in the devotee community may share our values and that’s why the point is that shila prabhupada has built a house big enough in which people can have differences of opinion and just because of difference of opinion they don’t have to leave the house just like any house there always be some conflicts so when conflicts arise prabhupada has built a house big enough that despite having the conflicts we can live gracefully with it so now one of there are many reasons for conflicts occurring but at a basic level the in one sense we can say if somebody is trying to serve krishna somebody’s trying to practise bhakti then that is a unifying foundation for all of us and that is definitely true krishna says in the bhagavad-gita and then he says so yudhya is fight anusmara is remember now the thing is with respect to anusmara there is no competition in the sense that if i am remembering krishna that is not going to intrude for you in any way but when it comes to yudhya when it comes to actually serving in the world there is always going to be some competition simply because the resources in the world are limited there are limited resources so for example if we have a programme and say two people want to cook for the programme now one person wants to say let’s make halwa in the street somebody else says no no we make halwa all the time let’s make jalebi that’s a difference of opinion now we neither have the time nor the finances nor the bandwidth to actually make both we’ll have to make one choice so in terms of remembrance there will not be differences in terms of service there will be differences so at a basic level because we are doing service in the material world there will be some differences say if we want to expand outreach okay we have a programme here should we do a programme in that area or that area now we have only enough resources to go to one place at a time so then there will be some differences because of that so in one sense these differences are unavoidable now when these differences arise so how do we tackle them some differences could be saved as a programme in India if we have a programme should we do it in English or Hindi now we may decide that’s based primarily on the speaker knows both languages then for the speakers speakers consideration is primary the second is what is the audience preference and beyond that we may decide that okay this is the particular demographic we are trying to reach and then based on that we may choose a particular language so now some people may not be happy with that so the fact is when we are trying to remember Krishna there is no conflict but when we are trying to serve Krishna in this world there will be differences of opinion so in one sense you could say if this is the Krishna consciousness movement in this Krishna consciousness movement we can say that Vrindavan is the place where everyone happily remembers Krishna so Vrindavan and Kurukshetra both have to exist side by side so what happens in Kurukshetra fighting happens so it’s like we have to be in Vrindavan and Kurukshetra almost at the same time so and we want to make sure that all of it doesn’t become Kurukshetra and although we would like all of it to be Vrindavan that’s practically not possible because this is the world even if we don’t have differences of opinion among each other we may have difference of opinion with the world and some amount of conflict is going to come so this combination of Vrindavan and Kurukshetra is actually seen in the Bhagavad Gita in 913 and 914 913 is talking about inner remembrance so describe these Mahatmas these great devotees what do they do there is no distraction for them they’re just immersed in the remembrance of Krishna but then the next verse is so it says they’re always glorifying me but then they have to endeavour and not just endeavour endeavour with great determination now normally for us when we are trying to be sadhakas for us our mind wanders here there and everywhere and then we have to endeavour to refocus our mind but Krishna here in 9.13 is describing those people those great souls whose mind have no impurities their mind is already fixed on Krishna so there is no struggle in remembering Krishna for them but then why do they need determination so 9.13 is talking more about the inner remembrance so for inner remembrance there may be a struggle but it’s not a struggle against others the struggle with our own mind and senses but so they don’t need that determination they’re already purified but what Krishna says is if we have to glorify him in this world then one requires determination so for doing outer service even if we have great purity still determination will be required because there will be opposition so now when this is at a basic level if we understand Prabhupada says don’t expect utopia in this world Prabhupada says that each one of us is an individual and that’s why there will be some amount of differences that are unavoidable so the words which we discussed just now is the cause of avoidable problems so there are differences now differences we could say will be unavoidable because we are all individuals but from differences to conflicts now this are conflicts avoidable we could say maybe partly avoidable if there are differences sometimes just live and let live you know you do this I’ll do this but sometimes it’s not possible there’s only one thing can be done so there is some amount of conflicts but from conflicts what is something is actually hatred antipathy so hatred this is avoidable in fact this needs to be avoided now there is a difference between anger and hatred how many what what do you think is the difference between anger and hatred okay most of all how many of you think anger and hatred are the same thing there is a difference how many of you think there is no difference okay how many of you think there is a difference how many of you think the difference does not make any difference so what do you think is the difference between anger and hatred okay so hatred is continuous hatred is long lasting so it is what about anger yes generally anger is short-lived and then as a consequence of that there is one more difference anger generally is impulsive just get an urge and we feel a surge of anger within us we speak something we do something but hatred is not impulsive it is calculative calculative means that a person plants in in cold blood this is how i am going to hurt this person so for example duryodhan poisoning bheema was that impulsive or calculative calculative he had to get the poison he had to get exact quantity he planned a feast he said i have prepared a special delicacy for you so this is in one sense another way to difference is this is hot-headed whereas this is cold-blooded like in crime also i have a friend who is an investigator there are crimes of passion sometimes those are one of the most common crimes among one of the most common crimes among people who are not criminals that if you get angry with someone someone has betrayed us especially if there’s betrayal in love or something like that then there is a crime of passion so generally that is hot-headed but somebody who is who is a say a professional killer a contract killer somebody they will plan where is this person vulnerable so it’s cold-blooded so for us differences are unavoidable conflicts we can try to avoid but sometimes they may also be unavoidable but from conflicts we don’t want to go to hatred so this is okay this is where we want to avoid so we are talking about conflict conflict management one is we don’t want conflicts to regenerate to hatred and when they occur we want to resolve them as amicably as possible so now in i started with this topic of the knowledge in the mode of ignorance so when conflicts occur let’s first talk about the knowledge of ignorance and then i talk about how that is related with conflicts and normally we consider knowledge and ignorance to be opposite so normally if knowledge increases ignorance decreases so this is opposite but what does knowledge in the mode of ignorance mean now technically speaking this knowledge is more referring to perception knowledge can refer to you know there’s knowledge of physics knowledge of chemistry knowledge of internet or social media whatever that’s knowledge but so knowledge can refer to the body of knowledge or knowledge can also refer to the information that we’re doing so krishna in this particular context is referring to the way we take in information through the karmic indriyas do we take information through karmic indriyas no normally we take information through where the yeah the karmic indriyas and what are the other indriyas gyan indriyas so normally we take information through the gyan indriyas so normally if i want to know how much something is heavy then i’ll lift it up and i’ll i can okay this is not so heavy this is very heavy so even from the hands which are like a karmic indriya from there also we can gain some knowledge but normally gyana comes to the gyan indriyas so if i meet someone then i look at that person and say you know this person indian or non-indian person south indian north indian this person young middle-aged elderly so all that knowledge we get from gyan indriyas so krishna is talking about our perception over here so the way we perceive things it can be in sattva it can be in rajas it can be in tamas so that these three gunas sattva rajas tamas they can be understood many different ways one way is that some people make things happen some people watch things happen and some people wonder what happened so in sattva a person thinks plans and acts and make things happen in rajas person is very impulsive rushes into things i want to do this but i forgot this and i didn’t think about this and that thing happened what’s going on watch things happen and people in tamas they’re not even aware what happened just lost inside their head completely so that is the mode of ignorance now knowledge or perception in the mode of ignorance means what that if say this is a totality of reality if this is the whole situation and then i am observing from here now probably from here i can see only this much and that is fair enough because that’s what i can perceive but when i equate so yathu krishnavat ekasmin ekasmin is one fragment of reality but when i equate this with krishnavat means i equate this with the whole thing so when we equate one small part of a reality of a situation with all of the situation that’s when we end up getting knowledge in the mode of ignorance what does it mean in this case that we know something but in one sense what we know blinds us to what we don’t know i know this and that’s all there is to know you know you spoke like this how could you have spoken like this if you spoke like that you are a terrible person but try to understand in what context i was speaking it but how could you speak like that i don’t care for the context no we need to care for the context nowadays especially with social media any statement of anyone can be taken just one small section video can be taken out one audio click can be taken out and then that might be a part of a much bigger conversation but something taken out of context and this is what you spoke but look at the context no i don’t care so if when we say knowledge in the mode of ignorance the knowledge itself keeps us in ignorance we know something but what we know blinds us to what we don’t know so it is knowledge that perpetuates ignorance that’s why it’s called knowledge in the mode of ignorance so this is in for example seen in biases so now biases are biases true or untrue what do you think somebody is biassed you know say people in america might be biassed against indians sometimes or in india if you go to north india people might be biassed against south indians so are biases true or false okay how many of you think true true false okay so let’s see what it means now people have biases that is true but are the biases themselves true the way we think not therefore false you would say but you know there’s that’s one way of looking at it another way is that biases often they are based on valid experiences say somebody may say you know oh a person from this community and then that’s a valid experience we cannot deny that experience but from that valid experience what is done is a invalid extrapolation the extrapolation is everybody is like this so everybody in this community is like this so this is where stereotypes come up sometimes you know people from this demographic like this or people from this particular group are like that whatever so the experience may be true and we cannot deny the experience so that’s why there is knowledge but knowledge in the mode of ignorance means the knowledge blinds us to further knowledge is everybody like that now maybe it is possible but often it’s just extrapolation that is not based on facts so knowledge in the mode of ignorance leads us to distorted perception where we know a part of the reality but we think that i know all of the reality and many times so i said in this session we will talk about how conflicts originate so broadly speaking generally when conflicts originate they originate in there are many possible but one possibility is distorted perception a partial perception a fragmented perception so now when something has happened but we assume that something else has happened sometimes that that kind of inference might be right but sometimes it might be wrong so in the in the ramayan there is a story of wali and sugreev the wali and sugreev were brothers and not just brothers they were the best of friends they had fought many wars together they had defended their kingdom heroically and kishkindha had become such a formidable kingdom that hardly anyone would dare to attack wali was much stronger than sugreev but since sugreev was no weak link and even ravan had not dared to intrude in their territory they were that powerful and one time just something tragic happened there was a demon mayavi who came in challenged wali for a fight and now when wali came out sugreev came behind him now it was going to be a straight fight between wali and mayavi but sugreev came in case mayavi had some tricks and he had some other associates who might ambush wali but seeing both of them coming mayavi got scared and he fled and mayavi had been terrorising the vicinity for quite some time so wali decided to teach him a lesson and he gave chase and mayavi trying to desperately hide found there was a cave so actually it was an underground catacomb complex network of underground passages and caves so he just dove into that and then wali told sugreev you stay here in case there is a circular way by which he comes out and escapes you stop him i will go inside and deal with him sugreev said it’s a dark place better that i’ll come with you otherwise he may ambush you he said no you just stay here because wali was the elder brother sugreev agreed and wali went inside and sugreev waited and waited and waited and waited and somehow there was no noise at all so he started becoming more and more apprehensive and then finally he heard the streaming of mayavi but he did not hear even the slightest sound of wali he’s waiting and he slowly started seeing blood streaming out he started thinking somehow mayavi killed wali he was waiting just couldn’t hear any sound at all certainly if mayavi has killed wali then he must be far more powerful than what i thought and if he has killed me killed my brother then he will probably kill me also and if he kills me then he will devastate our entire kingdom well i have to stop him and so he decided that the best way to stop him is to not let him come out of the cave itself so he found a huge boulder and he pushed it down with great force and exertion that completely covered the entrance of the cave and then with a heavy heart he went back to the kingdom he informed the citizens about the demise of wali there was a nationwide statewide mourning and then the courtier said that every kingdom needs a king and wali’s son angad is still too young to be a king so you need to take up this post and more or less it is understood that he was the right hand person so he was a de facto successor and he with a heavy heart reluctantly as a service to his brother accepted one day when he was in court suddenly he heard some thunderous footsteps coming and taken him back and suddenly he heard some screaming he thought could it be and then suddenly wali burst into the scene while his eyes were bloodshot red and seeing wali alive sugri was delighted his brother was no longer dead but before he could express any joy he saw the sheer rage in the eyes and the face of wali and he immediately understood wali had suspected that he had been trapped intentionally by sugri so he jumped off his throne and raced forward and came forward to greet and offer his respects to his brother wali was so angry wali said raised his fist to beat him sugri was ready to be beaten he just wanted to get his brother’s anger over but his wali was so angry wali had been inside the cave and he had been searching for a long time and because he had been searching for a long time he had lost a lot of energy now that’s why normally when he would win he would be very exultant and he would roar but this time just to conserve his energy he had not roared and finally he had finished off mayavi and had come out when he came out he saw that the entrance was completely blocked and he called out to sugri there’s no sound said one thing has anything happened to sugri did he get was he killed by someone who trapped me here and he had to exert himself enormously as frustrated because already he had been tired fighting with mayavi chasing mayavi fighting with mayavi and now he had to push against his boulder with great effort and ingenuity finally he had pushed the boulder aside and managed to squeeze his way out and when he came out he saw there were no signs of any scuffle any bloodshed he saw the footsteps of sugri just going normally he started thinking what happened the suspicion started coming in his heart did it sugri betray me did he want the throne and that’s why did he actually try to have me trapped and then he charged back to the kingdom and when he saw sugri on the throne his suspicion was confirmed for him he felt so angry at being betrayed pounding sugri was trying to explain clarify but he was while he was in no mood to listen and then finally sugri realised that the way wali is right now he knew about his brother’s anger so he decided that let me just go away let me just go away right now when he cools down then i’ll come back but unfortunately sugri was running away was seen by wali as confirmation of his guilt he was not guilty why did he run away now after this the courtiers and others tried to clarify and the more they tried to clarify the more wali became angry with them he said he told you a story and you believed it did not one of you try to confirm did not one of you come there to see actually whether i’ve been killed how could you believe it like that you didn’t know my power do you think any ordinary demon could have killed me and the more anyone tried to tell sugri side of the story the more he got on their case and then afterward everyone fell silent now sugri tried to talk with wali but whenever wali would see him wali would just get angry with him try to beat him up so now generally normally when we say that if somebody’s angry let some time pass now with time with the passage of time what happens anger it cools down but it’s not that simple you know anger with a little time with some time it becomes cool but if there’s too much time it becomes cold it doesn’t become cool it becomes cold so what that means is it’s like if you have a if you have a fracture then then they’re told keep your hand in the cast so some some amount of time the hand has to be kept in the cast so that the wound is not aggravated but if the cast is not removed at all then the very cast that was meant to protect the hand will cause the hand to atrophy isn’t it so too much time passing is not healthy so here what happened was a classic and tragic example of knowledge in the mode of ignorance in one sense both sugri and wali they made wrong inference sugri made an inference that wali had been killed and wali made an inference that sugri had tried to kill him so both inferences were mistaken and both were understandable and like you can you say this is both are understandable misunderstandings it is fairly understandable that both of them could have thought this way but the difference was between sugri and wali was that for sugri there was too much at stake to verify why because if wali had actually been killed and if he went inside to see and that demon ambushed him over there he would be killed now for wali there was not so much risk while he was anyway stronger than his brother now while he was already in his kingdom he had all the resources of the kingdom with him he could have tried to verify you know we have lived together we have been brothers we have been friends what made you betray me like this how could you have done like this so unfortunately wali just did not give sugri a chance to tell his side of the story so that’s why what we know can blind us to what we don’t know and when this happens it’s when conflicts escalate so sometimes you know differences of opinion and misunderstandings because of that so that difference of opinion is one thing misunderstanding is another thing but they all sometimes are just unavoidable differences of opinion may be just because of individuality misunderstandings may just be because of circumstances so when conflicts arise conflicts can be differences of opinion we just see things differently but then there are misunderstandings so the if there’s a difference between misunderstanding and conflict difference of opinion difference of opinion is basically just perceive things in two different ways now when we say we want to build a temple now some people may say that you know we want to build a grand temple so that anybody who comes in they will just be wowed by it just this will become a tourist it will come on the tourist map of the city and then automatically it will attract people somebody else will say you know if you build a huge temple that will require so much financial anxiety and instead of the temple being a spiritual place where we can focus on spirituality the temple will cause us to be all money conscious instead of Krishna conscious for now now both could be right these are just two different ways of looking at things so the point here is that differences of opinion are different from misunderstandings so now basically in one sense conflicts are just you could say they are a part of life you know it’s it’s part of the course it’s a part of life it’s a part of so one is because of perceptions two people just pursue things differently the second is because of approaches two people have different approaches to doing things and the third is which is what we’ll discuss in the evening class that is results sometimes we do something and one thing works another thing doesn’t work and then that becomes clear that this is a different this is this is the approach we should adopt and this is the approach you should not adopt so right now we are focussing today on these two things that when differences come they could be because of perceptions and in perceptions the way to deal with this is through communication so what happens is that we often talk about others instead of talking with others talking about others actually it’s other way this is not what we should do this is what we should do but oh you know this person did like this and this person did like that this person did like that and if Vali and Sugriva just talked with each other the issue could have at least some amount of understanding could have come up so if the perception itself is wrong then it’s so vital to be able to talk so to talk and sometimes the approaches might be different the approaches means two people may just have two different priorities so two people may have different priorities that’s fine they have different ways of prioritising things working on things and there is no in Krishna consciousness it is you know we want harmony it’s we want a harmonisation we don’t want homogenisation what is homogenisation like everyone is a rock copy of everyone else you know it’s not that every devotee is a clone of every other devotee in fact i was reading a christian a christian book on the existence of god and there there was an interesting example given they said that actually by the arrangement of god everything is distinct and individual this is every particle of sand is individual you know every shell is individual every leaf is individual every petal of a rose is individual and every Hare Krishna monk is an individual that’s what they put over there so somebody who does not know all Hare Krishna monks may look very similar they all have shaven head they all wear some marking on the head they all wear saffron clothes so but the point is that we don’t want homogenisation it’s not that everybody has to have the same view we want harmonisation so it’s like homogenisation means there is no individuality at all when i started saying about Vrindavan in Vrindavan it is not all the gopis they look exactly alike it’s not all that all the gopis have the exact same skill set each gopi has her own personality each gopi has her own talents and each gopi does her own services so when they’re cooking for Krishna then they all plan i’ll cook this i’ll cook this there’s no homogeneity but there is harmony so harmonisation means that there is there is a shared purpose there is a shared purpose that unifies that brings harmony so for us we cannot have this thing of approaches cannot be the same so if there is communication then what will happen is the perceptions can be addressed and similarly with through communication there will be clarification okay this is what actually happened but through communication when there are approaches there will be not so much clarification as acceptance okay that’s the way you want to do things that’s fine that’s not the way i would do things but that’s okay i understand why you are doing that it’s in one sense when there is clarification we understand actually there is no disagreement only it was just a perception that was wrong but when there are approaches the difference so here basically it’s like how should i put it here there is no disagreement in perceptions when the perceptions okay let me put it here once there is clarification we realise there is no disagreement it was just a miscommunication but here we basically agree to disagree that i want to use this approach but okay this is the approach you want to use that is fine we agree to disagree so i’ll give two more short examples and i’ll conclude and we can have some questions so with respect to perceptions now i was once in the Radha Gopinath temple and i was i gave in a festival class and after the class a lot of question answers so i was attending the answers and after that went down to the kitchen for prasad and there had been a feast but because i came very late most of the feast was over and there had been a sweet but the sweet was over so i sat down to take prasad that’s really a little bad and then i saw there was another senior devotee and he was taking prasad and in his plate there had been sweet the sweet was over and then he was asking he was asking is there any more is there any sweet the server said no Prabhu there’s nothing and he’s asking another server is there any sweet i think everyone i said you know i was thinking you already had one serving and people the servers are telling you no why are you asking again and again and because he was a very senior devotee and that’s because he was asking that’s why everybody was running around is there some sweet is there some sweet and then finally as he was asking again and again i was just feeling i was really annoyed no no culture over here no courtesy and finally sometimes when devotees are serving food they make their own plates before so so one of the servers had made his own plate before and there was sweet in his plate so he brought his own plate and started serving sweet i said this is just too much you are taking somebody else’s sweet and then when that is just about to serve food so that sweet he said no i don’t want it he says you should give it to him he didn’t get the sweet and he pointed to me so now if that last part had not happened i would have gone for probably the rest of my life thinking you know this dude is so uncontrolled the senses so now again this is a completely understandable misunderstanding isn’t it so i pursued certain things and i made an inference from that but this is where our perception can lead us to inferences which may not be right i was in rishikesh just a few one month or so ago so rishikesh is the world’s yoga capital but nowadays it has also become a tourist destination people go there for bungee jumping and canoeing and other things like that you know if somebody goes up the himalayas and jumps down you say this is quite dangerous but you know we may not we may or may not want to do that kind of dangerous jumping but we all do an even more dangerous jumping that is jumping to conclusions so we see certain things and based on that we jump to conclusions so that is rather than jumping to conclusions okay let’s try to clarify let’s try to communicate and gain some clarification so where conflicts arise simply from fragmented perceptions then it’s it’s something which can very easily be avoided they generally now sometimes i play the role of a mediator so you know there is there’s one side of the story and then there’s always the other side of the story and then there is the story so neither side has the actual story the story is actually something third only so communication is extremely important communication for clarification and the second is with respect to approaches this is a huge subject i’ll just give us some simple points over here that different devotees even while serving krishna may prioritise different things i was in i had some online outreach i have a couple of websites so people ask me questions over there there’s one devotee who had joined and uh who had uh who had connected with me and i told that you can go to the local temple and then i had done a retreat and he had come for that retreat so he’s telling me i asked him so are you connected locally he said it’s a big mess over there i said really what happened he said there are two groups of devotees and you know one both of them are congregation there’s no centre over there so one group he said that you know they on the weekends when they meet they do mangalaarthi at 4 30 in the morning and the other group does mangalaarthi at five o’clock and the first group when i went they said prabhupada said mangalaarthi means 4 30. if you are doing five o’clock you are deviating from prabhupada it is not mangalaarthi it is mangalaarthi. Krishna is not going to accept that aarthi.
now you know who can this is such a huge extrapolation isn’t it okay there are many different factors maybe your neighbourhood where there is a lot of noise you’d rather go to that temple where our the temple is right in the middle of the city so we used to have mangalaarthi at 4 30 and within a month of starting the temple we within a year we had like 25 court cases from all the neighbours so now we have mangalaarthi at five o’clock over there we have got like thick doors and close the doors but in their circumstances so sometimes what happens take one thing and make it the most important thing and if somebody is not doing this then that person is a deviant that person is somebody who is unfaithful and this is where fanaticism comes in we may think of fanatical or radical people as somebody who takes a gun and shoots others well yes that’s one kind of fanaticism but you know just like there can be a loaded gun from which you can shoot bullets now our tongue is also like a loaded gun and from that we can shoot bullet like words so essentially what is fanaticism fanaticism is the idea that what works for me what works for me that is the only thing that can work for anyone that which helps me come feel close to krishna that is the only thing by which anyone else can feel close to krishna so for example if somebody fasts on ekadashi without taking any water so nirjal they fast and they feel yes i’m doing some tapasya i’m doing some sacrifice i’m praying and i’m remembering krishna at that time that’s wonderful if that’s how they feel close to krishna but because of that somebody starts thinking that anybody who is not fasting is not a serious devotee you know in our temple we had two groups there was a what called it was joke there’s a nirjal group and there’s a nirlajja group so nirlajja is a shameless group so now it is not like that it’s not that simple but what happens is that we reduce reality to black and white and just take one criteria and this can lead to so many unnecessary problems there can be such different approaches and shila prabhupada was broad enough to accommodate different approaches right from the beginning of our movement itself if you consider this to be north america maybe it is not but here we have new york and somewhere here we have san francisco so two centres opened prabhupada came to new york and the first centre opened there the second centre was in san francisco the devotee shamsundar prabhu mukund maharaj now he went there so now if we look at the history of leela amrit new york was relatively a conservative centre now shamsundar prabhu mukund maharaj they were all people who wanted to do big things this is where they started rath yatra so they were not so strict about following all the rules but shila prabhupada was large enough to accommodate both of them so often between these two groups of devotees there would be criticism so the new york devotees would come hey you know you don’t follow this rule you eat this kind of food you do this you do that you’re not serious devotees and the san francisco devotees would say you have been having that centre for so long what have you done what events have you organised what big thing everyone is existing over there so this again the different approaches and prabhupada was large enough to include both of them so this actually now conservative and liberal just example of two different approaches but the principle is that there can always be different approaches and if we understand that they just because a person has a different approach does not mean that that person is a bad person so we can there will be some conflict but if there’s communication okay that’s how you think that’s what you prioritise fair enough that’s not what i will do but you you can serve in this way i will serve in this way so when we talk about cooperate you know we can cooperate or we can co-operate and co-operate with you operate here i’ll operate here so it’s like we agree to disagree so this understanding can help us minimise conflicts at least we pay and conflicts originate we won’t escalate them to the level of constant criticism or antipathy or certainly not hatred and now in both these cases what i’m talking about is communication is the key so that communication is what i’ll talk in the evening session today and how can we communicate in a way that is sensitive so i’ll summarise what we discussed today our topic was on conflict not so much resolution or conflict management it is part one so first point i talked about how conflicts are unavoidable um because at one level bhakti has remembrance and we have service so remembrance there is no competition over there no conflict i can remember but with respect to service conflicts are almost unavoidable that’s why why because there are limited resources there are only one thing or two among two things that we can do so it’s like the remembrance is the mood of rindavan the service sometimes may require the mood of kurukshetra so now what we want to do is we want to ensure that within our community both rindavan or within our movement red raj rindavan and kurukshetra both go together and then we talk about the origin of conflicts so origin of conflicts can come broadly from knowledge in the mode of ignorance so what happens is we take this is my knowledge but apart from that all this is not only i’m in ignorance but i stay in ignorance my knowledge blinds me what i know blinds me to what i don’t know this is knowledge in the mode of ignorance what krishna talks about 18.22 this word also leads to fanaticism so this is how biases occur we talked about how the story of vali and sukhdev how there was a tragic misunderstanding the understanding misunderstanding was understandable but from there what happened was something very unfortunate so we talked about lastly that when conflicts occur conflicts can occur because of differences of opinion conflicts can occur because of misunderstandings now when misunderstandings occur or difference of opinion when conflicts occur from there they can go down towards hatred and this is what we want to prevent so how do we prevent this so we talked about broadly three causes par it’s par for the course what is p perceptions so perceptions both of these for the communication is a solution by communication we can have clarification so then actually there is no conflict at all a was approaches approach two different people may have different approaches now again by communication here there will not be clarification acceptance okay we agree to disagree you do it this way i’ll do it this way and when the results are different then sometimes becomes clear this is what works this one doesn’t work so we’ll talk about that in our last session but broadly speaking if we try to communicate conflicts are unavoidable but we can minimise the conflicts so communication is the key to managing conflicts and the evening will discuss about how we can communicate in a way that is both that is effective based on the bhagavad-gita 17.15 thank you very much hare krishna let us pray to krishna my dear lord this is a place where this world is a place where misunderstandings occur so easily please oh lord let me not assume that my perceptions are final let me be open to learning what i don’t know and let me through communication minimise the conflicts that do happen in the world my dear lord this world is like a forest fire let me not fuel the fire make me an agent to extinguish the fires that are anyway set up set off if you have any question please raise your hand i can pass on the mic okay probably i have a question yeah wonderful classroom thank you very much i was meditating on the wonderful example that you gave over to yourself you put yourself in a very humble mood and put yourself uh you were thinking about the other senior devotee so i was not in the humble mood i was in a judgemental mood right now you’re taking that i’m one more actually given that instant so uh if that didn’t close it’s very natural for all of us to actually think that way that hey why is he doing like that we would just walk away from that and that instant probably we would forget but at that point that thought would be there so you had the fortune of actually getting closed in the sense so how do we approach in a situation where most of the time it’s not close it’s just like we have so i think it depends on two main factors you know how much is that particular perception disturbing us so if it is disturbing us then we may have to go out of our way to seek clarification that uh why is this person doing this we ask that person or we ask someone who knows that person we don’t ask in a judgemental way but just asking you i’m a little disturbed when i see this so and if it is disturbing us that’s then we have to do that or if it is something like a serious wrong then we may have to i mean it’s more like a obligation for the responsibility for us to report about it or enquire about it so that we can get clarification basically it’s like our guna karma often another word guna karma can be understood in different ways but guna can be understood to be our disposition and karma leads to our position so now if say we see somebody you know from the kitchen sneaking away maha prasada then we’ll say you know where did he get somewhere did he consume it themselves we might have some question but if we are maha prasada in charge then it’s not just it’s our position we have to ask about it we have to ask it politely still so in general it depends on those two factors whether we need to go out of our way to seek clarification okay thank you yes yeah prabhu so wali and uh sugreeva you gave an example so wali is extremely powerful so that it leads him that proudness and he is not in a position to like he is thinking he is always right correct so sugreeva had to accept because he is not that powerful enough so in that case cooperate will not work that is the reason he went somewhere and stay so cooperate is the correct for them right yeah but unfortunately that situation wali was not allowing them to cooperate also because wali was trying to assassinate sugreeva so it went in a very extreme situation but generally uh if there’s a power asymmetry then trying to fight in that situation may just not work so we may just have to move to a different situation generally i use this acronym called met now when like when you meet someone i have met so i met this person to met the situation means what they really contemplated the situation any difficult situation we have we have met a difficulty we broadly have three options to deal with it one is mitigate mitigate that is where we are and we fight in that situation he is emigrate we walk away from that situation and third is tolerate so now which of these do we do it depends on time place circumstance mishra prabhupada uh i started temple in jhansi and he started league of devotees and then the very people who are supporting him turned against him because they wanted to use that centre for something else the proper has a legal paper then he could have fought we said these people are not serious this is not a very big city so it’s not worth fighting so prabhupada just emigrated when prabhupada came to america he was staying initially at the house of sally and gopala galwar they were sponsors and they used to eat meat in the same fridge in which prabhupada would keep his boga they would have not just meat but even beef and she had that uh sally agarwal had some sensitivity she said swami i’m sorry we have only one fridge over here and prabhupada said think nothing about it now why because prabhupada saw that they are not really interested in becoming devotees so for prabhupada that is just a transitional place by which he could stay in america and explore further opportunities so he tolerated that uh would a proba that come to know that in any of the fridges in our movement there had been uh would provide i think nothing about it prabhupada would not have let us let us think of anything except that how did that happen that’s what prabhupada did later when the land was bought and then the owner wanted to keep the money and keep the land also prabhupada said if he wants to steal krishna’s land he will have to go over my dead body so probably fought over there now generally for each one of us we have to decide which one option do we take it depends on our service now if our service requires us to be in that particular place only then either we have to tolerate or we have to mitigate but if we don’t have the power to fix that situation then you’re tolerated but if we have a service does not require us to be there then we can emigrate from there so generally these are three broad approaches that we have to deal with difficulties okay the last question for mataji some question wow i thought that was a raising hand okay that was such a wonderful class so i have a clarification uh i’m uh so i want to i mean i don’t think i can narrate the full incident but uh let’s say there is a conflict and i we go ahead and communicate but that leads to more conflict and you know that person is like now because you have shared some information during the communication now they are using it against you so what do you do it then now i feel like i shouldn’t have communicated i should have just left the conflict yeah that’s true it’s sometimes some people are just too rigid in certain things they are set in their ways and if we communicate itself and this is what i was thinking and hold that against how could you be thinking like that so what do you do at that time we just have to in that sense you know just tolerate or emigrate from that situation so it’s that you know there’s no one approach uh that we can know in advance will work in many ways life is like an experiment see the pandavas when they came to the city they came to a snapper initially when Bhima tried to Bhima was poisoned Bhima was enraged and he wanted to teach Duryodhana a lesson then Yudhishthira said you know we are new over here and you don’t have any proof so it’ll just be your word against his word and we don’t want to break our family right we don’t know who will support us and who won’t just tolerate it maybe he’s just insecure we’ll be careful we won’t provoke him any further that didn’t work was Yudhishthira wrong well based on the situation he made a decision then when things went worse and then what happened after that was they tried to burn their entire family now this was a much bigger conspiracy and Yudhishthira decided this time that we cannot go back there they can do something this big and going back there is not safe so then they emigrated and then finally when the gambling match happened and after that they tried to dishonour Draupadi the panda was still after that also they were ready to emigrate they went to the exile but after that also when Krishna came as a peace messenger and they tried to arrest Krishna also they dishonour Krishna also and the pandavas said enough is enough now that’s when they mitigated so in life there is no guarantee which approach would be the right approach so we have to see sometimes if mitigating doesn’t work then either we tolerate or we emigrate so thank you very much for your participation and i’m amazed to see so many of you coming early in the morning for a class this is more than what we have probably in many temples also in the bhagavatam classes so that shows your sincerity and your earnestness in learning and growing in Krishna consciousness and we’ll continue today evening we’ll have a little more time also for question answers if you have any further questions thank you very much