If a child becomes orphaned because the parents commit suicide, is that because of the child’s destiny or the parents’ misuse of free will?

Transcript

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So, if someone misuses their free will, say and commits suicide, and then the child becomes orphan for the rest of their life.
So, is that the child’s destiny? But isn’t that the result of the misuse of the free will of the person who committed suicide? Is that actually the mystery of destiny? How it unfolds? There are, broadly speaking, multiple levels of causation. If we see when distress comes upon us, there is an immediate cause, there is a remote cause and there is an ultimate cause. The immediate cause can be specific.
Let’s say, my car skid while I was going on the road and that’s why I was thrown off and I got a fracture. That is the immediate cause. The remote cause is that I had done some karma because of which I had to suffer.
The ultimate cause is forgetfulness of Krishna because of which I am here in the material world and here I come under the jurisdiction of material nature where various distresses come by their chain of causes and effects. Now, most of us, at a practical level, we try to address the immediate cause. Say, if my stomach is upset, even in the tradition, it was Ayurveda.
Where we try to find out immediately what is the immediate cause. Maybe there is some imbalance, some kind of digestive upset is there and we address that. So, in the day-to-day occurrences, we need not usually think about the remote cause.
If things are explainable by immediate cause, why did I get stomach upset? Because I overeat yesterday night. That is enough. Now, it’s also possible that some people overeat and don’t get any upset.
Others, they eat a little bit off and they get a huge upset. So, here the basic bodily toughness comes in. And this bodily toughness, we can say, is the result of past karma.
So, when the immediate causal explanation works, we don’t have to look at the past in a practical sense, not in a philosophical sense. In a practical sense, we don’t have to look at the past. When the immediate doesn’t explain, we do one small mistake and it’s almost like hell breaks loose sometimes.
You know, it’s like 100 people pound upon us, they pound us. See, it’s a small thing. Why are you making it so big? So, like Parashar Maharaj, a small mistake, he put a dead snake around a sage’s neck and he was sentenced to death.
So, here the immediate effect is disproportionate from the immediate cause. Then, the immediate cause is simply a trigger. There is some remote cause which is manifesting through this.
So, we look at the level of the remote cause. Beyond that, in Krishna Bhakti, we focus on the ultimate cause, that is, the forgetfulness of Krishna. And that’s what we are trying to counter by practicing Krishna Bhakti.
Now, with respect to, say, somebody committing suicide, So, continue with the answer. When somebody is orphaned by the parents committing suicide, at that time, the immediate cause, of course, is the misuse of the free will of the parents. Now, the remote cause is the child’s own karma.
Now, the remote cause can come upon us in many different ways. And generally, in our day-to-day dealings, we don’t look at the remote cause. So, that means, if we consider, say, Bhishma Pitamah is speaking to the Pandavas, and he says, He says, how unfortunate it is, how unjust it is, that you had to suffer so much atrocities, that your mother became a widow when she was young, and you were persecuted so much.
So, now, he is not saying that, oh, it is all your bad karma because of which it happened. And he is not there talking at a purely transcendental level also. He is actually philosophically contemplating the cause of suffering.
So, generally speaking, when somebody goes to distress, thinking that it is their own past karma can make us hard-hearted towards them. So, we need to look at the immediate cause and see if we can address the immediate cause. But the problem comes when we try to solve it only at the level of the immediate cause.
So, if, say, there is a lot of poverty in a particular country, we could look at the immediate cause and try to address it. Okay, there is mismanagement of resources, or, okay, this particular, it is not rich in natural resources or whatever. But then, okay, why is it having rulers who mismanage the resources? Why is it that it is not rich in natural resources? We understand that it is because of past karma of people.
So, that is what we call as destiny. But attributing some suffering to destiny doesn’t mean that we don’t try to address it at the immediate level. The important thing is that we don’t restrict our addressing only to the immediate level.
So, like, say, somebody has got some sexually transmitted disease. If they have got that disease, then the doctor is meant to first and foremost treat them for that disease. But along with that, the doctor also has to give them knowledge that, you know, you have to avoid doing behavior that will get you that disease again.
So, if the doctor doesn’t treat, that is a problem. But if the doctor doesn’t educate, that is also a problem. So, both have to be done.
So, like that, we have to address, we can’t address the past bad karma directly, but at least we can educate so that people don’t do bad karma again. But knowledge of karma shouldn’t make us hard-hearted at all. So, if somebody has been orphaned, that’s a tragedy.
And if we can help in some way, we try to help them. But, yes, sometimes some children get kidnapped, sometimes they get caught in human trafficking, and then they have a hellish life. Now, those people who abduct and traffic children, they are, of course, very grievously misusing their free will.
So, the government at one level has to address and punish those people and try to break the trafficking trade. But at another level, we understand that it is those children’s karma. So, both the misuse of free will by a particular soul or a particular set of souls and the destiny in terms of the karma of the victim souls, both work together at different levels of causation.