If Krishna loves us, why is it necessary to suffer to return to him?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you. And evil is not due to Krishna’s intention. It is due to the soul’s volition.
Not due to Krishna’s intention means, it’s not that Krishna wants us to suffer. Soul’s volition, volition means the capacity to have freedom. It is we who have freedom.
And now Prabhupada gave the example that the sun is always the source of light. But if people turn away from the sun, they’ll experience darkness. They’ll see the shadows.
So like that, Krishna is the source of happiness all the time. But when we turn away from Krishna, then we experience misery. Now the question will come up, okay, okay, even if I turn away from Krishna, why do I experience misery? So point here is, we are searching at the temporary level, what is found at only a later moment.
We are souls, because the paradox of the human condition, what is the paradox of the human condition? Is that our heart longs, our heart beats for immortality. Because we all, none of us want to die. We all want to live forever.
Our heart beats for immortality and our heart beats towards mortality. With each beating, what is happening? We are all getting closer and closer to death. So why is it like that? On one side, we want to live forever.
On the other side, we’re just going on and on to our death. This is one of the biggest problems with materialistic science or atheism. Atheistic philosophy can’t explain that everything material is temporary.
Isn’t it? And all around us, things are perishing. So if we are ultimately just products of matter who have evolved from our circumstances, evolved from the circumstances around us, and nothing around us is everlasting, then where do we get the longing to be eternal? Is this point clear? I have no experience of eternity anywhere around me in the world. And if I am simply a product of this world, and there’s nothing in this world that is eternal, then nothing should give me the conception of eternity.
Nothing should give me a desire for eternity. But I have such a deep-rooted desire to live forever. Where does this desire come from? Because it comes because there’s a part of me that is eternal.
And that part of me is actually the real me. But, so what is happening? The soul is eternal, but the soul is now misaligned with the body. And after misalignment with the body, the soul is desiring what is available at the spiritual level, the soul is desiring at the bodily level.
Just like, to give a simple example, suppose there is a son of a billionaire, who is used to very opulent living, very comfortable, like delicious food, comfortable lifestyle, and all that sort of things. And somehow, he gets an amnesia, he gets rid of the son, and now, he’s identifying himself as a beggar. Now, what is happening? As a beggar, he’s desiring all the comforts that he had as a millionaire.
Now, is it possible as a beggar, he will get all these comforts? So, what he has to do is, he has to remove the amnesia. So, the suffering he is experiencing, is because he has right now the state of a beggar. So, like that, we as the children of Krishna, we are like the billionaires.
But, because of forgetting Krishna, we have now become the beggars. And all the sufferings that we experience, there can be very specific sufferings, we may not do well in the exam, not get a job, we may get a disease, some loved one may die, all these sufferings, specifically, all these sufferings can be painful, but all these sufferings are the foundation. And that foundation is misidentification of the body.
More than that it is, we are looking at the temporary level, for what is available at the eternal level. We are looking, the billionaire is looking for the comfort, as a beggar, the comfort that was available at the billionaire level. So, what we have to do is, so, it is not that Krishna creates suffering, that suffering is a natural consequence of our turning away from Krishna.
Just as darkness is a natural consequence of our turning away from Krishna. And just as the ultimate solution to darkness is, not just creating some sources of light within the darkness, it is to turn back towards Krishna. Similarly, the ultimate solution to suffering is not just to try to create some sources of love, find some sources of love, create some sources of happiness, in this material world.
It is actually to turn back towards Krishna. And then it will be relieved from all suffering. And in fact, love of Krishna is so uplifting, that even this world becomes a place of joy for him.
That’s right. We have Prabhudana Saraswati saying that, Once we start experiencing love of Krishna, then even this world becomes joyful. This world becomes joyful because, although at a physical level our body will decay and die, our consciousness won’t stay restricted to the physical level.
It will rise to the spiritual level. And irrespective of what happens at the physical level, at the spiritual level we keep experiencing love. And the material miseries will be there at the physical level, but they will not harm us so much.
So, ultimately, by redirecting our love towards Krishna, we can become free from all this. Not just in our next life, but we can become free from most of the misery, Amen.