If we are disappointed by our spiritual leaders, how can we continue in our bhakti?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Any other questions? Sometimes we may be disappointed Or let down by our Spiritual leaders And we understand that Krishna loves us But then those who represent Krishna If they don’t act In very loving ways They hurt us somehow So how do we reconcile that? Actually Krishna Krishna’s love comes to us Through many sources So it is not that Throughout our Spiritual journey Krishna’s love will always come through the same Not sources, channels Krishna’s love will come only through the same channels All the time In the initial days of our spiritual life It may be that some devotees inspire us a lot But as we grow As we understand our own nature As we come to know more about those devotees We may feel Not that much inspired by them But at that time Krishna will send us inspiration Through some other devotees So From wherever Krishna inspires us We take that inspiration And move onwards towards Krishna It’s like there are children When they are very small God for them, their mother and father Like God for them But as they come into They grow into teenage There is adolescence rebellion And in small childhood My parents, everything that they say is right And When they come into adolescence If my parents say it, it must be wrong That becomes sometimes the attitude And now If they keep growing through their adolescence Then they mature Then they realize that my parents have done so much good for me They are not perfect I am also not perfect But with all their limitations With their defects Still they love me and they have done so much good for me So similarly in our relationship with devotees also Initially when we come We may start thinking that Everybody who wears dhoti, kurta, saree They are all pure devotees We offer obeisances to everyone We offer great respects to everyone That is initial stage But as we keep growing We start realizing that different devotees are of different natures There are different levels of advancement They come from different backgrounds Their ways of dealing with each other are different And The same devotees who inspired us earlier may not inspire us later Sometimes After a few years in bhakti We may go into the stage of adolescent rebellion in bhakti Where Where the same devotees who inspired us We start rebelling against them And rebelling very forcefully But If we see them As the soul As the soul representatives of Krishna Then we will Extrapolate from Whatever hurt we have against them Whatever grief we have against them Towards Krishna And we will become alienated from Krishna also But if we see that It is one Krishna who is manifesting Through many ways Through this devotee So you will always find in our spiritual life There will be some like-minded devotees With whom we can connect With whom we can relate And they can be different in different ways in our spiritual life So from wherever we get inspiration We move onward We take that inspiration and we move onward in our journey towards Krishna And whoever has helped us in our bhakti We should be grateful to them Even if at present They are behaving in a particular way Which we can’t digest, which we can’t agree with Then we can keep a little distance from them For what they did in the past for us We respect them We are grateful to them for that But we may not take guidance from them right now We may not get inspiration from them right now So if we have There can be two kinds of fragmentation We see devotees Separate from Krishna And devotees are the only source of inspiration for us If those devotees stop being inspiring Then we just give up bhakti entirely The other is We see Krishna separate from devotees That means we say that you know Krishna is good but devotees are bad So I love Krishna But I won’t associate with devotees Any devotee at all That is also not proper So Krishna is connected with devotees But Krishna is connected with many devotees And we need association of devotees always But we need also Like-minded association So finding like-minded association Is our responsibility We shouldn’t The bad experience that we have with some devotees We shouldn’t extrapolate that and label all devotees as bad And certainly we should not label Krishna as bad Rather Recognize that Krishna will send his love through us His wisdom to us Through some channel or the other And we should look for that devotee association And by that inspiration we can move onwards in our bhakti Does it answer your question? Yes