Is there a purpose for punishment?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
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Okay.
Is there a purpose to punishment? Are you talking about the law of karma punishing? Are you talking about in the legal sense punishment being given or both? Okay. Yes. Is there a purpose for punishment? Say Ashwathama was cursed to be alone living away from humans for so long.
Yes. The purpose of punishment is multiple. See it is not just a one-to-one correlation.
You did this wrong, for this you get this punishment. That is true. The law of karma does act like that.
But karma is also a process of re-education. That means that when we get certain consequences of certain actions, we may consciously learn I should not do it. But unconsciously also there is a learning that happens.
When people go through the miseries of material existence, they start looking for something higher. Is there something beyond this world? And that subconscious reorientation of the heart is much more important than specific correlation. You did this action, you got this consequence.
I may avoid that action, but I may do some other wrong action after that. But the important thing is if by the whole process of going through material existence, facing various miseries, we start reorienting our heart. We look for something beyond matter as a source of happiness, as a source of shelter.
And that elevation of our consciousness towards the spiritual level is the ultimate purpose of all kind of punishments. Prabhupada writes in Ishopanishad Purport that the miseries of material existence are ultimately meant to teach us about our incompatibility with matter. So he says miseries of material existence, they are not just in a specific sense, they are result of the law of karma.
We may have done something wrong because of which we got wrong result, certain result. But in a general sense, the purpose of these miseries is to make us realize that I do not belong to this material world and we become elevated. So that’s why as devotees, we don’t focus too much on trying to do any psychoanalysis or something like that.
What could I have done because of which I got this punishment? Or we can become very, very offensive. If somebody is a very advanced devotee and this advanced devotee falls sick, you start thinking, oh, I thought you were advanced devotee, but you got this sickness. That means you must have done some terrible karma in the past.
That means you are not such a great devotee also. We can become offensive. Our focus should be not on trying to find out the specific cause of each misery.
Our focus should be on elevation of consciousness. And we will see advanced devotees, they may also get terrible pain, terrible diseases. But they state that as an impetus for elevating their consciousness.
And that they are attempting to elevate their consciousness, they are absorbing Krishna, that is the proof of their advancement, not the suffering that they are going through. So we should focus always on the generic purpose of misery, that is to elevate our consciousness. Thank you.