Love can light up our heart this Diwali – Lessons from Ramayana

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, love is the ultimate light for the heart. Now, broadly, we could say that Ayodhya is like our heart. Ram is the Lord of our heart and we are all like the residents of Ayodhya.
So, we all want the Lord to be present in our hearts. Now, we see that the Ramayana indicates what has later been analyzed by psychologists as typical story patterns. There is a peaceful situation and there is sudden disruption and then there is a restoration of order.
The peaceful situation is in Ayodhya where Ram appears and grows and flourishes, becomes a powerful prince and is about to become the king and then there is trauma. And then Ram is exiled from Ayodhya and then eventually he comes back. So, from our hearts also, at one level, the Lord is always present because he is the Paramatma.
But although he is present, his presence is not sensed by us. We do not feel his presence much. So, in that sense, he is no longer present in our hearts.
He is exiled from our hearts and we want to get him back. So, that will be the broad theme we will take today. So, here we see that in some ways, many of the depictions of Krishna Leela and Ram Leela are remarkably similar.
Now, Srimad Bhagavatam, after it was spoken by Shukadeva Swami, written by Vyasadeva, after that it became spectacularly popular and then even Ram Leela was modeled that way and there is Adhyatma Ramayana and some other books which describe Ram’s pastimes in a similar way in which the 10th Canto Krishna Leela is described. So, here we see Ayodhya was like a paradise. The four brothers were living happily with their three mothers and there was amity, there was joy and everybody loved everyone else and Ram was the center of attention.
Ram, he was the lord of the heart for everyone and now when we talk about, we light our heart. What lights our heart actually? The heart does not have any mechanical switch by which you can light it, but what lights it is actually love and that love is manifested in a magnificent way here. As Ram grew up, he became an archer.
As I said in some of the artistic depictions, Ram is depicted as if having a complexion. Now, here you will see this is Krishna that there are some level, normally we don’t see, of course, Krishna has a bow and arrow and this is Krishna’s complexion, but some artists have depicted Ram in ways similar to Krishna. So, here you see the complexions are slightly different here.
So, ultimately the lord’s complexion, Ram is sometimes said to be green in complexion, but actually Ram’s complexion is materially indescribable. Whatever colors we use, even for Krishna, blue is black. Those colors are simply indicative.
So, here we see their mothers are serving them and all of them are rejoicing and immeasurably they are living happily. This is hand, there’s no joy greater than the for the Ashwath, greater than to see all his sons flourishing. They all grew together very happily.
It is abode of love and joy in Ayodhya. So, what is the light of love? It is Ram’s upcoming succession. So, when that news came up that Dashratha decided at that time to become, to retire and to hand over the kingdom to Ram, there was no limit to that joy.
Ram’s presence was joy. In fact, the very word Ram means Ramati, Ramayati, that one who Ramayati, one who rejoices and who helps others rejoice, that is Ram. So, the whole of Ayodhya was lit with celebration, lit with joy, lit with love and the festival of lights in one sense mark the return of Ram, but lights are central to all kinds of celebrations and in this case Ram, Ram’s coronation, Ram’s succession and eventually coronation that everybody was celebrating.
So, this is for all of us in our inner world, if you want to light it, it is actually love that lights it. It is love that reveals all that is wonderful in the heart, love that reveals what is an exposure that was what is dreadful in the heart and helps us remove it. So, now when we talk about love, the soul is, we are talking about love.
Now, what is the soul’s nature is to love? Our deepest longing is to love and be loved and the soul has that natural effulgence. The soul is at one level, it is luminous, it is Atma Druk, the soul is the inner seer, the soul has consciousness which is like light. The soul’s effulgence, however, is covered by impurities and that’s why our people often behave in ways, we ourselves behave in ways that may not be very loving.
So, love is not just the pure state of existence of the heart, but love is also the means for purifying the heart. How does love purify? It is the ultimate purification, it is the ultimate illumination. When love lights the heart, in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that it is his love which lights our heart.
So, the Diwali in the heart, the lighting of the heart is done by Krishna’s mercy. When we direct our love toward him, then by the mercy of the Lord, he lights our heart so that what is dark, we can remove and what is unnecessary, he can, the light which we can drive it out, he burns it away. So, love is the purifier and is also the purified state of the heart.
Now, when we talk about purification, why does love need purification? Why do we need purification? Because there are many things which distort our love in this world. So, the purification, we will, so, Ayodhya was a state where everybody was purely loving the Lord, but there was a disruption. We will talk about the disruption shortly.
In our hearts, in the pristine state, our heart will also be like Ayodhya, but presently it is not. The Lord doesn’t reign over there supreme as the object of love because of the impurities. So, the purification doesn’t come by hating the impure so much that we drive it out.
I don’t want this here. I don’t want this anger. I don’t want this lust.
I don’t want this greed. Get out of my heart. No, we can’t drive out the impure from the heart, but what we can do is when we love the pure so much that the impure gets crowded out, that the pure could mean the devotees who are pure or devotees who are seeking to be pure.
The Lord has various manifestations which are pure and purifying. We may love the holy name. We may love the shastras.
We may love the deities. We may love the sacred songs and mantras. So, it is love that purifies.
So, this is love is the purifier and love is the pure state. Like bhakti is the means and bhakti is the end. So, the creed to light the heart is to evoke love in the heart and bhakti is the process for evoking that love and so to the extent we practice bhakti diligently, we are actually on