Mandodari’s lament after Ravana’s death 1 – Can some people never change

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
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So Chaitanya Bhagavata, for example, focusses on how Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is exalted and how his associates are also being exalted. So therefore, Sarovartacharya is depicted there as if he is already a devotee but a covered devotee. Whereas in Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the focus is on establishing the philosophical position of Vishwajitha Mahaprabhu’s teachings.
It’s a book of theology in the format of a Bible. It’s not a simple Bible. That’s why in Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, whenever the philosophical conversation starts, it gets closed up.
The incidents are described fast, but the conversations are described lightly. So for the purpose of describing how, say, Sarovartacharya was converted, so then the stress is on, okay, he had non-divisional antecedents and he came out of it. So there have been different perspectives of the same event.
And if somebody is living with someone and you know that person is in pain, and then hope springs internally in the human heart, we hope that that person will change. And we keep trying. So Mahabharata kept trying like that.
And ultimately, when Ravana is killed, we could say her mission is unsuccessful. But at that time, how does she see this? So this verse, she’s telling, it’s referred to in this, the Bhagavatam is a poetry. So, in many cases, the poetic harmonics come together.
So here we see, Loka Ravana, Ravana. So Ravana was his name and he was the person also who caused distress to others. Loka Ravana.
So here he’s saying that now you have been killed and she’s not saying, who will we go to shelter? I don’t go to shelter. He’s saying, where will Nanka get shelter? That Kamyayas Charanam Nanka. Where will Nanka go for getting shelter? And in the next verse, she will say that actually, it was you did not understand the power of Sita.
And it’s interesting, she’s our Mahabharata. You’re fortunate, you’re greatly fortunate. But you didn’t understand the power of Sita.
And thus, you were killed by her. Which is also very interesting analysis. He’s not saying you were killed by her, you did not understand the power of Rama, you were killed by Rama.
She says you did not understand the power of Sita and because of her curse, you were killed by her. So normally, we think that we are going to become an instrument for God. But here, the way she’s putting it is that God becomes an instrument for Sita.
So Sita’s curse comes through Rama. And then in the last verse, she said that now Lanka has become a widow. Because of your departure, Lanka has become a widow.
And not only Lanka has become a widow, but your body has become a destination for the animals to eat. And your soul is going to go to them. So in one sense, it’s a very distress-filled and gloomy overview.
And everything is lost. Whatever she had lived for, it’s gone. But even in these verses, her wisdom comes out.
And what was it that drove her on? That she kept trying to give good advice to Rama. And that’s how she was always there with him. So now Mandodari was the daughter of Mayadana and an Apsara Bhima.
And when Ravana was going around the universe, conquering various places. So at that time, he came to Mayadana. And Mayadana, who is he? What is his distinctive characteristic? Does anyone know? Sorry? Black arts, yeah.
Architect. Yes, thank you. He is the architect for the Asuras.
Just like who is the architect for Devatas? Vishwakarma. So now, Mayadana is a character who is, you could say, if you have black and white, then if you broadly say that the Devatas are white, the Asuras are black. Although Mayadana is a Dhanu, he is not entirely demonic.
And he is somewhere on the shades of grey. Towards the black, but on the shades of grey. So Ravana is attracted to Mandodari.
And he marries her. And then he has three sons through her. So Indrajit, Atikara and then there is Akshara.
Now Akshara is killed by Hanuman. Then after that, Atikara and Indrajit are also, they fall in the war in Lanka. And eventually, Ravana himself falls.
So by this time, now Mandodari has lost everyone. She has lost her sons, she has lost her husband. So it’s a state of utter bereavement for her.
And if you see, Mandodari throughout gives advice to Ravana. In fact, when he abducts Sita and comes, he also knows that because of the curse, I cannot forcibly violate her. Of course, Sita doesn’t know that that happened.
And he basically adopts a typical strategy which he thinks will win over Sita. Normally when you say a boy wants to woo a girl, then he will praise her beauty, he will brag about his wealth and he will trash his competition. So he does the same three things.
First he approaches Sita and quite explicit verses which describe Sita’s beauty. And Sita is taken aback initially. It’s a strange way of speaking like this.
And then he reveals, I am a donkey. And now Sita is not at all impressed by him. He says, what can he give you? He doesn’t even have a clitoris.
But Sita pays no attention to him. He thinks that let me take her with me and I will show her my kingdom and my palace. And he takes her on a tour of his palace.
And Sita is not even interested in seeing him. And then finally Sita says that I will not even stay in this palace. Because I am with my husband, with Ram.
And as long as Ram is excitedly staying in the forest, I will also stay in the forest. So she also stays in Ashok Vatika. And at that time Mandodari also says that unless she gives a consent, don’t break the peace.
So Mandodari also takes a strong stand over there. And eventually, when Ram gets very angry with Sita and tries to kill Sita because she is not ready to consent, then Mandodari says, no, what good will it get? The killing of whom? So there are times when we have two options. And the first option is bad and the other option is worse.
So if there is a good and bad option, it’s easy to choose relatively speaking. But if the only option is a bad and worse option, then what do you do at that time? So Mandodari, she keeps trying to at least minimise Ravana’s anger. And she gives advice but he never listens to her.
So basically, this is the background. And here what she is saying, in this verse is, now we are being killed. So we can say that Ravana meant the just desserts of his actions.
But could he have chosen differently? In the Sunday class, I was speaking about how Ravana had ten different people giving advices. So he had ten heads and each of those ten advices he rejected, then he lost one by one all the heads. So Mandodari also gave him advice.
But eventually when she gets emotional and he says that, well, you know, the fire of your lust for Sita has now burned everyone in the world. It has now burned your own son. So I can live no longer.
In the fire that cremated my son, let it be doused. How many more people will you burn in this fire of lust? Just give her up. But he never listens.
So now when somebody is so obstinate that he is not able to change at all. And you might say that some people are just evil. So broadly speaking, there are two broad theories of human nature.
But we will talk about two broad. So there is the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature and there is the modern leftist or communist theory of human nature. Judeo-Christian theory of human nature is that everyone of us is sinful.
Because the original man hadn’t sinned against God and because of that he ate the forbidden apple and therefore sin has passed down everyone like a genetic defect. And everybody is immediately sinful. Now this theory is opposed by communism.
Communism is a whole body of thought. Socialism is there. But the whole left, they say that actually people are uniquely good.
It is society that makes them bad. And their solution is, so the Christian solution is that it’s only God’s grace which can save us from our innate sinfulness. Whereas the communist theory is that what we need is social engineering.
That means if somebody is behaving badly it’s because society treated them badly. And change the social conditions. Give them better conditions and then they will start behaving better.
So now if we ask a general cross-section of people, adults, several companies and colleges, how many of you think that people are uniquely good? What do you think? Are people uniquely good? Okay. Are people uniquely bad? No? Okay. Are some people uniquely bad? Nobody says are people uniquely bad.
Nobody says yes to that. But as soon as you say are some people uniquely bad, almost everybody can think of some person. Who? So, it is actually much easier to love humanity than to love one unique.
So in the abstract, yeah, people are good. But this person is not good. This person is terrible.
People can change, but this person will never change. So it’s like that. So basically, when you have a small nuance statement that are some people uniquely bad, almost everybody raises hands.
There are some people, yeah, they may be bad. And you can think about psychopaths, you can think about sociopaths, you can think about terrorists. There can be people who are horrible.
So, I once met one person who was a Jew who was a committed devotee. So he was telling me that his grandfather, he was a part of the, he was a part of all those people who were killed in Nazi Germany. He had Hitler.
Hitler was having a pogrom to kill everyone, Jewish. So anyways, at that time, they were all a part of, they tried to overthrow Hitler. Many Germans themselves feel Hitler’s plan of trying to win the world is not going to work and he should surrender.
So, some of his generals themselves voted against him. So there were three of his generals and they tried to assassinate him and he survived. And when he came to know about it, he decided to have them killed.
But he had them hung not normally with a rope, he hung them with plastic bags. And what happened with plastic? The rope was such that it kept cutting their neck for 11 days. So they were hung for 11 days, immortally.
And, so you could say, to produce suffering simply for the purpose of producing suffering. That is the very essence of evil. There is a difference between tragedy and evil.
Bad things happen. Say, somebody is a drunk driver and they ran into someone and the person gets permanently paralysed. That’s terrible, that’s a tragedy.
And, when we encounter that tragedy, it is difficult. Why did this happen to me? But actually, even more difficult than to deal with tragedy is to deal with evil. Evil is, tragedy is when something or someone somehow hurts us.
But evil is when somebody systematically, maliciously, cold-bloodedly goes out to hurt us. So, evil means what? That to produce suffering simply for the cause of producing suffering. There is no purpose in it.
Just like a doctor does surgery for suffering. But that has a purpose. So you could say that there is, there can be purposeful suffering, which is like a surgery or an injection.
There can be purposeless suffering. It is, purposeless means at least from our perspective. Say, somebody just slips and falls down and fractures themselves.
A car runs over them accidentally because of a private incident. But, when there is, there is suffering, which is purposefully caused, but it is purposeless. It is purposefully caused.
It is deliberately wanting the other person to suffer. But, that suffering, why are you causing it? Just so that you can get joy in seeing the other person suffer. So, that is called sadism.
Sadism is where somebody delights in causing pain to others. What is the example of sadism in our tradition? Naraguni intervened and stopped someone. He got joy in seeing the pain of the animals.
So, basically, when we see the pain, most of us, we live in a very sheltered world. So, of course, the world is not a place of shelter in the sense that everybody gets trouble. But, to have somebody target us, that just target us for no reason except the cause of interest.
That can actually shake your, shake one’s feet in the very, very nature of being. That means, why do I exist? Why do women exist? Somebody suggests, they experience malevolence. Malevolence is where somebody just deliberately goes out of their way to hurt us.
So, when such evils encounter, our whole worldview shakes. So, the idea that people are inherently good is something which we all would like to be. At least you would like people to believe that I am inherently good.
But, even a little encounter with real life will expose us to people who are evil. And, somebody, what have I done to you? Why are you troubling me like this? So, sometimes people get on us. And then, unless we have a theory of evil, that means a worldview which acknowledges the presence of evil, we can’t make sense of what is happening with it.
So, basically, these two theories are there. The Christian theory that people are innately bad. And, of course, it doesn’t really say they are innately bad because everybody is a part of God.
In the sense, not everybody is part of God. That’s our way of saying it. Everybody is made in the image of God.
But still, although we are made in the image, but we are covered over by the sin. And without the intersectionary grace of Jesus, we cannot be redeemed. Now, the problem with this worldview that people are innately evil is that there are people who are good also.
Not everybody is equally innately evil. You can see people who may not be saved by Jesus, but they are virtuous, they are charitable, they are kind. There are good people.
There are innately bad people, but there are good people also. But the problem with the communist worldview is that where it says that there is nothing innate about people, it is situations that make them the way they are. Then we see that two people may go through the same situations, but they may respond entirely differently.
Two people may be born in poverty, they may be born and they may go through abuse, and still one grows up to become a very bitter and hateful person, and the other grows up and grows beyond their gender, beyond what they are called to be. So, neither theory is actually born is supported by evidence. But there is something called evil.
So the Vedic worldview, the Gita’s worldview is that basically we have to understand that there are two levels of innateness. When we talk about innate, what do we mean by that? That inside us, there is a soul and there is a mind. And beyond that is the body.
So when we talk about inside us, there is innateness. So what are we referring to by innate? So, at the level of the soul, because every soul is a part of God, because every soul is a part of God, so we can say we all have an innate potential for good. I’ll explain why this word potential.
But then beyond that, there is another level of innateness, that is the mind. And the mind carries impressions from the past. And because of these impressions from the past, they also affect how we behave.
And if those impressions from the past are bad, then at the level of the mind we can say some people are innately evil. In fact, this is how when I read the Bhagavad Gita for the first time, or not the first time, the first few times, the 16th chapter, when Krishna described the divine and demoniac nature, where now the paradox is profoundly contemporary and profoundly scary in terms of how Krishna described the demoniac nature. But one thing which puzzled me, even disturbed me, is Krishna said Abhijavathotsu.
That in 16.3 when he is describing the Daivik Prakriti, in 16.4 he is describing the Asuri Prakriti. Both these are Abhijavathotsu. For example, that Abhijavathotsu, that is born.
So this is the demon. Those who are born with demoniac nature have these qualities. Arrogance, harshness, ignorance, anger, whatever.
And like that he gives the rest of the divine qualities also. So now Abhijavathotsu, what does this mean? If you are born with it, then it becomes innate, isn’t it? Then is it changeable? So of course, if we were just like programmed machines where we couldn’t change anything, then Krishna’s instructions, Therefore, act according to Shastra. Act according to Shastra.
That means you have a particular nature, but act in a way that will help you to get rid of it. So when Krishna used the word Abhijavathotsu over here, he is basically referring to not the soul but the mind. That some people from their past bring impressions which will make them evil.
And some people may have impressions which make them good. So I used two distinct words over here. We all have a potential for good, but we also have a propensity for evil.
And the potential for good has to struggle against the propensity for evil. And only then it will manifest. So by default, is it that people are good and they will act in good ways? Maybe.
Most likely not. Most likely not. Because bad things happen to everyone.
We may be good people, but when bad things happen, then you start feeling good, bad, and you turn to those people. And the dark side within us comes out. So there is a potential for goodness within us, but there is also a propensity for vice.
And the essential human struggle is for the potential for goodness to manifest in spite of the propensity for vice. And to the extent we take on this struggle, to that extent the goodness will manifest. But if somebody doesn’t take up this struggle, now everybody has some good impressions within them, some bad impressions.
Even the demoniac people also, there is some good in them. I talked in the Sunday class about why Mantodiri refers to Ravana as Mahabhaga. And how he is able to, how he faces good fortune.
But essentially, so we all, are some people immediately evil? Yes, in the sense that some people may have very deep, innate negative impressions within them. It may be lust, it may be anger, it may be greed, it may be envy, whatever it is. And that might make them behave in terrible ways.
So we cannot deny this level of past impressions, but we can also see beyond those past impressions. So the way we reconcile the two is that actually, like I said, the problem with the Christian world is that if people are immediately evil, then why are some people good? When some people are good because the impressions within them may not be bad. Some people may have bad impressions, some people may have good impressions.
And are people products of their situations? Yes, we are, but not entirely. Our situations influence us, you could say they impel us, but they don’t compel us. They push us to act in certain ways, but we can’t push back.
And both against our impressions and against our situations, we with our potential for goodness have to struggle. And when we struggle and succeed, that’s how we fulfil the purpose of human life. So how does struggle can be done successfully? I’ll talk about this in Sunday’s class.
I’ll summarise here, you can have few questions. I spoke on this topic of are people uniquely good or uniquely bad? I started by talking about Mandodari how she had a close view that her view of Ravana’s, although she saw that Ravana was doing evil, so her choice was, she was already married to Ravana, so a bad and a worse choice. So bad choice, she was already there in that situation.
So she kept minimising the especially egregious choices that Ravana was doing. And she tried to stop it. And so then we discussed these two theories of human nature.
One of the Judeo-Christian theory that people are innately sinful because of the original sin. And leftist theory that people are uniquely good. So the Judeo-Christian theory holds that we need divine grace to give up sin and become good.
Whereas the leftist idea says that we need social engineering to become good. And the problem is that people even without getting divine grace can act as good. And people even in terrible situations can also grow through the situation, still not become bad but become good.
So the Vedic understanding is that there are two levels of uniqueness. That at the level of the soul everybody has a potential for goodness. But at the level of the mind everybody has different impressions.
And we have a propensity for vice. And the essential human struggle is for the potential for goodness to struggle beyond and rise beyond the propensity for vice. So when we learn to do that then we can fulfil the purpose of our human life.
Any questions or comments? Yes. Thanks. Thank you for an amazing lecture.
My question relates to when we deal with people closely in the outside world we see people who are having very good qualities like what you were saying about innately good in the terms of mind. Like you were distinguishing between the soul having a potential and mind with the sanskara of virtue. So we see people innately good people.
So for example we see someone who is not practising spirituality at all but the way they deal with other humans, the general compassion they have in situations. Their understanding is sometimes very high. At least.
So sometimes when you see such people you wonder is it that they had some devotional credit in the past or maybe some sattva guru in their system somehow because of which they are practising. So how do you see such people? That’s my first part of the question. Second part of the question is we also, at least I have also sometimes closely seen in some colleagues or people whom I deal with very closely for many many years that some of them they may not have simple habits.
So for example eating of meat and things like that may be very common in their daily routine. But still in terms of patience, compassion again qualities in terms of how they deal with humans it tends to be outstanding. And sometimes I also feel that maybe they are putting a show but then when you see the same person over several years having certain personal vices but at the same time manifesting certain qualities which are very appreciable then again the question comes how do we see that on the light of our shastra for example because he may not necessarily be doing activities which are sattvic.
It may be very promising in his personal life. But how is it that he is able to manifest something? Actually it’s coming because you know some examples that have been encountered in our office situations where we have seen people very closely for almost 20 years you know and you know so I just wanted to Yeah If I summarise the question that sometimes people may have no emotional or spiritual connection but still they are good and they are very thoughtful insightful sensitive and even if they are having some habit like still they are actually very good in their other demands. So how do we understand this? Yeah Now those who have a if somebody has a hammer everything appears like a nail to them laughter laughter laughter laughter So what that means is that when we take scripture now scripture helps us to make sense of the world but then the world is very complicated scripture is also we just take one point from scripture and we impose it on all over the world and it doesn’t work like that so let’s get some basics right actions have consequences so if somebody is doing something wrong right now it is going to have some results but if somebody is presently manifesting some virtues now one of the I was in America and there is one Canadian intellectual who has taken the world best form currently he is quite conservative he accepts the existence of God he draws from biblical teachings but his diet is only meat he doesn’t even put salt on it.
All three meals are only meat laughter and basically he and his whole dynasty they have autoimmune disease and they have autoimmune disease so his daughter who had a very severe disease he also had an indication of that disease so morning after a meal he just takes meat and his daughter is completely cured of that and he is also much healthier than what he is so now there are some devotees based on his diet they demonise him but he is actually bringing a lot of people to satchwa and bringing people towards spirituality so now obviously the particular diet he is having we wouldn’t recommend that put it mildly laughter but in logic there is an error called the error of the antecedent error of the antecedent means if A then G then if B then A what I mean is that if it rains the pavement will be wet that is if A then B but today morning I wake up and I see the pavement is wet therefore it must have rained if B then A not necessary that means it could be that there is a water leak somewhere it could be that somebody was watering the garden there could be other causes also unless you can say that A is the only cause cannot say that just when B is present A has to be present so A will lead to B so basically causal connections are subtle it’s not just A to B so or rather if B then A does it work like that the point I am making is here if some people are behaving in a particular way right now that is if they have an effect on their consciousness but it may not necessarily have an immediate effect because say as you rightly said if somebody has been living maybe in the past living in sattva or maybe in this life their remaining life is in sattva but that particular activity is very much in Rajasthan’s so there are certain behaviours which affect us but how much one will affect will depend on the overall way a person is living so we so we don’t minimise or deny the consequences of certain wrong actions but if somebody is speaking wisdom somebody is having insight then to go backward and say this cannot be insight because this person is reading it no, if the person is insightful, they are insightful so we can’t impose so in fact there is in the Bhagavatam itself there is a reference in the 11th canto to the to the Vyagna Gita there is a butcher who speaks wisdom and in the 11th canto, Uddhava Takshana refers to him in that how bhakti can manifest in anyone and there in the Mahabharata the incident is there in the Mahabharata and basically it’s a long story but essentially the point is that there is a brahmana who is very proud of his brahmanical prowess and then he some bird angers him and this person is just glad that the bird dies and then he goes to a house to beg for alms and the lady doesn’t give alms and he gets angry with her and she says I am not like that bird I don’t give alms he says oh why? he says I am serving I am taking care of my family so I am protected by virtue so he is impressed by that where can I learn more about virtue she says you go to that butcher and then he goes to that butcher and that butcher speaks wisdom and now the butcher speaks wisdom so now what the Mahabharata says over there is that what goes into your mouth is not as important as what comes out of your mouth now we may say that what goes into your mouth will take what comes out of your mouth that is true but how long will it take that may be see it’s like karma works in different ways for different people that means if somebody has we generally talk about good things and bad things happening to people I will give you the example of Delhi he is saying if somebody is doing bad Mahabharata they are not getting any results bad karma goes they have done some good karma in the past that’s what is protecting them but that can apply to their actions also somebody is doing one bad activity right now but that may not reflect necessarily in their behaviour because their remaining life might be virtues and their past might be virtues so if somebody is virtuous right now we have to recognise that they are virtues so generally when I started I said that everything seems to be like a nail to somebody who has a hammer sometimes we use philosophy to hammer the people but we have to use philosophy as a tool for understanding the reality and reality is complex, philosophy is also complex and how the two work together it is not easy to understand that and that is actually I would say that’s a in English there is a word ideological hobby horse what that means is that everybody has their pet ideological exclusion why things are wrong so communists will say that why are things so terrible? because the capitalists are so evil the capitalists ask why are things so terrible? the workers are so lazy now the reality is that yes some workers are lazy some capitalists are lazy but not all capitalists are lazy so basically when we adopt a particular philosophy it is a common temptation with every philosophy we just as soon as you see a situation you just ride on your ideological hobby horse that means give some oversimplified explanation for some idea but reality is complex and that doesn’t mean philosophy can’t explain our philosophy can’t explain a particular reality but it is that our philosophy has to be seen in terms of multiple factors so like Jagannath Bharat Maharaj was attached to a deer so he became a deer so now if he became a deer, what happened? he could say that is the law everyone is survival but the same Bhagavad Gita says so was all of it lost? no it was not lost because although he got a deer bone he did not get deer consciousness so he had human consciousness so basically Neha Vikramanath was saying that orientation towards spirituality will not be lost so there are both laws that apply so sometimes multiple factors may be working and we cannot reduce reality to an oversimplified model where based on one parameter we judge everything I have mentioned in my previous visit that humility means to acknowledge the complexity of reality so if we acknowledge that the complexity of reality then rather than forcing reality into the mould that our philosophy inserts we look at the reality look at the philosophy and then try to make sense of it do we have time? we have questions you can ask my question is understanding what exactly happens because not understanding what Bhagavad Gita is acting out of envy but then that may not be on the level of mind or may be on the level of mind or the soul so that is and how it is that Bhagavad Gita is saying about three kinds of bhakti abhisandhaya and vimsa both of vimsa so how do we understand exactly what is offence and what is vimsa I think this is going to take quite a long answer I will try to be as brief as possible so what is offence and what do we mean by bhakti especially bhakti involving vimsa offence at least the serious one generally words can have multi-level meanings let’s say in respect to prasad we can say that any food that is dedicated to Krishna that is prasad food that is cooked by devotees harvested by devotees anything that is served by devotees that is prasad so it’s a spectrum now different people may situate themselves at different levels of spectrum and that’s ok when somebody is having non-vegetarian food that’s absolute so with respect to offence it could have a multi-level spectrum of meaning so I had one level that if you see a devotee and you are not happy that’s an offence isn’t it? I mean you commit many offences there is one devotee who asked there are so many devotees I feel unnatural maybe I should not commit such devotees to a lot of offences no, that’s a misapplication the idea is that generally if we are connected with Krishna if we see somebody else connected with Krishna then we can feel happy to see them connected with Krishna but quite often what happens we are not so Krishna conscious so when we see others we don’t see how they are connected with Krishna we see how they are connected with us or how they are dealing with us and we may feel that they are dealt with us badly they may have also so it becomes a bit difficult so I would say that act is not a serious offence it’s not that we should feel angry when we see devotees we are feeling negative, we try to avoid that we try to cultivate some cultivating those who are conscious about their good qualities also we don’t think negatively about them maybe not when we see them but even before we see them we try to think of their good qualities so that’s, but that’s not a very serious offence a very serious offence would be where we consciously act to pull down somebody’s mood or when we see somebody being praised and we couldn’t hear their praise then we forget we say somebody gives very good classes and then somebody says glorify me I give such good classes you see how much prasad he gives it’s a, don’t think it’s a great person it’s a, it’s a pulling down something, consciously, and this is also a small way of pulling down, it can be much more serious way of pulling down us, but I think that when we are unable to tolerate the praise of somebody and we want to pull them down either literally by literally by literally dragging them down that’s very serious offence so now with respect to bhakti being performed now I was talking once to a Prabhupada disciple and he told me that devotees can be more wonderful than you can imagine and devotees can be more dreadful than you can imagine sometimes you see some devotees that’s so compassionate, so tireless so enthusiastic it’s herculean difficulties I was in America one young devotee girl, she had cancer and she was serving people which was so cheerful throughout all the hospital time and I asked her how one can say that people go through this and she said that there is enough misery in this world the world doesn’t need one more miserable person astounded by the thoughtfulness of this girl some they can hit me on the ears that how good devotees are and sometimes you will say how can somebody who behaves like this be a devotee how can a devotee do like this so you have the whole step why? because the word devotee itself is elastic so you may say that devotee is somebody who is chanting sutras or who is initiated or is coming to temple who is chanting who is a devotee satyaraja asked he gives different levels of answers so we could say that rather than how can devotee do a terrible thing or if somebody does a terrible thing, how can they be a devotee what we could say is that if they had not been devotees they would have been even worse things so we talk about innate evil that is there in everyone so that is the level of the mind that is there in some people more than others and we call them more than others so they will continue that means it is manifest so if that is happening we have to keep a distance from them so sometimes the devotees they may decide that what they are doing is devotional service but it may not sometimes the devotees get a conception that get a conception that this particular person since one devotee you know he he and not just one but for many it can happen but this particular devotee another devotee quoted this incident and it struck me says this devotee was told that you have become Prabhupada and you got a death threat but interestingly the mail was dear Prabhu please accept my humble obeisance and if you don’t stop doing this that means the last day of your life you are surrounded so what is very funny so people say they are having the external forms of devoting conversation why? he has developed that conception what are you doing is devotional service I am protecting Prabhupada’s mission whatever that’s why when somebody starts doing it himself and they think it is good that is the one situation generally it is good people will be good, bad people will be bad and if some devotees are being bad that usually means that it is because they had a lot of evil within them but that evil is not yet completely purged but now there is an exceptional case where if some devotees start thinking that what they are doing is right then then even good people may do bad things because they think that they are doing it for a good cause now whether that cause is good or not that is let us be careful and that’s why it is important for each one of us to not live in our own echo chamber echo chamber means that if I am alone in a particular room then I speak loudly and just my own voice echoes back to me so then similarly some people who are of a particular say worldly or even within a particular conception of how bhaktis would practise that if they live in their own echo chamber then they start thinking what I am doing is right and anybody who is doing anything different is wrong that’s why it is very important that even when devotees start differences of opinion there should be discussion so when discussion stops it is not that the argument stops rather when discussion stops bloodshed begins so if there are differences bloodshed, if there are differences but if we are living in our echo chambers then that’s when it happens that somebody could decide to do something bad because they think they are living for good purpose but if they hear from other people other perspectives then it is not as simple as they thought it was so that’s how sometimes devotees may do some violence also by practising bhakti so thank you very much we will have more questions on Sunday session so you can ask questions