No one has a right to mistreat you, not even you Gita 06 05

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna.
No one has a right to mistreat you, not even you. Suppose somebody mistreats us, and they call us for a meeting and then they just neglect us, or they are very late, or they constantly disparage us, humiliating us, or minimizing us, then we would say, how dare you mistreat me like this? I’m not going to stand this. So now, it’s not only people outside us who can mistreat us, even we can mistreat ourselves.
That means that we can be our worst enemies. We can end up, we can say, we can, something within us prompts us, do this, and we listen to it, and then we spend hours and hours on something which is utterly useless. Or sometimes, we just criticize ourselves, like Aranj, ruthlessly, and we end up demoralized by that.
We need to treat ourselves like someone we are responsible for, someone whose abilities and talents need to be engaged constructively, so that we can move on in our lives positively. We can make the best of what we have, and the Bhagavad Gita points to this dynamic when it states in 6.5, uddhare dātmanātmānaṁ nātmānaṁ avasādayet ātmaiva ya ātmanobandhara ātmaiva ripurātmanahā uddhare ātmanātmānaṁ. We need to elevate ourselves with ourselves, not degrade ourselves with ourselves.
One way we degrade ourselves is by mistreating ourselves. Now, the opposite of mistreating is not pampering. It is treating respectfully and responsibly.
That means that it’s not pampering, or you are terrible, or you are wonderful, everything that you do is perfect, not like that. It’s like a coach is responsible for a trainee, but the coach also needs to be respectful to the trainee, but coach can’t pamper the trainee, nor can the coach insult the trainee. So like that, we need to become our own coaches, and we need to see how the voice inside us, which we can call the voice of our mind, how it is acting.
Is it pampering us? Is it disparaging us? Or is it telling us something useful? And then based on merit, when we learn to act in ways according to our inner voice, often within consultation with our outer wise voices, when we act in a way that we elevate ourselves, then we can manifest our full potential, we can fulfill our destiny, and we can act according to the dignity of the parts of God that we are intrinsically. So, we refuse to let the world mistreat us, we resented, we revolt against it. Similarly, we need to revolt against we mistreating ourselves and learn to treat ourselves, not by pampering, not by disparaging, but by respecting and being responsible for to unleash our potential.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.