Our longing for love is perfected in Krishna

Evening program at ISKCON, Farmington Hill, Michigan

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So, this is from the Vrindadesha Stotra. And here the prayer is being offered unto that Lord, the son of Vasudeva. I have no other Lord apart from Him.
What is it that makes Him so special? We praise the song of the flute. And music captivates the hearts of the Gopis. And not just one Gopi.
There are hundreds and thousands of millions of Gopis who become attracted to Him. So, there is an alliteration of the word Goti. There are millions of Gopis who are attracted to Krishna.
And for each of these Gopis, Krishna appears like Smara Goti Samad. He has the attractive power of millions of cupids. And what is His speciality? Prativallavi Kaavimataad Sukhdaad.
With each of the Gopis, Krishna reciprocates individually, giving them Sukhdaad, giving them happiness. So, Krishna, although there are millions of Gopis who are attracted to Him, none of them is just lost in the crowd. Every one of them has an individual relationship with Krishna.
And every one of them relishes joy in that individual relationship. Now, love is one of the most universal longings of the human heart. And if we look at the longing for love from various perspectives, we can see that this longing, it transcends our immediate physical existence.
That means that, according to atheistic materialistic worldview, we are just biochemical protoplasmic bags driven with the urge for survival. Now, with this urge for survival, why do we long for relationships? We could say that it is just the nature’s mechanism by which there is copulation and reproduction. But we have various kinds of relationships.
And the relationship, especially in the human person, the longing is much deeper and it goes beyond the carnal drive. Now, for example, we appreciate beauty. Now, where do we get the appreciation for beauty from? We could say that, oh, that’s nature’s arrangement by which the sexes can be attracted to each other and copulation can take place.
But then we appreciate beauty in non-sexual contexts also. We see a beautiful sunrise. We see beautiful scenery.
We appreciate that. Now, if we consider from a purely survival driven motive, if a deer is about to pounce on a deer, a tiger is about to pounce on a deer, and the tiger says, oh, this deer is so beautiful. Then that momentary lapse and the deer will flee.
Tiger will go hungry. On the other hand, if the deer is grazing and sees the tiger coming, it thinks, oh, this tiger is so handsome. And that momentary pause can cause the death of the tiger.
So, the appreciation for beauty is not only not necessary for our biological nature, because it extends far beyond the biological urge for survival, but it can also be a danger for our biological urge for survival. So, now, where does this come from? Certainly, our bodies are machines designed for survival, but our essential core extends beyond the body. So, I will talk about this.
We are trying to understand the longing for love. I will talk it from a scientific perspective, then I will talk from a philosophical perspective, and then I will talk from a spiritual perspective. So, ultimately, our longing for love comes because we are conscious.
Nowadays, a new gadget comes up. Say, a new version of iPhone has come up. People fall in love with it.
But the iPhone doesn’t love anyone. So, it does not have consciousness by which it can experience emotions, including the emotion of love. Now, the iPhone or any such device can be programmed to speak, you know, I love you, but nobody is going to take that seriously.
At least nobody in the right frame of mind. So, the longing for love comes because, first of all, we are conscious. And because we are conscious, we experience various emotions and we long to experience love.
The researchers have tried in various ways to find out where is the centre of consciousness. So, with the development in neuroscience and cognitive sciences in general, researchers have been able to correlate the bodily functioning with brain functioning. So, for example, researchers have found out that when we see, when we process visual input, the visual areas of the brain are activated.
So, like that, where is the conscious observed in the brain? Researchers tried to find out. So, one prominent researcher was Dr. Wilder Penfield, he is a Nobel laureate neurosurgeon. He is often considered to be the father of neurosurgery.
And he did various experiments, which he wrote about this book called The Mystery of the Mind. I will talk about one experiment here. He had subjects and he told the subject, raise your hand.
When the subject raised the hand, he observed that a particular part of the brain is activated. I will avoid all scientific jargon here, just keep the concept simple. So, then he told the subject to lower the hand and that particular part of the brain got deactivated.
After that, Dr. Penfield, using electrodes, activated that same part of the brain and a hand went up. He asked the subject, what happened? He said, my hand went up. Did you raise your hand? He said, I didn’t, you raised my hand.
So, then he deactivated that part of the brain and the hand fell down. What happened? He said, my hand fell down. Did you put your hand down? He said, no, I didn’t, you did.
Now, this experiment raises a profound question. To understand its implication, we can consider, say there is a printer attached over here to the computer. And the printer has a printing hand and there is a print button on the computer.
Now, when the print button is pressed, the printer hand will move. And even if it is my computer, I can press the print button or you can also press the print button. And whoever presses the print button, the hand will move.
So, as a rough correlation, the hand going up and down is like the printer hand moving. And the part of the brain which is activated, that is like the print button on the computer. So, in the second case, it was Dr. Penfield who was pressing the print button.
It was he who was activating the part of the brain. Who was activating it in the first case? Who was that person who was saying in the second case, yes, the printer hand is being activated, but I am not activating it, you are activating it. So, just as there was an activator required for pressing the print button, the brain area is not the cause of the hand moving up.
It is the instrument that causes, that executes the function of the hand raising up or coming down. Just like the print button is the instrument to be through which the printer hand moves. But who is the presser of the print button? Who is the activator of that brain area? And no matter how much he probed the brain, there is no area, the activation of which the subject, made the subject feel that I am the dude.
So, after four years, not four years, after four decades of brain research, Dr. Penfield concluded that the source of consciousness is extra cerebral. The source of consciousness is extra cerebral. It is extra cerebral, it is outside the brain.
Consciousness does not reside in the brain. And that is the precise insight of the Bhagavad Gita. Consciousness is distinct from the brain.
The brain is a tool which is used by the soul to express its consciousness at the bodily level and to function, to make the body function. So, our consciousness, which is the foundation for our longing to love, that transcends our body. And that’s why its fulfilment also needs to transcend the body.
If we look for love only at the physical level, there can be some gratification, but there will not be lasting satisfaction. So, our being extends beyond the physical to ultimately the spiritual. Now, looking at this in another way, from a philosophical perspective, we all strive to form loving relationships.
And we want those relationships to be lasting. We want those relationships to be meaningful. When parents love their children, this labour and strife, so that the children grow up and become successful.
When a husband and wife, a man and woman get married, there are so many dreams that we will fulfil in our life together. So, in all our relationships, we long for fulfilment. We long for a meaningful, fulfilling, loving home.
And yet, if we look at the material level of reality, we find that life and our relationships can just come to a devastating end in one moment. At a physical level, just a simple blow or a bang or a bug, one germ enters into the body, or one car hits someone, and life is over. Longing for love is not just thwarted, it is terminated, if it is to be expressed only at the physical level.
So, we all intuitively seek meaning. We want a longing for love. And yet, we hardly ever, if we are realistic, we can see that longing for love will not be lastingly fulfilled at the material level of reality.
Now, around 25 years ago, I was met in standard. And I did very well in that standard. So, to felicitate me, the collector of Nasik, he came to our house to congratulate me.
My father still remembers that incident. So, yesterday he was showing me that photo also. So then, just within one month after that, on that very night actually, the very night the collector came, that very night, my mother was detected with blood cancer.
And within one month, she passed away. So, at that time, it jolted me, but it shook me, devastated me, but it put me on a search. I started thinking, for any parents to take care of a child is difficult.
But since my childhood, I had a handicap. So, my parents had to labour much more to take care of me. And at some level, I was aware of their sacrifice.
But still, it was such a loving relationship, just terminated in one moment. Not one moment, just one month at that time. So, it raised a lot of questions in my life of what is the point of living.
What is the purpose of relationships? Was it just meant for frustration? We all look for meaning in various ways in our life. So, if we look at it in a different way, I’ll come back to loving relationships once again. In all fields of life, we look for relationships.
Sorry, we look for meaning. We look for order. And if we don’t find order, then we look deeper to find some order.
Now, millions of people before Newton had seen fruits falling. Most of them picked up the fruit and ate it. It was Newton who thought, why did this fruit fall? Now, it is his brilliance that as an answer to that question, he came up with the theory of gravity.
But still, he’s very asking the question, why did this fruit fall? That indicates that there is some assumption over there that things happen for a reason. That there is some underlying order. Otherwise, you would not have asked, why did this fruit fall? So, we all intuitively assume that there is some level of order in our life.
In the world around us. And science seeks to discover that order. And if science finds something that is disorderly, then it doesn’t give up the search for order.
It looks deeper. For example, from the time Newton developed the law of gravity and the laws of motion, classical physics developed into a magnificent body of knowledge which explains practically everything that scientists knew. At the start of the 20th century, Lord Kelvin made a famous statement.
He said, the biggest problem for physicists in the future generations will be unemployment. They will have nothing to do because all the research has been done. They will only have nothing but to fill the details.
And just within 20 years, the whole edifice of classical physics lay shaken if not shackled. Classical physics, Newtonian physics didn’t work at the atomic level where the motion of fundamental particles was concerned. And it didn’t work at the cosmic level where particles approach the speed of light.
Now when this happened, did scientists say, oh everything is meaningless? No, they probed deeper. And that’s how we had the quantum physics coming up to explain the motion of fundamental particles. And we had relativity physics coming up to explain the motion of cosmic bodies.
So all science progresses by assuming that there is underlying meaning, that there is underlying order. And even when we don’t find order, still we seek order somewhere at a deeper level. So now, atheists sometimes argue that, okay you religious people, you do this ritual, you do that ritual.
It doesn’t make sense. It’s all meaningless. Now even if for argument’s sake, agree that, okay, religious rituals don’t make sense.
They are meaningless. We can turn that question around. And why are you complaining? According to atheism, everything is meaningless.
Isn’t it? All of life is meaningless. We just somehow exist for some time and then we die. And it’s all over.
We are just some flab of flesh which has come alive for a few moments between two infinities of nothingness. So if everything is meaningless, why complain that religious rituals are meaningless? Or conversely, atheists often misappropriate scientific progress to claim that if you are scientific, you would not be religious, you should become atheistic. But again, science is a search for meaning.
So if we just accept the atheistic interpretation of science, this is an important point. Sometimes people think that science and religion are at war with each other. No.
Science is a tool for acquiring knowledge. And science, as a method of methodology, looks for material explanations for material phenomena. And because it looks for material explanations, it does not say anything directly about the spiritual.
So just like if I have a fishing net. And with that fishing net, it has minimum holes. It has a hole of say 10 mm diameter.
10 mm. So then, 10 mm holes are there. Then no matter how long I fish, if there is any aquatic which is smaller than 10 mm, I will never be able to catch it.
It’s not inefficient fishing, nor is it that less than 10 mm fishes don’t exist. It’s just that that’s the way the fishing net is designed. So science casts a fishing net for acquiring knowledge about the world around us.
But science begins with the assumption that we will look for natural, meaning material, natural explanation of natural phenomena. And that’s why science, as a matter of methodology, cannot detect spiritual truth. But nor can it refute spiritual truth.
It is just beyond the scope of science, the spiritual subject matter. But inferences can be drawn. So now, if you want to draw inferences, atheists, the whole of existence is ultimately meaningless.
Somehow we came to life and then we are going to die. And atheists say, oh no, yes, that’s the truth. Be courageous.
Accept that life is meaningless. But is it really courageous if it is not true to accept it? And if everything is meaningless, then why do atheists consider that science has made religion outdated? That now because we are scientific, there is no need for us to be religious. As I said, science is essentially a search for meaning, a search for order.
So what does the atheistic worldview reduce us to? We are drowning in an ocean of meaninglessness while searching and priding ourselves for finding some pebbles of meaning. Oh, everything is meaningless, but particles move according to F is equal to gm1m2 upon r square. Everything is meaningless, but matter and energy are related as E is equal to mc square.
Well, where did the meaning of that come from? So either, if everything is meaningless, then even science should be meaningless. Why do we find order? Or, if there is order in which is discovered by science, then maybe there is overall order also. And we just need to look deeper to find that order.
So, science offers explanations to the natural phenomena. God and science are explanations at different levels. Science offers explanations for natural phenomena.
God is the explanation for the explainability of the universe. God is the explanation for the explainability. Why are natural phenomena working according to laws? If we look at the atheistic, if we would have an atheistic autobiography of the universe, what would we have? Nothing existed.
Nothing happened to nothing. Because nothing happened to nothing, something came about. And because of nothing happening to one thing, that something then changed into everything.
There is a famous atheist who wrote a book about how everything came from nothing. The universe explained. God debunked.
Now if you read that book, the essence of that book is a thorough redefinition of nothing. So that nothing is a lot of things. The nothing which is supposed to have given birth to everything, that nothing is a complex quantum mechanical vacuum which requires pages of abstract mathematics to develop, to even comprehend, to describe.
So that is certainly something. It is not nothing. So, you know, the explainability of the universe requires an explanation.
And that explanation is God. So just as, I am discussing all this, science pursues explanations in whatever field it goes. And when we don’t find explanation, we pursue deeper.
And just as we consider this spirit of searching for knowledge, even when things don’t make sense, that as a bold, courageous spirit which will lead to the growth of human knowledge, the same can be applied in the spiritual direction. Albert Einstein said that the sciences, the arts and the religions are all fruits of the same tree. They are all fruits of the same tree of the human quest for knowledge.
So now, we, when we turn towards, we are discussing the longing for love. So at one level, we live in a world where the longing for love is set for frustration. It may be sooner, it may be later.
But it is set for frustration. So, why is that? It’s set for frustration means that there are three possibilities basically. When we direct our love in this world, that we aspire for a loving relationship.
So when we aspire for a loving relationship, say a boy falls in love with a girl and he proposes to the girl and the girl responds with a slap. So we seek something and we don’t get it at all. Then that is frustrating.
But we seek something and say the relationship develops and we get that. Now, I was in Melbourne, so I was asked this question. I was talking about relationships.
You know, why are arranged marriages always better than love marriages? I don’t know. First thing is the nomenclature is biassed. It implies as if in arranged marriages there is no love.
Isn’t it? So, it’s a biassed nomenclature. And the point is, not that, people may say there is love at first sight. Okay, there might be, but what will determine the relationship is not whether there is love at first sight or not.
Whether there is love after many sights. There may be infatuation initially, but what will sustain the relationship is commitment. And if we live in a relationship with excessive expectations.
I’ll come back to this point a little later, what I mean by excessive expectations. But often we create for our object of love, you know, a tower and we imagine. We imagine that person to be so glorious that actually no human being can satisfy that.
So, that’s why when marriages, relationships are formed simply based on initial attraction, in the same mind which imagines everything wonderful in some person, when that expectation is frustrated, then we start seeing everything that frustrates us. And the same people who say I cannot live without you initially, after sometime they say I cannot live with you. The same goes to the extreme.
And so, quite often there is disappointment, there is frustration and there can be devastating pain for the heart when the relationships are observed like that. So, one is that the relationship doesn’t form itself. You want it to be formed, but it doesn’t get formed.
That causes frustration. Second is it’s formed, but then it turns out to be anticlimactic. It is there, but it turns out to be anticlimactic.
Third is that even if the relationship is formed and it is satisfactory, now both the partners come to a realistic understanding of what we can expect from each other and they have a satisfactory relationship. Still, that relationship cannot last forever. Now, many of the romance movies and novels, they all talk about H.E.A., Happily Ever After.
Now, this is a longing of the human heart, but at the material level of reality, it is not fulfilled. So, the point I was making is our quest for love and relationships in each of the ways is ultimately set for frustration. Either we don’t get the relationship we want, we get, but it doesn’t turn out to be what we adopt it to be or it may satisfy, but then it doesn’t last.
So, why is it that relationships, is it that we have a longing for love and it is meant for frustration? Isn’t there any way for fulfilment? So, what the Bhagavad Gita essentially tells us is that we have two kinds of relationships. We have horizontal relationship with others and we have a vertical relationship with God, with Krishna. The Bhagavad Gita offers us a vision of God who is not just like some being high up in the sky.
No, he is a guide by the side. The Bhagavad Gita offers a vision of Krishna who is, you know, sometimes in a movie, the hero enters. So, the hero often makes a dramatic entry.
Maybe there is a damsel in distress and the hero comes charging in a horse and slashes out at the miscreants. Or the hero comes driving a car at high speed and then we have the tyres crunching against the concrete and then the break and the hero jumps out and springs into action. So, now in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna enters for the first time in 1.14. Before that is other characters are blocking.
And how is Krishna’s entry? No. There is, he says, there is a magnificent chariot. So, it’s like, you know, there is a posh car.
And then, suppose the car is coming in. The car sweeps, first you can see the wheels, then you can see the car. And the door opens.
And the hero springs out. But here, the Bhagavad Gita starts with a vision. See, there is a certain, if a big person is there, maybe that person is sitting behind in the car and the driver comes out, opens the door and the big person comes out.
Or there is a certain level of heroism in oneself driving the car and coming into action. But, if the person is a chauffeur driving someone else, that is not very heroic. Not considered very heroic.
Isn’t it? But Krishna’s entry in the Bhagavad Gita is what? He is the servant of his devotees. He is taking the role of a chauffeur for his devotee. And this is the vision of God that the Bhagavad Gita offers us.
Now, God is not a person who delights in his Godhood, demanding that we all bow down to him. And if we don’t, he will cast us into hell for eternity. Now, Krishna is a guide by the side.
And as a guide by the side, he offers loving counsel. Loving counsel. And the whole Bhagavad Gita is essentially a demonstration of the transformational power of love.
It’s a demonstration of the transformational power of love. At the start of the Bhagavad Gita, when the first chapter ends, Arjuna has put aside his bow. In 1.46, it is described, विस्रुज्य ससरं जापं शोक सम्वीग्नमानसः विस्रुज्य, he put aside his bow.
ससरं जापं, he put aside his bow and arrow. शोक सम्वीग्नमानसः Being overwhelmed by dejection, by lamentation. And by the end of the Bhagavad Gita, the last verse is described in 18.78, यत्रयोगेश्वरः कृष्णो यत्रपार्थो धनुर्धरः That Bhartha, Arjuna is Dhanurdhara.
Dhanurdhara is one who is the wielder of the bow. This signifies that Arjuna has picked up his bow and is now ready to fight. So, Arjuna’s Gandiva bow represents the human determination.
The human determination. And adversities and the reversals of life, the perplexities of life, they make us lose heart. They make us lose determination.
And as Arjuna puts down his bow, similarly, we lose heart. We tend to give up. That give up can be in a literal physical sense, where people just become chronically depressed.
Or it can be in a metaphysical sense, where people give up the search for meaning and just live on through life, trying to achieve this, trying to achieve that, trying to do this, trying to do that. And somehow gain some sense of self-worth and self-identity. Find some meaning somewhere in life.
So, people just give up metaphysically. Don’t bother about the big questions. Just do what you can in life.
Now, this kind of living, most of us, we tend to live like that. But when some reversals come, when adversities come, at that time we’re jolted out. What am I living for? What is the purpose of life? What is the meaning of life? Ultimately, what counts in life? So, Arjuna had that question facing him.
He had to fight against his relatives, his grandsire, his teacher, martial teacher. He says, what is the point? What should I live for? So, what Krishna answers is that, sarva-dharman parityaja mam ekam sarva-dharman parityaja Give up all varieties of religion and surrender to me. Now, interestingly, when Krishna tells Arjuna, give up all varieties of religion and surrender to me.
But still, what happens after that is, Arjuna pursues a Kshatriya dharma. Get a little technicality over here. Essentially, Arjuna’s dilemma at the start of the Bhagavad Gita is, he has two dharmas.
One is the Kshatriya dharma, that he’s a warrior and a warrior is meant to fight and protect. And he had a Kula dharma. Kula dharma, he belongs to a particular dynasty and he should protect the members of his dynasty.
So, if he does the Kshatriya dharma and fights, he destroys his Kula. If he does his Kula dharma and does not fight, then he gives up his Kshatriya dharma. So, what to do? So, Krishna says, sarva-dharman parityaja Give up all varieties of religion and mam ekam sarva-dharman parityaja Just surrender to me.
Now, when he says, Prabhupada in one lecture says, the sarva-dharman parityaja is something which the hippies had also done. They had given up their families, they had given up their education, they had given up their governmental duties, they had given up all social responsibilities. That is not the point.
Now, mam ekam sarva-dharman parityaja is important. Surrender to Krishna is important. They had done sarva-dharman parityaja, mayam ekam sarva-dharman parityaja.
Completely surrendered to the forces of illusion. So, now mam ekam sarva-dharman parityaja, surrender to Krishna is not something which means that we have to give up all dharma. Rather, we have to choose that dharma which enables us to surrender to Krishna.
So, for Arjuna, in his situation, the Kshatriya dharma was anukula. As a Kshatriya, by fighting, he could serve Krishna. So, we have our material duties and we have our spiritual duties.
So, the Bhagavad Gita, when it says, sarva-dharman parityaja mam ekam saranam vraja, it does not mean that we have to give up all our material duties. But rather, we concentrate and cultivate those material duties which harmonise with our spiritual duty. Now, what this means is that we have, as I started this part of the talk by saying, we have horizontal relationships and we have vertical relationships.
So, the ideal human life is where a horizontal relationship and a vertical relationship, they work symbiotically. They work symbiotically means that our relationship with our loved ones, it inspires us to become more devoted to Krishna. So, for example, the parents are religious.
Parents are devoted to Krishna. Then, they train and inspire their children to become devoted to Krishna. And the obedience to the parents, the regard for the parents, inspire our children to also become devoted to Krishna.
So, the horizontal relationships, if we are, not just parents and children, but in our relationship, if we have relationships with those who are also striving to be devoted to Krishna, then that horizontal relationship strengthens our vertical relationship. And more importantly, our vertical relationship stabilises our horizontal relationship. How is that? Ultimately, as I said, no one can, no human being can satisfy the human heart’s longing for love.
And inevitably, there will be ups and downs even in the best of human relationships. So, if we are looking for the full fulfilment of our longing for love through another human relationship, we will set ourselves up for disappointment and frustration. And the disappointment and frustration will impel us to act in ways that will further damage the relationship.
On the other hand, if we have a strong vertical relationship, if we get our sense of self-worth and self-identity from our relationship with Krishna, you know, when any relationship is broken, more than the practical damages that might happen because of the relationship being broken, there is that very disheartening, moral devastating sense of rejection that comes. And that makes us question our intelligence, our judgement, our whole self-worth. So now, when we study the Bhagavad Gita, we understand that Krishna’s love for us is unfailing and unflinching.
There is nothing that any one of us can ever do that can stop Krishna from loving us. There is nothing. We don’t have the power to do anything that will make Krishna stop loving us.
So, Krishna will always be there and He will always keep loving us. And Krishna’s love for us depends not on who we are but on who He is. Krishna’s love for us depends on not who we are.
Now, we may be fallen, we may be godless, we may be atheistic, we may be demoniac, doesn’t matter. Krishna is there even in their hearts. And Krishna loves them also.
So, Krishna’s love for us doesn’t depend on who we are. It depends on who He is. At the same time, our experience of His love depends on who we are.
What that means is, that means is, the sun gives light to everyone. Wealthy, poor, virtuous, vicious. But, if I close my eyes, I cannot see the sun.
So, sun’s capacity to give light does not depend on the recipient. But the recipient’s capacity to receive light depends on his or her receptivity. So, similarly, if our consciousness is materially infatuated, then our eyes are closed to Krishna.
And when eyes are closed to Krishna, we can’t experience His love for us. So, when we start slowly redirecting our love towards Krishna, we can love Krishna at various levels. At one level, we may love Krishna because He is the provider of our needs.
And that is good. Krishna is providing us some things and we are grateful to Him for that. Now, Prabhupada would say, in the Christian tradition, people go to God and pray, O Father, give us our daily bread.
See, it is good that at least we are going to God. We are thanking Him for the daily bread. We are acknowledging that the bread doesn’t come just by our own efforts.
It comes ultimately by God’s arrangement. Our efforts are there. They are important.
But they are secondary. The bread is provided primarily by nature’s arrangement. If nature did not provide for grains, we would have no food.
This is every morning, when the birds start chirping, they are looking for grains. Now, they have to labour in search for grains. But, their labour does not produce the grains.
The grains already exist by God’s arrangement and their labour helps them to just find it. So, their labour is secondary. God’s arrangement is primary.
Similarly, for our getting the bread, our labour is important, no doubt. But it is secondary. God’s provision is primary.
So, thanking God for giving bread, that is itself a good level of God consciousness. But, if that is all we thank God for, then that is not love of God, that is love of bread. And then, if the bread somehow stops coming, then we will say, God, bye-bye.
God doesn’t exist. So, when we get a philosophical understanding of who we are and what our ultimate relationships are meant to be, then we can take our relationship with Krishna to a level higher than His fulfilling our material needs and wants. So, when we have, especially when we connect with Krishna through prayer, through meditation, through devotion, we experience inner peace.
We experience joy. We experience calming of the mind. We experience an unburdening of the heart.
And this is at our level of experience. This is Krishna’s love for us. Many people come for kirtans or bhajans and they also clap and they may dance and sing, they may feel very peaceful.
And then they go back, this is another nice experience I had. But, a thoughtful person asks, why did I have that experience? No. That is actually the scientific spirit of enquiry.
What is the cause of this experience? So, if we enquire like that and see with the eyes of the Bhagavad Gita, we will understand what this experience implies. Suppose, a baby is shivering in the cold and the mother sees that the baby is shivering and the baby goes and puts a blanket. Now, when the babies are very small, they don’t understand anything.
They may not even understand that there is a mother out there and the mother loves me. All that the babies understand is all of existence is potential food. So, whatever comes near my mouth, put it in the mouth.
They’ll put the mother’s breast, they’ll put their finger, they’ll put their toys, they’ll put their blankets, everything. So, initially, even when the baby doesn’t understand that there is a mother and the mother loves me, all that the baby feels is the warmth of the blanket. But then, as the baby grows up, the baby starts connecting, oh, there is a mother, she loves me and then at some remote level of consciousness, when the baby is shivering and then she feels the comforting warmth, then she understands, oh, this is my mother, the mother loves me and she is putting the blanket over me.
So, as the baby grows, gradually, even if the baby is asleep and she doesn’t see her mother, still she makes that connection between the blanket’s warmth and the mother’s love. Similarly, when we expose our consciousness to spiritual sound vibration, when we practise meditation, when we connect with Krishna in devotion, we experience the comforting warmth akin to a devotional blanket. We experience relief from anxiety, from agitation, from fear, from all kinds of negative emotions, we will experience that relief.
Whereas, the baby will automatically grow up, now we need to consciously grow up. Why am I experiencing this relief, this joy, this peace? If we study the Bhagavad Gita’s philosophy, then we will make that connection between the relief that we experience in devotion and Krishna’s love for us. I experience this relief because Krishna loves me and he is offering me this relief.
And as we grow spiritually more and more, we will start perceiving more and more of Krishna’s love for us. We will start perceiving, we will start relishing that love more and more. So, when we have experienced security in our vertical relationship with Krishna, then when there are some turbulences in our horizontal relationship, then we won’t be plagued by insecurity and rejection, we won’t have an identity crisis, we won’t have a self-worth crisis.
Rather, we will be able to maturely understand and evaluate and act accordingly. So, we will be able to weather whatever ups and downs come in our horizontal relationships better when we have a stabler vertical relationship. And in that way, in many relationships, storms come and storms go and then the relationship comes back to a stabler level.
So, we have to weather those storms. So, in this way, the vertical relationship can bring stability to our horizontal relationship. And thus, the vertical and horizontal relationships are meant to act symbiotically.
So, our longing for love, if we let it be restricted only to the horizontal level and relating with others, we are fortunate at a material level, we may form some satisfying material relationships. There’s no guarantee that we will, but even if we do, still, they will not be lasting. And what we get in a horizontal relationship, the love that we get is not unreal.
It is real. And it is meant to point us to the supreme reality. Now, when I first read the Srimad Bhagavatam and then I read the fourth canto, Dhruva Maharaj, when he was incited by his stepmother and his father remained silent.
This is for him a devastating shock. He had thought that I am a prince. And I have a right to be in my father’s lap.
And his stepmother’s cruel words just brushed him off practically from there. His father stayed silent. His heart broken.
And he ran crying hot tears of agony to his mother. And the media servers in the palace, they had already reported what had happened. And his mother, Suniti, she realised she was powerless.
She could do nothing for her son in that situation. Her husband favoured his co-wife, Suruchi, instead of Suniti. And what did she tell him? Anomaly.
Because she told him, if you want relief, go to Lord Vishnu. Seek shelter in him. But before that, she said something more.
She said that whatever love I can offer you, Lord Vishnu can offer you millions of times more love. So, what she told him, she did not say that I don’t love you. My love for you is not real.
So, he said, yes, I love you and Lord Vishnu loves you millions of times more. And this is a situation in which despite all my love for you, I am powerless to help you. But Lord Vishnu is not powerless.
Take shelter of him. So, when this verse is, you are the mother, you are the father, you are the friend, you are the brother, you are the wealth, you are knowledge, you are everything. Now, this verse, what does it mean? It is not simply pantheism.
Pantheism means everything is God. No, that is not the idea. In the Bhagavad Gita 7.19, Krishna says, bahunam janmanam ante jnanavan mam prapadyate vasudeva sarvamiti samatma sudurlabha So, he says, that person understands vasudeva is sarvamiti.
Vasudeva is everything. But then, Krishna doesn’t say this jnanavan surrenders to everything. No, he says, he surrenders to mam prapadyate.
So, the point is, when we say vasudeva is sarvamiti, that means God exists in everything and God is the attractive force, is the attractive principle in everything. So, tam eva mata chinta tam eva that you are the mother, you are the father, you are the friend. What it means is, that whatever shelter we get in any of these relationships or any of these things also, we may get shelter in knowledge, we may get shelter in wealth, whatever shelter we get in any of these things, ultimately that shelter is coming from Krishna.
So, we do value horizontal relationships, but we don’t restrict our love to only the horizontal relationships. See that, if in this relationship there is so much satisfaction possible, there is so much love and shelter possible, how much more will be the love in a vertical relationship? With that understanding, we focus our heart and its longing for love on Lord Krishna and harmonise all our relationships in a way in which we progress towards that ultimate goal of our life, to develop a loving relationship with Krishna and to attain lasting fulfilment thereof. Now, at a material level, death is going to come to everyone, whether we are devotees or whether we are non-devotees.
But, that death is not the end. That is not a termination. It is a transition.
And where we go after a transition depends on our consciousness. Now, if there is a hospital, and in that hospital, two patients are sick. The one of them, the disease is not diagnosed and no treatment is given.
No, no treatment has been prescribed. Another, the disease is diagnosed and the treatment has been prescribed. Both of them are sick.
And say, after one week of being in the hospital, both of them leave the hospital. Now, one of them, although both of them from the hospital’s perspective are left, one of them has gone to the graveyard, the other has gone back home. Similarly, from the arena of material reality, a devotee and a non-devotee, both will die.
But, a non-devotee is like a person whose disease has not been diagnosed and the treatment has not been prescribed. The disease is, our love is misdirected. Instead of the eternal, it is directed and consumed in the temporary.
So, they will continue on unfortunately in the cycle of birth and death. So, instead of just going round and round this cycle of birth and death, pray to Murari, please rescue me from this. So, a devotee may also die.
A devotee will also die. A devotee may also die in various ways, but that doesn’t matter how one dies. Actually, for a devotee, one who is directed one’s love towards Krishna, then the devotee will attain Krishna.
And death, in that sense, is not a defeat. It is the ultimate victory for a devotee. Because it is a reunion with the Lord of the heart.
I’ll summarise. I started by talking about how our longing for love is at the very core of our being. And yet, that longing is so often disappointed if not frustrated.
And we discussed, where does this longing come from? We love because we are conscious. And the source of consciousness is extra cerebral. I talked about the hand raising.
And who is the raiser of the hand? Dr. Penfield’s experiment. Then I looked from another perspective that all of human advancement, including scientific advancement, has happened because of the quest for meaning. Even when no order is seen, we look for order.
Just as science developed classical physics, then relativity physics, or quantum physics, but persevering in the quest for meaning. Similarly, when we look for our longing for love and see that it is going to be frustrated, then we can look for deeper meaning. And the deeper meaning is that we are meant for spiritual love and spiritual relationships.
And then looking in another way, I said that the longing for love is directed only materially to someone else, horizontally, three possibilities. Either the relationship doesn’t develop itself, it develops, but it turns out to be anticlimax, or it develops and there is some satisfaction, but then it is terminated. So either way, it seems as if we are set up for frustration.
Set up for… It’s meaningless. We love and we lose. What is the point of it all? The point is that this love which we have in our horizontal relationships, this is meant to be a pointer to our love towards Krishna.
And we discussed how Krishna is not a god who delights in his godhood. He is a god who becomes a servant of those who love him, just as he becomes a charioteer of Arjuna. And he loves his love for us unfailingly and unflinchingly.
There is nothing we can ever do that can make Krishna stop loving us. His love for us depends not on who we are but on who he is. But our experience of his love depends on who we are.
It’s like the sun gives light to everyone but if we close our eyes, we can’t see the sun. So we need to open our eyes. We need to turn our heart towards Krishna.
And then I discussed the process for doing this. Arjuna did not reject. When Krishna told, Arjuna did not give up all dharma.
He chose that dharma. For him, the tension was between Kshatriya and Kula dharma. He chose that dharma which enabled him to surrender.
That is Kshatriya dharma. Similarly, we don’t have to reject our material duties. Rather, we have to choose those material duties which enable us to harmonise with Krishna.
And then I talked about how our horizontal and vertical relationships can be symbiotic. So, by if our loved ones are also devoted to Krishna or we choose to love those who are devoted to Krishna then that inspires us in our vertical relationship with Krishna. Inspires us to become more devoted to Krishna.
And when there are disappointments and ups and downs in our horizontal relationship, if we are seeking self-worth and self-identity through some horizontal relationships, we will feel so rejected that we will react in a knee-jerk way and we will worsen the relationship. But if we are sheltered in our spiritual relationship with Krishna, then we can respond maturely and weather the storms that will inevitably come in the horizontal relationships. And we talked about how we get the shelter in the vertical relationship by experiencing Krishna’s love.
So, the relief that we experience in remembering Krishna in doing bhakti that is like the blanket that a mother puts on a baby out of love. So, the baby needs to grow up and make the connection between the blanket’s warmth and the mother’s love. Similarly, if we study the Bhagavad Gita and grow spiritually, we will make that connection.
This relief represents Krishna’s love for me. And as we move onwards in our relationship with Krishna, we realise that all the other loves of this world are meant to point us towards Krishna’s love. The loves of this world are not unreal, but they are meant to point us to the supreme reality.
Just as our mother said, Vishnu can offer you millions of times more love than what I can. And thus, whatever love we get in our horizontal relationship, we accept it weightfully. We reciprocate lovingly, but we don’t restrict our love to our horizontal relationships.
We concentrate our loving propensity on Krishna and harmonise all our relationships accordingly. Lastly, for a devotee, death is not termination, rather it is liberation. Like two patients, one undiagnosed and untreated, and patient diagnosed and treated, both leave the hospital.
But one goes to the graveyard, other goes home. Similarly, both the devotees and non-devotees may die, but non-devotees continue the cycle of birth and death, whereas devotees go to attain Krishna. Thank you very much.
Are there any questions?