Rekindling Wisdom 2 – How is God the supreme controller and what does it imply

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
that we may have hurt by judging without misunderstanding. Thank you.
Hare Krishna. It’s an optional, hazy, metaphysical construct. But often, when we live in the world, we find that things don’t work going well.
Though we try our best, things don’t work out. And at that time, somehow or the other, the question comes up, is there something else that is in control? Is there some other controlling factor? For example, if we consider sports, like cricket. Now, it’s undeniable that in cricket, the players have to perform well for a result.
But all cricketers, they know that just their best performance alone is not enough. There are other factors which come. And many cricketers have their own peculiar superstitions.
There’s one cricketer, an Australian batsman, who had the idea that before he would go for batting, he would go to the team pavilions, washrooms, and make sure that all the commode lids were shut. And he had the idea that if any commode lid shut would be open, lid would be open, he’d get out quickly. And sometimes he would get out quickly, early, he would not go back to the pavilion.
First he would go to the commode and see if any other lid was open. And when it would be open, he would go and shout, who kept it open? Because of you, I got out. Now, it’s obvious that, you know, that one, you say, isn’t it obvious? This has got nothing to do with that.
There was another player who had an idea that he would always, when he would go out, he would have a red handkerchief to be hanging partially out of his pocket. And if the handkerchief is properly positioned, then he’ll perform well. Otherwise, if the handkerchief is not positioned properly, then he’ll not be able to perform.
Some other players, they would have only one earring on one hand. And I think this is a sign of, this will give me some good luck. So there are different players who have their own different superstitions.
Now, these players, obviously, they know that they have to perform. But still, they know that their performance alone is not enough. So, what does it indicate? That they also recognize that there is something else that is in control.
And if somehow I can connect with that, and I can tap that power, then I will be able to get the good result. So, actually, one devotee sent an article, this Indian Crypto Seva, it made a double century. So, at that time, he was dropped along the way.
And when the West Indies player dropped him, so he said, when he dropped my catch, then I knew God over myself. So, the idea is that God is going to cause someone to drop somebody’s catch. But the idea is what, even if the person is breaking the world record, or setting the world record, yes, I think something, the record for the highest score in Monday cricket, something like that.
So, he also knows that it’s not just my performance. There is something else also, which plays a significant role. And we all recognize this, in our own small or big ways, that when I want to get some result, things are not in my control in there.
Now, the question comes up, what else is in control? Is there just a hostile, blind destiny? Or some chance? Or what is it that is in control? So, again, we will move, like we discussed with this sort of propagator, we’ll move from logic towards scripture. So, from logic, we can understand that there is something beyond us that is in control. Now, by logic, different people can posit different things.
Or maybe the shutting of the code is in control. The position of the position of the handkerchief in my pocket was a propagator. If you drop a catch, before looking at the ball, you look at the handkerchief, is the handkerchief fallen off? Because of that, I dropped the catch.
So, we can ascribe that controlling thing to different things. That is basically guesswork. But if you look at scripture, scripture uses a coherent philosophical understanding of who is in control.
And that supreme controlling principle, that is the absolute truth. That is God. So, the idea of God being the supreme controller is not just some sectarian religious belief.
It’s not that for Hindus, God is the controller, for Muslims, God is not the controller. For Muslims, God is the controller, for Christians, God is not the controller. No.
The point is, nobody, whatever be their sectarian religious denomination, nobody is in full control. For everyone, there is something else beyond them that controls. So, who is that control? So, when we look at scripture, tell us that this is the absolute truth.
That is God. So, there are, the Upanishads describe, three fundamental truths in existence. You can call them in three J’s.
That is, Jagat, Jeev and Jagdish. Jagat is a semantic, the Prakriti, which we discussed in the previous verse. Jagat, and then there is Jeeva.
Jeeva is the soul. And then there is Jagdish. Jagdish is the Supreme Lord.
Jagat is the Ish of the Jagat, of the world. And of course, he is the Ish of the living entity also. So, Jagat, Jeev and Jagdish.
Now, in these three, there is a hierarchy. So, actually, the Jagat is insentient. It is not having consciousness.
So, Jeeva can control the Jagat. So, for example, now if I decide, I can love this. This is Jagat.
This is a Jeeva. So, Jeeva can do something with the Jagat. But what I can do is limit it.
Jagadish can do anything. Krishna, he can just not lift a bottle, he can lift the whole Govardhan Hill if he wants. Now, some people ask, when Krishna lifted the Govardhan Hill, how did he find the center of gravity of the Govardhan Hill, so could he lift the Govardhan Hill? Now, Krishna does not have to find the center of gravity because he is the source of gravity.
The whole law of gravity comes from him. So, when he wants, the law of gravity acts. When he wants, the law of gravity gets suspended.
So, he is the supreme controller. So, we have some capacity to control. So, in this hierarchy, the Jeeva can control the Jagdish, Jagat to some extent.
But the Jagdish controls the Jagat fully and the Jagdish also controls the Jeeva. Like we discussed, we cannot determine the ultimate result. We do contribute, no doubt, players have to play well to get the result.
But their play alone does not determine the result. So, the Jagadish is the controller of the Jagat and is the controller of the Jeeva. Now, when we say controller of the Jeeva, the Lord is not the absolute controller.
The difference between the Jeeva and the Jagat is that the Jeeva has been given freedom. So, by free will, we can use our free will to either control the Jagat independently on our own account or we can use it to control it according to the will of God. So, what happens when we try to, so this is our position in the hierarchy is intermediate.
If we try to put this out, put God out and we try to make ourselves the ultimate controllers, then unfortunately this hierarchy turns around and we find that the Jagat starts dominating the Jagat. For example, there is addiction. Now, when the addiction happens, initially all sorts of things are okay.
Say, students come from their homes, maybe their homes are protected environments, they come to hostels and some seniors come, do some ragging, do some venting. Come on, drink once. You have to become a man.
Now, what a man has to do with drinking, only they do. But, you have to become a man, drink. And then a person drinks once, this is a stupid experience.
And then the person starts drinking, initially I am enjoying, I am enjoying. So, people in the movies, they say cheers. So, I wrote a poem about this once.
Their hearts are filled with fears. Their minds are pierced by desires. They are on the verge of tears and they say cheers.
So, actually it’s a show. Internally, there’s so much anxiety and misery, but it’s conceived. So, initially what happens, people think I will enjoy the cheers.
But, as one keeps drinking, first one thinks I am going to use the alcohol to drink and enjoy. But, what happens eventually, the alcohol captures the person. First it says the man gets the drink, then the drink gets the man.
Then the person gets caught. And it’s almost as if there’s an invisible rope between the bottle of alcohol and the mind of the alcoholic. And that rope drags the person, drags the person.
Now, in communist Russia, there was, everybody had practically no possessions. Everybody was poor because the government ruled everything. So, at that time, they had this vodka, which was the Russian wine.
And the vodka people would purchase and enjoy. So, what would happen is, this is a common story, because people in Russia had outlawed God. The official belief is God is the epitome of the masses.
So, people had no means to get higher taste. They just get helplessly addicted to alcohol. So, this story was repeated.
This is a real life that happened. So, the government would increase the price of vodka. And then, this child, his son will ask the father.
The price of vodka has increased. Father, will you drink less now? And the father will say, no, you will eat less now. Now, this is me.
You know, which father would want his son to starve so that I can drink? You see, no sensible, responsible father would want like this. But what has happened is, when the father becomes addicted, there’s nothing that can be done. Addiction controls the person.
So, initially, we tell that with matter, I will enjoy. But then eventually, matter trips us over and we become controlled by matter. So, with respect to addiction, this is easy to understand.
But it’s more difficult to understand with respect to other fields. You see, science and technology are also very valuable branches of knowledge. But they have to be used for the proper purpose.
In the Vedic culture, also science and technology is there. For example, Ayurveda. It’s a science.
And Ayurveda, thousands of years before surgery was talked about systematically in Western medicine. Western medicine comes out of Hippocrates. But long before him, Sushmit Chakkar, the primary compiler of Ayurveda.
But even before that, there was a sophisticated surgery that was talked about. So, Vedic culture is not anti-science. It is not anti-technology.
The point being is that it is pro-God. So, Ayurveda is a medical science. But it is a spiritual medical science.
It incorporates an understanding of the spiritual dimension of life. When God is put aside, so science and technology also become means for controlling the world, for asserting the position of God. When that happens, then science and technology can have destructive effects.
So, what happened is, if you look at the 15th century, this is an elaborate seminar I have, I won’t go into that. But since the time of Newton, when science started understanding the laws of nature, the laws of motion, the laws of gravity, from that time, materialists developed the over-confidence that we will be able to understand all of nature, and we will be able to control it. And then there is no need for God, because we are the controllers.
So, unfortunately, if you look at it ecologically, sociologically, psychologically, what we discussed today, we will look at it in three ways. Ecologically, the idea was, nature is cruel. We will control nature.
We will conquer nature. And that’s why there has been huge deforestation, mass industrialization, urbanization. The whole idea was, by the power of technology, we will control and conquer nature.
But what has happened? We know that these efforts had disastrous results. Ecologists tell us that our current generation, we have not inherited the past. We have not inherited the past from our ancestors.
We have borrowed the future from our descendants. What does it mean we have borrowed the future from our descendants? We have depleted the natural resources so much, that future generations are going to have tremendous problems. Now, at the dawn of Indian independence, Gandhiji was asked by the Britishers, will India follow the model of development which Britain has followed? So, Gandhi said that Britain, one small country, for its model of development, required resources from the whole world.
From the whole world. If India is to follow that model, India will require several earths. Because there are only one earth, we will not follow that model.
Of course, many of the Indian industries are not always resilient. But the idea is, what has happened? We know fossil fuels, they are on the verge of running out. And if they run out, the industrial and machine-based economy, as we know, is going to face severe problems.
Similarly, one-sixth of the rivers today in the world, they don’t reach the ocean. They dry up before they reach the ocean. Vast tracts of land have become barren because of excessive exploitation using the artificial means of fertilization and things like that.
So, this is a huge matter of concern. The World Health Institute has said that we are living on the brink of ecological super-disasters. We are living on the brink of, not just disasters, but super-disasters.
So, you know, if global warming happens, then what is likely to happen? One tsunami which came on the south-eastern coast of India, tsunamis like that can come because once the polar ice caps melt, the ocean level rises, several coastal cities can get inundated. So, the point here is, the idea that we will be able to control our own ecology, that idea has backfired. Now, more and more ecologists are promoting what they call deep ecology.
Deep ecology means we cannot control nature, we have to live in harmony with nature. Actually, that is the teaching of Vedic literature. Those of you who are interested in reading more, there is a book written by a Viscount devotee scientist, Dr. Michael Curie-Moore, it’s called Divine Nature.
It gives an elaborate analysis of the ecological aspects. So, what has happened? As I said, when the Jiva tries to control Jagga, then what happens? It gets reversed. Now, we are facing severe shortage of water, severe shortage of fossil fuels, severe shortage of indigenous land and an overall danger to our earthly existence because the source of sustainability exists.
So, they have become destroyed and degraded. So, the idea, all this started with the idea that the world is ours and for us to control the way we want. So, instead of accepting God as the proprietor, we think I am the proprietor and we think I have become the controller and we try to control and then things backfire.
So, this is social, ecologically facing. Then, we see psychologically. So, ecology, okay, we will look at one time.
Ecology is, you remember these three tapas, which are the three tapas, three kinds of miseries, Adhyatmik, Adhibhautik and Adhyadhyatmik. So, basically, I am correlating these three. So, Adhyatmik, Adhyadhyatmik refers to ecology.
We will look at, so, how it is, these three miseries, if you want to understand them, one simple way to understand it is that we as souls are situated in three circles. The soul is situated in the body. Second circle is the society.
And the third is the universe. As all these three, if we live in balance, they become the source of misery. The third, outermost circle is the universe.
So, from there, we get Adhyadhyatmik. I was talking about ecology. I am not talking about the full cosmos right now.
I am talking about ecology. And the second circle is the society. From there, we get Adhibhautik.
So, and therefore, the body itself, we get Adhyatmik. So, ecologically, the idea that I can control nature. That is, sociologically, I am the controller.
I can control others. I am the controller. There is such a social breakdown that is happening.
Now, in America, actually, more than 75% of the marriages, it is like, they do not live for more than three years. That is with respect to the first marriage. And people have a second marriage.
Second marriage, lasting, its percentage is less than 80%. That means 80% of marriages do not exist. Then people have a third marriage.
And third marriage, the probability of that staying is less than 85%. I mean, there is a 50% probability. You know, the likelihood is 25% that first marriage will survive.
Second marriage is 20%. Third marriage is 50%. And fourth marriage, it becomes even lower.
Some countries like New Zealand now, they have just decided there is no such thing called marriage anymore. Because as it is, marriage will not live. But then statistics have shown again and again that when we do proper marriage, the generation that grows up, the children that suffer terribly, if there is not a proper parent home, then the children do not grow up properly.
They do not get the proper nourishment. The mother gives one kind of love. The father gives another kind of love.
And that does not happen in society. Those have been balanced. So marriage is just one problem.
There are so many sociological problems that come up. All over the world, if we see, the crime rates are increasing. The violent crime rates, they are enormous.
If you look at Adi Bharati’s rage, what has happened? You know, we say science and technology has progressed so much, which is true at one level. But the last century, the amount of deaths that happened in the last century, violent deaths, they are seven times more than the number of violent deaths that happened in the 1st century to the 19th century. From the 1st century to the 19th century, all the number of violent deaths through wars and other acts of barbarism, in the 20th century, it is seven times more.
So again, the World War II, how did so many deaths happen? Because we have this technology, which will destroy people. So actually speaking, the idea that the human condition has improved because of technology makes it improve over a limited span of time for a limited number of people. But at a broad level, it is not.
Things have become much, much worse. Then if you move forward psychologically, psychological things have happened worse than ever before. The mind, the mental health problems are going to be the biggest problems in the current century.
Not just the current century, the predictions now are the current millennium. So what is the problem? Actually, once we reject God, what happens is we inherently code loneliness. Not loneliness in terms of being physically alone.
The city’s people are crowded together. But there is an existential loneliness. Existential loneliness means, I have existed alone.
There is no other person who can protect me, who can turn to shelter. And what are we ultimately? The idea is, we are just particles of matter who are just whizzing around aimlessly and endlessly. As a tragic conception of life, and the kind of mental problems, the extent of mental problems that are there, there have never before been in the world history.
Stress, depression, suicide is always a problem. But what is the extent of suicide now? One million people commit suicide every year. Of course, one million would be a reported number.
There are many more who commit, but she doesn’t get reported. There are many more who attempt, but don’t succeed. So now, if we see, what does suicide indicate? A person is so frustrated with living, it’s better to die.
So the WHO calls suicide a tragic social mental problem for which there is no known cure. Now this figure of one million is more than the total number of people who are killed in wars, murders and terrorism combined together. That means more than the number of people who have been killed by others, are the number of people who are killing themselves.
Now this figure of one million, what it means is, it means almost something like 40 suicides per hour. So since the time we started this morning presentation, 80 people have committed suicide. It’s a very alarming statistic.
And suicide is of course the most extreme. Stress, depression, hypertension, all these problems are there. So what is the cause of all this? They all have their specific causes.
But underlying the generic cause is that we have rejected God. We are trying to become controllers of our own minds, controllers of our society and controllers of the world around us. And the result is, it’s backfired.
It’s backfired on us. So at the very least, we can understand that we are not the controllers. Now over age, disease, death.
Now disease, certainly there are many diseases which have been cured and their credit is due to those scientists who did the research, pioneering, who did the hard work. They can be given the credit. But when we extrapolate from that and imagine that just by releasing all diseases we will be eliminated.
That is a dream, that is an illusion. You know there was a medical doctor, Descartes, he wrote a book called Health in the 21st Century, the Future of an Illusion. So what he said, even the diseases that we think have become eradicated, since most diseases are not just the products of certain germs or certain pathogens or whatever.
He says most diseases are products of certain socio-cultural conditions. So for example, people are living in farming places or in industries, rats are common. So then through rats, plagues come.
So now when the industrial civilization, whichever way the civilization changes, then that disease becomes less. But he says when our civilization has come up, a different kind of diseases have come up. Now we see the extent of cancer, the extent of heart diseases.
It’s been unprecedented in the world history. Another big problem now is degenerative brain diseases. You know, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, they are extremely mortifying diseases.
So the extent to which they were there in the past, when they were there, now it’s tremendous, too much. So the idea that we can remove disease is an illusion. We, of course, use medicine to cure diseases, no doubt.
It’s a normal endeavor. But the idea that by medicine we will be able to free ourselves from disease, that’s an illusion. Similarly, OIDH, the International Gerontological Association, so it issued a statement of public interest.
What they said is, because there are so many advertisements that come up, become young, do this, just speak this, do that, you become young. They said that there is no technology, no medicine, no therapy available that can stop, slow, or reverse the aging process. It cannot reverse, that means it cannot make an old person young.
It cannot slow it down, whatever age it is, it cannot stop it. So what can we do? We can only conceive. So what is the purpose of analyzing all this? We are not the controllers.
We have to recognize it in the heart. So, like the examples we discussed, we surely can control such device, and that is a testimony to human intelligence. See, I can come to this point now.
The very activities that are seen as the greatest successes of science, they are seen as the greatest successes of human being, and they are successes. But rather than using them to defy God, they can also be used to glorify God. That means we human beings can make satellites which can fly in the sky, and our intelligence is funded.
And with our intelligence, such things can be done. With God’s supreme intelligence, how much more wonderful things can be done. So that way if you understand, we don’t have to see some people have the idea that, oh, if God is the controller, what is there for me to do? No, then I become the controller, then I become the slave.
No, it’s not like that. Actually, it requires intelligence to understand that our intelligence is not enough. It requires intelligence to understand that our intelligence is not enough.
Our intelligence is valuable, but our intelligence gets complemented, it’s completed in connecting God’s intelligence. So, God has a plan and a purpose for all of existence. And if we use our talents and