SB 01.05.02 – Don’t let the quest for physical and mental productivity deprive us of spiritual productivity

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
we can focus on centered response which involves spiritual reinstatement. Thank you. Narad Muni is beginning his instruction to Vyasadev who is dejected even after having written all the Vedic literature.
Still Vyasadev feels as if there is something more to be done, as if he is not satisfied and immediately the spiritual master is going to the root cause and is pointing out that the problem is he has not understood the real essence of our being. He is asking a rhetorical question. You are a great person.
He is referring to the disciple respectfully in two ways. Parasharya. He is saying that you are the son of that great sage and then Mahabhaga.
You are yourself greatly fortunate. In fact, Vyasadev is considered to be a literary incarnation of the Lord. So both ways he is very great.
But still he is asking you have identified the shariramanasa, the self, you have identified the self as the body and the mind. That means you have written Vedic literature which talk about the well-being of the body and the well-being of the mind, which talk about heavenly pleasures which in one sense are the pleasures and comforts for the body and which talk about the pleasure of salvation which is for the mind. The mind which is excited or agitated by pleasures or pains becomes peaceful contemplating the prospect of impersonal liberation.
But either way the soul is not satisfied. The mind may temporarily become peaceful but actually what we want ultimately is not just peace. We want happiness and happiness comes by the reciprocation of love.
That you have not talked about that positive reality much. You have not talked about the reciprocation of love, pure love between the transcendental supreme being and the transcendental souls. So you have not really talked about the well-being of the soul by identifying the body and the mind as the objects which are to be satisfied, gratified.
Are you satisfied by that? Is that what is going to do ultimate good either to you or to your audience, your readers? So in our life also we live in a world where the bodily consciousness is very high and now because of some mental health problems, the mind state of health also people are talking about. So anything that comforts the body we consider it as technological progress and anything that pacifies the mind. And nowadays people think of it as spiritually good.
There is a fundamental confusion today in society where people equate the mental with the spiritual and that’s why anything that just makes people feel a little better, makes them feel good about themselves, they think of that as spiritual. But it’s not that people have to be miserable physically or mentally but we are not the body or the mind. The soul is actually internal to what we consider as internal.
Normally the body is external and we consider the mind and its emotions to be internal but from the soul’s point of view both the body and the mind are external and we need to go beyond the external and beyond what is often thought of as internal, that is the emotions of the mind and thereby activate the life of the soul proper. So when we are practicing meditation, if we are chanting or praying and if we focus primarily on the mental level alone, then sometimes our meditation doesn’t seem to pacify our mind. Sometimes while trying to meditate the mind becomes all the more agitated and you may wonder why am I doing this meditation at all.
I was told that this will make me peaceful but far from making me peaceful, just the effort to chant is exerting me so much and the mind is running here, there, becoming crazy in this and that direction. So what is the use of this whole meditation business? But the problem is that the mind may be troubled when we are chanting but beyond the mind is the soul and the soul is nourished, the soul is being aroused from its long multi-lifetime slumber and gradually if we keep connecting with Krishna in a devotional attitude then the soul’s natural happiness in a loving relationship with Krishna will become activated. So to the extent we expect physical or mental well-being from our spiritual practice, to that extent our spiritual practice will stay disturbed and distracted.
Disturbed because we’ll not be able to will not become steady in it and distracted because we’ll always feel maybe something else will offer me something better. Now chanting actually certainly helps us to gradually purify the mind and bring it under control but before that control there is the combat and the combat can be quite fierce and if we are not careful in understanding what is what then the combat phase may intimidate us so much that we may feel that there is no need to get into this whole business itself you know that rather than having such a fierce fight with the mind just let me forget this whole meditation business and live the way I am living but only when we combat the mind will we be able to penetrate through its defenses and then convert it from its enemy from an enemy to a friend from its default attraction to material things to its gradually developed attraction to the spiritual reality Krishna and therein will lie the ultimate happiness. So this is a good verse for us to recollect whenever we start feeling that our devotional life is not very practically productive.
You should know that just physical and medieval productiveness is not the standard of practical productiveness. Ultimately it is spiritually productiveness, spiritual productiveness that is the ultimate benchmark and from that benchmark’s perspective devotional activity every devotional activity is contributing preciously indispensably eternally to our supreme well-being and happiness. Thank you.