SB 11.07.32 – Chanting helps us to take shelter of our intelligence and others’ intelligence

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you. So, in the previous verses, Maharaj Yadu has asked the brahmana what the secret of enlightenment is, although he is acting like an ignorant and foolish person, the brahmana is also looking peaceful and wise and is transcendent situated, not ragged by any of the passions of this world, so he is asking this brahmana, how have you become enlightened like this? And the brahmana replies that, santime guravo rajan, okay, I have gurus, there are santime, bahavo buddhyupashyatah, so buddhyupashyatah is a very important word here, so I have many gurus, but ultimately, how can I learn from these different gurus? Only when I take shelter of proper buddhi.
You know, Krishna describes in bhagavad-gita-sadāmi-buddhi-yogam-tam ye namaṁ upayānti te, in 10.10 he says that, I give you the intelligence by which you can come back to me, in general, whatever intelligence we have, it comes from Krishna, in 15.15 he says, so our intellectual, cognitive, discerning faculties all come from Krishna, but the way we use it, the way we choose to use it, that depends on us, we may have the best spiritual master, but that does not in and of itself automatically guarantee our liberation or our return back to the spiritual world, we have to utilize the teachings that the spiritual master has given, without utilizing those teachings, we will stay bound in illusion, we utilize not in the sense of utilize to make commercial profit, but utilize in the sense of applying those teachings by which we can become elevated, so for that purpose, we all need to make spiritual advancement and it’s a symbiotic process, the more we make spiritual advancement, the more our own buddhi becomes pure and then the more our buddhi becomes pure, the more we can learn from our spiritual master as well as learn from others who are capable of teaching us how to move forward in the spiritual path, in contrast, if we are spiritually undernourished, malnourished, then the result of that is that we are not able to recognize, our buddhi is not clear and therefore, the self-defeating influences that are there in the world, they drag us down and then they make us feel that we are useless, so we can’t learn anything from others’ experiences nor can we learn anything from even our own experiences, so this verse emphasizes the point that we cannot outsource the responsibility for our intellectual and spiritual maturity on someone else, it is for us to use the intelligence that Krishna has given us and to use that intelligence for our, for making the right decisions for enriching ourselves with wisdom and devotion and the Avadhoot Brahman is telling over here that actually since I took buddhubhashitaha, I took the shelter of my intelligence, now here he is not using the word specifically my material intelligence, no, actually that spiritual intelligence which gives us further spiritual intelligence or further spiritual insights that doesn’t come by one’s independent effort, that comes by the grace of God and that grace becomes available to us through the practice of devotional service, so when we are chanting and not just doing some isolated activity involving some religious rituals, we are actually fortifying our buddhi, strengthening our buddhi by contact with God and that’s why we will see that if we do proper chanting then we are sharp and we can gain so many realizations, learn so many things as we go through the day but if we are not adequately spiritually nourished through divine sound then we just rush through life as if we are, it’s a blur nor are we really able to do some things to do much tangibly nor are we able to learn much tangibly from others, we just stay caught in life not being able to do much, not being able to move forward, so if we can put our effort in chanting then many other things become properly aligned and we learn we can with our intelligence learn from various sources and life becomes a constant learning and enriching experience