Subduing Kaliya, subduing ego

[Janmashtami talk at Toronto, Canada]

Video:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So thank you very much for coming today for our celebration on the occasion of Janmashtami, which is tomorrow. So I’ll speak today on the topic of appreciating Krishna’s love as is manifested through an activity that might seem very unloving. That is his fighting with demons.
The stories of Krishna are not just stories. They are principles of eternal truths demonstrated through stories. If we consider from a purely functional perspective, people in the past, at least a few hundred years ago, had lives that were physically much tougher than ours.
They didn’t have air conditioning, they didn’t have electricity. So when there’s the survival of the fittest, then at that time people don’t want to carry anything that does not serve any functional purpose. If you’re going on a journey, it’s a tough journey, then you won’t carry anything which is not going to help you in that journey.
So what applies to physical baggage also applies to intellectual baggage. If the stories of Krishna, if any story has survived for thousands and thousands of years, that means people found that story useful in their life journey. That’s why they remembered it, that’s why they shared it, they repeated it, they represented it through drama, through art, through poetry.
So the stories of Krishna, they survived for thousands and thousands of years. And it’s not just in India, actually across the Indian subcontinent, in various other parts also Krishna Leela is alive. It has been for many, many years.
So what is it that millions for millennia have found valuable in these stories? If at one level we could say it’s entertainment, stories are entertaining. But so many people have written so many stories throughout history. Even now people keep writing novels.
Sometimes some novels just disappear into the ocean of books that have been published, never to emerge again. So the stories about Krishna, they as I said demonstrate in eternal truths through the medium of stories. And what is that eternal truth? Broadly speaking, if we consider this is the physical reality that we live in.
So right now you have come to this room and you’re sitting in this room. It’s a physical reality. And one basic feature about the physical or the material reality is that it is boring.
A survey was done of people in North America and Europe. People were reasonably healthy and well to do. They found that 5% of the time people are happy, 5% of the time people are unhappy and 90% of the time they’re bored.
And one way we try to deal with boredom is by creating some reality or creating something which is more interesting than our day to day life. And that is novels, that is movies, that is broadly fiction. So we could say this is the physical world.
And when we want to retreat from the physical world, because it is not very interesting, either it is boring or sometimes it can be agitating, sometimes it can be stressful, sometimes it can be distressing. So to retreat from it, we go towards the fictional world. We watch movies, we read novels, we see dramas, dance, music.
All of these are ways by which we try to withdraw from the physical world so that we can get some relief, some release, some rejuvenation. Now, at one level, this is an understandable human need. And generally, if we look at most movies, most novels, they basically have two main ingredients.
One is romance and the other is action. Now some might have more action than romance, some might have more romance than action. And in some, the action might become extremely violent, sometimes the romance might become very explicit.
But broadly, if we consider in our life, if we consider the physical world that we live in and the fictional world that we create, in the physical world, it is these two things that primarily occupy us, the kind of people that we bond with, the relationship that we have, that is what, if you look back at our past, our past does not stretch like a flat territory, a flat plane in our memory. Our past is actually filled with peaks and plateaus and most of the things that we remember from our past are either centred on love, where we had some special loving dealings with someone or they are about how we face challenges. Now most of us live in a civilised society, so we may not have to physically fight with anyone, but still we have to fight against challenges.
There can be difficulties, there can be emotional difficulties, social difficulties, financial difficulties. So it is broadly these two things, the relationships and the action, the challenging situations in which we have to take some action. These are the two broad things that we remember in our life and in many ways fiction is, it is said who is a good fiction author or what is a good fiction book A good fiction book is one in which the author edits out the pages that the reader will skip.
That means anything that will not catch the interest of the reader has skipped out. So I am also planning to write some fiction in the future, so I have talked with a few fiction authors and they say that they derive inspiration from people to write fiction. But generally no one person’s life is interesting enough to write about in fiction.
So usually the fictional characters are composite of multiple people. So basically the same thing what we see draws us in fiction, it’s action and romance, we see that’s what draws us in real life also. Not necessarily that same intensified ways that we see in fiction, in movies, in novels, those are the two main things that make our life enlivening.
So when we look at Krishna Leela also, we will see something similar. We see that there are very loving dealings between Krishna and his devotees and there is action. There are demoniac forces or demoniac people who break havoc and Krishna stops it.
So basically if we consider this physical reality and the fictional reality, in some ways people might think, Krishna Leela is also like a fictional reality. Well, yes, it is like a fictional reality, but it is not a fictional reality. Why is that? Because the physical reality that we live in is one level of reality and across the world, if you just consider a few hundred years ago, if you had a time machine and you went to the 16th century, we find that whether it is India or it is America or Australia or Europe or the Middle East, everywhere people had this implicit understanding that this world is a place of journey and beyond that there is another world and that world is the real world, that world is the eternal world and that is what we are meant to attain and for attaining that world, this world, the way we live in this world, is a preparation.
So, the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhakti texts tell us पूर्धमूलमदशाकं अश्वत्थं प्राहुरवियं चन्णानुसियस्यपरणानियस्तम्मेदसवेदवेत that there is an upside down banyan tree, its roots are upwards and its shoots are downwards. What this refers to is that it is a reflection. Normally a tree has roots which are branches that are upwards, roots are downwards.
Upwards means it is a reflection and what the Bhagavad Gita says is this world is a reflection and there is a reality of which it is a reflection. So, what is that reality? If we consider, now somebody might say I don’t believe in such reality. Yeah, we all have a right to our beliefs, whatever we want to believe but we don’t have a right to our realities.
Reality is what it is, independent of our beliefs. So, if we consider, we all have a longing for love and not just a longing for love, we have a longing for lasting love. That’s why most of the novels and movies are about romance and most of these they talk about happily ever after.
We want to love and we don’t want those relationships to end. No, actually in real life we see there is no happily ever after. Now, why is this? Is it that our deepest longings are meant simply to be frustrated? In fact, if that were the case, where did those longings come from at all? If say somebody lives in a remote African forest unconnected with anything else anywhere in the world, then they have no internet, they have no phones, they don’t know anything and one day a child, a small boy goes to his mother and says, Mom, I want a pizza.
What will the mother ask? Yeh kya hota hai? Yeah, what is a pizza? Even if somehow she knows, she wonders, how did you come to know? There is nothing in the child’s vicinity that can give any indication of a pizza. So normally, our knowledge and our desires, they come from our circumstances and if a particular desire has no origin in our circumstances, then we wonder where does this desire come from? So if we consider the world around us, nothing lasts forever. Absolutely nothing lasts forever, even huge mountains.
If you look at the map of the world as historians talk about it, the topography, the big land masses, they just disappear. The huge mountains, they were not there a few thousand years ago. So nothing lasts forever.
So if we live in a world where nothing lasts forever, then why do we have such a deep-rooted desire to live forever and to love forever? Where does the desire come from? Could it be that this desire comes from something within us from which lives forever? This, the Bhagavad Gita says, is the soul. The soul is eternal. So our desire to live forever comes from the soul which is by nature eternal and our desire to love forever comes from the world to which the soul belongs.
That is the spiritual world. And there our longing for love is fulfilled eternally. So what this means is, I talked earlier how we have the physical reality and this is not very stimulating.
So we have, we create a fictional reality. It’s not real, but for us when we are experiencing it, it’s real. We go into those emotions, those situations.
So now what the Bhakti texts tell us, what the spiritual texts tell us is, there’s another reality that is spiritual reality. So physical reality, fictional reality, and spiritual reality. And what we don’t find in the physical reality, what we long for by creating a fictional reality, that is actually found in the spiritual reality.
So our deepest longings for lasting love are fulfilled at the spiritual level. So now, from this spiritual level of reality, where the Supreme, who is revealed to be an all-attractive object of love, who is known by different names in different traditions, who is known by the name Krishna in the Bhakti tradition, from that spiritual world, Krishna descends to this world to help us know about that world and aspire for that world. And in fact, that is the world to which we belong and that is the world for which we long.
Even when we don’t realise it, we consider the longings that are deepest to us, they will never be fulfilled in the world that we live in. We all will perish one day. So is life just meant for that? To have deep longings, which are impossible to fulfil? No, they’re possible to fulfil if we direct ourselves properly.
So basically, these three worlds, the physical world, the fictional world, and the spiritual world, all have similarities. Why? Because the physical world is a reflection of the spiritual world and the fictional world is an idealised imagination based on the physical world, drawn from the physical world that we have created. So if we go this way from the physical world, if we go into the fictional world, we are in a sense escaping from reality.
Whereas if we go from the physical world to the spiritual world, we are escaping to reality because this is the eternal reality. So we can either escape from reality or we can escape to reality. And when Krishna descends to this world, he comes to remind us that there is a higher world, that there is a better life and we all can have that better life, not by necessarily rejecting this world, but by spiritualising our life in this world.
So when Krishna descends to the world, he is confronted by many demons. So he does basically, the two things, have love and have action that we all long for. That we long to see in our heroes, our heroines, that Krishna exhibits with his devotees.
And then he comes to the world and he kills demons. Now in fictional tales, if the demons, there are also sometimes there are dragons, there are demons, there are villains, there are some forces which oppose and then the hero has to fight against those forces. And how the hero wins against those forces and reunites with the loved ones, that is the essence of the story.
So the same motive, the same broad outlines are depicted in Krishna Leela also. Now when Krishna comes to the world, he faces many demons. Now one of the demons I’ll talk about and we’ll talk some broad principles based on this demon’s activities.
So when Krishna was living in Vrindavan, at that time, when Krishna was still a small boy, he would go around travelling, taking his cows. Although Krishna is God, when he descends in this world, he demonstrates a life of natural beauty. Vrindavan is a pastoral paradise where surrounded by greenery, surrounded by cows and cows, Krishna lives happily with his friends and his loved ones.
So Krishna, he joyfully goes out and grazes the cows every day. Trunacharanagam Shriniketanam Although he is Shriniketanam, he is the lord of the goddess of fortune, but because of love, he loves the cows and he goes out with the cows to graze them. So one day when they go out, they feel thirsty and as they feel thirsty, they look around and they suddenly, they see a lake over there and they go toward the lake and normally whenever we go toward any water body, the level of greenery and the level of life near the water body increases.
They see lush greenery around it. They see birds chirping. They see small animals moving around.
But as they went closer to this water body, to this lake, they found that everything was becoming deathly still. That there was no greenery around that lake. There were no birds flying nearby.
There was nobody coming to drink the water. Now, they felt a little puzzled but if we have a particular need, then we focus on that need and other details we don’t notice so much. See, we ourselves are very thirsty and we come to a hotel.
Now, normally we might look at the setting of the hotel, how the chairs are, how the setting is, but if we are thirsty, first we get some water. That’s what we’ll ask. Similarly, although this strange setting they notice, but because the cowherd boys are very thirsty, they just rush to the lake and they drink water from there and when they drink water, to the horror of them, the same water which is supposed to nourish them, they drink it and they topple over and they fall as if dead and then Krishna comes over there.
The other cowherd boys just run ahead. When Krishna comes there, he says, what’s happened? And then they come to know that in that lake there is a very dangerous creature. Does anyone know who that is? Kaliya.
Kaliya is a giant snake. Kaliya is such a snake, normally we have in Sanskrit there is Sarpa and Naga. So, especially snakes which have hoods, they are considered especially ferocious and Kaliya was such a giant snake that he had multiple hoods.
So many hoods and just the sight of him was blood curdlingly scary and on top of that it was not just scary, just the sight of snake scares us. But if the snake happens to be poisonous, even if the snake is not poisonous, we get scared. The snake is poisonous all the more so.
Now, Kaliya was so venomous that the venom from his body, from his mouth would spread out into the atmosphere so the whole lake had become poisoned. Not only the lake, the water would come out from the lake and touch the coastal area and all the greenery over there had died. Not only that, when the poison would come out, it would spread as toxic vapours into the sky and birds would fly over it, would fall inhaling that poison and losing their lives.
So Kaliya was such a dangerous creature that in the beauty and the greenery of Vrindavan, he was the source of venom and death. In many ways, Kaliya represents the environmental degradation that we see in the world today that while nature is at one level very attractive, there was a pilot who flew across the earth in a helicopter and he shot a video of the earth and of the earth’s surface and he saw that if we look from the sky wherever humanity has not touched nature, the sky, from the sky, the earth looks beautiful and wherever humanity has touched, that part looks scarred, that part looks disfigured. So of course, it is not that we humans consciously go about polluting the environment.
But often there are self-seeking people who just don’t care and for various reasons, so much of the environment is today degraded. So Kaliya had this kind of malevolence. Malevolence is where somebody just for the sake of hurting others hurts others.
Sometimes two people are fighting a war and each person wants to win and that’s why they will try to defeat the other person. But sometimes if one person wins, then after that just to exhibit their brutal power, they will massacre the people on the other side. So fighting is sometimes just a fact of human life.
But ruthlessly killing innocent people, that’s even greater, that’s far far worse. So Kaliya was not just violent but malevolent. Violent is when you fight with someone but malevolent is when you deliberately want to go about and hurt.
So when Krishna saw this, this demon, this demoniac being, Kaliya had rendered the whole beautiful lake and its vicinity lifeless and not only that, he had stripped the life of his loved ones. Then at that time Krishna decided to take action. So nearby there was one solitary tree that was alive and Krishna climbed up that tree.
Krishna tied his clothes like a wrestler tying up his clothes and then with a theatrical wave of his hands he jumped from the tree right into the lake. Now Krishna at this time was just a teen. In fact, in Vrindavan he was not even a teen, he was a preteen.
He was 8-10 years old. Actually the Govardhan Leela happens after this past. And Krishna was 7 when he performed the Govardhan Leela, when he lifted Govardhan.
At this point he was less than that. He was barely a boy of 6. And yet when he jumped into that lake there was a thunderous sound. It was as if a giant mountain or a hill had fallen to the lake and the lake started overflowing.
And Kalia was at the bottom of the lake resting in majesty. He heard that sound, was furious Who has dared to enter into my place? Not only enter into this place but enter so aggressively. Normally if we go to someone else’s house at that time it’s not that we will go and bang on the door as if we want to break the door.
And certainly if we are going to the house of somebody who is extremely powerful maybe the chief of police of the city or worse still if somebody who is underworld don and we are going to their house nobody will go and bang on their door. They will think that that person will bang my life out of me. So Kalia was like that and yet when Krishna just jumped into his lake he was infuriated.
Who has the audacity to challenge me like this? To disturb my peace my order and he came out and he saw Krishna and he looked at Krishna and he looked beautiful. Krishna he was in that lake and he was swimming graceful. Krishna had actually invited Kalia to come challenged Kalia to come not invited in this case and it is said that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
Now of course beauty lies outside the eye of the beholder also that means yes there are some people who are much more beautiful than other people but depending on the vision of a particular person they will if if they have affection then even a person doesn’t look so beautiful they look very beautiful but now Krishna was extremely beautiful but because Kalia was so evil and on top of it he was angry so he just couldn’t appreciate Krishna’s beauty all he saw was this intruder he said I am going to punish this intruder and with fearsome speed this intruder charged on Krishna and within moments just caught Krishna in his coils and tied him and imprisoned him over there they became horrified and as they became horrified at that time the news spread oh Krishna is trapped by the snake and all the residents of Vrindavan the Vrajivasis they came charging out the Bhakti test described that right from babies who were one year old who didn’t even know how to walk properly they forgot that they didn’t know how to walk and started walking and all people of the age of 100 they needed 6 to walk but they charged out what has happened to our Krishna the love was so great that they forgot all physical limitations and ran out towards Krishna they ran and ran and they came and they were horrified beyond words to see Krishna trapped now Kaliya had not just trapped Krishna Kaliya had also used his toxic teeth his fangs to bite Krishna and Krishna appeared as if he was dead he was motionless and Krishna’s mother Yashoda saw this she just couldn’t resist just jumped into the water to jump into the water to save Krishna now that’s a natural maternal instinct but the other ladies stopped Ananda Maharaj was looking with unblinking eyes his dear son was there whenever somebody we love is in trouble we want to help them just seeing them in trouble is very painful but seeing them in trouble and being utterly unable to help that is even more painful so they were in that situation not knowing what to do they knew that if they entered into the lake they would all die and they had the hope maybe Krishna will be back and we should stay alive as they’re watching more and more residents of Vrindavan they came there not only from Vrindavan from the nearby villages they also came now Krishna was as I said just a small six seven year old boy and he was performing a leela now the word leela is a common word but it has a very deep meaning what it means is that Krishna although he is God he does not always act as God why because if he’s God he’s all powerful he’s all knowing then how do you reciprocate love with such a person for the reciprocation of love Krishna wants to have the full flavour of all the gamut of relationships that we have in this world so it is one way that love is increased is through vulnerability what do I mean by vulnerability increases lovability that suppose somebody is a very powerful person maybe somebody is very if you have a boss in your office or you have some friend or acquaintance who solves everyone’s problems now whatever challenges come up immediately they are ready to solve all the problems now when we know how resourceful they are how wise they are how powerful they are knowing their greatness creates some respect some submission some reverence towards them it’s a great person now that greatness is good to create submission but suppose then they tell us actually I’m facing a situation and I don’t know what to do about this if I do this this will happen if I do this this will happen and none of these seem to be good so now what are they doing at this point that person who’s so powerful that person is now exhibiting vulnerability and this exhibition of vulnerability actually indicates trust the world is a cruelly competitive place and that’s why all of us try to put on a facade of strength we try to appear strong because otherwise in the world if people see our weaknesses they will exploit it it’s like in a boxing match two boxers are fighting and say one of the boxers punches grazes the chin of the other person and as it grazes the chin he pinches then immediately the other boxer knows oh he’s got some injury over here so then the whole remaining match will be hit where it hurts just hit that boxer over there till you can knock the boxer out so in the world if we show any weaknesses there are many people who will exploit those weaknesses and that’s why we hide our weaknesses but we can’t always keep hiding this and if we trust someone closely then we reveal those vulnerabilities and that revelation of vulnerability actually brings the two people closer if they have an affectionate disposition so vulnerability increases lovability of course it’s not vulnerability alone as I said somebody is great that awareness of greatness brings submission but awareness of vulnerability brings a special flavour of affection we start seeing that person not just as a great person but as a human being and we go closer to that person in general if we want to come closer to anyone an affectionate relationship we start by lowering our guards sharing our vulnerabilities and then the other person shares their vulnerabilities so similarly Krishna is God although he is supreme he doesn’t always act as supreme in order to increase the intimacy of the relationship between him and his devotees he sometimes takes a position of apparent vulnerability although he is God here Krishna in the clutches of Kalia is acting as if he is powerless and seeing that now a mother and a father they normally love a child but if they see the child sick on a hospital bed and then the affection for the child for one special person to come does anyone know who that is Balram is there of course right from the beginning Krishna is waiting for Radha to come Radha is a small girl and she lives in a distant place Radha is Krishna’s internal consort but she is a small girl at that time now Krishna when he wants he is going to do something heroic but he wants his beloved to see all that heroism so he doesn’t want her to miss any of the action so he waits and waits till the news goes to Varsana where Radha lives and Radharani she’s at this time not a queen normally we refer to her respectfully as Radharani but she is a small girl at this point and her parents hear about her parents are coming running and she comes with them and when Radharani comes in she is so horrified to see Krishna caught over there and Krishna is lying over there motionless but his eyes are not closed his eyes are permanently closed or constantly closed they fear that he is done he is dead so Dwarajiva still has hope for his life and Krishna with his eyes then he sees Radha has come and then he says now let’s begin the action so within a moment and that same Kalia who had completely tied Krishna in his coils he finds Krishna is free what happened so Krishna actually expands his body so suddenly and so forcefully that Kalia’s coils just can’t hold it and normally if you put a say if you put a rubber band on some object and say an object starts becoming big if you put a rubber band on a balloon and the balloon starts becoming bigger and bigger and bigger then if the balloon is strong enough the rubber band will break so what happens Krishna expands his body so fast that Kalia feels as if my body will break and in order to not be broken just lets go and the next moment Krishna just breaks free and there’s water all around and Krishna just jumps onto the hooves of Kalia now Kalia has dozens and dozens of hooves ferocious snake and Krishna has just two feet but with his two feet he is now standing on Kalia and then he starts the ultimate dance performance now normally if somebody is going to dance you need a special dancing floor where they can dance nicely now in the case of Krishna what did he have if you have a dancing floor it has to be smooth it has to be steady it has to be firm if the floor starts moving I was in New Zealand giving a class and suddenly I saw everybody was moving what happened they said it is an earthquake and everybody was so calm earthquake happens every week over here really he said most earthquakes are so small that we don’t even notice it sometimes we notice so they are all so nonchalant about it but I would say even if you are sitting comfortably we start moving if the earth starts quaking now Krishna he was dancing but he was dancing on the hoods and the hoods were moving so to dance on a moving floor is very difficult to sit on a moving floor is very difficult how to speak of dancing on a moving floor and it is not just moving now if you have ever touched a snake don’t do it but if you have ever touched a snake a snake’s skin is very slippery so not only was the floor on which Krishna was dancing was moving but it was even on top of it was slippery slippery on top of that not only was it slippery Kaliya was in the water and each time Krishna put his foot down now Krishna was just a six year old boy but he is not a six year old boy he is God manifesting as a for the purpose of Leela a form of a six year old boy Leela means as I said God is all great all powerful but he exhibits a vulnerability so that the lovability will increase so he looks like a six year old boy but he has the omnipotence of God and thus when he dances he puts his foot down on Kaliya Kaliya’s hood hood is higher it just goes into the water and as it goes into the water already the hood is slippery when something becomes wet it becomes even more slippery and when the hood goes down another hood tries to attack Krishna Krishna with another hood then Krishna immediately puts his foot on that hood so Krishna is dancing on a floor which is moving which is slippery which is wet and on top of that it’s not just all this it is all of this along with that very floor is trying to attack him so the hood Krishna has only two feet and Kaliya has dozens and dozens hundred hoods but still Krishna moves those two feet so effortlessly so swiftly so elegantly that he is dancing a majestic dance performance and Kaliya is overwhelmed Kaliya not one of his hood can bite Krishna wherever he tries to go he finds Krishna’s foot falling on his hood and when Krishna’s foot falls it is like a thunderbolt striking him thunderbolt thunderbolt and as he keeps fighting keeps fighting but he just can’t he just has no opportunity to attack and Krishna is not even fighting with him it’s like imagine say there is a boxing match going on and in the boxing match one of the players starts dancing and the other person comes to attack and while dancing he makes some moves and the other person knocks him down the other boxer is a big boxer he feels insulted he is not even fighting with me I am getting beaten how does this happen so Kaliya is not only being defeated he is being humiliated he is Krishna is just dancing I am getting pounded over here he is pounded once twice he is beaten and finally as blow after blow after blow keep hitting him so at that time Kaliya starts experiencing what he had caused many people to experience drinking his poison people would swoon and now he starts swooning by all the battering that he is receiving he starts becoming dizzy he starts becoming dazed he just can’t keep his senses and then as he starts weakening the pounding is still going on Krishna is dancing and as the odds have turned so dramatically all the Vrijivasis are watching majestically over there and as they are watching majestically over there they see their lord so beautifully performing this extraordinary dance they are captivated and they start celebrating in joy as Kalia starts becoming weaker and weaker and finally Kalia who thinks I am a great hero that I can defeat anyone he is on the verge of not just defeat but destruction and at that time the queens of Kalia they come to Krishna now they they do not share the malevolent disposition of the snake of Kalia so it’s they have a devotional disposition and normally this king thinks oh what these queens I am protecting them but the queens pray to Krishna and when they pray to Krishna they say that he is envious but now he has been touched by your feet and by that he will become purified please forgive me and because of their prayers Krishna forgives and tells him that disrupt this sacred land no more go away from here and Kalia meekly departs so here we see that by the power of devotion the normal hierarchy is inverted this big serpent who thinks that I am going to protect my queens actually his queens protect him why because they have devotion whereas he doesn’t have devotion he has animosity and his animosity towards God makes him weak whereas that the devotion of the queens towards God makes them strong so strong that their intervention saves them and their husband and Kalia he sees that his queens are offering prayers and he realises this person is extraordinary initially because he had so much anger in his mind on thinking that Krishna is an intruder that he had not been able to appreciate Krishna’s beauty that had not registered in his consciousness but now slowly as he starts as his intoxication of his power and anger starts decreasing then he starts looking at Krishna who is this person and then he starts appreciating Krishna’s beauty he starts offering prayers and his heart becomes transformed his heart also becomes transformed he becomes devoted like his queens are devoted and thus Krishna in this case does not destroy Kalia Kalia is a demon but Krishna does not destroy him Krishna destroys the demonic mentality and Krishna delivers him so the the lake in which Kalia was living is like our heart and in our heart is the vicious beast of the ego the ego is something which is like a snake the ego has many fangs and the ego can so when somebody is going through some great difficulties we may want to help them but in life we can only help people who are unable we can’t help people who are unwilling so as long as Kalia was unwilling even his queens couldn’t help him but when he became unable what do i do i can’t fight anymore that’s the time when they could help so sometimes we may want to help someone but if they are too full of themselves then we don’t turn away from them we don’t abandon them but we won’t sometimes life has to teach certain lessons before we can teach something to them and sometimes people have to experience the consequences of their actions before they become ready to learn and it’s quite painful watching somebody whom we care for go through that and that what applies in the external world applies in our inner world also and when sometimes our ego is crushed by something at that time our tendency is to fight back how dare this happen but if we keep identifying with the ego then we will simply get beaten more and more and more but instead of identifying with our ego if we identify with our godly side yes this has happened but still life goes on so we can if we identify with our ego we will experience humiliation but if we identify with our godly side we will experience humility yes i used to think that i was very big but i am not that big but that doesn’t mean i am worthless it is when our godly side manifests we start understanding our spirituality our connection with god and ego can give us some security but that is a shallow security anytime whatever is boosting of that ego can collapse and that security will be lost but real security comes in our spirituality when we understand ourselves as souls as devotees of god and connect with him there in the experience the supreme security just as Kaliya got that security we too can get that security and Krishna is coming into this world i started by talking about the last point now that talk about this physical reality fictional reality and spiritual reality so in the physical reality we all try to become as big as we can be as wealthy as good looking as smart and this is natural because the world is a place of struggle functionally we need to have all the resources that we can have for surviving and succeeding in the world but if we identify too much with them we obsess over them and that’s like our ego rises and that ego fixates us at the physical level and some people they can’t fixate too much in the physical they can’t make it big in the physical world then they withdraw into the fictional world that means they will go and watch movies and play video games and they shoot down characters on a digital screen and think i’m such a great hero so basically even in the fictional world that’s another way we try to build our ego oh my favourite hero is so great my avatar in this video game is so great therefore i am so great but there is a better way to live instead of as long as we identify with our ego we stay caught in the physical world or we drive deeper into the fictional world but if we identify with our godly side then we rise from the physical level to the spiritual level and so god the purpose of the divine descent is to inspire the human ascent god descends from the spiritual level the material level so that we can rise in our consciousness from the material level to the spiritual level as we become attracted to Krishna we start practising bhakti towards him our consciousness becomes spiritualised and in that spiritualised consciousness we can find the supreme security in becoming devoted to Krishna our longing for lasting love is perfectly and purely fulfilled it is for this purpose that Krishna descends to the world and performs his leela to attract our hearts towards him so I’ll summarise I spoke today on this topic of demons in Krishna leela and I started by talking about how we all seek relief from our daily world the physical world is boring or troubling and therefore we go to a fictional world now in the fictional world there is love and action and in our physical world also that’s what is the most prominent memory that we have of love and action of facing challenges but the fictional world is fictional and in the real world our longing for love no matter how much we fight is never permanently fulfilled it’s frustrated by the temporary nature of the world so where does this longing for love come from like an African boy suddenly desiring a pizza it points to the fact that it must be coming from somewhere else everything around the world is temporary but we long for lasting love it points to our spiritual core and to the whole who is the object of our love then we talk about how Krishna descends to the spiritual level to this level to attract us to the spiritual level and how does he attract us by performing leela where he also manifests love and he also manifests action but because it is all God centred it is uplifting it is purifying then I talked elaborately of the Kaliya leela Kaliya was a terrible serpent who destroyed everything in the lake and around the lake because of his poison and even Krishna’s Gopas were killed apparently killed but Krishna when he entered to challenge him and he got furious Krishna was beautiful but he couldn’t see his beauty and Krishna was caught by Kaliya so I talked about how although God is all powerful he exhibits vulnerability to increase lovability we normally put on a facade of strength but if somebody lowers their guard and shares their vulnerability we feel that we are coming closer to them similarly Krishna for his devotees who wish to come closer to him exhibits vulnerability and that increases the love of all the Vrachivasis who come running over there helplessly drawn toward Krishna and Krishna stays in that vulnerable state till Radha comes over there and then because he is God at any moment he can give up his vulnerability and manifest his invulnerability and he begins a magnificent dance performance on a floor that is moving that is slippery that is wet and that is attacking him but with his two feet alone he pounds and brings his submission in the multiple hoods of Kaliya and then finally Kaliya is saved by his queens who are devoted so the normal hierarchy gets inverted that he instead of protecting his queens his queens protect him and then finally Kaliya also starts offering prayers the way the queens are offering and his heart is transformed so the demon in Krishna Leela represent various things and in this particular case Kaliya can be said to be like our ego the ego poisons everything around it and the ego needs to be pound so that the godly side within us will become manifest will be heard so when the ego is brought down it is the people who have self esteem they are not so disturbed the greater the self esteem the less the ego that’s why even if they are disrespected they don’t get so agitated but the lesser the self esteem the greater the ego and they get extremely agitated so when our ego is being pounded at that time we can either continue to be humiliated or choose humility by remembering that I am not the supreme I am part of the supreme and the servant of the supreme and when we identify ourselves as souls as parts of god our longing for love is fulfilled in our relationship with Krishna so it is to help us ascend from the physical level to the spiritual level that Krishna descends from the spiritual level to the physical level thank you very much Hare Krishna do we have any other questions yes please one question yes so in real life when we make decisions based not based on people but based on the spiritual side of life sometimes it’s looked as if we walk all over the world the most important of the human life is talking to people how do you distinguish how do you come across as more strong spiritually versus when you make decisions not spiritually okay yeah so if we are spiritual then people may walk over us in say in professional life in the competitive world today there’s a difference between being nice and being naive being naive is to think that if I am good everybody will be good with me well yes we should try to be good but it doesn’t mean that everybody is going to be equally good with us and we have to we have to be strong so nice means that we are not malevolent we don’t want to hurt others but if we let others walk over us then we are hurting ourselves the idea is to be spiritual is to be focused on our purpose and whatever is required for that purpose we do that for example we talk about humility now humility it doesn’t mean that oh whatever you say you are right and I am wrong or whatever you want to do I accept it because I am humble humility simply means that we don’t let our ego come in the way of our purpose that means if I have decided something and somebody else comes up with a better suggestion who do you think you are you think you are cleverer than me this is how we are going to do it although what they are saying is better things will work better for them but because of the ego we don’t accept it so actually if we understand humility properly then the spiritual virtue of humility can be very powerful for team play we might be a team lead but if somebody comes up with a better suggestion if we have ego we will dismiss the suggestion if we have humility we will at least consider the suggestion and use it if it is appropriate so humility means we don’t let the ego come in the way of our purpose we want to get this project done well this is my plan somebody has come up with a better plan lets try it out but if we think of humility means whatever anybody else does i accept that that is not humility that will be passivity that will be weakness so humility means we don’t let our ego come in the way of our purpose but if something comes in the way of our purpose we need to do what it takes to persevere in our purpose does that answer your question any other questions so we talked about ego and disrespect from others and what i see if i step back what i see everywhere people don’t forgive others and that causes more more pain to them how can you share some practical tips where people can learn to forgive others and just move on in their life yeah so people are not able to forgive and that makes things worse for them that’s true actually being resentful being hateful it’s the heaviest thing to hold in the world is a grudge if you’re resentful it’s like driving a car with the brake fully pressed all that happens is power gets wasted and a lot of noise comes but we don’t move forward so often if we’re unforgiving we feel that i want to get back at this person they did something terrible to me yes but when we’re unforgiving towards someone no matter what terrible thing they have done to us we are doing something more terrible to ourselves because all that negativity is burning us poisoning us now having said this we have to know again that forgiving is extremely difficult and sometimes forgiving can seem dangerous because if i forgive they may hurt me again and that’s where we need to carefully understand the difference between forgiving and trusting and trusting forgiveness is for the past trust is for the future that means what you have done in the past i won’t hold you against hold it against you for the rest of your life but at the same time you have done that and i can’t simply turn a blind eye to it so now because of if somebody has done something which has hurt us a lot then we would be foolish to again trust them say somebody borrows some money from us and they lose the money they may be invested somewhere foolishly or just spend it on various things now if they are close to us we must forgive them but the next time they ask for money and we give it again that will be foolish so there is a difference between forgiving and trusting quite often when we think both of them as equal that means when we forgive it is as if we restore the relationship to the previous level no there is a difference between forgiveness can be given but trust has to be earned the person has to exhibit some inclination to change I have a whole seminar on forgiveness but broadly speaking we can talk about this thing say normally if somebody has done something wrong then our default action should be forgive immediately don’t hold it against them but forgive and don’t trust that means at the very least see if you don’t forgive that means you did this to me so I am going to do this to you and the whole centre of our consciousness becomes how can we get back in the person and that is very destructive for ourselves so okay I am not going to take revenge against you I am not going to make my life centred on vendetta so in that sense I forgive you but I don’t want you to hurt me again so we create the necessary safeguard we create some distance by which they can’t hurt other now when it is at this level forgive but don’t trust then there are broadly two possibilities that maybe that person realises their mistake and they improve and if they improve then they earn their trust and then they will come to forgive and trust now sometimes they may not change at all they may still become they may become worse now at that time we may forgive in intention but we may see justice in action there’s a difference between justice and revenge revenge is because you hurt me so I hurt you but justice is not just because you hurt me I want to hurt you but rather if you do something wrong then that is bad not just for me but also for you because if you get away with it you will do it more many more people will be hurt and ultimately even that person is not accountable to anyone we are all accountable to karma and they will have to suffer for that so sometimes justice may also have to be sought but in general in our close relationships if we learn to differentiate between forgive and trust usually things may not have to go to the level where we have to we have to go around seeking justice we can be at that level of forgive but don’t trust or forgive and trust things may come back to that okay thank you we were talking about forgiveness so i was just thinking sometimes you forgive for your own sake because if you feel that the other person doesn’t deserve forgiveness but still you feel you want to forgive this is for your own sake because otherwise you are hurting yourself and if you want to move on you have to yeah you want to move on and you want yourself to be at peace so you want to forgive and you forgive maybe the other person deserves or he doesn’t deserve he or she and at the same time the two things were being discussed the trust trust again if you have forgiven you forgive okay it’s his own choice whether he or she builds up their trust or he continues to be on the same platform so i mean that’s how it goes on i feel for my sake if i want to be at peace i would like to forget forget about whatever the person is doing even in this life it’s only his own or her own mind make them realise whatever they are doing is right or wrong until unless it’s not realised the things will never change but i am at peace because i feel i have forgiven right yeah that’s true see forgiving and forgetting is the best way to gain peace that’s true so when we talk about forget there are different meanings of the word forget our brain doesn’t come with a delete button to forget so when we say forget it that means keep it in the past don’t bring it ahead so in that sense forgiving and forgetting is definitely very helpful that enables us to stay at peace and help us to move on with our life so at the same time we have to consider that what is possible for us may not always be possible for everyone else because all of us have different levels of say physical strength physical weaknesses others have physical emotional strengths emotional weaknesses that others have different levels of that so some wound somebody has done something which has wounded us which has wounded another person so now we might be able to just bear it and move on if somebody is maybe because of their situation their background they are wounded far more than us then if they are not able to move on then sometimes just telling them is forgive it forgive and move on that can make us see it’s a so ironic that forgiveness is a virtue but nature or you could say the forces of illusion are so cunning that they can convert a virtue into a vice and I have seen people who are forgiving become so judgemental about those who are not forgiving and that is not healthy because what happens is yeah I’m able to forgive that’s good but if somebody is not able to forgive then we need to help them as much as possible to move forward in their lives thank you any other questions comments slightly different question and some thoughts related to something so I’m new to this Krishna consciousness so I wanted to ask a question here so I mean Krishna is a godhead right like I just created like an all human force whatever right so why is your different different the mindset for the people like one is cruel one is good okay good question so Krishna is God he has created everyone so why has he given some people good mindset some people cruel mindset it is not exactly that Krishna has given it is more that we have chosen and cultivated by our own actions so here let’s look at it from a this life perspective say parents might have two twins and they are genetically similar their upbringing is similar but still one twin might become a very respectable upstanding person the other person might become resentful sullen disagreeable now we could say there’s nothing external over there Krishna different their upbringing was different their parenting was different every one of us makes choices and our disposition is shaped by our choices every it’s like every action that we do it has not only an external reaction it also has an internal component to it and that is every action forms an impression and every impression comes off as a proposition that means each time I do something the next time I have that situation I will be prompted to do it again say nobody is born an alcoholic but they drink once twice thrice what happens that action creates an impression and the deeper the impression and the stronger comes the proposition so now you can extend this framework backward backward means to before this life just as two twins they by their actions chose particular impressions and they develop particular dispositions although most of the things about them are identical so similarly the kind of disposition that we get at birth so it is true that we do get sometimes some disposition at birth itself even among if you have multiple children each child has a different personality so some children all children cry but some children cry in a way it appears that they are going to bring the whole house down by their actions now where does this come from the personality of the child may be very in a small way expressed in infancy or childhood but still it is there so that comes from the previous life’s actions so those who have chosen to act virtuously in previous life will be born with a virtuous inclination in this life so is forgiveness more of a Christian concept and the Gita’s concept is that just don’t be affected by what has happened around you stay true poised and move on it’s a it’s a over simplification to attribute certain behaviours to certain traditions it’s true that following those of particular traditions may emphasise certain things more but forgiveness is a virtue which is mentioned even in the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavad Gita said that the capacity to forgive is one of the defining characteristics of a Brahmana so forgiveness is also talked about but it’s also true that equanimity is stressed in our tradition so in the Christian tradition the idea of soul is there but it is not very clearly explained often the word soul is used as a metaphorical reference to our non-material essence that means yes we have a soul but often their idea is that the body and the soul are inseparable and that’s why on death they bury the body because their idea that resurrection the person with the body will be coming back same body whereas the Bhagavad Gita is very clear in explaining that the body is like a dress that we are wearing so the body and the soul are different and this philosophical knowledge can make tolerating or staying equi-poised amidst life’s ups and downs easier so sometimes some people are just the way they are and they just will continuously keep doing things which hurt us and we may forgive them but if they keep doing it again and again then what do you do we just keep forgiving sometimes we just have to get used to it it’s that we all want to have a tender heart but we need to cover this tender heart with a thick skin otherwise we will be hurt so being equi-poised is also very important and spiritual knowledge can help us when I understand that actually all this is happening at the physical material level and I as a soul am different from all these then tolerating that without getting affected is much easier but it’s not that this or this it’s not forgiving or just being equi-poised it’s not necessarily like digital logic you have to do this or do that basically all of these are different resources that we have in some situations in some we use the resource of forgiving in some situations we just use the resource of transiting that’s how it is just move on don’t get so affected by it so we can draw on various resources during our life journey tomorrow okay thank you so thank you very much om