Those who don’t respect themselves are most agitated when others don’t respect them Gita 16 04

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna. Those who don’t respect themselves are most agitated when others don’t respect them.
We all face situations in life when we are disrespected, and some of us can react to those situations gracefully, some suddenly, some violently. Why these different reactions? Some people, their reactions seem to be completely disproportionate. This often happens because these people are internally insecure.
Those who don’t respect themselves are often most agitated when others don’t respect them. When we function in life, we all need a certain amount of self-respect or self-esteem, not in the egoistic sense, but in the sense that our existence has value, our endeavour has value, whatever we are doing, it has some value, and some people are very insecure about this, and the more spiritual we are in our worldview, the more our sense of self-worth comes from within by understanding that we are divine and we are parts of the supreme divinity, Krishna. However, when we start thinking that we are parts, that we are just particles of matter, bags of protoplasm somehow come alive, then that itself creates a huge amount of insecurity, and thereafter, if we find that somebody is not respecting us, then it is not just that interaction which is painful for us, that negative interaction threatens our entire sense of self-worth, because our sense of self-worth is coming from within, from our, it is not coming from within, it is coming from without, from that other person who is respecting us, just as if somebody maybe pushed us a little bit, we’d feel annoyed, but if somebody was about to build a bomb, blow off a bomb, that was going to bring our whole house down, we would be far more wildly agitated, so similarly for some people disrespect is like just being shoved, pushed a little bit, but for some people disrespect feels like their whole house is coming down, the whole world is coming down, naturally they react, excessively react wildly, so this is why we need a spiritual worldview, Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that those who have a materialistic worldview, they often degenerate towards a demoniac nature, one of the characteristics of the demoniac nature is that they are extremely harsh in their speech, so arrogance, conceit and harshness, all these characterise those with a demoniac nature, they want the world to respect them and they don’t at all, they can’t tolerate if the world doesn’t respect them, they become harsh towards those people, if we want to become more balanced in our lives, then we need to raise our consciousness from a material level to a spiritual level and as we acquire a spiritual self understanding, then the world’s disrespecting us won’t disturb us that much, Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita how those who have realised their spirituality by going beyond the mind’s duality, they so accept so much that it’s always there with us in our heart.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.