Three factors that determine what we see – Knowledge, Desire, Commitment

[Congregation program at ISKCON, Sydney, Australia on Bhagavad-gita 15.10-11]

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Our vision.
So, I started by, there are three factors broadly I talked about. Do you remember what are the three factors? Knowledge, desires, and compassion. Commitment.
So, I talked about first, we don’t just see with our eyes, we see with our knowledge, which makes us sense of what we see. Scientific knowledge progresses from visible phenomena to invisible principles that explain this phenomena. The falling fruit, gravity is the explanation for that.
You see a line on a computer, that’s a stock market crash. So, whatever we see, it is our knowledge that helps us to see. Similarly, with respect to, if we want to look at spiritual reality, then, we might just see, this action is happening, this stimulus is coming in, this response is coming.
That’s all we see at external level. But we understand there is experience within. And experience doesn’t come from matter.
Experience has to come from something else. So, similarly, for seeing spiritual reality, for seeing the Atma also, we need knowledge. Gyan Chakshusha.
However, knowledge alone is not enough. There are many times, we know something is good, but still we don’t feel like doing it. We know something is bad, but still we feel pulled to do it.
Because our desires distort our vision. When somebody is an alcoholic, that desire for alcohol is so great, that even if they see alcohol killing an insect, that vision will be misdirected to say, Oh, it will kill the germs within me. It will not kill me, it will kill the germs within me.
So, our desires direct our vision. If I am hungry, I just see food. If somebody is having a particular desire, at a conscious level, as well as subconscious level.
Subconscious level means the same fact of death. That we will die, materialistic people will think that, Oh, therefore, let me enjoy before I die. Whereas spiritual people will say, Let us become spiritual, because life is temporary.
So now, what do we do, if our desires and our knowledge, they are in variance, they pull us in different directions, our feelings and our intelligence pull us in different directions, that is where, last part, commitment comes in. Commitment means, we use our intelligence and internally envision, keep the goal in front of us. We humans have the capacity, not only to see things as they are, but also to see things as they can be.
And this capacity, so, sometimes we see the things they are, they seem very dreary, depressing, but how things can be, if we keep that vision in front of us, Prabhupada was getting no response from anyone, in his Krishna Bhakti outreach, but he kept the vision of the future. This Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu has said that, this will happen. And that gave him the determination to move on.
So for us, whatever is important in our life, we have to keep a vision of how I can be transformed, how committing to this, what change will come about. And when we keep that in our inner eye, when we keep that, either in written form or in a visualized form, in front of us, then we get the commitment to move forwards. And gradually by that, our inner world changes.
Concluded with the story of this Christian preacher, who was averse to Unity Worship, but became attached to Unity Worship, by the incremental process of Bhakti. The process is evolutionary, but the result is revolutionary. So act it, till you achieve it.
Thank you very much. Hare Krishna. Are there any questions or comments? Yes, Bhagavan.