Tolerance How it empowers, not disempowers Charan Prabhu Sunday Feast 4 27 25

Hare Krishna. I’m grateful to be here with all of you today. And today, I’ll speak on this verse from the Bhagavad Gita. This is 2.14. So am I audible clearly?

Oh, okay. It’s gone. It had connected just now. Okay. Thank you.

This one? Okay. Thank you. So the topic I’ll speak on today is tolerance. Now what does tolerance mean and how to tolerate?

Recently I have been in a tour of America for about one and a half one and a half months now, the part of a three month tour and I was asked this question that this idea that Krishna tells in the Bhagavad Gita tolerate and this won’t that lead to some people doing abuses and we thinking that oh I’m just meant to tolerate and we continue tolerating. So what does tolerance mean and how tolerance is actually a great power provided it is understood properly. That’s the theme I’ll discuss. So when something bad is happening to us, when do we tolerate it and when do we decide not to tolerate it. That’s the broad topic I’ll discuss.

So this is extra from my latest book, this is for prayers inspired by the Bhagavad Gita. So in this I have taken each key verse of the Gita and there is a small poetic rendition of the Gita’s verse and then there is a prayer inspired by that verse. So let’s recite the words. So the theme I am talking about is that what you talk let tolerance increase my intelligence, oh lord, not my importance. Tolerance is not meant to make us powerless.

So let us look at these words, Those of you who are familiar with the font can recite after me. So once more we’ll recite. One last time now. This time we decided together all of us, not responsibly but together. Together.

So I tried to do a poetic translation of the verses over here. From the contact of senses with their objects comes joy and pain. These are time bound like winter’s cold and summer’s rain. They come and go forever, they never stay. Tolerate them all, march firm on your way.

So they never stay, march firm on your way. So this is the key over here that Krishna is telling us to march ahead. We’ll read one or two sentences from here. So when we are going through life, how do we decide which battles to fight? We’re all fighting some battle or the other.

So right now, you’re sitting here. Maybe there’s a battle in your mind. You know, you have got so many things to do at home. You hope this class won’t go too long. Maybe you’re hungry and there’s a battle.

Maybe if I go right now, can I get food in advance? Or maybe you want to focus on this class, but sitting on the floor is not so comfortable. So constantly, there are many things going on in our head and like that many things are going on in our world. And we cannot fight all the battles that are happening in the world. So in one sense when Krishna talks about tolerance, the key to tolerance is choosing our battles.

That means we decide which battles I’m going to fight and which battles I’m not going to fight. So I was in Australia and I gave a class over there one sitting in a temple. And there’s one young man who comes for my classes there regularly every year when I go, and he gives after my class, we have an intelligent discussions with him. He gives some thoughtful points how he appreciated. So my class topic was tolerance.

And so after the he he came a little late, so he’s sitting behind it. After the class, I asked him, so what do you like about the class? So he said, see, normally your classes are very intellectually stimulating. He says, but in today’s class, I got to practice what you taught. You know, my class was on tolerance.

So I was thinking you had to tolerate my class? So there’s a Jewish saying, have your ears heard what your mouth has said? So that he saw my expression. Yeah. And he said, no, no.

Actually, I was sitting behind. And when I was sitting behind, the person next to me was constantly talking on phone. His phone was not silent, phone was beeping, and he’s also talking quite loudly on the phone. I was annoyed with that person. But then I thought the class was on tolerance, so I tolerated.

But then because I was tolerating, I couldn’t hear any of the class. So I told him with all due respect, whenever somebody uses the phrase with all due respect, what is going to come after that is not going to be very respectful. So I told him, with all due respect, that is not tolerance, that is importance. So now, what does it mean that it’s not tolerance but importance? You see in this particular verse, which we are discussing right now, this is two fourteen in the Bhagavad Gita, This is well known as Tam Sitiksha Sabharata.

Here Krishna is talking about tolerance. And so I’ll be talking about tolerance in three broad perspectives and using the word acronym called WIT, w I t. The three aspects of tolerance. Now before Krishna cues a call for tolerance, there is the words So before that Krishna is giving intelligence. So we need to have intelligence, a synonym for intelligence is wisdom.

So that’s the first w, but first we need to have wisdom or intelligence. And what is wisdom about? Wisdom means to know which are the big things in our life and which are the small things in our life. So when there’s a lack of wisdom, what happens is we need to make small things very big. If somebody has to go somewhere urgently and they drive, although they they are driving a car, although they know there are no brakes in the car.

I want to get there very fast. Will you get there somewhere else very fast? Isn’t it? So what is the big thing? Okay.

Going to a particular place is important, but surviving is much more important. So which thing is more important and which thing is less important? Which is a big thing, which is a small thing? Understanding that is wisdom. And without wisdom, tolerance has no meaning.

Now if you go forward, this is going to be the key of our talk, but what is tolerance? Tolerance is basically that we are able to keep small things small. Tolerance is where we keep small things small and we keep thereby big things big. We keep small things small and we keep big things big. What does this mean?

That in this case of this young man I was telling him, say, if you come for a talk, the big thing is to hear the talk. Now while getting the talk, we may want to sit on a chair, but sometimes all the chairs are occupied, so to sit on the floor. That may be a little inconvenient. But, okay, the talk is going to go for me forty five minutes, one hour. I can tolerate that discomfort of sitting on the floor.

So relatively speaking that’s a small thing so that I can do the big thing of hearing the class. But if I’m coming for the class and I can’t hear the class only and that interference, that distraction, that noisiness if I tolerate that, then what is happening is I’m not able to do the big thing. So tolerance is actually about keeping small things small, when you keep small things small, you can actually keep big things big. And conversely, when you keep big things big, you can also keep small things small. So but tolerance cannot be exhibited unless we have the wisdom of the intelligence to know what is a small thing and what is a big thing.

So here itself in the Gita Krishna is calling Arjuna to tolerate. Now does the tolerance mean that oh the Kauravas the opposite side in the army has done horrible atrocities. They tried to kill his brother, they tried to assassinate him, burn him and his entire family alive, they tried to disrobe his wife, they cheated and defrauded them of all the property and on top of that they had no remorse, no repentance. The way they try to humiliate Draupadi eventually in the same place in a similar way they try to dishonor Krishna. That’s when the Pandava decided enough is enough.

So when Krishna is telling tolerate is he telling okay you know just accept all the atrocities that the Kauravas have committed, just tolerate it and live with the injustice. Is that what Krishna is implying? Actually Krishna is calling upon Arjuna to fight. So what to tolerate is important to understand. When Krishna is telling Arjuna to tolerate it is not tolerate the Kauravas atrocities.

The Kauravas have committed many atrocities and they are not to be tolerated. Now what is it that Krishna is telling Arjuna to tolerate? Here it is, the pain of fighting against his elders. He has to fight against Bhishma, he has to fight against Drona. These are the people from whom he learned archery, these are the people for whose pleasure he learned archery.

But unfortunately, now duty is calling him to fight against them. It’s very difficult but Krishna is telling him, yes it’s difficult but you need to do it because this is the way you’ll be able to do your duty, you’ll be able to establish Dharma. So the bigger cause of establishing a virtuous order in society is important and therefore tolerate the pain of fighting against Vishnu Mindrula. So before we can actually tolerate we need to have the wisdom to know what is a big thing in our life and what is a small thing And then we can keep the small thing small and then we move toward the big thing, we can focus on the big thing. When Srila Prabhupada was in India, not many people were coming for the outreach that he was doing from 1920 to when he met his spiritual master.

From that time he was trying in various ways to reach out to people and especially after 1940 he started focusing more and more on outreach and till 1965 he was trying many things and somehow there was not much success. Various reasons Prabhupada was primarily preaching in English. Most people even those times did not really were not really comfortable with English. Prabhupada was giving a more philosophical spirituality. Indians at that time were more interested in Katha centered, story centered spirituality.

And India was very much infatuated by the West. So now Prabhupada could have said, okay, you know, maybe people are not coming, what can I do? Maybe this is Krishna’s plan for me, let me accept it. Nobody is coming, nobody is interested, what can I do? I’ll accept it.

No. Prabhupada didn’t accept. Prabhupada tried to change things. The change he did was he came all the way from India to America. Now why he came?

We’ll talk about that as a part of later strategy. But the point is when something bad is happening, something unwanted is happening, it is not an automatic virtue to simply tolerate it. First we have to see what is the big thing in our life and what is the small thing in our life. So now after we have decided this, then the next point that comes up is does anyone remember the acronym? WIT, yes.

WIT. So W is wisdom. We need to know what is the big thing. So the whole point of tolerance is that keep small things small so that you can keep big things big. Otherwise, what happens is if we lack tolerance, sometimes we may life is always filled with ups and downs.

So there’ll be good times and there are bad times. In any relationship, there can be good times, there can be bad times. You know, any job we are having, sometimes the boss may just ease us, sometimes somebody may be rude to us, sometimes it may be very pleasant, we may get a lot of success. Now, often what happens to us if we do not have the capacity to tolerate, then when we go through ups and downs, our mind goes way up and way down. So this is what makes people very unstable.

So nowadays this is becoming more and more. Sometimes when something good happens, you know, two people meet each other and they have some pleasant interactions. One person says, I love you. I can’t live without you. And a couple of days later, we had one unpleasant interaction, I hate you, I can’t live with you.

So it is just we become very very unstable and what happens is these phases will come and go. So if we lack tolerance then we all have emotions that are often reversible, we often have emotions that are reversible. But if we don’t have tolerance, now tolerance means what? Yeah, this is the bad phase we are going through and this phase will go. I’m feeling terrible right now, this phase will also go.

But if there is no tolerance, then due to reversible emotions, we end up making decisions that are irreversible. So this is a great danger. If we lack tolerance, see when we are going through a bad phase, we’ll feel terrible. And in that terrible phase, what is the point of all this? Oh, when people when the people in the relationship they say it’s a break up.

When there is no up actually, it’s a break down most of the time unfortunately. The thing is that we don’t want reversible emotions to lead to irreversible decisions. So for example, there are some people who are very emotionally unstable. So when something good happens to them, they go way up and they think, now I can I have so much energy, I can shake the whole world? So it’s like this is a manic they have a manic level of energy.

And then something bad happens and they go so down that they go into complete depression. Psychology calls this the manic depressive personality. So one day they seem to have so much energy they can shake the whole world. Next day, when something goes wrong, it seems the whole world can’t shake them out of their bed. They just want to pull a blanket over their face and stay there.

So now this is if okay these faces will come they will go, don’t take them so seriously. Sometimes when something goes wrong in the people’s lives, this is terrible, I’ve lost everything, not everything. But, starting I’ve lost it, this has gone wrong, that has gone wrong, that has gone wrong. Our mind starts replaying everything that has gone wrong in our life, starting if my life itself is wrong. And that’s how sometimes people may try to end their life itself and that’s totally irreversible decision which arises from a reversible situation.

So what happens is that if we don’t have tolerance then we make a small thing very big. Yeah, it was a loss but it’s not the end of the world. So when there is no tolerance, what happens that we all will experience loss in our life, but we all will process loss differently. The loss could be loss of a job, loss could be loss of our savings, maybe a stock market crashes, loss could be loss of a relationship, a loud one may pass away, relationship may break down, losses can happen. Now there are three ways we can process loss.

I have lost. This is the most objective, the Bhagavata calls this as the Sattvic way of processing. In Sattva, this was the opportunity, I lost it. I have lost. But if we are in rajas, it might become much more I am lost.

Now I am lost is far more disorienting. I don’t know what to do. Sometimes somebody has invested a lot of time and energy in a particular career and then maybe somebody wants to become an athlete and they get a career ending injury. I don’t know what to do in my life. I’m lost.

This is far more damaging. But the most damaging is I am a loser. Now when somebody starts interpreting it like that, that can be devastating and this is Tamas, this is the mode of ignorance. So if we start interpreting it like that, suppose we were in a relationship with someone who we thought was a loser, then what would we do? We want to end that relationship as quickly as possible.

But if we thought that we ourselves are losers, then what are we going to do? Can we end our relationship with ourselves? Can we break up with ourselves? Well we can’t but many times suicide is like a desperate attempt to try to break up with ourselves. So tolerance is a great virtue that enables us to keep small things small.

Somebody said this is not a small thing, this is a terrible thing. Yeah it’s terrible but it will pass, don’t overreact to it, don’t let reversible emotions lead us to irreversible decisions. So tolerance is a great virtue, it’s a very important power and each one of us we need this power because we live in a world which is very very volatile and we live with minds which are even more volatile. It’s a deadly combination. So tolerance is very much a virtue.

At the same time, what is it that we have to tolerate that we have to understand with wisdom. And then I was talking about the WIT, I is influence. Okay, I may decide that this is a big thing for me and this is a small thing for me. So now once I decide something is big and something is small, then I have to check. I wanna work on this big thing, but do I have the power right now to work on that big thing?

Or if you don’t have that power, what do we do? We have to work each one of us has a certain level of influence in our lives and we need to work with the influence that we have. So I’ll explain what this means that some of you may notice that I need crutches for walking. So when I was one, I got polio. That I my mother took me to a we used polio to a physician.

We were staying in a small town in Maharashtra in India. And she took me to a physician to get a polio vaccine. And unknown to that physician, because it is a small town, that clinic had had a power outage the previous night. And the fridge in which the clinic had been kept, the clinic had kept the vaccines had got disconnected from power. So the temperature had increased.

And the attendant didn’t notice that, neither the finished physician noticed that. So they gave me that vaccine, but because the temperature had increased, the germ percentage had increased within it. And the vaccine, instead of preventing polio, ended up causing polio. So now I don’t remember any of that, but I was about one and I was just learning to walk and I fell down and I could not walk afterwards normally. So and this happened, I had a maternal uncle here in America.

And he was among the first in our family, extended family, who had come to America. And when he heard this, he immediately said, you should you should sue the doctor. Now, my father is among the calmest persons I have known. His favorite verse in the Bhagavad Gita is of the section on Stitha Pragya, bistoik. So he told my uncle, my maternal uncle, he said that the Indian legal system is such that if you see sue them in court, probably we’ll die before the case comes for hearing.

Anyway, the thing has happened, what can we do about it now? So he accepted that. Now a few years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine, and he told me that this happened in America, in Florida. He said he he he was expecting a, a daughter, his wife was expecting, and, there was some complications, so she was rushed to the NICU and then they had a baby that was somewhat premature. But in the whole process, the the the medical staff did some multiple mess ups.

And because of that, when the baby was born, she had cerebral palsy and number of other issues. And now, then this devotee, he wrote to his spiritual master, spiritual master is also my spiritual master, Radhanath Maharaj, and he asked Radhanath Maharaj that should I accept this? This has happened, we’ve got a baby like this. Should I accept this as my karma or should I sue the hospital for it? It was their negligence.

So basically Maharaj replied to him saying that, it is what has happened, it has already happened, it is you have to accept the responsibility to take care of your daughter now. At the same time, it is your when it is your dharma to take care of your daughter, if you can get some support, some assistance in doing that dharma, in doing your duty, then you should seek that assistance. So he he sued the hospital and because it was a clear case, not a medical malpractice but medical negligence. So the hospital settled out of court and he’s got a fairly decent financial support for the lifelong care of his daughter. Now that does not change the fact that she is tragically physically damaged, but the fact is that it is not that tolerance means that something bad has happened, it’s my own karma accepted.

No, it is that we have to see what influence do we have. The focus is not on why something happened. The focus is on the cure. The focus when we are trying to deal with any problem in life. The focus always has to be on not whether it is karma.

Oh, is it my karma? Is it the baby’s karma? Is it this person’s karma? Our focus should not be on the cause. Whose karma is it?

Our focus needs to be on the cure and the cure is what is my dharma in this situation? What is my duty in this situation? And for the sake of my duty, I will do what is best for me. If we start focusing too much on karma, then where will we stop in that case, isn’t it? Say, if there’s a newborn baby, say, if say a guest comes to our home and the guest says we give them we have we have a guest room, say, and the guest says, oh, it’s so cold over here.

Can we tell them it’s your own karma that you are feeling cold? No. It is. What? If they have come to our home, it is our duty as hosts.

It’s our dharma to take care of our guests. So our focus should always be on our dharma, not on someone else’s karma. If we have a newborn baby and the baby is crying, and should the mother think, oh, the baby is crying because of her past karma? No. It is your present dharma to take care of the baby.

Now sometimes despite our best efforts to take care of the baby, sometimes there might be some disease that might take some time to heal. And that time the baby might be crying, we feel very bad, we see the baby is in pain. But then, if after doing our dharma according to our influence, according to our capacity, still if the problem remains, then we need to tolerate it. So our focus is not meant to be on the cause because we don’t know what whose karma is, what is known for us is what is our dharma. So we focus on our dharma and that way we see, okay this is my dharma, but how much influence do I have right now to do my dharma and we act accordingly.

So now what I understood, my my father when he was in India, the Indian legal system and the American legal system are quite different. I traveled all over the world, only in America have I seen ads of lawyers. Just as I was coming along, I saw, who hurt you? So, in each country, what what billboards are there, that does indicate something about the culture. I traveled all over the world.

Only in India have I seen jewelry ads. Huge ads of jewelry. It’s not generally for brides, but it’s for all occasions. So anyway, so America is a much more litigious country than India. And in India, my father didn’t have much influence.

So he took care of me and my parents, they I’ll talk about them a little bit forward, but we have to see what our influence is. It’s a big thing if a child is damaged in some way. But do we have the influence to choose to do something about it? If we don’t, then best to tolerate it and move on with life. If we have, then we should make a change to it.

So we look at our influence. And then the last part is what are the acronym once again? Wait. Wait. Yes.

Thank you. So now T is transform. Now transform can mean multiple things. Sometimes it can mean various kinds of transformation. So here once we have tolerated, so there is a very big difference between tolerate, to tolerate is not to suffocate.

Sometimes we are angry with someone, somebody is doing something, she’s annoying us, irritating us, and we keep burying all those feelings underneath us, and we keep tolerating. And then what happens is we keep tolerating tolerating tolerating but it’s all suffocated. And one day that person does something and we explode. And then when we explode what that person at that time has done might be very small but we explored for all the seventeen thirty six things that they had done before. And we didn’t do anything about that.

So tolerating is not about burying our feelings and living in a suffocated way. Tolerance is a much more resourceful way, like I said of choosing our battles. Which battle am I going to fight and which hurdle I’m not going to fight? So we need to transform something, either transform ourselves internally, transform ourselves externally. So this is where that way we transform is in three broad ways.

This is the concluding part. I use the acronym here for act. Sometimes we accept what has happened. So broadly speaking, what can we do? Say, if I am here and there is a big bully who is tormenting me.

Now what can I do? There are there is a person situation that is troubling me. So either I can just accept it, I can accept that it is there like that, or I can counter or I can transfer myself. Transfer myself means I go away from there. And all three options are perfectly valid.

The focus for a devotee like I said for others, how can I do my dharma? How can I serve Krishna in this situation? Ultimately, our dharma is to serve Krishna. So let’s take two sets of examples and I’ll conclude with that. See when the Pandavas came to the kingdom, they were born in the forest and their father unfortunately passed away and that’s when they were told by the sages, go back to the kingdom.

They told Kunti, you’re a single mother now and the forest is a dangerous place filled with deadly animals. You better go back to the kingdom. Little did those sages know that in the kingdom, in the palace was a far more dangerous animal in two legs on two legs. That was Duryodhana. So now when when they tried to poison Duryodhana tried to poison Bhima.

Bhima was Bhima somehow survived and he was enraged. He said, I’m going to trip this Duryodhana apart. I’m going to beat him to death. So at that time, Yudhishthir told him, you know, it’ll you don’t have any evidence that it was Bhima who did this. It’ll be your word against his word.

And we’re just new over here, we don’t know who in the family will support us, who will not support us, we don’t want to rip the family apart. Maybe he’s just a little insecure, maybe he could not Yudhishthir was a good reader of people. He noticed that Duryodhan had a lot of power. So but then when the Pandavas came, Bhima was much more powerful than Duryodhan. So naturally, Duryodhan might have felt a little insecure.

So Duryodhan Yudhish still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. That is even people hurt us, there can be broadly say when some someone hurts us, there can be broadly two kinds of reasons, many, but broadly two kinds of reasons. The most positive explanation is that they are just insecure. They are not hurting us because they want to hurt us, but they’re just insecure. And if you pacify them that I’m not a threat to you, and they will support us.

The other is that they have envy or even enmity towards us. Maybe envy is in between. From envy, when it becomes active, it becomes enmity. So now, Yudhish still gave the benefit of the dog. He said, let’s accept it.

Let’s not do anything. But then what happened was, unfortunately, it did not work. What did they have to do? That they had actually, he started doing worse things. Initially, he had tried to poison Bhima, then he tried to kill the entire family including their mother also.

See, among all the ways in which you can kill an enemy, burning them is the most painful. Sometimes if there’s a big building on fire, people prefer to jump and die because in one moment it will be over. They’re burning, they’re burning for several minutes and a long time, it’s very painful. So he tried to do that. Now at that time, all the Pandavas said, okay, you know, let’s not confront them.

So they decided to remove themselves from the situation. They transferred themselves, okay? They stayed incognito for some time. Later on, when they got the kingdom, they also decided they they got half of the kingdom which is barren, they said let’s accept it and let’s live separately. So they transferred themselves away from the situation.

They moved to a different situation, let’s forget it. But then, Duryodhana was such that he kept persecuting them. He tried to dishonor their wife, then he after forty, thirty years of exile, he tried to dishonor their Krishna also. Then the Pandava decided, this person is never going to learn. So then if we are truly protectors, we are Kshatriyas, we need to protect not just our family, we need to protect society, protect humanity from this tyrant and therefore we have to fight.

So we need to fight against them. So basically there are different choices in different situations and in all of them the focus of the Pandavas was on how to serve Krishna. How can we best serve Krishna? If you look at Srila Prabhupada’s life, when Srila Prabhupada was in India, there’s a place called Jhansi, where Prabhupada has tried to start an organization. He called it the League of Devotees.

And this was between the first World or second World War at that time, there was a League of Nations that had been established. So Prabhupada had that grand vision that this would actually unify the whole world. So he started that and it was it seemed to be going well, but then suddenly there was a clique against him and the very property on which he was going to have his temple, that property was the deed to it was challenged. Now Prabhupada could have legally challenged that, fought the battle, but but Prabhupada decided to leave. He so again, if you look at this act what is act?

Remember, a is accept, c is counter. Counter. And t is? Transfer. Transfer means go somewhere else.

So when Shlupra was in Jhansi, what did he do? He transferred himself. Okay. Now why did Prabhupada transfer himself? He is reasoning, he tells in some of his talks afterwards, he said Jhansi was a small place, the people also were not so serious at that time, they’re more religious than spiritual, and they’re more ritualistic.

He said they’re not really interested in seeing seekers. So Prabhupada left for there. He said fighting this battle is not that big a thing. Now, when he came to America, he was staying, he was first staying in Butler, Pennsylvania. He was staying at the house of the Agarwal family who had sponsored his visit.

And they used to eat meat, even beef. And then would offer the proval of have his bhoga which he would cook for Krishna. He had to keep his bhoga in the same fridge. And now the hostess, she was was an Indian man who had married American women, just Gopal Agarwal and Salia Agarwal. So she she had some sensibility because her father-in-law would sometimes come to America, so she said that, Swamiji, I’m sorry, I have only one fridge over here.

And what does Prabhupada’s reply? Think nothing of it. Think nothing of it. Now, if in, say, five years down the line, ten years down the line, if in a temple, if something like that have been found, would Prabhupada say think nothing about it? Prabhupada would have said think nothing except about this.

How did this happen? Isn’t it? So at that time, Prabhupad in Butler, he accepted that. Why did he accept it? Because he knew he is not gonna permanently stay there.

These people are they are hosting him. They are not themselves. Prabhupada could make out very quickly that these people are they’re doing this as a courtesy for their father-in-law. They’re themselves not interested in becoming devotees. So Prabhupada is not interested in imposing his principle on people who are not interested.

So he said, okay. So the temple, they accept it. But then afterwards, when, around in the 1970s, when Prabhupada started working on a big project in India that was in Mumbai, in Juhu, Now there, there is a person who tried to, there’s a politician over there, he tried to take the money and not give the land. And when that happened, Srila Prabhupada, he wrote a letter to one of his supporters, he says, if he wants to steal Krishna’s land, he will have to go over my dead body. So Prabhupada fought over there, Prabhupada countered And why was that?

Prabhupada felt that Mumbai is a very important place, that Juhu is a prime property, we have already invested time, energy and money in the project. We want this for the service of Krishna. So Prabhupada was choosing his battles. So sometimes Prabhupada accepted, sometimes Prabhupada has transferred himself, Prabhupada sometimes countered. So in this way, tolerance is one virtue.

But the biggest virtue for a devotee is not tolerance, the biggest virtue is transcendence, being dedicated to the service of Krishna. And how do we serve Krishna? Sometimes we accept the situation we are in, sometimes we change the situation, sometimes we change ourselves and go to some other situation. Now most of the times, our tendency might be to fight, but that’s not very healthy. Sometimes our tendency might just go away from that situation.

But no. What is healthy is see, accepting, as I said, accept is not to suffocate. To counter is not to retaliate. It is counter means we are trying to fix the situation. We don’t hate the person.

The the person who was trying to take the money and the land from Srila Prabhupada, he passed away because of a heart attack. And then his wife tried to fight and she sent some hoodlums, some thugs to try to attack the devotes and intimidate the devotees. But then Prabhupada and the devotees were very courageous, they fought and finally she realized this is a battle I can’t win. She came to Prabhupada and then they signed the land deal properly and she says, Swamiji please forgive me for what what I did. And Prabhupada was completely saintly and ferocious, you are like my daughter, I’ll take care of you.

So countering is not retaliating. It is not that we we treat the other person as enemy and we have a vengeance. Countering is this is a wrong situation, I want to fix the situation. And transfer is not running away. Or in psychological terms, this is not that it is fight, flight, or freeze.

We’re not talking about any of these things. When we when we are talking about learning to tolerate, we’re not freezing, we’re not fighting, we’re not flight we’re not flighting, what we’re doing is we are focusing. We focus on what is the best way I can serve Krishna in this situation. And when we have that vision, that’s how we can move forward. So my parents, they didn’t just, okay, this is he’s got polio, we can’t do anything about it.

Now I what I remember when I was about two and a half or three, one of my relatives, distant relatives had come to meet us and she was consoling my mother saying that it’s so sad your son got polio. And I remember my mother’s voice very calm, clear, confident, She said, whatever he lacks physically, God will provide him intellectually. So, I don’t know why she said that, what ability she saw in me, but somehow that part stayed with me. And, yes, as I grew up, I couldn’t play outdoor games like other kids could play. And I part of me felt, you know, why why why is this happening to me?

This is unfair that I have this physical disability. But when I started studying, I noticed that, I could read rapidly, I could remember well, I could articulate clearly. And then somewhere in the back of my mind, it settled down that, okay, what did I do to deserve this intellectual ability either? Isn’t it? So life is unfair.

We all sometimes get things that we don’t deserve, but in the big picture, life is fairly unfair. Life is fairly unfair. Sometimes we get more than what we deserve and sometimes we get more than what we deserve. So the unfair part we want to tolerate, so that the fair part we can transform, we can tap that for the service of Krishna. So in this way tolerance can be very empowering for us.

I summarize what I discussed today, broadly speaking, mention three points that we’re talking about what is tolerance and how to tolerate, how basically the theme was how can tolerance be a power for us, how can tolerance give us strength and not be lead to importance, not make us weak? So I talked about three points. What are the first, what are the acronym? Weight. Weight, w I t.

W was? Wisdom. So wisdom is to know what are the big things and what are the small things. And the purpose of tolerance is to keep the big things big and the small things small. So tolerance is a great virtue because without tolerance, when life’s ups and downs happen, we will go way up and way down.

And what will happen is because of emotions that are often reversible, we will end up taking decisions. If there is no tolerance, then we’ll end up taking decisions that are irreversible. So that could be a disaster. And that’s why when something is going back, we’re going through a bad phase, tolerate it. It’s not going to last forever.

So it is meant to help us avoid irreversible decisions and that is a power. But we also need to recognize that it is not the big things that we should be tolerating against. So now if we decide, I is influence. Now what is it that we can do in a particular situation? So our focus should not be on whose karma is it.

Oh, this is this person’s karma, this is that person’s karma. Our focus should be on our dharma. What is my responsibility? What can I do in this situation to fix the situation? So when we are dharma focused, if we have the power to fight, we fight, if we have the power to we don’t have the power to fight, we accept, but then we fight in some other direction.

So the essence of tolerance is we all have to fight, but we need to choose our battles. So each of us in different situations will have different powers. So I give the example of, you know, my polio versus the cerebral palsy in America. This is the. In one case, they accepted, my father accepted.

In another case, you accept the response to find the situation because the we need to do our dharma and we do it in the best possible way. And last, he was transform. Now how do we transform? That means tolerance is not passivity. We can transform broadly.

You know, if there is somebody or some situation that is terrorizing us, they are persecuting us, then we have three options. We accept it, we counter it, or we transfer ourselves from that situation. So all three options can be done in a mood of service. So this is it is called the acronym act. Now the key difference for a devotee is how can I do my dharma?

How can I best serve in this situation? How can I serve Krishna in this situation? If we have that consideration, then we will decide what is the best thing to do. So transferring is not running away. Accepting is not suffocating.

It is not that we encountering is not retaliating. We are not focused on the situation, we’re focused on fixing the situation. So it is not fight or flight or freeze, it is focus on our service to Krishna. In this particular situation, how can I serve? So ultimately, when we chant the holy names, it is not just a utterance of a ritual, it is a prayer to Krishna, please engage me in your service.

So Krishna is actually guiding us that means, Krishna, please give me the intelligence to know which battles to fight. Krishna says I’ll give you the intelligence by which you can come to me. So let us pray to Krishna that He help us to choose our battles in the tolerance, helps us to keep small battles small and focus on serving Him in the best possible way in all situations according to our capacity whether it is by accepting, countering or transferring ourselves. So let’s repeat this prayer once, My dear Lord, can you repeat with me, My dear Lord, let tolerance increase my intelligence increase my intelligence not my importance. Thank you very much.