Value Education and Spirituality 33 – Ramayana 15 – Jambavan – Help bring the best out of others

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna Welcome back to the Ethics from Epic series We are now discussing the Ramayan where we will today discuss the principle of We need those who bring the best out of us In this world we are surrounded by different kinds of people some don’t care for us some are eager to push us down some just want to use us for their own purposes and some want us to grow There are some people who out of their affection, out of their love they want to bring the best out of us and with such people’s confidence such people’s guidance such people’s encouragement that often helps us to overcome our own doubts our own self-limiting misconceptions and by overcoming these to unleash our potential for achieving wonderful things So we see this in the past time of the Vanaras deliberating about who will scale the ocean After the Vanaras were guided and encouraged by Sampatti who then departed in celestial body the Vanaras came Jubilant Now we know where Sita is Now we are going to be successful in our mission and they came charging towards the ocean but as they came charging towards the ocean suddenly they stopped and as they look at the vastness of the ocean it just expanded as far as the eye could see and beyond and suddenly they look at each other muted their rose of jubilation suddenly transformed into a into a perplexed and vexed silence and then they started thinking Angad in order to encourage all the Vanaras he said I am confident that any of you any of us will be able to jump across this ocean and get to Lanka So who among you Vanaras would like to venture for this mission So now they had known from Sampatti that actually the ocean was 100 Yojanas and beyond that was Lanka So the different Vanaras started saying Oh I can jump 10 Yojanas I can jump 20 Yojanas I can jump 30 Yojanas I can jump like this So they all started giving various statistics So now this is not just like a long jump which is done in athletics it actually involved having the capacity to fly it’s like there are birds and the birds can fly but even a bird cannot keep flying endlessly it has to it needs some rest So although the Vanaras talked in terms of who can jump for how long it was not just a jump like a long jump it was a jump which involved flying You have to remember that these are not just monkeys ordinary monkeys they are celestial monkeys they are Vanaras and they had powers which ordinary monkeys don’t have and yet none of the Vanaras said that they could jump up to 100 Yojanas and then Jambavan he said that you know in my youth what to speak of jumping 100 Yojanas I have scaled I have gone across the whole earth so but now I am old and now I cannot jump so much sometimes we may want to do wonderful things but our body has just lost the capacity to do it so we should know that that means we can’t at least the Lord wants us to do some other services and that particular service somebody else has to do Jambavan had the grace the humility to admit that it was not possible for him to do it Angada realized that he was a prince and he gallantly rose up and he said I think that I will be able to jump 100 Yojanas but I do not know whether I will have the strength to jump back again and come all the way 100 Yojanas this was a situation where his capacities itself were unknown yet none of the Vanaras had ever been faced with an obstacle of this magnitude and they just didn’t know how to deal with it how to respond to it so when they thought about this at that time they decided that they would discuss with each other and they could not come up with a solution now all this while Hanuman was just silent and then Jambavan turned to Hanuman and he says Oh Vanarputra Hanuman why are you silent now you are capable of things of wonderful huge things you can surely go across this ocean rise oh Hanuman achieve your potential Hanuman was looking at him what are you speaking actually Hanuman’s story is quite dramatic Hanuman is had had a phenomenal powers he was actually a manifestation of lord Shiva who was conveyed through Vayu that is a whole different story we will not go into about his antecedents right now but the focus is he had extraordinary antecedents he was considered a manifestation of Shiva a son of Vayu and in his childhood he had been blessed by all the devatas at one time he had been as a mischievous child he had been he had been playing and he decided to go and he thought the sun is a ball for playing and he jumped up to try to catch the sun and the sun and this boy just came kept coming coming coming initially the sun thought that what is this boy from earth coming like this this is a childhood bird but eventually the boy kept coming coming coming and he just grabbed the sun and the sun was horrified almost like grabbed the sun and the sun ran to Indra and said please save me and Indra hit him on his thunderbolt that’s why his jaw got distorted and it’s like Hanuman so one whose jaw is prominent that’s how he got the name many different names like Maruti, Bajrangbali and others so now when he fell on the ground unconscious almost like dead Vayu became very angry and he said that he is a child he could have been explained why did you have to assault him like this he became so angry that he stopped the flying stopped the stopped the stopped the flow of air everywhere when the flow of air was stopped at that time everybody started dying of asphyxia suffocating they didn’t have any breath and then in order to pacify and gratify Vayu was rightly angry the gods came and they benedicted this boy and they all gave different benedictions to him so Brahma came there and he revived the boy and he blessed him he said that that even the that no celestial weapon will affect him too much and even in the weapon which will be directed in Brahmastu will also not affect him for long like that he gave him different the different devatas gave him different benedictions and this Vanara who was already very powerful he was powerful enough already to jump up to the sun and appear like a threat to the sun now with all the benedictions of the Vanara of the devatas he became even more powerful but that power when combined with the mischievousness the naughtiness that is characteristic of childhood he became a threat sometimes they would do some mischievous tricks with the sages and he would do all sorts of naughty things and the sages they found that their meditations and their sacrifices and their sacred duties were being interrupted by this naughty boy they did not want to punish him because they knew he was a special person and they also did not want to incur the wrath of Vaidyaji but they also realized that he has to be checked so they said that they gave him forgetfulness you will forget your powers till someone reminds you of them at the right time and although he was an extremely powerful Vanara but when Sugriva was being persecuted by Vali at that time he did not remember his powers and that’s why he did not fight with Vali so the initial part of the Ramayan when he enters he is a servant of Sugriva that is the Kishkindha kanda but in the Sundara kanda which is the next kanda he actually comes to the central stage he becomes the greatest of the Vanaras and the greatest of the servants of Lord Ram also so here Sugriva Jambavan knew about the glories of Hanuman and he started speaking to remind Hanuman who he was what powers he had, what benedictions he had been given, what he was capable of and as Hanuman heard this the effect of forgetfulness that was caused by the curse started dissipating and his confidence his morale, his determination started increasing more and more in some dramatized versions of the Ramayan it is described that Jambavan actually sang a song praising Hanuman and Hanuman became confident and jubilant by hearing this and by the time Jambavan finished his speech Hanuman was confident and said yes I will jump across to Lanka and I will find Sita I will ensure that our mission becomes successful. He was filled with confidence in this way so Jambavan was a person who knew about the potential of Hanuman and who had faith that that potential could be uncovered and could be channelized for constructive purpose so beyond our lives have talents and we need to we need people who have faith in us to develop those talents, you know our whatever talents we have they can be put in four categories if you consider a square with four sub squares in it, there are talents which we have, talents we know talents we don’t know so there are some talents we know, talents we don’t know, talents others know and talents others don’t know so we place our talents in these four categories then there are some talents about us which we know and which others also know there are talents about us which we know others don’t know, there are some talents about us which we don’t know but others know and some talents which neither we know nor others know now often when there are others around us they can observe and discover our talents and if they encourage us then we develop those talents and practically speaking if you see all the great performers, great successes in life they always have had someone who encouraged them, who mentored them and who had confidence in them even a person who is said to be a self-made man or a self-made woman we see that even in their lives they usually got some guidance, encouragement from someone or the other, it may not be people in their usual circle in their friend family circle or anything like that but usually this helps a lot in helping us to overcome our own doubts, our own forgetfulness, now we may say that in one way we have a lot of all of us have excessive pride you know we often believe that we often want more prestige, more honor more respect than what our actual actions describe yes that is true but that is based on emptiness everybody in this world has an ego and because of that ego we want more prestige than what is due for us, that is unfortunate and we are not talking about others boosting our ego there is our imagination of who we are and there is a reality of who we are so there is a big gap between the two and the imagination is often a fantasy if we don’t have the abilities or if we don’t do the hard work but what we are talking about here is not the imagination of who we are but the reality of who we are, that itself can be boosted if we have others who see our potential and who inspire and encourage and guide us to unlock that potential, so now as I said there may be talents which we have but which we don’t know about and others can see them or there may be talents which we have which neither we nor others know about but when we explore we may discover those talents so all these require there are three possibilities talents which no one knows about, talents which we ourselves don’t know about and third is there may be talents which we have, which we know about but the talents are such that we don’t have the confidence to use them properly, that means that it is said that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, that means even if somebody has talent, after the talent there has to be perspiration, there has to be tremendous amount of hard work that is required for one to translate talent into greatness talent into achievement so now we need people who believe in us and encourage us, just as Jambavan believed in and brought out the potential of Hanuman, so if we have mentors, if we have well-wishers if we have friends who do the same for us, then we can also make the journey from talent to achievement now all of us have to identify our own self-limiting misconceptions whatever talents we have been given by God we are not meant to lock them within ourselves certainly that is injustice to those talents and to our own potential and to God who has given us those talents, we are meant to use our talents for our good, for others good and for glorifying God who is the source of those talents also so now what do we do when we have these talents but we are unable to use them, often we have some self-limiting misconceptions, we do not even voice those misconceptions but maybe sometime in our childhood we failed or sometimes something went wrong when we tried to achieve something and because of that we start believing that we are failures, that we will not be successful, that we will choke at the critical moments that our destiny itself is spoiled, so all of us have certain self-limiting misconceptions and we have to find those self-limiting misconceptions just as there was a curse of forgetfulness that separated Hanuman from his talents similarly we have our self-limiting misconceptions that separate us from actualizing our talents and moving towards achievement so if we have people around us at least one or two people not everybody will encourage you but even if you have one or two people who believe in us and who see the good in us and guide us towards bringing out that good then we too can we can also achieve wonderful things and ultimately this is what a spiritual mentor does for us in our life certainly we can achieve various things in this world and if we have the talents and we have the inspiration we should do the best we can and achieve the wonderful things that we have the potential to achieve at the same time beyond what we can achieve in this world we are at our core spiritual beings and we are meant for eternal life and we are as is told in the famous parable a lion who lived who somehow a lion cub started living in a sheep cub among sheep and started thinking of himself as a sheep and was bleeding like a sheep so eventually when a lion came and saw what is this a lion cub fleeing away like a sheep and bleeding like a sheep so the lion charged and caught the lion cub and the lion cub was frightened and he thought that now I am going to die the lion was amazed to see this lion cub speaking exactly like a baby sheep and finally he was trying to communicate to the lion cub actually you are a lion you are not a sheep the lion cub just couldn’t understand finally he took him to the banks of a river and showed him his face and he looked at it and then he looked at him and he said I don’t look like a sheep I look like this lion and he was so amazed by this and the lion growled and he pointed to himself and he tried to growl and that growl came out so naturally and he realized that bleeding was actually an unnatural sound for him and roaring was natural sound for him and thus this lion cub who had circumstantially reduced itself to a baby sheep now metamorphosed into a lion cub similarly we are actually indestructible eternal souls but when we live in the we are meant for eternal existence we are meant to be fearless we are meant to be confident we are meant to be joyful because that is all a part of our core we are satchitananda atmas and when we get caught in association of people who are spiritually unaware people who are materialistically infatuated then our ambitions get reduced to the material level and we are always insecure what if I don’t get this enjoyment what if some threat comes up what if an accident happens and we get we start bleating like sheep instead of roaring like lions because we are always at the back of our mind conscious of our fragility and our mortality but the lion who saw this baby that is like the spiritual master and the spiritual guide the spiritual master the guru when the spiritual master sees us then the spiritual master illumines us gives us spiritual knowledge spiritual knowledge in the bhagavad gita if we study it carefully then it acts like a mirror it acts like the reflecting medium as was the river for the baby cub and when we understand ourselves as explained in the bhagavad gita then we understand oh I am not the body I am soul I am eternal indestructible I am a part of the all attractive supreme that knowledge is enormously empowering and liberating for it enables us to move towards the highest accomplishment as we use our material talents to achieve wonderful things in this life but we use our heart to achieve ultimate destination beyond this world also so in this way by having people who believe in us people who want us to achieve our potential see our potential and inspire us to actualize that potential we can achieve great things as Jambavan did for Hanuman so can our relatives and mentors do for us and so too can we do for our loved ones and in this way we can all make positive contributions to this world by acting like Jambavans for each other in our journey onwards towards self actualization thank you Hare Krishna