Value Education and Spirituality 24 – Ramayana 6 – The illusory dear – Use intelligence to see beyond appearance to substance

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
Hare Krishna. Welcome back to the value education and spirituality series. We are discussing from the Ramayana.
Now, we will discuss about the illusory deer form that Maricha had taken and how that can caution us about not being taken in by seductive appearances. To look beyond appearance to substance in things and then respond. So, Ravana, when he was goaded by Shurpanakha to take revenge and to get Sita, he lost his intelligence because of lust.
And then he went to one of his former assistants Maricha and forced him to join a conspiracy to abduct Sita. So, Ravana told Maricha that you take the form of very attractive deer and Sita will be attracted to you and she will send Rama and Lakshmana off and then I will grab her. Maricha tried to dissuade Ravana but Ravana told him I have not come here for your advice, I have come to give you instruction.
Either you accept my instruction or you will die, accept destruction at my hands. That’s your only choice. So, Maricha complied and he became a beautiful looking deer and he started frolicking around in the vicinity of the hermitage, cottage where Sita, Rama and Lakshmana were living.
So, Sita and Rama would live inside, Lakshmana would stay guard outside and when Sita, she was plucking flowers, she saw a beautiful deer and she was charmed. Oh, what a beautiful deer this is. She says, Rama, Rama, please come.
And she called, Rama came out. Now, she says, see how beautiful this deer is. She was so excited in speaking that on hearing her, Lakshmana also came out.
And when Lakshmana saw this deer, immediately he became a little suspicious. So, now, Sita said, how beautiful this deer is. How beautiful it is.
And Rama, when he saw the deer, he was not very attracted by the deer, but he was happy to see Sita so excited, to see Sita so happy. Now, Rama was a responsible king, a responsible husband and he had never wanted Sita to come out to the forest like this. When he accepted his father’s instruction to go to the forest, his intention was to go out all alone.
And when he was going out all alone, when Sita insisted that I want to come with you, he tried his best to dissuade her. And Sita actually started to cry. She says, I can’t live without you.
She fervently begged to him. And when she desperately, fervently insisted, then Rama accepted and then she came with him. But Rama always felt that she is a princess.
She is meant to live in royalty. Her father entrusted her to me. And I am not able to take care of her.
Because of me, she has to live in this forest amidst such austerity. So he felt happy to see that Sita was happy. And he felt that… So when Sita finally, she was so animated to see this deer, and she said, Oh Rama, can you get this deer for me? Now, Rama had not the heart to refuse at that time.
It’s a small thing she is asking. You know, she has given up the whole kingdom to accompany me. She is living amidst such poverty.
Let me do something for her. And Rama felt inclined to oblige and give her the deer. Now Lakshman was suspicious.
Lakshman said, I have never seen a deer like this before. This deer doesn’t look like an ordinary deer. I have seen many different kinds of deers.
But this is so exceptionally attractive that it doesn’t seem real to me. And Sita was so excited that she was not ready to hear anything, any objection to her scheme. Now it is not that Sita was a foolish lady who just got seduced by appearances.
What was Sita’s heart? She said, Rama, if you get this deer, then we can keep that as a pet with us. And then we will adopt it, we will have it as a pet. And then later when we go back to the kingdom, at that time I will offer this as a gift to your mother Kaushalya.
This will be a memento which we can offer from the forest to her. So she was also having plans and it was also centered on her own pleasure. Certainly her pleasure was there.
But it was also she was thinking of giving that as a gift eventually to Kaushalya. So seeing her so excited, Rama heard Lakshman’s words, but Rama decided to do this small thing for Sita. And Sita was so excited.
She says, please get that deer for me. Please get that deer for me. And then Rama said to Lakshman, you stay here and guard Sita and I will go out and get this deer.
Lakshman said, I still feel that there is something wrong over here. This is a deceptive deer. Can’t you see that actually none of the other animals are coming close to this deer? In fact, wherever this animal goes, you see the birds fly away in the sky.
The squirrels go away. No other animal stays close. They all go away in fear of this.
Surely there is something wrong. I think this is a Rakshasa in the garb of a deer. So Sita was not ready to hear any of this.
And she said, oh, it’s a deer. What can it do? It’s such a beautiful deer. It’s a playful deer.
Now the animals, they could sense from the smell and from other things that animals have a different sense. Sometimes animals are able to sense also in advance that an earthquake is going to happen. Our seismographs are not accurate always, but there are several researchers who have found that animals, they change their behavior just before an earthquake is going to happen.
They seem to have some kind of mystical sense. So the animals could sense and they were all going away. But Sita was so excited that Ram decided to oblige.
And then Ram went out in the forest. And this was what Maricha wanted. This was what Ravana had and Maricha had schemed.
So as soon as Maricha, the Rakshasa in the form of the deer, saw Ram coming, he just started fleeing. Now initially the plan was that Ram will catch the deer and bring it back alive. Because Sita wanted the deer as a pet.
So Ram started going after. He could have just shot an arrow, but his goal was not to shoot an arrow. His goal was to catch the deer.
So when the deer started running, Ram ran after. And the deer ran, Ram ran. And the deer sometimes appears close and suddenly it would take one giant leap and go far away.
And Ram was trying to cover the distance and the deer led Ram far away into the forest. And then the whole terrible, terrible conspiracy was going to unfold. And we will discuss the further unfolding of the story later.
But here the important principle is this. That actually we can often get taken in by appearances. That there is appearance and there is substance.
And intelligence means to go beyond the appearance to the substance. When a deer, for example, or any other animal in the forest, sees a mirage. And this thirsty sees the water over there and rushes after it.
And it rushes after it and puts its mouth to get the mirage, get the water. What happens? It just gets burning sand. And burning sand.
And then it goes to another object. And another object. Another object.
And in that way. In that way, it just goes deeper and deeper into the desert. Never quenching its thirst and eventually dies.
Now an intelligent human being also sees the mirage. Sees that there is water. But uses the intelligence.
And with the intelligence one understands that actually this is not water. This is an illusion. I will not be fooled by the illusion.
Sometimes people say seeing is believing. But actually seeing is believing is the philosophy of the animals. The animals see the mirage and believe that there is water.
And that’s how they stay deluded. And they may go into the death by that. Intelligence means not seeing is believing.
Sorry, human beings are not meant to see and believe. Human beings are going to use their intelligence. And then decide whether they should believe what they see or not.
That is the sign of intelligence. Unfortunately, intelligence is not so common. Many people just go by appearances.
And that’s why people get exploited. So exploited. And actually to a large extent the advertising industry does this.
It creates such a captivating appearance that people get deluded. The evil genius of the advertising industry is to make us feel that we cannot live without the things which we don’t need at all. The whole idea of the advertising industry is to create needs where no needs exist.
Sometimes some hair dye is there. So if a hair dye is there for females for making the hair brunette. So then they show some very attractive female who has dark hair and nobody pays attention.
Who has blonde hair and nobody pays attention. Or has dark hair and nobody pays attention. And suddenly she dyes her hair.
And then suddenly everyone becomes attracted. And then all women start thinking I also have to dye my hair. And then they think I will also become attractive by this.
And people will get attracted to me. And then actually there is nothing wrong with whatever natural color of hair we have. But people just keep changing.
Fashions, how are fashions propagated? It’s all by appearances. All by appearances. Something is made to be seem attractive and everybody follows this.
And then the new fashion comes up and we get exploited. Oscar Wilde, he said that fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to change it every six months. Very insightful.
Normally we think of fashion as something beautiful. But the whole perception of the beauty of fashion is created by propaganda based on looks, based on appearances. And some new hairstyle, some new dress style, some new brand, some new brand of new version of a device, new brand of a particular product is brought out.
And it’s glamorized and people go and purchase that. And once they purchase that, then what happens? It is used for some time and then soon after that a new brand comes and that becomes glamorized. And people think that oh, now if I want to be attractive, I have to purchase that brand.
And then the same brand which seemed irresistible earlier now seems old fashioned. In order to give it up, the same clothes which were supposed to have brought us attention and made us the center of attraction. Now after six months or one year, they mark us as old fashioned.
And we have to sell them off and then we have to discard them and purchase new dresses. So that’s how we get exploited. And actually this can go to far greater extremes also.
In the 1920s and when the cigarette industry was actually aggressively marketing cigarettes, they found that their sales had reached a plateau. They were not rising up. Because all the men who had the capacity to smoke, they were, they had purchased, they were habituated to cigarettes.
And then they thought that how will we expand our market? And then one of the cigarette executives got a, got a perverse brainwave. And he said, actually 50% of our humanity is not smoking. Women practically don’t smoke.
So we should ensure that women smoke. How to make women smoke? Cigarette smoking was considered a primarily masculine activity. There were movie stars and James Bond or whoever, people, eminently masculine activity.
So how would women be made to smoke? So then the cigarette industry, they came up with their own advertising master plan. And they made a special, separately designed kind of cigarette, which was meant primarily for women. And then in America, in the 1920s and 1929, one of those years, at that time they, during the Independence Day parade, they had got prominent female icons, Hollywood stars and other female icons.
They were all going on the parade at one of the most visible places during the parade. They paid all these female icons, handsome amounts of money so that they would, when they would be most visible, the cameras would be there, people would be observing. They all, families, they flipped out their special customized cigarettes for females.
And they lit it and started smoking it. Everybody was watching, watching and watching. And then, not only did they smoke, he said, what are you doing? Afterwards, when they asked, he says, this is the torchlight of freedom.
It’s a torch of freedom. And this was the time the suffragette movement was gathering momentum. And women were feeling that, oh, we have been controlled by men for so long.
We have to become free now. And they thought, oh, this cigarette is a torch of freedom. And they thought, yes, we will smoke.
And we will smoke and we will be free. Now the propaganda was so visually appealing and it has given such an air of freedom that everybody wants to be free. Who wants to be bound? So nobody asked the question, what is smoking a cigarette got to do with freedom? How is this a torch of freedom? No, it was just in my appearance, the female cigarette was portrayed as a torch of freedom.
And thousands and thousands and thousands of women started smoking. And only after several, almost several decades later, how smoking is so harmful for everyone, and especially how smoking is harmful for women, and all the more so how smoking is severely harmful for women when they are pregnant. All that came to know later.
But the exploitation had already been done and the damage had been done. And the peddlers of death, as sometimes these advertisers, especially advertisers of products that are self-destructive are called, they had already made money. So the point is that we need to be careful.
We should not get seduced by appearances. Just because something appears attractive doesn’t mean necessarily that it is attractive. In fact, there are people out there who want to exploit our vulnerability for good looks.
So when I talk about Shorpanakha, the point was specifically about the sexually appearing, the sexually provocative depictions. But here I’m talking about general, about products. In general, appearance is there and substance is there.
And we need to go beyond appearance to substance using our intelligence. If we don’t want to be fooled and exploited. Thank you.
Hare Krishna.