Was Vritrasura’s bhakti covered over because of his past offenses?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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Does that answer your question? That’s true. So is it for a devotee, for Dhritarashtra, was it because of his offense that he was covered over? And then when that offense period expired, then that’s how his devotion manifested.
Yes, that’s true. See, for everything that happens, there can be multiple levels of explanation. Say, if somebody gets malaria, we could say that this person got malaria because the mosquito bit them and some microbes infected that person.
But now in that same house, there might be so many people staying. Did the mosquito bite only this person? Now we may say that actually, no, no, no, but now everybody has different immunity levels. But sometimes two people, if you measure their immunity levels, they may be exactly similar also.
But still one person gets malaria, the other doesn’t get malaria. So it is that there is also some purva karma involved. And even when cure is happening, two people may take the same medicine, but they may not get cured at the same time.
One person may get cured in 2-3 days. Another may take 2-3 months to get cured also. Particular kind of disease is there.
One disease may lead to another disease or it may lead to some complication. So we usually say that karma is the system of action and reaction, which is true. But it is not a simple system.
It is not that action A will lead to reaction B. Action A can be combined with the reactions to past actions and then it will lead to reaction B. So it may be that this life’s action and previous life’s action may combine together to give a particular reaction. So if an ordinary person say overeats sweets, they might just feel sleepy for some time. They might just gain a little weight.
But if a diabetic person eats sweets, for them they might get a severe health attack by that. So it is that their eating sweets is not the only factor which is causing the situation. It is the overall health of the health condition also.
So similarly, we can look at multiple layers of explanation for things. So yes, it was definitely the offense which had covered him over because of which he had to get a demonic body. But the point I was making here is that what brought about the transformation? Parvati did not say that for a particular duration this curse will remain and then the curse will go away.
Like Nalakuvar and Manigreev, for them, Narada Muni specifically promised them that Lord Krishna will deliver you. Krishna will deliver you in the future when you are living as trees. There also he did not say.
But there we can see Krishna acting specifically and bringing all those trees, the Yamalajna trees and that’s how Nalakuvar and Manigreev delivered. But there is no such specific statement made with Parvati. So we can look at a circumstantial level and circumstantial level actually, we will not see any sudden change.
But what we do see is that when he is in that final fight, his consciousness suddenly shifts from Indra to Vishnu and we can trace this back to his previous life. So what offenses do is, offenses basically they block our access to our own devotion. It’s like there’s a poor person who has no money at all.
As a wealthy person who has a lot of money, say in the treasury, but they lost the key to the treasury. Or somebody has a credit card, but they have lost the code of the credit card. And they just they have the money, but they can’t access it.
So like that, what offenses do is that the word offense is related with the word fence. Basically, there is a fence of proper behavior. When we transgress that fence and go out and behave improperly, especially we behave maliciously trying to put down some person.
Then that is when we when we violate that fence, then what happens is the fence, which is initially a protector for us, like for Draupadi, for Sita, the Lakshman Rekha was the protector for her. But then when she came out, then Ravana abducted her and took her to Lanka and Lanka became like a fence for her, surrounded by the oceans. And she just couldn’t go anywhere.
So initially the fence that protects our devotion, that protects us from sin, if we violate that through offense, then that offense changes the nature of the fence so that we become fenced out of our devotion. So we get trapped somewhere else in a particular consciousness that our own devotion is no longer accessible to us. But when that offense is, when the right time comes, then actually we become aware and then we move beyond the offense.
We are moving on the result of the offense. So we were looking. Now, if we have committed some offenses also, we don’t know about what we may have committed in the previous life.
But we can look at the circumstantial situation and we can look at what Uttarasur did and we can try to do that. So we can try to raise our consciousness from the horizontal to the vertical. Does that answer your question? Yes, yes, Prabhu.
For that we need Krishna’s mercy. That means he will create the sattva.