What is the Vedic understanding of spiritual leaders like Sai Baba?

From Pancha Pandava Das

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Question from Panchipanda Prabhu What exactly is the Vedic understanding of people like Sai Baba Answer I will explain this from three perspectives The social or humanitarian perspective The philosophical perspective And the devotional perspective Often because these three perspectives are not understood separately, there is overlapping of understanding and that’s why there is confusion. So from the social or humanitarian perspective, there are in India many spiritual leaders who have done a lot of social welfare work.
They have opened big hospitals, maybe they have created facilities for education, they have helped the poor during times of disaster and other such situations. So because of this, within the general society, they get some amount of goodwill, sometimes a large amount of goodwill. In fact, even political leaders and governmental agencies may also appreciate such leaders because of their humanitarian work.
So from the overall point of view of social well-being, yes there are poor, there are deceased and there are uneducated people. So offering them humanitarian help is good and as far as that goes, those leaders who do it, whether they be spiritualist or non-spiritualist, they are acting in the mode of goodness which is higher than the mode of those of passion and ignorance where most people are working. So from the social humanitarian perspective, these people are doing a lot of good work and that is appreciable.
Now from the philosophical perspective, many of these people, many such leaders claim to be God or even if they don’t claim to be God, their followers consider them to be God and they don’t explicitly deny that they are God. They accept their glorification and often they claim to exhibit certain magical feats which are seen by their followers as proof of the divinity of their leader. For example, they may produce a Shiva Linga by magic out of their mouth or they may just move their hand, chant some mantras and some ashes may appear or there are claims that they have magically cured sick people.
Now there are rationalists, say like the Indian Rationalist Association and other rationalists who consider their life mission to disprove and debunk all such miracles and claims of magic and then they make videos out of such stunts which they will perform and then they try to show how they are just sleet of hands, they are just trickery and not actually any kind of magic and then overall there ends to be a debate whether actually magic has been performed or it is just a trick of the hand. So from the Vedic philosophical perspective, there are mystic siddhis which are possible. So there are certain dimensions which modern reductionistic science has no knowledge about and those who access these subtler dimensions can do things which others, ordinary people cannot do.
So in principle, siddhis are definitely possible and the Srimad Bhagavatam talks about eight principle siddhis and many subordinate siddhis also. So siddhis are definitely possible. Now whether specific people have those siddhis or not is a debatable issue.
They may have it or it may be some sort of magic done by sleet of hand or it may be a combination of both. Sometimes it may be actual mystic siddhis. We cannot know that.
It is very difficult and such sort of events are often shrouded in secrecy and mystery. It is really difficult to know the truth. But either way, from the yogic perspective, the siddhis are acquired when one is advancing on the yogic path as a by-product of that path.
So once one’s in the Ashtang Yoga, there are eight stages and once one goes beyond the fifth stage, comes towards dhyana, dharana and samadhi. So at the stage of dhyana onwards, one starts getting this yogic siddhis. And of course, some people may have some yogic siddhis coming from previous lives.
They may be carried over in some cases. So either way, people can get yogic siddhis. But the more important point from the philosophical perspective is that the presence of yogic siddhis does not prove the divinity of the possessor of those siddhis.
Just because somebody can produce ash, that doesn’t make the person God. That just makes the person an advanced yogi. And actually, if not a very advanced yogi also, because the most advanced yogi don’t get distracted by magical siddhis and certainly don’t go about parading displaying those siddhis in order to impress followers.
The most advanced yogis focus on the Paramatma in the heart. They focus on meditation on the Supersoul in the heart and thereby they transcend this world. So looking at this from the philosophical perspective, the rationalist campaign to try to prove all magical tricks are wrong is unfounded and unbearable.
It is based on misinformation because there are yogic siddhis. But at the same time, the followers of these spiritual leaders who believe that their leaders are actually God because they perform these miracles, their understanding is also incorrect. Because even if those magical tricks are true, they only prove that the person is a yogi or a person having siddhis.
It doesn’t prove that the particular person is God, particular spiritual leader is God. So beyond this, from the devotional perspective, it is actually quite a serious offence for a human being to consider himself to be God. Why is it an offence? Because God is the supreme object of worship and the conditioned soul comes to this world because he wants to imitate God.
So certainly all people want to imitate God implicitly by trying to become the best in whatever they are doing, by trying to become the number one, trying to become number, the champion in everything. So often the desire to enjoy is what motivates people towards excellence and that desire to enjoy can often be the expression of the latent envy of the soul for Krishna. If I am the champion, then I become the number one, I become the centre of attraction for everyone.
Instead of God, Krishna is the centre of attraction for everyone in the spiritual world. So this is the basic enjoying mentality. So most people have this implicit, most people when somebody is becoming a sports champion or a popular film star, that person is not explicitly thinking that I want to imitate God and become God.
It is just a background, subconscious drive that is consciously the person just wants to excel and make a name for himself or herself and thereby attract people’s attention. But when the conditioned soul actually explicitly claims or accepts the claims that he is God, then that is a much higher degree of envy of Krishna. So such a claim is often considered to be from the devotional perspective extremely offensive to Krishna because the person is usurping the position of Krishna and taking for himself the worship that is meant for Krishna.
And more than usurping the position of Krishna and taking for himself the position that is meant for Krishna, the most harmful consequences is that the conditioned souls, other conditioned souls, who by worshipping Krishna could have made spiritual advancement, are distracted towards worshipping such a person and towards chanting the names of such a person and towards making deities of such a person and doing pujas and aartis of such a person and even sometime discussing the Kathas of this person and maybe making names of that person and chanting the names of that person which is all very tragically misdirecting because a soul no matter how spiritually advanced he may be cannot actually have the potency that God has and because he cannot have the purifying potency which Krishna himself has, often people who chant the names of such a people, they cannot get purified. Certainly not as much as Krishna, as chanting Krishna’s name would make them purified. There might be some little transformation that may happen in some people because overall they are doing activities whose cultural form is similar to the cultural form of devotional activities.
By similar cultural forms I mean that, so in devotional service we do kirtans of say the Hare Krishna Mahamantra and some people may start chanting the names or doing kirtans involving the names of these particular spiritual leaders who claim to be God and they because the cultural form is similar both are doing kirtans. Now the cultural form of kirtan can get people to the mode of goodness relatively speaking but it can but unless it is connected with Krishna, it cannot help people to transcend and take them towards the ultimate destination of life which is the spiritual world. So the most dangerous consequence of people claiming to be God and general people accepting the claims of such people is that many people who are potential spiritual seekers who have religious sentiments within their hearts, who have a culture that encourages them to worship and adore God, all this pious and religious tendencies and spiritual seeking within them gets misdirected away from the real God towards a person who claims to be God and because of this their spiritual prospects, the spiritual prospects of the followers get seriously hampered if not completely ruined.
Why do they get hampered? Because the ordinary soul cannot by his chanting of his names and doing his kirtans cannot purify people the way Krishna can and by completely ruined because sometimes the particular person who is claiming to be God, he becomes such a focus of the object of worship that other people, that their followers don’t even worship other forms of God. For example, a particular spiritual leader may claim that I am Krishna, I am Ram, I am Narasimha and he may also sometimes give darshan as Krishna, give darshan as Narasimha, that giving darshan basically means that person does a makeup and carries a flute and maybe changes the colour of the face so that it has a bluish complexion like that of Krishna and claims thereby that he is God and he is giving darshan. So now if the people start worshipping only him, so they may even chant the names of Krishna but because they are attracted to this particular person who is claiming to be an incarnation of Krishna, from the followers perspective even when they chant Krishna’s name they don’t think of Krishna, they start thinking about this person and actually the name of Krishna will purify but ultimately chanting of the name of Krishna is meant to help us remember Krishna but if you remember somebody else then it doesn’t purify.
Vishnu Prabhupada would give the example that he knew a barber who would say that when the people would go around the streets chanting the names of Radharani, this barber had a neighbour whose wife’s name was Radha and he just remembered that woman whenever the devotees would chant the names of Radharani. So Prabhupada said this is such a terrible material vision, so there’s a transcendental name but it stimulates a material memory then practically the purification is nothing. So in Ajamel, he actually chanted the name of his son but that stimulated the memory of the Supreme Lord Narayan because when the Yamadutas were coming, he chanted first addressing his son but then as he uttered the name Narayan, he remembered the Lord Narayan whom he had worshipped in his childhood and that’s how that chanting of the holy name of Narayan purified him and saved him.
Of course, later on he had to do rigorous sadhana to become fully purified and to become qualified to go back to Godhead but the point is it is not just the utterance of the names, it is also this memory that is stimulated. So sometimes the followers of such people who worship God, who worship those who claim to be God, they may chant the names of Krishna and Ram but if they are too influenced by these followers, these particular spiritual leaders and even when they chant the names of Ram and Krishna, they are attracted not to Ram or Krishna, they don’t think of Ram and Krishna, they think of this particular leader itself and then the purification is extremely little if at all and he’s there. So in this way because there is a massive misdirection of people who could have advanced spiritually and returned back to God towards some other person who cannot in any comparable way help the spiritual, his followers to advance by claiming to be God.
It’s actually from the devotional perspective a serious crime, a penalizable crime for a soul to consider himself to be God and to allow himself to be worshipped by his followers as if he’s God. So that’s why the great devotee Acharyas, whether we talk about Baldevidya Bhushan, who in his Vishnu Sasaranam says that those who claim to be God are actually serious offenders and their offence is going to lead to karmically penalizable reactions or we have Bhaktavinod Thakur who challenged Vishakse who was a person who claimed to be an avatar of Mahavishnu and in the name of that he often does immoral activities because of which he was arrested and jailed and then eventually Bhaktavinod Thakur because of his mystic powers was troubled a lot, his family was threatened but he fought on for the cause of justice and he ensured that both from the material and spiritual perspective, material Vishakse had done some crimes and spiritually he had done the crime of claiming to be God. So he brought him to justice and had him punished and Vishakse eventually died in the jail itself or we have Srila Prabhupada and Bhaktivinoda Thakur who strongly condemned people who claim to be God because they were misdirecting people away from the true God.
So often most people cannot appreciate the gravity of the consequences that result when people get misled away from God to some other person who claims to be God and because people just don’t think about the future life very seriously and the future life consequences and because people can’t understand this gravity of these consequences, often they can’t understand the intensity of the reactions of the devotees. So Srila Prabhupada would sometimes use strong words to point out the inadequacies and the misleadings that were happening because of such people claiming to be God. So often ordinary people who see these spiritual leaders as spiritual just because the cultural forms of activity associated with them are spiritual or because they are doing some humanitarian activities, they become shocked when they hear such strong criticisms of such people.
So you need to understand from the devotional perspective which is actually the ultimate perspective because all of us are ultimately meant to be devotees and our highest prospects are devotional. We can have eternal life of happiness only when we practise devotional service and return back to Krishna. So from this devotional perspective this can be a serious form of misleading which also will bring serious consequences both for the followers and the leaders.
So now we will not go into the specifics of any particular person because we cannot know the heart of any particular person. So in the case of some of these spiritual leaders they never claim to be God but their followers make them into God and they often do not deny it. Actually the same thing happened to Srila Prabhupada in Nivaranda at one time the devotees started claiming him to be God and Srila Prabhupada rather than just saying that oh my followers are accepting me as God, what can I do? I don’t want to hurt their sentiments.
That’s what many spiritual leaders do when they know and if we ask them privately they will admit that they are not God but then just to please their followers they will accept it and some leaders will go further and they will start exhibiting the giving darshan as if they are God also. So which is actually quite a reason but if you look at Srila Prabhupada’s example those devotees who claim to be, those devotees who said that he was God, Srila Prabhupada was so heavily against it. He said that those who claim to be God, those who say that I am God they are succumbing to this great wrong philosophy of Mayavadi and he said they have no place within the Krishna consciousness.
He actually expelled out of Mumbai those people who said that he was God and those people were shocked because they thought that we are glorifying Srila Prabhupada. Then they begged for forgiveness from Prabhupada and Prabhupada said you go and preach elsewhere and you get some people to Krishna’s lotus feet, that will be your atonement and then you can come back to the Krishna consciousness movement. So actual devotee of God, an actual transcendentalist who is devoted to the supreme personality of Godhead, he will never claim to be God nor allow the followers to declare him to be God and nor will he actually be able to tolerate so many innocent people getting misled because of somebody claiming to be God.
So this of pure devotee may speak strongly against this but that is not because of any competitive envy towards other spiritual leaders, that is not because of any kind of fanaticism but it is because of concern that people do not, people who have pious religious spiritual little nations don’t get misled away from God towards somebody else. So as devotees if we have been, if we meet somebody who is a follower of a particular spiritual leader like this, we don’t have to express blunt moral judgments and shun those people because they may, they will feel so hurt by such blunt moral judgments about the spiritual leaders whom they even consider to be God that they will forever give up any thoughts of coming to Krishna consciousness. So therefore we need to gradually help people understand the culture and help people experience the culture and then understand the philosophy and then we say yes, as devotees we respect everyone even an ant, not to speak of a person who is doing so much humanitarian work and who is possibly a yogi who has some yogic siddhis either by this life’s austerities or some past life’s credits.
So we certainly respect such a person but what we strongly and fiercely object to is such a person claiming to be God and if you give a logical understanding of that systematically, calmly, unemotionally then intelligent people will be able to appreciate it but if you just directly express blunt moral judgments, say for example somebody who is a follower of Sai Baba, he comes to Iskcon devotees and I am following Sai Baba and somebody else starts blasting, that is we are really being very unfair to that person and his spiritual prospects, we are committing violence to that person’s prospects in many cases. If we are so pure-hearted and so spiritually exalted that we do it out of compassion and that person’s heart gets transformed, that’s a different thing that Vishwa Prabhupada could have done that but most of us can’t do that. So if a person who is following Sai Baba comes or some other spiritual leader like this comes to a devotee’s circle, we should gradually help that person feel at home through the culture and slowly, subtly, gently elevate the person’s philosophical understanding so that the person can make an intelligent choice of worshipping Krishna as the ultimate, as the real God, as the ultimate God and not some other person to be God and secondly if we ourselves have been say worshipping such a person as God or say because of our family or because of our culture, we have been going to be associated with such a person and we might have worshipping such a person also for whatever reason or we might have been appreciating such a person because of humanitarian work and the spiritual work that has happened because of that.
From the broader cultural perspective, we could say that these spiritual leaders are also preserving Vedic culture to some extent that means that say there are, there are often Christians and Muslims, it’s not that we have anything against them, they are also bona fide ways of going towards God but Christians and Muslims they are, these are exclusivist religions which claim that our way is the only way and often they aggressively through offering financial allurements or in other ways they convert people and when the people get converted, these people, converted people often become hostile towards the culture which they have left, that is the Vedic culture. So from one, from the broader cultural perspective, we could say that these spiritual leaders who despite claiming to be God have kept people within the Vedic fold but even they have kept them in the Vedic fold, actually they are not in the Vedic home, they are like in the people who are followers of these spiritual leaders, they are actually like in the courtyards, in the outside precincts, near the outside precincts of the whole Vedic complex. So certainly these people have still some faith and faith and probably say protection of cows, faith in the Vedic literature quite possibly and some understanding or some faith in the potency of the chanting of mantras and the worship of the deities, it will vary according to spiritual leader to leader.
So my point here I am making is, if a person is ordinary materialist and a person is a follower of a particular spiritual teacher like this, then certainly if a person is a follower of a spiritual teacher, that person has misconceptions which may make the person feel that taking to Krishna consciousness is unnecessary because I already have my God and that misconception becomes a serious obstacle. But if the person is open-minded and intelligent, then the person can understand that how considering this person to be God is not philosophically sound and I should worship the actual God, that is Krishna, Bhagavad Gita, Bhagavatam and other Vedic literature. Anybody with a little bit of intelligence can understand this and of course many of these spiritual leaders, they may even try to translate or interpret certain Vedic verses in a way by which they claim that I am God and these verses prove that I am God or that followers in the zeal to prove that the person whom they are worshipping is God may also find out verses from this Purana and that Purana and this and that to try to prove that they are God.
But if you look at the actual Sanskrit validity and soundness, we will find that it is not at all sound, it is a serious distortion of those verses by which the claims for divinity are being supported. So anyway, I am talking here from the point of view of those who are followers of such spiritual leaders, so their misconception that the particular spiritual teacher is God is a big obstacle on their path. But at the same time, it is quite possible that because of being followers of that particular spiritual teacher, they may have developed enhanced cultural appreciation for various aspects of Vedic culture, like say for the Vedic scriptures, for the chanting of mantras, for the respect of cows, for the respect of saintly people in general, it might happen like that.
So if that has happened, then this could act as a stepping stone for those people to eventually come to Krishna consciousness. So that means even if a person is actually connected with a spiritual leader, we shouldn’t think that that person is not having much spiritual prospects. You know, if we have been following spiritual leader, we could very well see it as one progressive step in our spiritual journey, which ultimately brings us to Krishna’s lotus feet.
So we don’t have to condemn these people if that is, if through them we have developed, if through say Sai Baba or through some other spiritual leader like that, we have developed enhanced appreciation for Vedic culture, then to that extent, we can be grateful to them for what they have provided us. But at the same time, we also have to recognise that their claims to be God are something which are neither substantiated by scripture, nor are they actually in the proper spirit of devotion, they are actually antithetically, violent antithetically towards devotion. So by calmly pondering on these things, we can, in a non-emotional, non-fanatical way, raise ourselves spiritually from being followers of those who are imitators of God, to becoming followers and devotees of the one true eternal God, that is Krishna.
And then we could see our experience with some particular spiritual leaders as, as stepping stones, as landmarks on our progressive spiritual journey. So certainly, if somebody gets stuck over there itself, claiming that, that person is God, then that person’s spiritual prospects can be, can be harmed or even ruined. But if we can see that as one step forward, then we can appreciate and be grateful for whatever we got from such spiritual leaders.
But at the same time, we also recognise that we were in a great danger of being misled into the notion that that person is a self-God. And by Krishna’s mercy, he has saved us from that misconception. So we shouldn’t have some sentimental, seeming fuzzy understanding about the position of God that makes us equate all spiritual leaders as good, irrespective of what their professions are.
By professions, I don’t mean professional activity. By profession, I mean what they profess to be, what they claim to be. So in this way, we can progressively elevate ourselves towards Krishna’s lotus feet.
Thank you.