When difficulties force us to surrender to Krishna where is our free will?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
So we say we have free will but sometimes we are just supposed to surrender to Krishna because material nature is so difficult. So then where is free will? Yes, it is true that in material life there are difficulties.
And those difficulties can push us towards Krishna. But it is not that everybody who is in difficulty will move towards Krishna. It is that many people because of sufferings they become atheistic.
Some people even become because they face problems in material life. They become anti-theistic. They become preachers against God.
So basically it depends on our disposition what our response to distress will be. So especially if you are a devotee, even if you are pious. And all the more so if you are a devotee.
We know at the back of our mind that Krishna is the only shelter. But somehow, sometimes we just delay taking shelter of Krishna. For materialistic people, Maya attacks why? Maya deludes them by saying this is unreal.
God doesn’t exist. God doesn’t matter. That sort of very gross misconceptions are there.
For devotees, Maya will not delude by saying Krishna doesn’t exist. Krishna doesn’t matter. Not like that.
Maya will act in more such a way. Only as Krishna consciousness is important. But this is urgent.
This is important. This is urgent. And everyday something urgent keeps coming.
And in that way, we accept Krishna consciousness’ importance but we don’t practice it. So sometimes Krishna makes such a way that whatever is urgent is not working. Nothing seems to work at the material level.
Then we are forced to take shelter of Krishna. Now that force does not necessarily mean the absence of Him. It simply means that that which we were inclined to do anyway, we do it in that way.
There are even people who may be close to death. And they realize they are going to die. They may realize I have no shelter other than God.
But there are atheists who say that I am never going to believe in God. And if I die, you should not do any religious rituals for me. They are just determined atheists.
Even when the death comes, they do not take shelter of Krishna. The point is we always have free will. Now when specifically as devotees when we are practicing, and Krishna in a sense puts us in circumstances where we have no option other than to take shelter of Him.
Is that Krishna taking away our free will? Rather than seeing it that way, we can see it as Krishna is pushing us to do that which we know we should have been doing earlier. So I should have been wholeheartedly practicing bhakti. But somehow I was being a little distracted.
And now there is just no alternative left. Let me take shelter of Krishna. So yes, material nature’s difficulty is meant to inspire us to take shelter of Krishna.
But not everyone does that. Prabhupada writes in a Ishopanishad purport that the miseries of material existence indirectly serve to remind us of our incompatibility with matter. The miseries of material existence, what do they do? They indirectly serve to remind us of our incompatibility with matter.
You don’t belong, you are not compatible yet. So we usually talk about compatibility and incompatibility in terms of marital relationships. Prabhupada is thinking in a more fundamental way.
The soul and matter have joined together in the relationship. Purusha prakriti stodhi, mumtri prakriti janmanan, karanam guna sangosya, sad asatyam janmasu. That because the soul desires to enjoy matter, our consciousness gets embedded in matter.
And thereby we undergo various sufferings in life. But if we understand, we are practicing bhakti, material miseries come, at the material level we think, okay, this problem, this will be the solution, this problem, this will be the solution. But if we are in spiritual consciousness, at that time we understand that actually the only solution is Krishna.
So that is not Krishna taking away our free will, that is actually Krishna pushing us to do that which we know we should be doing. Because in that same situation, others may not take shelter of Krishna. Even no matter how difficult it is, we just become more aggressively atheistic.
So we all, by our past karma, sometimes have greater facility for doing things, sometimes we have lesser facility for doing things. So it’s like in youth, we have more energy. In old age, we have less energy.
Now at one level, this is just the course of nature. But sometimes people, some people in youth are also sickly, some people in old age are also healthy. So all this, it’s a complex combination of how we have lived in this life, how we have lived in the past life, it all combines together.
But basically, the scope of our free will can be decreased or increased depending on circumstances. And when it is decreased, when we have very little free will to do things, then as devotees, we will naturally take shelter of Krishna. So we see it as Krishna facilitating us to choose that which we anyway knew we should be doing.
But we are pushing it off for a later date. Does it answer your question?