When initiation frees us from all sins, why do initiated devotes suffer?

Podcast:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Shouldn’t a devotee who has been practicing serious sadhana, who has taken initiation and it said that after initiation all our sins are taken away. Shouldn’t that all count? Why if we are suffering? Shouldn’t what is our promise that at the time of initiation all our sins are taken away? How does that count? There is a particular the nature of spiritual literature is that there is a particular approach that whenever a particular activity is to be glorified at that time there is the focus on its potency alone and in general amidst glorification there is no caveat or qualification or nuancing done just like when the glories of Vrindavan are to be described those glories are described in such an exhaustive way that one may feel that Vrindavan is the best place and there is nothing apart from Vrindavan to consider in one’s life and that’s a wonderful way of looking at it but when we go to Puri or we go to Mayapur, the glories of those places are also described like that so why reduce this to initiation alone? There are so many glorifications in scripture for example when we hear a particular pastime we will be freed from all sins that’s a standard promise that we find again and again in scripture at so many places you hear this particular pastime and you will be freed from all sins so why take the promise of initiation in particular and make it stand out we may say okay but that’s because at the time of initiation we make a commitment to practice bhakti at a particular level in a particular way and that’s what makes it special.
Yes that’s true but still how true is that? that means is that something which we can universalize and absolutize we see throughout the tradition even great souls and even those who have taken initiation have had to go through great difficulties we see Bhaktivinoda Thakur such a great saint and he took initiation from Bihari Goswami he took a shiksha from Jagannath Das Babaji and yet throughout his life he was constantly troubled by health issues which didn’t go away just because he was practicing bhakti and even according to very strict standards towards the end of his life he was practically he was in a very poor health condition towards the end of his life but still he remained in divine consciousness so now from this you could make two inferences that all the promises in the bhakti tradition are in general they are just false and they are meant to mislead us or we could arrive at the other explanation that maybe these are indicators of how much the lord is going to reciprocate with us but still he is an individual person we are individual persons and we all have our individual path that we need to chart in life so therefore rather than getting carried away by petty things we need to by things over which we have a limited grasp we can look at how the tradition itself has understood that suffering so at the time of basically rather than saying that these are false what we see then is these are indications of how much the lord can reciprocate but they are not necessarily that on each occasion the lord will reciprocate in that way so Ajamil was saved from the Yamapash by just one chanting of the holy names now that doesn’t mean that everybody who chants will be similarly saved if they chant just once now if we see Bhagavatam itself, Parishit Maharaj says that, he is told by Shukadeva Goswami that if he hears the pastime of Putana or if he hears some other pastime he will be saved from great distress but that doesn’t lead him to say okay I have heard one pastime, why do I have to hear for all 7 days now I have heard, I have become purified and no need for all this austerity so the purpose of all this glorification is to inspire commitment which in turn will lead to attraction and absorption and that absorption is the purpose so rather than taking every scripture promise entirely literally scripture is written in the form of poetry so we cannot take rather than taking every scripture promise literally or dismissing every scripture promise as mere exaggeration we see that this is an indication of how much is the magnitude of the mercy that the lord may give us if we devote ourselves to him now it may not be that each person gets the same amount of mercy so if we practice our bhakti seriously doing very strict sadhana with the expectation of material protection as the reciprocation from Krishna for our serious practice then we will get into big trouble sooner or later because the material level troubles do come upon us and then we will be deeply troubled thinking that Krishna is not reciprocating but if we see our strict practice as a means to cultivate spiritual absorption then we will be able to move forward in a way that can enable each one of us to do the practices that will help us to become spiritually absorbed and if you are spiritually absorbed that is our life’s perfection that can help us not only to face the problems of life in the material world but that can also help us face to go through and to grow through the problem that is life in the material world thank you