Especially when things are going all wrong in our life how can we maintain faith that Krishna’s plan is still working in our life?

Hare Krishna Prabhu. Prabhu, oftentimes we face reversals and difficulties in life when it’s really hard to look beyond the present. Now at that time how do we maintain the faith that there is a plan from Krishna and it’s working in background? How do we do that? Yeah, see when we can’t see the future we generally need the association of someone else who can help us see the future.

So generally speaking see for us if I am here there is the present which is just around me right now and then there is the future ahead of me and then there is the past behind me. So among the three phases of time and now we could say Krishna is the controller of past present and future. So Krishna is everywhere in the past in the present in the future.

So among these three phases right now I see chaos in my life. So then what do I do? So for me to be able to see beyond I need to have someone else who can help me to see beyond. Now if I don’t have that then it is going to be a problem.

That’s why I need to cultivate those kind of friendship those kind of relationships where somebody will help me in those times. Having said that faith ultimately is a matter of choice. That either I can accept that there is no plan and everything is just chaotic or I can accept that there is a plan and it’s not chaotic.

See atheism, now we may not say that I’m an atheist philosophically but functionally we sometimes say where is God? Is God playing any role in my life? See atheism it doesn’t remove life’s problems. Atheists have the same problems that everyone else has. That is life has physical suffering, mental suffering, environmental suffering, social suffering.

Everybody has that. So atheism does not remove life’s suffering life’s problems. It only removes the hope that life’s problems may have a purpose.

That life’s problems underlying them there is or there may be some purpose and in that sense we are just left with the existential hopelessness. So if there’s no association to help us then it’s ultimately it’s just a matter of choice. What am I going to do over here? This is what the way life is right now.

I can say that there is some higher plan or I say there’s no higher plan. So then what is going to help me to live the best quality life right now? It is considering that there is a higher plan. There are many many atheists like Sigmund Freud and others they said that basically religion is like a pathology and religion is a disease but almost 60-70 years of medical research has again and again proven that people who have some kind of religious faith are actually healthier than people who don’t have any such faith.

They’re physically healthier, they’re mentally healthier, they fall desperate to addictions and such kind of destructive behaviors. They are able to deal better with the moods and the ups and downs of the mind. So there’s one famous researcher he said that if religion is a disease then we should all want to be infected by this disease and if religion is an opium then we should all seek to become addicted to this opium.

So the idea is that even if it were an illusion it is a healthy illusion. So the way it’s like almost in chess you have you have checkmate or in boxing you have knockout. So what it’s like there is Krishna is the reality and Maya is the illusion but what atheists try to say is that actually Krishna is an illusion.

The way Krishna has orchestrated scientific research to come out is that even if Krishna is an illusion it’s a good illusion that makes the reality better. So even if you believe only the material world is the real world and there’s no spiritual world and therefore there’s no God but accepting God will actually improve the quality of your life in this world. So in that sense it’s it’s a positive thing to do and time will vindicate it.

Most of you know that I have polio so when I was one I got polio and my mother had taken me to a polio clinic to get some vaccine but somehow the fridge in that clinic had got off its power supply had gone off and that’s why the vaccine’s percentage of germs increased a lot and the vaccine instead of preventing polio ended up causing polio to me. So now I don’t remember that so I was just learning to walk at around one and I fell and I couldn’t walk normally. But my first memory of that is when I was about two and a half or three a distant relative had come to our home and she was consoling my mother saying that it’s so sad your son got polio and I remember my mother’s voice very calm clear confident said that whatever he lacks physically God will provide him intellectually.

Now I don’t know why my mother said that at that time at a day of two and a half or three what she saw in me and unfortunately she passed away afterwards so I didn’t soon afterwards so I didn’t get to ask her that but somehow that stayed with me and that has shaped my life in many ways. As I grew up I saw that that I couldn’t play outdoor games like other kids could but I started reading I could read fast I could remember well I could articulate nicely so somewhere at the back of my mind it settled that yeah I could say that it’s unfair that I have this physical disability I didn’t do anything to deserve it but then I could say that I didn’t do anything to deserve this intellectual ability also isn’t it so life may be unfair but in the big picture life is fairly unfair.
Thank you!