Why did Vishvamitra lose his power on creating another heaven?
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Transcript
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So, when Vishwamitra came to the artificial heaven, he lost his power. Why was that? Yeah, so what happens is there is a cosmic order.
There are things which happen in a particular way. Say for example, if you have a place like Harvard, I was just in Princeton, I gave a talk over there. Say if you have an elite college and then in that college you send a person who doesn’t even know basic alphabet and basic arithmetic.
It disrupts the whole class over there. So, to get into particular places, particular basic qualifications are required. So, generally to go to heavens, punya is required and there is a system of order by which you do punya here and then you go over there.
So, when Vishwamitra or the Trishanku did not have the adequate punya and one part of it is that it’s not just you have to have piety, it’s also that there has to be a certain amount of transformation that happens. People cannot go to heaven and stay in heaven for their whole heavenly lifespan in this body. They have to give up this body and get another body and go there.
So, Trishanku wanted to go in this very body. But that was a disruption of the cosmic order. So, when he used his power to send Trishanku up, Indra saw an unidentified flying object coming here and Indra sent it down.
And then Trishanku came down, again Vishwamitra sent him up, again he went down. And then Vishwamitra, see it was his abuse of power here that instead of telling Trishanku, you do the right punya, you will go to heavens. What happened is, Trishanku was a part of the dynasty for which Vishwamitra was the priest.
And he had asked Vishwamitra, how can I go to heaven? You do punya, I will do yagyas for you, next life you will go to heaven. He said, no, I want to go in this life. That’s not possible.
Now, Trishanku knew about the rivalry between Vishwamitra and Vishwamitra. So, when he first came to Vishwamitra, he was also cunning. He said that, I know you are extremely powerful.
I know you are more powerful than Vashishtha. But you can do that which Vashishtha can’t do. So, what happened is, why did Vishwamitra became so invested in Trishanku? Because Vishwamitra always had that feeling that, oh, Vashishtha is such a powerful sage, I want to be a powerful sage also.
So, I want to prove my power. So, there was no noble motive for that. It was just like, you could say, one-upsmanship.
I want to prove that I am better than him. And because of that, his desire was not in harmony with the cosmic order. So, then when he tried to force him there, that didn’t work.
He said, I have given my word, I will create a separate heaven. So, now the whole problem with that is that, it’s like say, as again the example of Harvard or Princeton or whatever, Stanford, whatever. So, then if somebody says, oh, you are not allowed in Stanford, I will create a separate Stanford for you.
Okay, but do you have the technological facilities, do you have the faculty? Just give a name Stanford over there and you create it. But then that will disrupt the whole educational system, isn’t it? Now, in India, we have IITs and now the government is creating more IITs, which is in one sense good. But then there are many, I was with a professor in IIT Kharagpur, he was saying that the standard of the IITs is diluting because there are so many IITs that we don’t have enough staff to actually take the standard.
Of course, there are intelligent people also going over there. But the point is that, if you indiscriminately replicate something, then you cannot maintain the standard. So, because it was primarily disrupting the cosmic order and it was because it was desired by his, because of his own desire for one-upsmanship.
That’s why in doing that, he lost all his power. Okay, thank you.