Why has Krishna created this miserable world?
Answer Podcast
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.
If the material world is full of misery, why did Krishna create it? Answer. Krishna created the material world as an opportunity for us to turn towards him and to be united with him for an eternal life of love and happiness. So the material world is a place of experimentation and reformation.
For the souls who want to enjoy separate from Krishna, the material world offers various opportunities by which the soul can experiment. And when the soul realizes that this world is not a place of enjoyment, whatever promises enjoyment actually leads to misery, then the soul turns away from those things, turns towards Krishna, and eventually, that’s what the soul wants to do. Krishna is there.
Krishna’s devotees are there. Krishna’s wisdom is there in the Bhagavad Gita and other scriptures. And in that way, the soul is facilitated in the material world also to come closer to Krishna.
So there is experimentation and there is rectification. So two broad metaphors can be used to understand the purpose of the world. At one level, we could say this world is like a jail, wherein those souls who are law-breaking, those souls says government does not desire to create the jail.
The government doesn’t desire to punish people. But those people are law-breakers. The government places those people there so that they can be they don’t, so that they can be essentially reformed.
So that is the purpose of the jail is primarily as a correction center. So like that we can understand this world is not that God wants to punish us, but we have an ignorant mentality to enjoy separate from God. And Krishna wants us to correct that.
And often we want to exploit others and dominate others and we have these lower desires. The world is a place where we can get over these lower desires and come closer to Krishna. Now secondly, another metaphor, sometimes the jail metaphor might seem very harsh.
And this might seem like Krishna is like the person who keeps us in jail. But another metaphor which we can use for this is the hospital metaphor. Actually this world is like a hospital and Krishna is like the doctor.
So in a hospital misery is always there. But the doctor is not the cause of the misery. The doctor is the person who is going to help remove the misery.
He is the cure for the misery. Similarly, Krishna has created this world for us souls who are diseased with the self-centered enjoying mentality to cure us of that selfishness. So the material world is a place where we all can make a journey from selfishness to selflessness.
And Krishna helps us in this world as a supreme doctor through the events in this world, through the guidance through Guru Sadhu Shastra, through the guidance which he offers as the Paramatma, the Chaitra Guru. Through it all, Krishna enables us to come closer to him. To move from self-centered desires to selfless love and thus become free from the miseries of this world.
And when we look at 8.14 in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna talks about 8.15, he talks about this world being miserable. The focus is not on the misery of the world. The focus is on the process, potency of bhakti to take us beyond this world.
So Krishna says that those who become devoted to him, they go beyond this world. They attain the eternal kingdom of Krishna and they do this by the practice of bhakti. So the doctor’s purpose is not to cause misery to the patient.
Nor is the doctor’s purpose that the patient stay forever in the hospital. Doctor’s purpose is to help the patient get cured and become discharged from the hospital. Similarly, Krishna’s purpose is to enable us to go out of this world to his eternal abode where we can be eternally happy and to provide us the facility to rise from selfishness to selflessness, to provide us the facility to rise from the temporary miserable world to the eternal ecstatic spiritual world.
This world acts as a bridge. This world acts as an arena where we can transform ourselves and thus by his grace become liberated. Thank you.
Hare Krishna.