Q &A After the lecture given by H.H. Suhotra Swami
on
Caitanya-caritamrta Adi-lila 17.261-5,
recorded
on 21st February 1999
at
Radhadesh, Belgium
Here is the
answer to a question from this mornings CC class at Radhadesh given by Guru
Maharaja. The question was along the lines of: If devotees are being protected
by Krishna then why do we suffer (but I didn't
hear that so clearly).
The answer:
This is what I
call the Disneyland conception of spiritual life, where Krishna
is like Mickey Mouse. Kids go to Disneyland and Mickey's there welcoming them:
"Welcome to my happy Magic
Kingdom
There are people
who seem to think that this is what ISKCON should be like. ISKCON should be a
Disneyland, and if it's not a Disneyland then there's
something wrong and we have to get together to have meetings to fix it. But as
far as I can understand this idea is totally alien to the Vedic conception of
dharma and human life. This actually comes from the Western conception of life.
It's said that God gave Adam and Eve a Garden of Eden, an earthly paradise and
everything was nice. So people have this idea that if we become nice again,
like Adam and Eve, pure and innocent, then God better give me a Garden of Eden
or there's gonna be trouble.
There's a
history to this. This whole Western conception originally comes from a Vedic
sage who deviated. He is mentioned in the Rg Veda as Jarutha, and is known in
Western history by the name Zarasthustra. He started a religion called
Zoroastrianism, which is the first of the Western religions. After Zoroastrianism
came Judaism, then Chrisitanity, then Islam; it's like a sampradaya.
Jarutha was a
brahmana, a priest of the demigod Varuna. Jarutha was the first one to conceive
of an earthly paradise and that there will be a messiah who will come. He came
up with the notion that all the bodies will be raised out of the ground and
judged and the bad ones will go to Hell and the good ones will inherit the
Earth. The Earth will become like heaven and that will be the reward for our
pious activities; we'll live forever on the Earth in an eternal material body.
These teachings
of Jarutha are the seed of the whole Western conception of religion and we see
that people come out of the Western culture into ISKCON and they bring these
conceptions with them. They get all excited about the millenium. That is also
part of Zoroastrianism; that there will be a day when the Earth will be changed;
that there will be a day when all the evil people are destroyed and only the
good will be left and the messiah will be there. The Western mind is obsessed
with this idea: That if I dedicate myself to God and if I become pure again
then there should be an Eden, an earthly paradise; everything should be nice
and taken care of and if it's not then there's something wrong.
But show me such
a promise in the Srimad-Bhagavatam or Bhagavad-gita, there's nothing like that
there. What Krishna says in the Bhagavad-gita
is that if you take to this path you have to be prepared to tolerate the sukha
[happiness] that you deserve by your past karma. You have a certain amount of
happiness coming to you and a certain amount of duhka, suffering, also. You
have to see happiness and distress, not as one better than the other but as the
same—happiness and distress as perceived by this material body are the same. We
should just tolerate them, don't be interested in them and definitely don't try
and judge your spiritual life or your spiritual advancement in terms of how
much you're enjoying. Don't think that if you're getting more duhkha than sukha
that there's something wrong, that we have to make a revolution; again this is
the agitated Western mentality.
We should
understand what is the siddhanta, what is the actual conclusion of our
bhagavata philosophy otherwise we will not attain Krishna Consciousness.
