Cast into Suffering
16.17 Self-complacent and always conceited, deluded by wealth and false pride, they perform superficial sacrifices in name only, without following the vedic rules or regulations.
16.18 The demonic person, consumed by ego, power, pride, lust and anger, becomes envious of the supreme personality of godhead, who is situated in His own body and in the bodies of others, and blasphemies against Him.
16.19 Those who are envious (of Him) and cruel, who are the lowest among men, I repeatedly cast into the ocean of material existence, into various lowly, demonic forms of life.
16.20 These foolish beings attain repeated birth amongst the species of demonic life. Without ever achieving Me, O Son of Kunti, they sink into the most abominable existence.
Krishna has said in other verses that He will receive anyone with compassion and redeem them. Here He says He will cast them aside into suffering. How do we reconcile these two positions?
Both positions are true! After all, every word that an enlightened master utters is true. It is our understanding that needs to improve.
Krishna is compassion incarnate. Anyone who surrenders to Him is redeemed, liberated. That is the absolute truth. The problem is that we only pretend to surrender. What we have are mere words. Our thoughts do not match our words, and our words do not match our actions.
People come to me and say, 'Swamiji, we surrender to you. Please help us and relieve us of our suffering.' When I tell them to attend the meditation program the following week, they say they need to check their appointment book!
Is this surrender? Does this have any meaning? It is sheer hypocrisy, trying to involve the master in a conspiracy of our own making.
There are a few people who take foolish risks despite my warning; they say that they have faith in me and that they will be saved. A few years ago, on our Himalayan trip, such an incident happened. We were staying at Gangotri, where river Ganga takes shape. We planned to go to Gomukh, the source of Ganga the next day. Gangotri is about 12,000 feet high and Gomukh is a difficult and dangerous climb of another 3,000 feet. At the discourse the night before, I announced that I had decided not to climb to Gomukh as I felt the strong possibility of landslides, which are common in that area.
Usually I give people a choice. They need to exercise their free will. I told my followers that I would not be going because the weather would be bad; however, if anyone felt that they must go, it was their choice. We had eight buses with about thirty people in each bus. Each bus had a leader who kept track of his group and one person coordinated all the buses. It was understood that everyone should keep their group leader informed of their whereabouts, since the mountains could be treacherous.
The next morning I casually asked someone whether anyone had gone to Gomukh. That person did not know. I called the overall coordinator. He said no one had told him they would be going. However, one person had said the previous night that he planned to go despite my warning and he would surrender to me to ensure his safety!
About ten people went to Gomukh that day without informing their group leaders. There were land and snow slides along the way. They returned safely.
If these people had really surrendered, they would have listened to my warning and not gone. What perversion of surrender is that when someone goes against my warning and still says I should take care? This is how many of us behave. We hurt others, harm others, we do all kinds of nonsense which we know we should not; then we go to a temple and pray that everything should be okay. How can it be okay? Why should it be okay?
Every action has a reaction. That reaction is what we commonly call karma. Forget all philosophical, metaphorical and spiritual significances. Common sense tells us that if we do something there will be a consequence. Ninety percent of the time we know the consequences in advance. And still we claim we make rational decisions.
Why then make God or master responsible for our rational decisions?
If they have faith in me, why don't they listen to me in the first place? Why do things I advise against and then say that their faith in me will save them? Is it to test me? Is it to make me responsible for their foolish deeds?
The point is that as human beings we have free will. The problem is that we feel free, yet we are unwilling to exercise our will. People ask whether they are controlled by destiny or free will. I tell them that no destiny binds them; they are free to exercise their will.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad puts it so well: as are your thoughts, so is your will; as is your will, so your action, as are your actions, so is your destiny.
Destiny is nothing but the end result of how we exercise our free will. The problem is, we have no will; in the morning we want to do one thing, by noon it is something different, by night it is totally different. So, if our will keeps changing, how can it ever be converted into action?
People tell me, 'Swamiji, you say visualization helps make things happen; we have tried: nothing happens.'
Nothing happens because you are full of self-contradiction. If we wish to get rid of back pain, and we keep saying, 'Let this back pain go,' it will never go. Every time we utter the words back pain, our mind latches more firmly onto the concept of pain. If we want to get rid of pain, we must visualize health, not pain, not getting rid of pain, but feeling healthy.
When we surrender to Krishna, our surrender must be total. There can be nothing between Him and us. Then, He surely liberates us. Because then we are already liberated, we are in Krishna consciousness.
Here, He talks about people who feel no need to surrender to Him. They are so full of ego, that they feel He is their competitor. He says He will cast them into the material world. In this material world, they can follow their senses, sense objects and what they consider to be sensual pleasures till death. As I said before, it is our decision. Even Krishna is helpless to change it, because He has given us the power to decide. He has handed over the decision to us; to decide whether we want to be 'me' or 'you' focused: demonic or divine.
Saying again and again, 'I believe in what Krishna says,' has no meaning. It does not help. Faith does not mean belief. Belief is not trust. Belief is a pseudo-trust, imposed, cultivated out of fear. It is not something that has grown from within us. Rather, it is something that has been implanted by others: society, religion, the state. They have their own interest in creating belief in people. Believers are obedient. Believers are not rebellious. Believers remain stupid; they never grow in intelligence. And society does not want people to be intelligent.
Society can tolerate intellectuals but not the really intelligent. It can tolerate professors, scholars, educated people and knowledgeable people. They are intellectuals, not wise, not intelligent, because if they were intelligent they could not cooperate with all the hypocrisies that go on in the name of tradition, culture, civilization and religion. They would rebel.
Society has a vested interest in belief. Society creates belief. It is a poisonous phenomenon. It destroys intelligence; it destroys independence and rebelliousness. It creates hypocrites. The 'yes' of a man who cannot say 'no' is always powerless. First a man must learn to say 'no,' only then does his 'yes' have meaning.
Faith is different from belief. It is a totally different phenomenon. It is not social. It is individual. Others do not give it to us. It is of our own seeking. It grows in us as we start trusting Existence. It arises not out of fear, but out of experience, out of love, out of joy. Faith is tremendous freedom, and infinite bliss.
With faith we grow. We grow in love to a master and to God. Most of us look to God as a person to pray to, to worship. We feel God is a third person. He is not us. Prayer and worship become important pathways to reach this form. The moment we drop the idea of a person, prayer disappears; instead, meditation becomes significant.
In prayer, we worship God. In meditation, we become God. It is easy to resort to worship, as it is external. We are used to focusing on externals. Meditation is going inwards. So, it is more difficult for many who are educated rationally. That's why meditation never became the central core of religion in the West. In the East all the great masters founded their teachings on meditation. They taught followers to turn inwards. They taught them to be God, not to worship God.
Meditation leads us to surrender. Meditation is the creation of awareness. Awareness is the knowledge that we are one with the universe. It is then about 'you' instead of 'me'. The feeling of 'you' and the absence of 'me' dissolve the idea of 'I' as identity. This is the foundation of surrender.
This is what Krishna talks about in this chapter. The courage to move from 'me' to 'you' is the courage to trust, love and surrender. When that happens there is nothing else but Him. We become Krishna.
When we are one with the universe, one with Krishna, there is nothing else we need to look up to. There is nothing else to look for. We have reached eternal bliss - nityānanda.
Q: Swamiji, many religions refer to love as the noblest of all emotions. Is love the same as surrender?
Yes, love is indeed noble. Yet most of us do not know love. What we think of as love is either lust or a cunning tool to demand attention. For most, love is business.
As long as love is conditional, it cannot be noble. For humans, unconditional love is almost impossible. To be unconditional, love can have no expectations. Even a mother loves her child based on expectations. Perhaps not when the child is an infant and there is an instinctive need to protect. Once the child grows up there is almost always a condition attached to the nurturing.
Many parents complain that their children are doing whatever they please. They say they love their children and cannot bear to see them ruin their lives. When I ask them how they are ruining their lives, they say either that the boy or girl plans to marry someone they love or they want to work instead of getting married.
Who is getting married? Is it the father and the mother, or the child? Why would they ruin their lives if they married on their own or decided on a career? It is all the expectations of the parents that the children should do as the parents demand. Why? Parents do not possess their children just because they brought them into this world.
This attachment and these expectations do not allow us to express love unconditionally.
Nonetheless, love is the ruler of all emotions. Learn only two things: meditation and love. For some, the emphasis will be on love; meditation will be a support. For others, meditation will be the main key; then love becomes the support. Both are needed; the question is of emphasis.
If your emphasis is going to be on love, love the Whole, love the entire world. Let your love be undivided and undifferentiated. Let it be like the sun who warms all, saint and sinner alike. Love is the most luminous phenomenon but one needs totally different eyes to know it, to see it, to feel it. Ordinary eyes cannot look at it. Our eyes can look at matter, not energy. They are capable only of seeing the peripheral and superficial. They have no capacity for the core and depth.
Love is an emotion that arises from your core. As you travel inwards, the more loving you become. In fact, that is the only criterion of whether a person is going inwards or not. If he is becoming more loving to others and towards himself, then he is going deeper. He is coming closer to truth, and he is becoming suffused with the divine energy of Existence.
Love is expressed as compassion when it is at its peak and purest. Compassion is not the expression of the human; it is the expression of the Divine.
At the ultimate peak, at the ultimate depth, love explodes like an atomic explosion. One becomes pure light, light from end to end. That's why this ultimate moment is known as enlightenment. It is a transmutation, transfiguration and a transformation. A totally new being is born that does not belong to time. It belongs to eternity. The mind is conscious of time and space. The heart is not conscious of time and space. Love is centered on the heart.
Seek your heart, go deeper into it, and risk everything for it because nothing is more precious. Even if life is lost but you have attained a moment of glorious love, your life has known fulfillment. You did not live in vain. You lived nobly. A moment of love is more valuable than thousands of lives that are loveless.
Become a servant of love. You then become a master of humanity. One begins as a servant. However, one ends as a master. In this world, you often begin as a master and you end up as a servant. That is the law of the external world. In the inner world there is a totally different law. You begin as a servant and you can end up as a master. You surrender to love, you surrender and love and you shall certainly conquer the world.
Buddha has said: In the outer world everything is sweet in the beginning and bitter in the end; in the inner world, everything is bitter in the beginning and sweet in the end. Only the end matters. Where you begin is not in your control.
Once you understand how to love the people around you, only then can you love God. You cannot hate your neighbor, brother or spouse and love only God. This is impossible. When you start loving those around you, you start loving yourself more. Strangely, you start thinking less about yourself. In your defeat, you win others.
This is what surrender is about: It is asking for your defeat. Let me repeat: Surrender, renunciation of the self, or sanyā́s is a defeat, a defeat of the ego. God is realized the moment the ego is dissolved.
Surrender is the search for the divine principle. Call it God, truth, freedom, or nirvāṇa. They mean the same thing. The search is for something that is missing in life. We are alive but unaware of what life is about. We exist, but we are completely oblivious to the fact of who we are.
Existence is there, but awareness is not there. Unless existence becomes aware of itself, life remains empty, unfulfilled. The search is for awareness. Awareness is the divine principle that can transform your life from a mechanical existence into conscious bliss. This search is not done in the outer world; it is done in the inner world. The truth has to be found with closed eyes, within oneself. It is already there; we must dive into ourselves.
Meditation is the art of diving into oneself. Surrender is the courage to take this plunge. One is going into the unfathomable, and in the beginning it is frightening, but only in the beginning. As you become more and more skillful at diving deeper and deeper, life becomes an adventure of tremendous beauty and bliss.