Just to recap, part 1 of this 2-part series was published in the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of this magazine. While that article was more about seeing defects as opportunities in Kṛṣṇa’s service, this article deals with facing reversals in life, taking them to be Kṛṣṇa’s blessings, and in fact, leveraging them as great accelerators for our spiritual progress.
ILLUSORY HAPPINESS
Lord Kṛṣṇa has declared in the Bhagavad-gītā [8.15] that this material world is duḥkhālayam aśāśvatam — a temporary place full of miseries. So one can hardly expect a happy life here. In another place in the same Bhagavad-gītā [15.7], the Lord again emphasizes that all conditioned souls in the material world are undergoing a great struggle for existence for some momentary, flickering happiness.
But the illusory energy of the Lord — Māyā — is so powerful that one hardly realizes that he is suffering. Indeed, he takes the suffering to be enjoyment. Prahlāda Mahārāja has called this māyā-sukhāya-bharam — the burden of illusory happiness.
Thus considering oneself happy, the conditioned soul continues his material existence in various species of life. Therefore, despite all the miseries, a conditioned soul hardly wants to leave this place. There is no point in arguing that a materialistic man can be happy. Our beloved spiritual master Śrīla Prabhupāda explains in his purport to Śrīmad Bhāgavatam [1.2.3] that “no materialistic creature — be he the great Brahmā or an insignificant ant — can be happy. Everyone tries to make a permanent plan for happiness, but everyone is baffled by the laws of material nature. Therefore the materialistic world is called the darkest region of God’s creation. Yet the unhappy materialists can get out of it simply by desiring to get out. Unfortunately they are so foolish that they do not want to escape.
Therefore they are compared to the camel who relishes thorny twigs because he likes the taste of the twigs mixed with blood. He does not realize that it is his own blood and that his tongue is being cut by the thorns. Similarly, to the materialist his own blood is as sweet as honey, and although he is always harassed by his own material creations, he does not wish to escape.”
THE ULTIMATE REVERSAL
Out of sheer mercy for such foolish souls, the Lord sometimes arranges severe reversals, which are of course, also the results of their past sinful activities, in order to stop the foolish conditioned souls right in their tracks of materialistic sense enjoyment and induce them to begin questioning the nature of their very existence. In that questioning, coupled with the good fortune of association with great saintly devotees, lies real auspiciousness for the living entity because the answers to such questions awaken their dormant Kṛṣṇa consciousness by the strength of which one becomes completely disgusted with the materialistic way of life and progresses towards the transcendental kingdom of God.
Śrīla Sūta Gosvāmī, the speaker of the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, congratulates the assembled sages who put forward relevant questions before him. He said, “O sages, I have been justly questioned by you. Your questions are worthy because they relate to Lord Kṛṣṇa and so are of relevance to the world’s welfare. Only questions of this sort are capable of completely satisfying the self.”
Usually, no one likes to experience reversals in life but they forget about the ultimate reversal called death, which everybody has to face and when everything is forcibly taken away. Death is the ultimate calamity. There is nothing bigger than death. Every other calamity and inconvenience fades in comparison to impending death. But it remains a calamity only for the materially attached. For the self-realized transcendentalist, death is painless because his life and activities concern the eternal spirit soul, not the temporary material body and such activities continue unimpeded even after the destruction of the present material body. There is absolutely nothing to lose.
THE REAL STANDARD OF HAPPINESS
The easiest, most direct and the most effective method of self-realization is bhakti-yoga as confirmed in the Bhagavad-gītā [6.47] itself. By the strength of bhakti-yoga, one can remain equipoised both in material happiness and distress because one’s standard of happiness depends on his permanent transcendental servitude to Kṛṣṇa and not upon the fleeting events of this material world. Instead of hoping for a utopian problem-less material situation, one should take to bhakti-yoga and remain unshaken in the face of any calamity. If we pray to God for removing unpleasant circumstances, we are essentially not wanting to grow stronger to overcome them. We should rather take such circumstances as Kṛṣṇa’s blessings to make us stronger in our Kṛṣṇa consciousness, thereby making us stronger in our resilience and stronger in our determination to get out of this material world.
The Bhagavad-gītā [6.20-23] describes this stage of perfect mental equilibrium as follows: “The stage of perfection is called trance, or samādhi, when one’s mind is completely restrained from material mental activities by practice of yoga. This is characterized by one’s ability to see the self by the pure mind and to relish and rejoice in the self. In that joyous state, one is situated in boundless transcendental happiness and enjoys himself through transcendental senses. Established thus, one never departs from the truth, and upon gaining this he thinks there is no greater gain. Being situated in such a position, one is never shaken, even in the midst of greatest difficulty. This indeed is actual freedom from all miseries arising from material contact.”
REVERSALS AS SPRINGBOARDS TO SUCCESS
This uncommon mental strength was practically demonstrated by the legendary queen Kuntī, the mother of the five Pāṇḍavas in Mahābhārata. After having faced all the humongous challenges in her life, she addressed Kṛṣṇa saying, “I wish that all those calamities would happen again and again so that we could see You again and again, for seeing You means that we will no longer see repeated births and deaths.”
She is a pure devotee of Kṛṣṇa and is therefore always Kṛṣṇa conscious irrespective of happiness and distress. But in this prayer, she is indirectly instructing us that it is easier to remember the Lord in times of distress than in times of happy tidings. In so called material happiness, one easily becomes complacent and thus forgets to worship the Lord with sincere feeling.
Therefore, a sincere practitioner of bhakti-yoga, or Kṛṣṇa consciousness, has to welcome difficult circumstances considering them a small price to pay for achieving Kṛṣṇa’s eternal service. There are many examples in history of great saintly persons who have considered heavy reversals in their lives to be the Lord’s blessings in disguise and thus took advantage of them to make tremendous progress in spiritual advancement. One such example mentioned in Śrīmad Bhāgavatam is King Aṅga, the saintly father of the demoniac king Vena. King Aṅga had the seeming misfortune of having both, a wife from a bad family, and a son of bad character.
When King Aṅga wanted to leave household life, being disgusted with his son, he thought as follows [Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 4.13.46]: “A bad son is better than a good son because a good son creates an attachment for home, whereas a bad son does not. A bad son creates a hellish home from which an intelligent man naturally becomes very easily detached.”
Śrīla Prabhupāda further explains this point best in his purport to Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 4.13.39 as follows: “Sometimes the Lord arranges an unfortunate wife for His devotee so that gradually, due to family circumstances, the devotee becomes detached from his wife and home and makes progress in devotional life. It appears that by the arrangement of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, King Aṅga, although a pious devotee, got an unfortunate wife like Sunīthā and later on a bad child like Vena. But the result was that he got complete freedom from the entanglement of family life and left home to go back to Godhead.”
BLESSINGS IN DISGUISE
It is said that one can see a glass either as half-full or half-empty of water. The highest degree of optimism is demonstrated by a devotee of Kṛṣṇa. He takes everything as the blessing of the Lord without the slightest complaint. There is a saying — ”We often ask God to change our situation, not knowing that the Lord engineered the situation to change us.” That is indeed a fact. The grand arrangement of the cosmos with its multifarious planets along with all the intricate details is made for only one reason — our reformation or our purification. Therefore, we may perceive some events as reversals only because we are going in the reverse direction from Godhead, or in other words, we are treading the path of sense gratification. So the Lord wishes to change our course back towards serving Him which ultimately serves our best interest.
In the purport to Śrīmad Bhāgavatam [10.14.8], we find the following explanation: “… the particular punishment given for a sinful activity is specifically designed to curtail the mentality that produced the activity. Although a devotee has surrendered to the Lord’s devotional service, until he is completely perfect in Kṛṣṇa consciousness he may maintain a slight inclination to enjoy the false happiness of this world. The Lord therefore creates a particular situation to eradicate this remaining enjoying spirit. This unhappiness suffered by a sincere devotee is not technically a karmic reaction; it is rather the Lord’s special mercy for inducing His devotee to completely let go of the material world and return home, back to Godhead.”
ALWAYS KEEPING THE GOAL OF LIFE IN VIEW
In fact, reversals, if taken in the right spirit, propel us forward in the march back to Godhead much faster than favorable circumstances because favorable circumstances may make us complacent but reversals keep us alert, humble and conscious of the presence of Lord Kṛṣṇa at every moment of our lives.
This right attitude is described in this wonderful prayer by Lord Brahmā to Lord Kṛṣṇa in the Śrīmad Bhāgavatam [10.14.8] as follows:
tat te ’nukampāṁ su-samīkṣamāṇo
bhuñjāna evātma-kṛtaṁ vipākam
hṛd-vāg-vapurbhir vidadhan namas te
jīveta yo mukti-pade sa dāya-bhāk
“My dear Lord, one who earnestly waits for You to bestow Your causeless mercy upon him, all the while patiently suffering the reactions of his past misdeeds and offering You respectful obeisances with his heart, words and body, is surely eligible for liberation, for it has become his rightful claim.”
Being always conscious of the attainment of pure Kṛṣṇa consciousness as the ultimate goal of life, one will be able to have a better idea of what is going on when things become otherwise unclear. Understanding the bigger picture helps us to change our perception of reality for the better and gives us the strength to sail through any adversarial situation with ease. One only has to concern himself with becoming Kṛṣṇa conscious. Equanimity of mind is a natural side effect. [End]
