Vedanta Psychology - Suhotra Maharaja Archives

My dear Kåñëa, generally human beings know that material life brings great futureunhappiness, and still they try to enjoy material life. My dear Lord, how can one inknowledge act just like a dog, an ass or a goat?So now here is Uddhava discussing with the Lord, how is it that the human beingon the path of progression can still do this? It’s very important, because we have thisidea that actually if you are spiritual, you can’t have any of this. And so this is a very,very simplistic religious concept.It’s important to note that if we get to the actual platform of prema, you won’thave any of this. On the gross platform as we know it, once you get to bhava, youwon’t see any of this. But it does go on until that point. So that’s very important tonote, because I have heard it said that some say that devotees that before veryadvanced associated with Prabhupada, did so much service, service that we can’teven dream of doing, made so many thousands of devotees, inspired them and allthis, and then when they somehow or another become distracted from Krsnaconsciousness, went away, devotees would make the point, well, they were neverdevotees in the first place. So this kind of understanding is very far from.If you are taking Visvanatha’s point that you are a devotee when you come toprema, yes, then that’s true. But if we are taking it that this process is that ofsomeone who is committed to it is therefore a devotee, to say that from that contextwhich is how probably everybody takes it as opposed to possibly how the person whooriginally made the statement. What they were making the statement was, they werenot on the level of prema, they were on a level lower than that, therefore they couldfall down. Like Bharata Maharaja, he was on the level of bhava, he could fall fromthere. But on prema you don’t fall. That was the statement made. But it was takenthat they were never devotees, they were pseudo devotees.And previous to that statement and that thing, people will make mistake, it’sunderstood. After that it’s now it’s this puritanical thing that if you make any mistake,then you have to be thrown out. Just like nobody cares for the moon, because it gotspots on it, so therefore it’s been removed from all concepts of romance or beauty orany other things of aesthetics because of those there, isn’t that the statement, theplatform now? You agree with it, ok. He is from Alachua.Therefore this is very detrimental. Because Uddhava is pointing out that this isgoing on 5000 years ago, that the spiritual person who is making this endeavor tocome to perfection and come to the platform of prema is still in this conflictedposition. And he uses this word anyonya, which means anya anya, means otherother. Means it’s basically you are having two contradictory things happening at once.So that’s where you see this is discussed. So this is a natural point of thephilosophical thing. So basically that’s the main point of now this chapter is to discussthis confliction.So now he there then in this then brings out Krsna then to answer this question,then he brings out a discussion between the Kumaras and Lord Brahma. And so in