Love, Ego, Truth, Knowledge

LOVE

Our desire to love someone here in this earthly planet is a reflection of our original desire to love Krishna. Krishna is so kind; He has no reason to be hungry, He has everything and is everything, but based on our desire to serve Him, He becomes hungry. To awaken this desire we have the opportunity to serve Krishna always by preparing food for Him, dressing Him, offering flowers to Him and chanting His names constantly.

“You are what your deep driving desire is, as your desire is so, so is your will, as your will is so, so is your deed, as your deed is so, so is your destiny.”

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5:

‘Pure you’ = ‘pure truth’

The body, the mind, the intelligence, the ego: use your mind to control your body, use your intelligence to control your mind, and use “the ego” to control your intelligence. “Ego” is the real you, the eternal living spirit soul. True ego is: “knowing who you are and what your position is in the world around you.” ‘Pure you’ = ‘pure truth’. The false conception of ego is: “I am a man, I control all that I see, I can do this, I can do that” This is a false identification with the ego and this is “not” the true self. When you identify with your true self and you know who you are, then you know the real truth. The true ego is: knowing who you are = “you are Krishna’s eternal servant.” Not everyone is Krishna’s servant, but everyone is Krishna’s “eternal” servant. Those who deny the existence of God are trying to become God by default, but that is the one very constant impossibility.

There is always someone that controls something because that is how things get done. That’s how everything runs. A businessman owns a car factory, he has his general manager serve him to manage his business, supervisors serve the general manager, and workers work on the assembly line to get the job done. Everyone is serving someone: the factory has light bulbs, someone bought them at the store, a store merchant purchased them to sell, a manufacturer had them made, someone came up with the idea of a light bulb and consumers demanded supply, and finally the light bulb was made with supplies like tungsten, medal and glass. Someone used their intelligence to put these materials together in the right way to make the light bulb. The question is who gave the intelligence to this person? Who gave the intelligence to the businessman? The intelligence comes from the life force, the true ego. Where does life come from? Life comes from life. God controls everything by default and by definition that’s what God is. Just as a huge tree comes from a small seed, our small “true self” comes from Krishna’s infinite supreme self. In the Brahma-samhita it is said,

isvarah paramah krsnah sac-cid-ananda vigrahah anadir adir govindah sarva-karana-karanam

Karana means cause, cause of all causes, seed of all seeds. A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada says, “This is confirmed in the Seventh Chapter of Bhagavad-gita where para and apara prakrti are discussed (Bg. 7.4-5). The elements of nature–earth, fire, water, air, ether, mind, intelligence and ego–all belong to the inferior or material energy of the Lord, whereas the living being, the organic energy, is the para prakrti (superior energy) of the Lord. Both of the prakrtis, or energies, are emanations from the Lord, and ultimately He is the controller of everything that exists. There is nothing in the universe that does not belong either to the para or the apara prakrti; therefore everything is the property of the Supreme Being.” (Isopanishad, txt 1, purport, page 1)

What is real love? First there must be two egos in the equation to conclude the word love. You can love your self, but that is still two egos because it is the real you in love with your ideal ego: that is, your real ego in love with your conception of your ideal “false” ego. That, of coarse is not real love. You can be in love with another person, or so you think, but that’s not real love either because you are also in love with a false conception of the other’s ego: you think they are a type of person who looks a certain way, acts a certain way, moves a certain way, talks a certain way, and thinks a certain way. You are not in love with them; you are in love with a false notion. They are not their false ego, they “are” their true ego. They are not their body. Real love is love of the ultimate lover: Krishna. He is the ultimate Supreme Being. Everyone in this material world is infatuated with lifeless mater. I love this beautiful girl or this beautiful boy. A natural attraction is there because everything on material planet is a perverted refection of the life we have had in the perfect spiritual sky where Krishna resides in His supreme personal form. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called it the “I-Thou relation,” where the human being goes into a certain relationship with his innermost ego and whole being, in a encounter, in a real dialogue this is what both of the partners do. For Buber, interhuman encounters are only a reflection of the human meeting with God. But to really understand this is to know that true love is love in the purest form: love of the perfect being, Krishna and anything else is a perverted reflection of this. A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada says in the Brahma-samhita, “Krishna is the exalted Supreme entity having His eternal name, eternal form, eternal attribution and eternal pastimes. The very name “Krishna” implies His love-attracting designation, expressing by His eternal nomenclature the acme of entity. His eternal beautiful heavenly blue-tinged body glowing with the intensity of ever-existing knowledge has a flute in both His hands. As His inconceivable spiritual energy is all-extending, still He maintains His all-charming medium size by His qualifying spiritual instrumentals. His all-accommodating supreme subjectivity is nicely manifested in His eternal form. The concentrated all-time presence, uncovered knowledge and inebriating felicity have their beauty in Him. The mundane manifestive portion of His own Self is known as all-pervading Paramatma, Isvara (Superior Lord) or Visnu (All-fostering). Hence it is evident that Krishna is sole Supreme Godhead. His unrivaled or unique spiritual body of superexcellent charm is eternally unveiled with innumerable spiritual instrumentals (senses) and unreckonable attributes keeping their signifying location properly, adjusting at the same time by His inconceivable conciliative powers. This beautiful spiritual figure is identical with Krishna and the spiritual entity of Krishna is identical with His own figure. (Brahma-samhita, txt 1, prt 1, page 1)

Our desire to love someone here in this earthly planet is a reflection of our original desire to love Krishna. Krishna is so kind; He has no reason to be hungry, He has everything and is everything, but based on our desire to serve Him, He becomes hungry. To awaken this desire, which we have always had but have forgotten because we are infatuated with material life, we have the opportunity to serve Krishna always by preparing food for Him, dressing Him, offering flowers to Him and chanting His names constantly. Just as you may have a burning desire to be the best businessman on earth, if you understand your desire, you will attain that small position of best businessman on earth. If you desire to love Krishna, with a burning desire, so you will attain His love. This is not a false notion. This is a real notion because Krishna is the epitome of Truth. A falsity is putting your faith in something that will change, as if it would last forever. Krishna is the constant. You may say you love all those material possessions, but they will cease to be in the future. That beautiful girl in her next life will look different according to her karma. If she has good karma and a burning desire to love Krishna, she will remember Him in her next life and have the opportunity to be with Him in His abode, maybe even in this life. To love real truth is “true love” and you must have a burning desire for the truth in order to attain it.

Ego=Real Knowledge

The famous philosopher Socrates, when he discusses the different types of love in “Plato’s Symposium,” says that the greatest type of “love” is Philosophy because it concludes an eternal truth. The truth is: “knowing what your constitutional position is: your relationship with the Universe and of coarse God- who is the controller of the Universe.” There are different types of knowledge. One might know, for instance, that he has the body of a man or that she has that body of a woman. That is general knowledge or “Dead Truth:” something that you can see with the material eyes to make a certain judgment and then use that judgment to make a certain truth. For example, I see a tree, a rock, a stream, a woman, a man, a house. This is a type of false knowledge because when the body, which is operated by the soul, dies by disease or old age everything is forgotten, when the entity is under the conception that he or she is part of this material world: that he or she is the body. That type of truth that existed to that person when he or she was alive in that old body is irrelevant. That knowledge doesn’t cease to exist when the person’s body ceases to exist, but it ceases to exist to that person when he or she leaves the body and takes a new body on earth. “Real Knowledge” is: “knowing” what the position of the tree, rock, stream, woman, man, and house is. They are temporary in the big picture. In the “Real Truth” they are what scientist call “matter,” temporary material dead “lifeless” things. The body will get old and wither, the rock will become a mountain or get corroded by rain, and the house will fall apart and become dust. In the future they will become other material things and they never really exist, because to “exist” is to have consciousness, to understand, to know to be able to feel, to love, comprehend, discover, to live. You, the eternal living spirit soul, other eternal living spirit souls, and God will always exist. You are in one body in one lifetime and then another body in the next life. So “Real Truth” is Truth that exists eternally and the real you, the ego, is “understanding who you are.”

You “are” what your deep driving “desire” is. If you really desire Krishna and you “understand” it, then you will go to Him in the spiritual sky. If you desire to be the greatest businessman on earth and you really understand it, then that is who you think you are and that is what you will become. That conception of “businessman” is a false truth because if you attain the position of best businessman on earth, Krishna is the best businessman is the universe (always) and you can not top that. If you understand that these designations: businessman, Man, Woman, Animal, Rich, Poor, they are all false truths because you can never be “businessman, Man, Woman, Animal, Rich, Poor,” forever. Truth is the Truth that is always True, forever. The one constant that is always true: there is only one Supreme Personality of Godhead. If you understand truth, understand YOU, understand who Krishna is and you have understood everything.



By: Gadadhara das

What is Re-Incarnation ?

Re-Incarnation

HINDUISM: THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING:
Swami Adiswarananda, Ramakrishna-VivekanandaCenter, New York

Why is a soul born on earth, and why does it suffer? What happens to it after death, and what is its destiny? Why are there inequalities between one person and another? According to Hinduism, the idea of complete annihilation of the soul after death is inconsistent with the concept of a moral order in the universe. If everything ends with death, then there is no meaning to life. Nor is the view that the soul is created at birth and then becomes eternal at death reasonable, for anything that has a beginning will also have an end. Further, this view does not explain the obvious inequalities among people.

Re-Incarnation

Clearly, all are not born equal. Some are born with good tendencies, some with bad; some strong, and some weak; some fortunate, and some unfortunate. Moreover, all too often the virtuous suffer and the vicious prosper. One cannot attribute these injustices to the will of God or to some inscrutable providence, because such a concept belies any belief in God’s love for His beings. These glaring differences cannot be considered the mere results of chance happening; for if such were the case, there would be no incentive for moral or material improvement.

Then, heredity and environment, although they explain the physical and mental characteristics of an individual partially, do not explain inequalities satisfactorily. Nor does the doctrine of eternal happiness in heaven, or eternal suffering in hell, answer this question. Everlasting life in terms of time is self-contradictory. The dwellers in heaven, endowed with subtle or spiritual bodies, are still subject to embodiment and therefore cannot be immortal. The idea of eternal damnation for the mistakes of man’s brief earthly career contradicts justice and reason. The inequalities and sufferings of life cannot be set right by readjustments after death, because what happens after death cannot be verified. The conditions on the two sides of the grave are different, and the dead never come back to testify to their afterlife conditions.

        HINDUISM: REBIRTH AND THE LAW OF KARMA 

Hinduism contends that the cause of suffering and inequalities must be sought not in what happens after death, but in the conditions before birth, and puts forward the doctrine of rebirth. Rebirth is the necessary corollary to the idea of the soul’s immortality. Death is a break in the series of continuing events known as life. Through death the individual soul changes its body: “Even as the embodied Self passes, in this body, through the stages of childhood, youth, and old age, so does It pass into another body.” A knower of the Self can witness the passing of a soul from one body to another at the time of death: “The deluded do not perceive him when he departs from the body or dwells in it, when he experiences objects or is united with the gunas; but they who have the eye of wisdom perceive him.”

Rebirth, Hinduism maintains, is governed by the law of karma. According to this law, man is the architect of his own fate and maker of his own destiny. Karma signifies the way of life, that is, what we think, say, and do and it brings conditioning of the mind, the root cause of embodiment. It is the mind that produces bodies, gross or subtle. Remaining identified with the body-mind complex, the soul, though ever-free, follows its destiny and, as it were, experiences all pairs of opposites, such as birth and death, good and evil, pain and pleasure. Patanjali (the teacher of the Yoga system), in one of his aphorisms, describes the causes of suffering as five: ignorance, ego-sense, attachment, aversion, and clinging to life. Reality is neither good nor evil. There is nothing in the universe which is absolutely good or absolutely evil, that is to say, good or evil for all time. Good and evil are value judgments made by the individual mind in keeping with its inner disposition caused by past karma. If one asks, why does God permit evil, then the question will come, why does God permit good? According to the Hindu view, good is that which takes us near to our real Self, and evil is that which creates a distance between us and our real Self. The law of karma is the law of automatic justice. It tells us that no action goes without producing its result. The circumstances of our present life, our pains and pleasures, are all the results of our past actions in this existence and in countless previous existences. As one sows, so shall one reap. This is the inexorable law of karma. Karma produces three kinds of results: (a) results of past actions which have produced the present, body, mind, and circumstances; (b) results which have accumulated but are yet to fructify; and (c) results that are being accumulated now. Over the first category of results no one has any control; these are to be overcome by patiently bearing with them. The second and third kinds, which are still in the stage of thoughts and tendencies, can be countered by education and self-control. Essentially, the law of karma says that while our will is free, we are conditioned to act in certain set ways. We suffer or enjoy because of this conditioning of our mind. And conditioning of mind, accumulated through self-indulgence, cannot be overcome vicariously.

A Hindu is called upon to act in the living present, to change his fate by changing his way of life, his thoughts and his actions. Our past determines our present, and our present will determine our future. He is taught that no change will ever be effected by brooding over past mistakes or failures or by cursing others and blaming the world or by hoping for the future. To the contention that the law of karma does not leave any scope for the operation of divine grace, Hinduism’s answer is that the grace of God is ever flowing equally toward all. It is not felt until one feels the need for it. The joys and suffering of a human individual are of his own making. Good and evil are mind-made and not God-created. The law of karma exhorts a Hindu to right actions, giving him the assurance that, just as a saint had a past so also a sinner has a future. Through the doctrine of rebirth and the law of karma, Hinduism seeks an ethical interpretation of life. The theory of the evolution of species describes the process of how life evolves. But the purpose of this evolution can be explained only by the doctrine of rebirth and the law of karma. The destiny of the soul is immortality through Self-realization. Existence-knowledge bliss-absolute being its real nature, nothing limited can give it abiding satisfaction. Through its repeated births and deaths it is seeking that supreme fulfillment of life.



[Copyright Swami Adiswarananda]