31 Oct 2014
Dr. Nikhil: “How to overcome the practical problems faced in this spiritual journey to reach God, the ultimate goal? These problems are very hard without any scope of solutions”.
Swami Replied: When you are travelling towards God, the problems come to test your determination. Certainly you will fail. As a result, you will have tension and lot of disturbance. Do not take this as a negative sign since you can easily find it as positive sign only on doing analysis. The lack of possibility to overcome the hurdle improves the intensity of your determination. Opposition always increases the emotion. The normal human psychology is to oppose any negative force. The negative force existing in the problem will be naturally opposed by you. The opposition to negative force of the problem is always positive resulting in success. This can be clearly understood in the case of several examples. Let us take the incident of a boy loving a girl. As the boy proposes his love, the girl will be exposing several problems that resist the success of love. As these problems are expressed, the emotion increases in the mind of the boy opposing the problems. Such emotion increases the strength of the love in the mind of the boy. The girl is playing this trick only to increase the love in the boy. If the problem is weak, certain normal quantity of emotion is sufficient to overcome the problem. In such case, the emotion will not raise to a greater height. More difficult the problem, more will be the increase in intensity of your determination. You can examine the example of a culvert in the water canal. The culvert is a strong wall and the water is not allowed to pass through it. It is a very tough problem for the flow of the water. The water stops for sometime finding no way to pass through it. In the place of culvert, if a small stone stands, water can pass over it very easily with little effort. In such case, the speed of the water is not appreciably increasing. In the case of the culvert, no doubt the flow of the water is completely stopped for sometime. But, after sometime, the water rises due to increased force and passes over the culvert. Now the flow is very vigorous and the water travels fast covering long distance. When the water is stopped by the culvert, the water should not be worried. It should have some patience so that sometime will be taken for the process of increase of force. Hence, Shankara told that patience (Shama) is the first required quality. Sai Baba also tells that along with the attraction for goal (Nishthaa), patience (Saburi) is also required in view of the culverts.
Therefore, the essence of all this is that problems in the spiritual journey towards God are only helpful like culverts and not the opposing enemies. God is only encouraging your spiritual journey through such problems. The impatience and tension you get increase the force of your devotion. Hence, your depression in the problem is also positive helping the rise of your determination. Narada says the same while defining the devotion. He says that the devotion is the total surrender to God (Nishthaa) and also the disturbance in facing the hurdle that needs patience (Saburi) in his Bhakti Sutras (Tat Vismarane Parama Vyakulataa…).
The power of Maya of God is unimaginable and beyond logic. The power of Prakriti is imaginable following the logic and forms the subject of science. The hurdle placed by Prakriti can be easily surpassed like the small stone in the path of water stream. The hurdle presented by Maya is very difficult like the culvert. Both Maya and Prakriti are the two parts of the power of God only. Maya is associated with God like Prakriti and hence, both need not be differentiated. God is the ultimate possessor of both the powers. To distinguish God from human being following the path of science, God is specifically mentioned as the possessor of Maya only (Maayaam tu Prakritim… Gita).
The hurdles in the spiritual path are psychological and arise due to lack of complete right knowledge. Any quantity of wrong knowledge or partially right knowledge results in uncleared doubts. These doubts only appear as problems. If you have total knowledge, which is right without any trace of false knowledge, no trace of doubt exists in your mind and you will not find even a trace of problem in the path. The sages have spent million births to achieve complete right knowledge. In the final birth as Gopikas, they did not have any problem to recognize and fully surrender to Lord Krishna.
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