03 Jul 2016
Shri Pavan asked: What is the practical spiritual knowledge to be given to an ordinary human being? What is the goal of various stories narrated in the secondary scriptures called Puranams?
Swami replied: O Learned and Devoted Servants of God, the practical spiritual knowledge, which is the essence of the Gita and other scriptures is that you should approach God simply by your attraction to God (based on His Divine personality that is expressed through several stories presented in scriptures), which is the natural and spontaneous love or devotion. The best example is your love for your issues in which you are prepared to sacrifice what all you earned in the entire life even though your issues are insulting you throughout your life. You are prepared to do any sin for their sake. Such love should be expressed to God aspiring no fruit in return as in the case of your issues. You may argue that such love cannot be expressed to an outsider, be the God. Your argument is not correct if you take the example of a fan of a cinema hero. For the fan, the hero is outsider only. The fan is not benefited in any way from the hero. Moreover, the fan spends from his pocket only in the celebrations of new pictures of that hero. His love to that hero is so much that he takes away his life when the hero dies! Such love is not seen even in the case of issues! What is the reason for such madness of love to the hero? In all the films of the hero, the personality of the hero is expressed in such climax so that the impression of the fan to the hero goes beyond even the climax. All these stories of God in scriptures are only the various films of that God-Hero. The difference between God and the cinema hero is that the stories of God are true and the stories presented in films about the hero are totally false and artificial. If such love is developed in the mind of the fan by such false stories, how much love to God should be developed by these real stories! Hence, you should become such fan of God to worship Him simply based on your unassuming attraction to God and not based on the fruit in return. It is this fundamental cancerous point that brings failures in the approach to God.
God is always in the reverse gear. As you ask repeatedly for something it is pushed down and down. This is very clear even in our worldly experience. If you press the feet of your father asking for his property to be given to you, what a nasty opinion is developed in the mind of your father? You may keep the nasty opinion in your mind as secret and express the true devotion outside through acting since your father can’t know what is in your mind. But, God is omniscient and knows everything present in your every internal nerve and hence you can never fool God. Therefore, you should totally detach from the desire and worship God as in the case of that fan to that cinema hero. When you are not aspiring any fruit in return and express your real love on God based on your attraction to Him due to the impression of His Divine personality on you, God grants everything asked by you and also not asked by you, which is good for you. This is the essence of the Gita, which says that you must worship God without any desire. Narada in his Bhakti-sutras says that one way of developing the devotion is to hear the stories of God, which project His Divine personality that develops terrible attraction in your mind without the context of fruit in return (Tat kathaa shravanaadishu…). You need not worry about the historical aspects of these stories like time and space, which are relative with respect to the absolute God. God is beyond space and time. Therefore, the essence of the message to any ordinary human being in this world is to read the stories of God and to see the pictures of God so that a spontaneous inspiration of attraction develops in the mind without any reference to the context of the desire or fruit. Even if you observe social pictures, you super impose God on that hero trying always to establish justice in the society, thereby even the social picture is turned to a Divine story based on the concept of the hero as representative model (Pratika) of God. This was the real tradition of our ancient sages. Unfortunately, we are in the present blind tradition, which was developed by our ancestors in the middle age connecting God always to the fulfillment of desire by achieving its related fruit. Whenever we do worship of God in the form of rituals, the very starting point is to say ‘Samkalpa’ in which the list of all worldly desires are mentioned. From our birth we are grown up in this blind psychology of God linked to the fruit.
The very first introduction of God to us was given in terms of fulfillment of desire and attainment of fruit only. The theoretical devotion like prayers to achieve a practical fruit from God is like the false love of a prostitute, who extracts your money through sweet words (Veshyaa bhakti). Sometimes, the practical devotion in terms of service to God is also seen, which is only a business deal of exchange of practical devotion with practical fruit (Vaishya bhakti). Of course, in the Vedas also, the devotion linked to fulfillment of desires is projected as instrumental devotion (Kaamya bhakti) in which God becomes the instrument to achieve a desired fruit. The Vedas have expressed this way for the beginners in the spiritual path, who are like children going to school with the help of the chocolate. After sometime, as the child gets interest in the process of learning, the chocolate gets dropped. But, unfortunately, we are going to the school only for the chocolates from birth to death. I’m not telling to eradicate LKG class from the school. I’m only telling that you should not sit in the LKG class throughout your life.
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