Hello and welcome to episode 107 of The Ask Sri Vishwanath Show. Today I want to talk about God and emotions. Does God have emotions? How does God tolerate all the injustice in the world?
Today’s question comes from Ryan and he says “I have 100% faith in works and laws of God but I don’t understand how he can keep quiet when there is so much injustice in the world?”
That’s a great question. This is a question that’s always asked. It was asked ten thousand years ago, it’s asked now and it will be asked again in the future.
Krishna says “the lord neither creates objects of the world, nor the agents nor contacts with them. Rather the nature of the thing operates. The mighty being accepts nobody’s sin nor merit. Knowledge is shrouded in ignorance hence all living beings are deluded.”
People need to accept this verse. This is one of the most important verses to come from Krishna so if you get this then you get everything. Krishna says he did not create the objects in the world nor did he create the gunas. Krishna says that it is all an appearance that stem from our emotions. He is not associated with it.
The only way to see through this is to have knowledge of the consciousness. Your consciousness is the only thing that actually exists in this world of appearances. A good teacher would be able to go through this with you very thoroughly. I want share a story that will help you understand.
There was a man living in a village. This man was a Brahmin meaning he was a very high caste. In the village there was a beautiful garden that he catered. He was really proud of this garden and he cared for it very well.
One day a cow had broken loose and had gotten into the garden where it trampled a lot of the flowers. The man was so frustrated that he started to hit the cow. The blows were so fast and hard that the cow died. In Hinduism cows are considered to be very sacred. They are next to God. Killing a cow is one of the greatest sins you could commit.
When the villagers saw what the man had done they told him that he must pay for this sin. The Brahman was clever and tried to figure a way out of the situation. In Hinduism each part of the body is represented by a god. The hands are represented by the god Indra. So the man maintained that it was not him who killed the cow, but the god Indra. So it is the God who should be punished and not him!
Word spread and eventually reached the god Indra. Indra was not impressed and knew the situation had to be fixed. He came to earth in the disguise of a normal person and approached the man in the garden. Indra asked the man who looked after this beautiful garden. The man replied proudly that he did. Indra turned around and said well it is actually Indra who takes care of it all. The man said no it was him. He put the seed in the ground, he took care of the soil and he watered the plants. He said that Indra sits in heaven while he does all the hard work.
Indra said that he heard there was a cow that has trampled the flowers and that this man had beaten it to death. The man said that he did not kill the cow, Indra did. He was foolish and thought he could say that his hands made something beautiful and good yet it was Indra who committed the terrible sin of killing the cow.
At the point Indra resumed his original form and told him that if it was his hands who created and tended this beautiful garden then he must take responsibility for the death of the cow. He need to takes responsibility for both or let Indra take credit for both.
The same happens with us. We want to take credit for all the good things we do in the world then we want to blame God when bad things happen. It has to be one or the other. We can’t take credit for the good stuff and then wonder where God is when tragedy strikes. Either we take the good and the bad or God does. Either way is fine but we must stick to one to get back to the consciousness.
The problem is we want to think whatever we want and do whatever we want yet we want to experience heaven on earth. This is how foolish we are. We speak so much crap and see so much rubbish everyday yet we want this world to be like heaven. Vivekananda says “I dreamt of pleasure without pain and it never ever came. No one but me to blame.”
Let’s assume that you are God. There are 4 events happening in the next two seconds all at the same time in different locations. A girl is going to be raped, an elderly man is going to be robbed of his life savings, an honest man will be murdered and your son crossing the road and a truck will come and kill him. So you are God and you can only be present at one event. Which one will you save?
Obviously you would save your son. As you do that the other 3 events will happen. Why would you save your son? You save him because that’s how we see the world, through our narrow minds. We say this is right and that is wrong. When we are given options we only see what we want. Because it is your son crossing the road you want to save him and you are not concerned about the others. When the world is seen through the lens of Krishna or Christ it becomes totally different.
God is present in all the events happening in the world whether they be good or bad. Even when someone is being murdered or robbed. He is present and sometimes he doesn’t do anything to stop it. This is because he is detached. All these events appearances and this is called karma.
A person’s inability to discover his true nature when things are going good is the true problem. When someone dies his family will be sad and they will cry which is fine but he has lived his entire life and his consciousness will never ever die. People are unable to draw themselves in so they place the blame on god. Even though he is equally present everywhere. The same as our consciousness. I encourage you to watch episode 81 to learn more about this.
If we can’t understand this concept then this is our problem. We need to learn through meditation and practice. When we do this we will learn that everything outside is an appearance and the only true existence is the consciousness. Everything else is duality.
It’s like a dog who bites the hand of the owner who feeds it. We go after power, pleasure and domination and when we don’t get it we get frustrated and we take it out on God. When we don’t get things first time we bite. No one questions why we were seeking those things in the first place. It’s because we don’t understand.
Vivekananda says in his poem:
From the unreal lead me to the real,
From darkness lead me to light,
From death lead me to immortality,
Reach out to me oh great one,
Through and through the soul.
God is in the heart of all beings causing them to revolve through maya. The maya is an appearance and the consciousness is real.
I hope I answered your question. Remember you keep asking questions and I’ll keep answering them.
