Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Re: Bhishma's death
Dear Mihir, Swamiji and all Vaisnavas on this sacred sangha,
Nityananda Gauranga Hare Krishna! Please accept my humble obeisances! Here I am sharing some realisations along with some nectar which great devotees have told me.
We only have limited and conditioned vision and hence things don't seem right. We need some revelation from the Lord to tell us what is behind the scenes. It is very mysterious the way in which the Lord and his devotees work. They don't obey any logic whatsoever. Indeed if the Lord wants us to tell lies, we do, even though it is ethically incorrect. Bhaktisiddhanta Prabhupada states that morality or ethics are merely relative ways by which people come to accept ideas of right and wrong. However what the Lord wants us to do, that alone is right, the rest is wrong.
You mention the Mahabharata. Yudhisthira's chariot always rode 5 fingers above the earth because of his dharmic nature. The pandavas had not stopped Draupadi's insult, so why did that chariot still stay above ground? Why did the Pandavas not fall to Vaisnava apradha but Bhishma did? One other thing is that when Lord Krishna wanted Yudhisthira to tell that Asvatthama was dead, he did not do it, but instead tried to say it was the elephant. At that point his chariot hit ground. Why is that? The answer is not because of the lie, it was because he had hesitated to act upon the Lord's order and tried to take shelter of mundane dharma at that point. He told a lie because he told something other than what Krishna wanted him to say. That was the real reason. It is very confidential and none of the mundane writers of the Mahabharata can understand such things.
Why did Yudhisthira hesitate? One answer is that when Yudhisthira went to hell for a while, all the sinful suffering souls there were immediately delivered simply by that small amount of association with a pure devotee. So there was another reason behind that too. Another is to show us that surrending to the Lord's will is far superior to mundane morality.
A great devotee like Bhishma is fully aware of right and wrong, being the authority on thousands of scriptures. Why did he not save Draupadi? As a matter of fact, why did he even stay with the Kauravas at all? There are many reasons. First of all Bhisma was actually playing his part in the Lord's pastimes as the Lord wanted. The pastime of Draupadi being rescued by Sri Krishna at the last minute is to show to the whole world how we must completely abandon our mundane ego and our sense of shame, honour and surrender to the Lord. The Lord in turn will never let his devotees be overpowered by demonaic forces. Thus the rascal Duhsana's attempt was utterly foiled. One very good reason for the whole Mahabharata war taking place is because of that one Vaisnava aparadha against Draupadi. The Kauravas were then doomed along with all their allies. Now the Lord had the best reason in the world to get rid of them. But he made them invite their own doom by letting them misuse their independence and he arranged for their annihilation by this type of circumstantial arrangement. Similarly Hiranyakasipu was killed after he began to commit Vaisnava aparadha against Prahlada, but till then he was allowed to be let loose. Kamsa's fate was sealed after he committed numerous offenses against Vasudeva and Devaki and the residents of Vrindavana. That is one reason.
Dhritarastra attained sayujya, but he failed to attain the Lord even though he was the first person to hear the Gita live as it occured. Why? Because of Vaisnava aparadha.
Another thing is that Bhishma and all the others had been stopped by yogamaya and made to watch silently. But actually they were getting the highest bliss out of the Lord coming and saving them. Actually a pure devotee experiences highest bliss in playing whatever his role is in the Lord's pastimes. The thing in the spiritual world is that if you are meant to be the Lord's pin cushion, then you get the highest bliss when he pokes pins into you. In Vrindavana sometimes the devotees are victims of Lord Krishna's endless pranks. But that is the highest bliss. If the Lord didn't come to their home, they would be lost in an ocean of sorrow. And if someone was to be hit by stones and shoes, that would be the greatest pleasure for them. Everyone serves the Lord willingly and unconditionally and that's exactly what they want. Which person is so fortunate to get hit by a devotee's footwear, which is worshippable all over the universe?
So Bhisma was not actually pained by getting pierced, struck down and lying on a bed of arrows so many that there were not even 2 fingers gap between them. His role in the pastimes was exactly that, to act like an enemy of the Pandavas. Although externally he manifested great suffering, internally he was actually experiencing the topmost bliss! That was his role in the pastimes and he gained the highest bliss from being massacared in battle. That is really the love of the devotees for the Lord. Anything that the Lord wishes becomes the highest bliss for his devotees. In hell, there are even worse punishments for the sinners than a bed of arrows. But the devotees are willing to desperately go there if the Lord wants them to go. Who can even fathom this type of love? No ordinary man can understand the real nature of the love between the Lord and his devotees?
In truth, the Lord and his pure devotees experience bliss in all situations. In the spiritual world, everything is spiritual and everything is living. Think about the sweets that get chewed and crushed and eaten by the Lord. What about the cooking vessel which has to be heated up in a fire and the milk that got boiled for the Lord, and the butter pot that got broken into pieces so that Krishna could taste his beloved butter? What about the humble blade of grass that gets trampled by every moving entity walking in the dhama? How did they feel it? Answer : The highest bliss. That is the perfection of their existence. In the end actually only we are feeling sad because we are seeing with conditioned vision and material logic and we tend to judge everything based on those limitations. Our mundane logic is based on rules which keep it bound up and limited and one only sees how hopeless are the efforts of the rationalists, scholars, mystic yogis, impersonalists and speculators in trying to come up with imaginary ideas about the Lord.
Lord Gauranga Krishna is a reservoir of all contradictory qualities. He is the only place where things are black and white simultaneously. Actually he was giving the highest bliss to both Arjuna and Bhishma and one can very well see how eager Bhisma wanted to get killed by the Lord. To enjoy that mood, he even gave away his weak point of not being able to attack women or anyone who had been born a woman. One more lesson in that pastime was that it is better to choose a bed of arrows over siding with non-devotees and Vaisnava aparadhis, so sinful were the Kauravas. Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti in his Sarartha Darshini commentary on the Bhagavad Gita says that the Lord had induced the mood of an enemy in Bhisma to enjoy this pastime. Otherwise Bhisma would never have been able to attack the Lord. This commentary gives many confidential revelations about the mellows of devotion while Prabhupada's Gita gives the siddhanta. As a matter of fact the acarya even says that Lord Krishna accepted the arrows of Bhisma like love bites in loving excahnges. Please try to study them side by side to get a complete picture of the very esoteric truths of bhakti in the Bhagavat Gita.
Again the pastime of the Lord breaking his promise shows how loving devotion is far superior to mundane morality. Those ethics aren't going to save us in the end, only the Lord saves us. Actually he tells us one time how to behave by giving us the Vedas and then he tells us to behave another way at another time. Still even this small thing can never be understood by even those respectable people in the form of scholars or moralists because of lack of devotional qualifications.
There are infinite layers of understanding in the Lord's pastimes. If this is the first layer than there is a second, a third and a hundred millionth layer and so on and very quickly we are overwhelmed on realising how utterly insignificant and ignorant and tiny we really are and how much we depend on the Lord and his devotees. We are only tiny souls who are so weak and who are like toys before maya's charms. We see ourselves with conditioned vision and wonder why the Lord has made us so imperfect. But yet there is a reason why we are what we are and when we realise it, that becomes ultimate perfection for us. Being that most unworthy, insignificant, utterly ignorant and worthless little particle of dust, a mere nobody and nothing in the midst of the infintely great personality of the Lord and his unfathomably, unimaginable great devotees is exactly what we want and that is exactly what gives us the greatest bliss and the greatest love as that is our real position -- being the lowest of the low. That is ultimate perfection!
I have written something which I think I understood to some extent from what the great devotees on this sangha have instructed me about. I am full of flaws and actually I should not be talking about such high things which I myself don't follow. I look for the first opportunity to trade devotion for some mundane pleasure and with all such disqualifications, I am actually incapable of having the same effect as what I received when a pure devotee told this same thing to me. My words are full of flaws and inconsistencies, but I pray that you overlook them for the fact that these are actually inspirations of the vani of those pure devotees who revealed these facts to me.
If you are made happy by this, then I fall at all your feet and request you to show your mercy on this sinner so that he can continue to serve you as always.
Offering my dandavats and aspiring to be your eternal servant,
Srinath
Nityananda! Gauranga! Hare Krishna!
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