«DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHASTITY AND SECTARIANISM»
«DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHASTITY AND SECTARIANISM» | Talk with Sripad Bhakti Chaytanya Bharati Swami, Evening class on 27th of January 2019 at the Bhakti Yoga Institute of West London.
- How we define chastity and sectarianism (00:00)
- A sectarian and a true believer (05:35)
- Non-stop reciprocation (13:30)
- Free will and karma intricacies (22:00)
- Physical laws or concoction? (36:40)
- Two groups of believers (55:25)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3lrdA3qGeY
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHASTITY AND SECTARIANISM
Sripad Bhakti Chaytanya Bharati Swami, January 27, 2019, London
LISTENER: There’s a question, Maharaj. Can you explain the difference between chastity and sectarianism?
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Yah, good question. I don’t think there’s an exact definition, exact line between them. Chastity and sectarianism – are they of the same category? We can compare something of the same ‘breed’. Chastity is to be loyal to someone who is the one. In mundane life, there’re persons who are accessible for anyone and we call them prostitutes; and there’re persons not accessible for anyone, we call them old virgins, or whatever. There’re chaste ladies who are loyal only to some one. Chastity in the religious sense means that the practician is loyal only to one doctrine, one line of guru varga, is loyal to one idea, and that soul doesn’t allow access to any other idea. This is called chastity. Sectarianism is rather similar to this definition. It doesn’t have good or bad qualities. It means to be loyal to a group but in our daily life the sectarians are considered as something bad. Like, Oh, you’re a sectarian. Actually, a sectarian is one who is loyal to some sector. So, we cannot directly compare these two things, sectarianism and chastity. What we can compare is a sectarian and a true believer. Of course, we can compare these notions if we study electromagnetic fields; color and sound are sorts of electromagnetic waves; there’s a border which ultra-violet or ultra-sonic; they are on the border. Okay, this is my strong side…
So, we can compare a sectarian and a true believer. A sectarian is one who sticks to certain ideas and doesn’t allow any other ideas to come in. This is good when the ideas one shares are true. Of course, what is true and false… but anyway… let’s say there’re true ideas and false ones. So, a sectarian follows certain ideas and doesn’t care whether they are wrong or true. When his life experience shows that the ideas he shared and followed proved to be wrong he still keeps holding on. As to a true believer, or a broad vision believer, once he finds that his faith is not perfect or the leaders who represent or lead the person are not in accordance with the ideas they preach he leaves these leaders. Srila Sridhar Maharaj makes the difference between a blind believer and …
LISTENER: Blind faith and seeing faith.
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Yes, but he used another word… — sincere. So, blind faith and sincere faith, or seeing faith, that’s true. Sometimes I give the following example: say, you have a box with golden coins and only one coin is 100% gold while all other are alloy, mixture of gold and some other metals; the only way to find the real gold is to weigh them when you take two of them and then choose the heavier one and set aside the lighter one, repeating that with every other one, and when you weigh the last one you can have the real one and the false ones. So, a sectarian will go on claiming/stating that this is real gold although you weighed all coins; he cannot admit a mistake was made before. If you tell him that it’s more like real gold because it’s heavier so it has more gold inside the blind faith does not allow admitting a mistake. And with the sincere faith, you stick to the ideas the heaviest is gold and reject the form; you don’t care about the form, you chose the heaviest. This is, so to say, the difference between blind and real faith. And we want to keep on going with the real, not blind faith.
LISTENER: What allows a soul to admit the mistake?
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Sincerity. The inner sincerity: I made a mistake; I’ve been fooled for all my life; no, I’m smart enough to not be fooled.
LISTENER: The question is: what is the free will of the soul; can she see the picture she wills? Krishna translates pictures for souls and what they can reveal, what they can choose?
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Srila Sridhar Maharaj calls Krishna the Supreme Hypnotist. When a djiva soul has a desire or desires to establish itself, to occupy the space, more-then-nothing, because a djiva soul has no room in reality, when it wants to expand its existence — in Srila Saraswati Thakura’s words, to lord it over – to occupy the place, when this desire is broadcasted to the environment Krishna arranges the environment for the djiva soul so that it can fulfill its desire. It’s like when we see a picture on a computer monitor, actually what is delivered through the wires is not the picture but only two digits (many 1s and 0s). Hitting your video/computer board these signals are transferred into pictures that you can see. The signals that come into the computer and make the signals you can see are reflections of your signals. You signal to Krishna, you broadcast to Krishna ‘I want this’ and your digital desire or will hits Krishna’s power which is called shakti, then it is reflected and the signals are returned to you in the form you can observe. Further, you observe if new desires arise and you signal again, broadcast again, and again the signals hit shakti, and come back to you. You cannot stop it; it’s a non-stop reciprocation: I want this – Okay, you get this. You try to grasp it and on the way you get another desire or desires, you grasp it again and then you feel frustration, and send your desire again. You can never feel satisfied because once you get something you want more. So, you send the desire – He sends the environment. It’s like this.
LISTENER: Is it what you want you can see or you only see what you want?
BHARATI MAHARAJ: It’s a combination. You see the mixture of what you want and what you deserve… Oh, okay, not deserve, what you’re able to see, what your capacity to see is. It’s like you want to see a football match or tennis match and you are given this opportunity but you may take the front row or the last one, and you’ll see different pictures. At the front seat you can see clearly, even touch the ball and the player, and talk to him, while in the last row you can only cry… [LOL] with no reciprocation. This is like the karma. You send an appeal: I want to experience that, — and you’re given the environment but you may not be able to reciprocate. There’s a funny joke: a guy in Africa, a desert dweller, asked the Lord: I want to always have much water, — and he became a water closet. [LOL] So, he experienced an unlimited amount of water but (!) as a water closet. It’s just a joke which means we can express our desires but the question is whether we are ready to experience exactly what we want. Like, you want more and more meat, and you become a worm eating your mother and sister; you know, they eat each other. So, here you are – you get fulfillment of your desire – but maybe it’s better not to ask for.
Any other questions?
LISTENER: [ … ] People are not always getting so well with each other. Suppose, one person kills another person. Was that person destined to kill the other one? Or the other person was destined to be killed by the first person? What about the free will here?
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Oh, the free will, we’ve come back to this. Arjuna asked Krishna the same question and Krishna said: don’t even try to go into all intricacies. It’s so complicated and Krishna harmonizes what you deserve with what you want. The fact is when you hurt/kill someone there’s always, in this act, the portion of your free will and his/her destiny; it’s always there.
LISTENER: Like a mixture.
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Right. So, the more free will you have in this act the more suffering you’ll receive in the future. That person is destined to be killed or hurt and you are the agent of Yamaraj, the Lord of destiny. But when, being an agent, you input your own will then you are to be punished.
LISTENER: Is there necessarily any particular agent? If you kill a person are you destined to kill that person, or..?
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Not you. He was destined to be killed but, as it happened, you had some desire, maybe not to kill, which necessarily involves hurting someone. It’s not like: Krishna, I want to kill this person. It’s more like: Krishna, I want to be rich and I’m ready to do something against the law. Krishna arranges it so that your free will hits the other person’s destiny. It’s really complicated and Krishna told Arjuna not to be involved in these intricacies. Krishna says that He is the only one who understands this. He is like a ‘super computer’. You know, they’ve developed a super computer which can forecast the weather for many days. It fails, of course… [LOL] Super computer means it can calculate much data. But can you imagine a computer calculating all possible data? This is Krishna. But when He fails eventually He kills the whole universe.
[LOL] He just puts a limit on it: now it’s not possible. [LOL] This is the meaning of the end of the world. We’re talking in the material world scale but, within the universe, this happens once again and again. When the super mind called Brahma is not able to harmonize all tendencies and all activities that are going on he also fails and falls down, like a server attacked by DDOS. So, Brahma crashes his creation and ‘formats the disk’ but, in a time, Krishna involves him again into the creation; Krishna inspires Brahma and he wakes up inspired by Govinda’s brilliance. You know, when an artist or a poet, or a musician wakes up in the morning… oh, no, when he is in a deep sleep, dreaming, and something wakes him up suddenly, maybe a poem or a tune, and he starts up writing or playing, or whatever because he is a creator. Brahma is also awaken by something inspiring and beautiful, and starts to create. He composes his first poem which is called Brahma-Samhita and after that he starts writing the novel which is called ‘universe’. Or, he starts composing a play, with certain characters for the government, like the Sun god, or saptarishi, the ministers, the board of advisers… Then, he shapes 8 400 000 different forms. And when the ‘book’ is ready, all characters are set, he again prays for that inspiring something/someone to make his play alive, and then what he writes on paper, so to say, becomes alive, and the characters start playing the drama. Sometimes it turns to be a comedy, sometimes a tragedy.
Brahma is impartial here because he knows this is just a play and when the last page is turned over the book is closed, and again everything is finished. But those who play the game take it very seriously. [LOL] You know, when Indra fled from Hiranyakashipu, I believe, he had to hide in a bamboo stem, and Agni, the fire Lord, used to come secretly to feed him. We know from the Scriptures that Indra takes the drama very seriously while Brahma, normally, is impartial but sometimes he also gets involved and takes it seriously. Like, the creator of a computer game knows it’s just combinations of digits and he stays impartial but sometimes he gets exited/involved. So, Brahma too, sometimes gets anxious and turns to the Lord, Govinda Adipurusha, Lord Narayana, and asks for help: something’s wrong with my book, the play’s going wrong.
Actually, this is all the arrangement of Narayana Himself. When the play goes wrong, not as Brahma designed, this means Krishna has a desire to come down and play His role. Sometimes, He wants to because, I think, when He looks at that drama, tragedy or comedy, He wants to take part: why they’re playing without Me? This is my speculation but maybe He wants to play some role as well. So, He casts illusion on the ‘author’, comes down, and does something which wasn’t in the script, and then the four-headed author comes down wondering what’s wrong: I cut that page with the cows and cowboys but they are there again, I took away that chapter… but it seems like nothing changed. Then he realizes that when he turned back someone wrote in some notes, and only then he realizes that it must have been Krishna.
LISTENER: [ … ] We can see again it’s against physical laws…
BHARATI MAHARAJ: There’re no physical laws. It’s a concoction from Isaac Newton. There’re no physical laws at all.
LISTENER: But according to some laws… it’s like we cannot see the miracle… unusual things cannot happen, we cannot fly or…
BHARATI MAHARAJ: We cannot because we don’t know the cheats in computer games.
LISTENER: We don’t know the hacks.
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Yah, you know, when you play a computer game, though it’s a complete illusion, you cannot fly there. To shoot monsters you need to go through a wall and kill them from the back and some guys have their cheats, they beat some codes, like sbu3. When I was young I used to play these games, and one of them was Doom2, as if you were doomed, and when it was hard you had to beat cheat clicks to kill the guy, or you could get the armor so that the guy couldn’t kill you, or you could get a jet pack to fly.
So, this is called siddha; they’re eight of them. Some persons can develop these ‘cheats’ and can fly or walk on water; they can become lighter than the lightest, smaller than the smallest to go through the walls, or heavier than the heaviest, whatever… to get something at a far distance, travel to the other worlds. We have certain limitations according to our karma and we foolishly call these limitations the laws of nature. But there’re no laws of nature. In computer games, we have laws but if you know a certain cheat…
LISTENER: But we have ‘mass’ and ‘speed’ that are somehow related to each other, under some formula, and they’re always the same. If you boil water today or tomorrow it’s the same process.
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Yah, but the temperature will be different. If the air density is less you may boil your water at a shorter time, or faster.
LISTENER: What about basic principles like the law of gravity?
BHARATI MAHARAJ: There’s no law of gravity.
LISTENER: But if we jump we come back down…
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Because this is the bottom and there’s the top. The law is that you always fall down.
LISTENER: Exactly but there’s something that makes you come down. No?
BHARATI MAHARAJ: No. Demigods drive their vehicles with the power of thought. There’s no law of gravity for them. Even physics do not except this law of gravity; it’s a primary school level. There’s no law of gravity – just a play of energy. The only law is the will of the Creator; the will of the Lord is the law.
LISTENER: Krishna’s will.
BHARATI MAHARAJ: We can put aside the religious conception of Krishna’s will because it’s easy to speak out but, for a sober person, it’s like nonsense. Right? You can ask a sober person: Okay, there’s a law of gravity. There’s the Earth, a globe, and the Moon, also a globe. The Moon’s mass is 1/6 that of the Earth. Under the law of gravity, the centre of their combined mass must be somewhere in-between. Do you understand what I’m saying? You know people/sportsmen lifting the weight; the right and the left discs have the same weight and when you throw one of them it starts rotating in the air, and the central point of rotation would be… where?
LISTENER: In the centre.
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Yes, between them, in the centre. If the right disc is heavier than the left one and you throw it – where would be the centre?
LISTENER: Closer.
BHARATI MAHARAJ: Right. There’s a formula but it will be closer and will rotate in a different way; if they’re the same they will rotate equally around the centre. If you take the weight with the left side six times heavier than the right one and throw it there would be the rotation point? Closer, at some point. So, the Moon and the Earth have the weight proportion of 1/6 and 5/6 and they should rotate not like the ‘traditional’ picture of the Earth and Moon. And here your law of gravity doesn’t work. If you go to the university and ask why so, do you know what the answer would be? ‘We don’t know’ [LOL] ‘We haven’t discovered yet’. So, if you talk of universal laws like the law of gravity they don’t work.
What we call the laws of nature are the laws written by Brahma, by the Creator. It’s like a set of laws. When a computer game designer designs a new game he sets a number of laws. In his reality that we’ll play later there’re his laws. Brahma also creates a certain number of laws, and we have to obey these laws, and we call them the laws of nature, but the will of the inspiration force is Krishna, Narayana, whose laws always overcome the laws of the script writer. But this doesn’t happen all the time. Statistically, the laws of Brahma always work and only when Krishna interferes He breaks these ‘scripts’ because He is the ‘network administrator’; He can break any rules.
Brahma who designed this world describes how it looks like because he designed it, and knows it better. He says the Earth is flat, with seven ring-shaped islands separated by six oceans: salty, plain water, nectar, wine, curd, milk… if I’m not mistaken. This is how he designed it. And there’s a mountain right in the centre of this construction, and Brahma lives on the top of it. The narrow part of the mountain is the bottom and the broad part of it is the top, like an upside-down pyramid. Brahma resides on the mountain top looking at four sides of the world where the demigods Dharma, Varuna, Chandra and… I forgot the fourth name… live. Different levels of the mount Meru are populated by different forms of life like demigods, apsaras, gandharvas, etc., then the people and animals come, etc.; and lower are the hellish underground worlds where serpent-like creatures live… it’s like that.
For us, brainwashed by modern fantasts, this looks very weird. They say: yes, it looks nice but is not scientific, and we can present you a scientific picture of the world. When you ask what scientific picture is they say: at the beginning there was nothing, then it exploded, and some gas densities appeared from nothing that later became stars, and some chunks started rotating… This is what they call scientific picture. And when you ask them to give some scientific proof… Actually, there’re only two scientific proofs, mathematical and physical experimental evidence, and when you claim a scientific statement you have to give a scientific proof. When you say ‘I believe this’ you’re not obliged to give a scientific proof, it’s just your belief. But once you dare to state that this is scientific truth you have to bring about scientific evidence, and there’re only two ways: 1/ to show a physical experiment, or the photo or video of it; 2/ to calculate it mathematically. If you say that, in the beginning, there was a very small chunk of matter, as small as a lighter, and then it exploded, you might be asked: Okay, then give me scientific evidence, like a photo. They will answer, of course, there’re no photos, because when it happened there was no time. Okay, then give me the math formula and mathematically explain how nothing produced something. And they cannot, they fail. They also say the Earth is a globe. Okay, give me scientific proof of this — a photo of the globe Earth or its mathematical evidence. They can show you photos that are fakes, computer generated graphics. There’s not a single real photo.
In this situation, we have two groups of believers; not scientists and believers but two groups of believers. One group, which is presently the major one, believe in a very big fire-ball which is the centre of some round chunks rotating around; this is the first group of believers. And there’s another group of believers that believe the Earth is flat. The only difference between them is that whenever you can have a real physical experiment about the surface you always come to the flat Earth because this is the physical truth. You can find the info that I saw: in 1958, the Americans made a big jet (F115 or F15, I don’t remember) which had a small jet-fighter attached to its wing; when it reached a certain altitude the small jet separated and flied by itself, with a pilot, of course; that jet had two cameras, in the pilot pit and outside, and reaching the altitude of 103 km it showed the horizon which was completely flat, although at that altitude the Earth surface must look curved. And this picture had been taken before the NASA was established in the early 1960s… who cares about the curves? I feel awkward talking about such things but I just want to point out that whenever you hear statements of scientists you must understand that they are believers, not scientists. As to the laws of nature this is just a script written by the computer engineer whose name is Brahma, the Creator. Having created his drama, his ‘computer game’ he wrote the code book, the Vedas. So, if you want to know how the world is designed you have to take the bone fide book written by the One who made the world. If you want to know how the computer game is operated approach the designer — he knows it better.
Transcript by Elizabeth D.
