अनन्याश्चिन्तयन्तो मां ये जना: पर्युपासते।
तेषां नित्याभियुक्तानां योगक्षेमं वहाम्यहम्।।22।।
ananyāśh chintayanto māṁ ye janāḥ paryupāsate
teṣhāṁ nityābhiyuktānāṁ yoga-kṣhemaṁ vahāmyaham
Persons who, meditating on Me as non-separate, worship Me in all beings, to them thus ever zealously really engaged, I carry what they lack and preserve what they already have.
~ Chapter 9, Verse 22
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Questioner (Q): What does it mean to worship Krishna as non-separate or ‘ananya’ in all beings? I find it easy to see Krishna in animals, but I notice that I see the opposite of love, compassion and truth in other humans. I sense this is because my mind is dirty and unclean, so I see that in others.
Is the verse asking us to focus on what is loving, compassionate and truthful in other humans instead of focusing on what is not?
Acharya Prashant (AP): No, no, no. There is just too much of pop-spirituality in this question. All these notions that you are coming from have sprung up mostly in the last hundred years, since the advent of industrialization, and they all just rally against the one fundamental requirement for spirituality. It is called discretion. Discretion or ‘viveka’ is to differentiate between the temporal and the non-temporal, the true and the false, the deceptive and the reliable.
But if you do that, then the false is not left with a place to hide. Therefore, the forces of falseness all have penetrated spirituality to create a kind of neo-spirituality these days, in which all falsenesses are acceptable in the name of unconditional love or focusing on the positives and such things.
Real spirituality is about rejecting the false. Real spirituality, therefore, is uncompromising, harsh, ruthless. Just reject the false—that's what real spirituality is about.
But if you are living in an age, in an era, in a society, in an economic system that is dominated by forces of falseness, then it becomes imperative for them to invent a new kind of spirituality that engages, even endorses all falsenesses. So you have terms like, ‘don't judge me’ or ‘don't judge anybody’. Now, what does that mean? That means, don't call the false as false. Because if you start calling the false as false, how will the false sell itself? And how will the sellers of falsenesses profit from your pocket? Therefore, the new spiritual aphorism is: ‘don't judge’.
Similar to this is, belonging to the same family, ‘love unconditionally’. Where is discretion then? If everything is lovable, then the dirt within is also loveable; then what is the need to improve at all? If one’s dirty condition is lovable, is there a need to take a spiritual bath?
Similarly, there are more such aggregates floating in the spiritual places nowadays, and they have become so commonplace that they have almost gained acceptability as something scriptural. People are surprised when I tell them that no scripture ever talks of such things as looking at the true and the false in the same way; no scripture ever says that the false is as lovable and as respectable as the Truth. So that's the backdrop from where this question seems to be coming.
Now the question. You see, you are asking, “How to see Krishna in all beings?” It has to be done in two ways. We'll elaborate.
Every human being, every sentient, conscious human being is constantly in a state of inner strife. There is the inertia of the body; there is inertia of Prakriti that wants the status quo to continue, that wants the past to keep rolling on into the future. That's the law of inertia, isn't it? If something is moving, it will just continue to move on. In the absence of the resisting force, the law of inertia states that if something is moving, it will simply continue to move till infinity; it will never stop. And if something is not moving, it will not move even in infinite time in the absence of an external force.
So, there is the force of inertia within us, and it's something that has a lot of weight and momentum behind it. That which is rolling is rolling with a great momentum that is obtained from the millions of years of the past. It is rolling on, it is rolling on, it wants to keep rolling on; it is a juggernaut. It's happening within every human being. Something within us just wants to keep rolling on. It doesn't want to look right or left. It doesn't want to exercise the brakes. It doesn't want to see what was behind and what lies ahead. It just wants to roll on blindly.
There's that, and then there is somebody who is contained, confined within that rolling machine, who sees no sense, no purpose, no gain in just rolling on blindly. He also finds that he is in no position to stop the rolling movement. The rolling machine, the rolling apparatus is simply too big, too heavy, very unstoppable. So the only option left to him is to either adjust, succumb—or reconcile in polite language—or find a way to be liberated; liberated from the confines of the machine. That's what every human being is facing.
This is the internal situation within every human being. And as we have already said, therefore there are only two choices available to every human being.
The machine will continue to roll on. You cannot do anything to the machine. It's almost as if the machine does not belong to you; you are just an unwilling captive inside the machine. You have been vested with no authority to tamper with the machine, apply the brakes, or do anything, right? Don't you see that the heart keeps beating, the lungs keep breathing, the brain keeps thinking, the machine rolls on—what can you do about it? You cannot do anything about it. Even the most important event of your bodily birth—were you consulted? You are so helpless. It all happened without your consent. You are not even engaged in the process. You were just handed over the body, and you are asking, “But why? Why has this been given to me?” You are handed over the body and the body has not been given to you as a gift. The body has been given to you as a jail. You have been told, “Here it is, and you have to live within it.” And you cannot do much about the body.
Obviously, superficially you can change the body, just as a prisoner can choose to paint the walls of his cell, can he not? Superficially you can choose to do something with the body. So you can, for example, you can lose weight or gain weight; you can get a haircut of your choice; you can even get your face modified, some surgery, plastic surgery or something, botox and such things are happening; you can get a dental job done—but does any of that alter the fundamental tendency of the machine to keep rolling on? No!
So, confined within the machine, you can at best keep fiddling with the machine in a very inconsequential way. Really you can change nothing about the machine; really you cannot change your primitive and fundamental biological tendencies. Nobody does.
Now you are left with two choices: either adjust and say, “But this will continue, so I might just as well reconcile, adjust, and make merry in my confinement. I’ve come to terms with the reality that this is what is called life, and I don't want to spend this life fighting an impossible war.” That's what 99.99999% do. They say, “This is an impossible war. So I’ll simply accept my fate and decorate the insides of the juggernaut.”
Or you could imagine a huge cylinder that is rolling on, and somebody is caught inside that cylinder, and he is either painting the insides or doing some other stuff; throwing a wedding party, earning money, building a house—all inside the rolling cylinder. How comfortable would it be, by the way? Your house is inside a rolling cylinder that is rolling without your consent into a future that is unseen, not determinable, and yet you choose to just keep celebrating inside your captivity. That's the choice most people make.
“How do you see Krishna in these people?” That's what the question is. How do you see Krishna in these people? You see Krishna in these people by seeing that they too somehow want to avoid suffering. It’s just that Krishna’s Maya is such that in the process of avoiding suffering, in their quest to avoid suffering, they are just bringing more suffering upon themselves. So, here what you see is Maya in operation.
You see, what is the aim of even Maya? What does Maya promise you to allure you? Maya promises you freedom from suffering, right? Does Maya come to you and say that “I'll make you suffer”? No, Maya seduces you by offering you happiness, does it not? Right?
So, when you see such people, you have to see Krishna by realizing that everybody is after, all are working for happiness. And so great is the Yogamaya of Krishna that people, in spite of wanting happiness, work against their own happiness.
And then, there is the remaining little fraction, .0001%, who are directly targeting Freedom or Krishna; both are synonymous. Krishna is another name for Freedom. There is that minuscule fraction that directly targets Freedom. Obviously, when you look at them, there is no need for conjecture left now. Those people are Krishna personified. There you’ll see the love of consciousness for Freedom; there you’ll see how each being is so desperate to reach the same point it is coming from, how we all cannot exist without that one thing, call it Truth or Freedom or whatever. But such direct evidence is available only in one in a million people. In the others, you will only see in indirect evidence.
So, when you look, for example, at an instance of obvious evil, how do you see Krishna there? You see that this person, after all, is seeking freedom from his suffering. He too is seeking Krishna, but he is under the spell of Krishna's Maya. Therefore, he is not seeking Krishna directly; he is seeking Krishna indirectly. Therefore, he does deserve your compassion, but because he has chosen an indirect path now, therefore direct compassion will not work with him. What Krishna displays towards Duryodhana on the battlefield of Kurukshetra is surely compassion, but indirect. Towards Arjuna, Krishna is displaying direct compassion. Towards Duryodhana, Krishna is displaying indirect compassion. How? The best way to demonstrate, or rather sometimes the only way to demonstrate a person in the wrong that he is indeed in the wrong, is by defeating him. What is it that supports his wrongness? His confidence that wrongness will win. How do you then liberate him from his wrongness? By demonstrating to him that wrongness will not win. Therefore, by defeating Duryodhana, Krishna is offering his compassion to Duryodhana.
You have mentioned here that when you see the opposite of love, compassion and truth in others, then you tell yourself that it is because your mind is dirty and unclean; therefore, you are seeing dirt and unclean stuff in others. No, please avoid this attitude. If you see dirt, clean it up. It is stupid to see dirt and say, “Oh, it is appearing like dirt because my mind is dirty!” Such an attitude can be especially dangerous in coronavirus days. You cannot say that the virus too is an embodiment of Krishna, and everybody who is carrying the virus is actually not sick, but is appearing sick because your mind is sick. No. Sickness is sickness and virus is virus. Clean up and avoid.
Love is a highly exclusive thing. You just cannot love wisdom and nonsense in the same way. You cannot talk of the highest and the lowest in the same breath. You must learn to exclude. You must learn to reserve. You must learn to see distinction before you come to see unity. If someone starts talking of unity without firstly being adept in the art of discretion, then he is just fooling himself.
It's a process in levels. At the lowest level are people who see no distinction. To them clean and unclean are the same. To them right and wrong are the same. Therefore, in the name of rightness, what they usually do is something wrong. To them dharma, adharma are same. In the name of dharma, what they usually engage in is adharma. This is the lowest level of people. They just cannot differentiate; they have no discretion.
Now from this stage, to take you beyond this stage, spiritual practice starts. And spiritual practice is about learning to differentiate. Learn to differentiate first of all; learn to see that Truth and Maya are different; learn to see that wisdom and foolishness are different; learn to see that freedom and bondage are different. And once you have become adept in seeing the differences, you then come to a point when you see that even that which is false, is false only because it was approaching Truth in a convoluted way, in a personal way. So the false too is actually a lover of Truth; therefore, the false too deserves consideration and compassion. That is after stage two. In stage two first of all you must practice the art of the ‘viveka’ or discretion, differentiation, and only after that you come to a point where you become capable of ‘ananyatā’ or unity.
Most people, in the name of the unity that belongs rightfully only to stage three, keep themselves on stage one itself. What's common between stage one and three? On both these stages, there is no distinction. But in stage one, there is no distinction because you have no eyes, no senses, no faculty, no wisdom to differentiate. And in stage three, you see no distinction because now you can see the true even in the false. Are you getting it?
Don't skip stage two. Stage two is where the work lies. Stage two is where the practice lies. Don't just try to have a shortcut to stage three. Stage two cannot be bypassed. Is that clear? Be intolerant towards falseness—that’s stage two. Most of us require that. That is the only practice. Stage three happens on its own; love comes on its own, great acceptance comes on its own. Rejection has to be practiced. You practice stage two, that's your job. That's sadhana.
