AUDIENCE: I just wondered for example for a mosquito, if in their life, they was like injecting malaria into people, and like, causing loads of suffering to the whole conscious or something. How would that mosquito get further up the scale of consciousness, and eventually, go back to Godhead?
JAYADVAITA SWAMI: Okay that’s a good question. For the lower creatures, they are always acting exactly as they are supposed to do. It’s the business of the mosquito to suck your blood and give you malaria sometimes. That’s what mosquito’s do. You never see mosquito’s, stealing oranges or something like that. The mosquito acts always exactly like a mosquito. The cow acts exactly like a cow. The birds exactly like a bird. And the human being like any damn thing!!! He acts like a dog, like a mosquito, blood sucking tax men!!!
So the animals are the lower creatures. They have no karma they just automatically do what they supposed to do. But the human being having greater choice. Goes up or down. So it’s not, you know I might not get what I want or, it might not make me happy, but there’s like further ….dimensions to this. Then when this one lifetime has finished, then what? You know it’s like, you’re here in university it’s not like whether or not you have a good time in university, whether or not you feel fulfilled, whether it’s a question of, did you get the grades that you need so that you can get the job or, um, the career that you had in mind afterwards? It’s not just what happens within these three or four years….. there’s a future. And the intelligent person plans for the future, well I’m thinking about education, well I’m saving for my retirement. But then we don’t go beyond that, because we’re only thinking in terms of the body, we’re not thinking in terms of our spiritual identity…. We don’t look at well, what’s the larger picture? So our suggestion is looking at that larger picture and not neglecting it. Really looking into it and saying well you know it matters! It matters! It may be there it may not be there, but it matters! It matters more than anything else matters.
(Jayadvaita Swami 10/2007)