(HH Kadamba Kanana Swami, Cape Town, 30th June 2012) Lecture: BG Chapter 5
Our mind is daily connecting and disconnecting with so many things in the world, and that is the nature of the mind…accepting, rejecting. So the question is, what are we connecting with?
Sometimes we connect with material things – name, fame and glory in this world. ’ I want to be famous.’
Okay, but are you sure? Sometimes you read stories about celebrities and what they have to go through, big sunglasses, hiding, running and racing. Like the story of Princess Diana in England who was followed by reporters and was racing to try and stay ahead. Stories about George Harrison diving into a laundry chute, in a hotel, when finally the press kicked in the door. They were coming in! He dove into a hole in the wall, landed on a pile of laundry and then ran out of the back door!
To be a celebrity…. well I don’t know, is it really that much fun to be famous? It’s like: ‘Well, I want to be the president of the United States,’ (if you are a American Citizen) ’The number one man of the world.’
Okay, but do you know that the head of states gets one-sixth of the karma of all the people in the Country? Would you want to be the head of the States?’
‘What do you mean by do you want to get the karma?’
It means that everything that the citizens have done which is not okay, you get one-sixth of the karma for it. And if they do something right, then you also get one-sixth of that karma. You want to gamble if the citizens are doing the right things or the wrong things?
There are laws that govern this world. Don’t we experience the law of gravity? So we may say that we want to be free but can we be? No, I can only jump so high because I am limited by the laws of nature. I can only see so far. I can only hear certain tones and so on.
This law of karma is also there. So, in this way it’s not so easy to be free. Externally, I don’t know if we can make ourselves free. Everyday you have to eat. Just think about it, if we didn’t have to eat, then maybe we wouldn’t have to work. Every morning people go to work. One concern is:
‘You got to eat, you know. You’ll get hungry.’
So the first problem is that we have to eat, so we are not free. We can’t just do as we like. We are always thinking:
’Do I have to do these things?’
We have so many needs, so we are not free and that is the first point on a physical plane. On a mental plane we are also not free because as some band used to sing:
‘You can’t always get what you want.’
And that is true. If I was free then I would get everything I want, and if I don’t get everything that I want (or none at all), then I would not feel very free. So freedom on the level of the body or mind is very difficult to achieve.
But we can be free – we can be like a lotus on water, but first we have to understand the purpose of the whole universe, and we have to also understand the purpose of what our role is in the whole blueprint of the universe. So that basically is what the Bhagavad-Gita is saying, which is:
‘The world has a divine purpose. It has a purpose that all living beings become uplifted – uplift their consciousness – grow and become greater and reach a divine state of consciousness. And in that divine state of consciousness they themselves are always situated in happiness and all their actions are aiming to include the happiness of all others.’
So just think about that. That is something profound!