(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 30 June 2012, Cape Town, South Africa, Bhagavad-gita Chapter 5)
Question: I was just thinking of how we could treat everyone as friends. Maybe we should not be thinking of our own Krsna consciousness and that other people should just go their own way while we are trying to grow spiritually. We try to see everyone on the same path, trying to grow externally.
Yeah, it says something like that in the Bhagavad-gita (5.18) ‘paṇḍitāḥ sama-darśinaḥ. One should see all as equal. One should see all living beings as souls, no matter what body they have. But we have the tendency to see others as different, and made these differences. We only stick to our own kind, you know what I mean!? Only people with glasses are okay and all the other people who don’t have glasses are strange, sorry! And the other way round. We can fall into that mood but actually people with glasses, once used to be people without glasses! So we get so caught up in the externals and then we make all these separations between people and as a result… this one doesn’t talk to that one… this one doesn’t trust this one.
But the root of all this is fear. Well he is like me so maybe he is okay and we can be together. But then, the others, they look different so we are not sure if they are okay.
The division in the world is based on fear and now of course, there are reasons to fear because there is violence; a lot of violence. So if the Bhagavad-gita would enter into the educational system, then maybe many people would start asking, What am I doing? So that is why we want to put the Bhagavad-gita out there with deep reflections.
