(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 2 February 2020, London, United Kingdom, Bhagavad Gita 9.22)
We have information on the surface – Google. But if you get information from the Guru instead of Google, you go much deeper. Prabhupada was walking on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, and he was asking his disciples, “Why is the ocean so peaceful?” It is one of those questions, why is it so peaceful? Prabhupada then responded himself, “Because it is very deep.” So, if we go deep, we can become peaceful. If we live on the surface, that means we are dealing with things with the external energy, and our mind goes into the things and the things go into our mind and we get preoccupied with all of them and carry them around in our consciousness. If we would however instead search for the cause of things, for the cause for all the phenomena, for the cause of the phenomenal world, then we will come to Krsna. And that cause is very interesting because it is not an impersonal cause.
There are so many impersonal forces in this world which cause anxiety. For instance, there are these black holes in the universe and they eat matter, they suck it up and they are everywhere. So, all these things – so much anxiety out there. When I was a kid, there was a television series called “Twilight Zone”, and this was a spooky show. One time, it showed how these extra-terrestrial beings landed on Earth and they were very intelligent. They had very high heads and as a result, had a lot of brain, but they were very friendly and they came to Earth with good intentions. They were kind to humanity and they helped in so many ways. They brought medical knowledge and other goodness to humanity. So, everyone was happy and then they invited people to come on board of their spaceship and it was a huge thing, a huge dome and they would get an excursion to their planet. People signed up and they were ready to go. It was really good and they were going and they got nice cabins and all. Then, one man who was actually a scientist said that he wanted to go. As a scientist, his specialty was decoding texts somehow or other and that was what he was doing. He discovered some old unknown text on board the spaceship, and he tried to decipher it. After one point after the spaceship had taken off, he was locked in his cabin and the door was locked. Then after a while, some food came through a little opening in the wall and then the door closed again. Anyway, he was deciphering that book and eventually after hours, he figured it out. It was a cook book, and it had recipes of how to cook human beings!
Anyway, so because these creatures had so much more intelligence than human beings, they saw human beings as sort of lower creatures and therefore there was ethically nothing wrong with eating them – that was their philosophy. Anyway, as a kid, these things spooked me out for a long time. I was looking up at the sky and even my father could not calm me down. Because I basically said, “Give me one argument why it could not be true? This could be true!” And he said, “Well, it could be true but it is not likely that it is true.” And I said, “But you said it could be true!” Then I looked up at the sky again in anxiety because I did not know what was out there, and I knew that my father did not know what was out there. And this was the cause of my anxiety because not even the scientists knew what was out there. So, in this way, we live in a world which is unknown to us. It is a world of anxiety because we are limited in many ways and anything can come out at us at any moment out of anywhere. So, it is best to simply focus on the cause of all instead, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krsna!