Sharanagati

(continues from the previous issue)

Krishnais very personal. He is just like you, like humans. He likes natural heart-to-heart connections. Not only official prayers: “You are the greatest!” but He likes personal prayers: “Hey, my friend, may I steal your laddu[1]?” But in order to help these intimate feelings to manifest He has to hide Himself. We cannot play football with God, right?! But we can play football with our friend. Therefore He hides Himself in a divine way also. He is ready to give up He’s being God. And we can say that He is ready to become just like humans. And the opposite of this human distortion that “I am God”, the top of the spiritual essence is that He is ready to show Himself as human. This is His divine illusion that He thinks: “Ah, I am a cowherd boy.” When He forgets about Himself being God Supreme and acts as a simple human being. This is the function of yoga-maya – to cover the majesty in order to improve rasa. Is that picture true? It is not really true, because still He is God, but He is ready to come out of His position to come closer to you. There is distortion in that higher picture also, but that is sweet distortion. While the maha-maya picture is bitter. So, yoga-maya will give you knowledge. It will help us to realize the Supreme – therefore we can consider it a connecting energy. While maha-maya brings you the forgetfulness, it brings illusion, it brings lack of faith. The first one brings vidya, knowledge; this one brings avidya, ignorance.

And how to get rid of this illusion, how to get rid of this avidya? How to come out of the darkness? With some meditation on light. “From darkness lead me to light.” From the material darkness you can escape by material light. But from the spiritual darkness you can escape by divine light.

So, now Krishnais describing the picture in which setup we should understand that He is Supreme, right? This is the topic for the second verse. And basically He is describing illusion – “everything that seems to be not connected with Me, that is illusion. That is not true that anything is independent ofMe. If you think that you are independent of Me, that is not true. Your thought is there, in that sense it is real, but it is not true.”

Just like the expression “The earth has two moons.” Is that true? It is not true. Still this expression exists? It exists, because we had told it: “The earth has two moons.” So the idea exists, but it is not true. This is illusion. The idea exists, it is real, but is not true.

Yamuna: But in a poetic way it can be true. If we are at the shore of a lake and we look at the reflection of the moon…

Tirtha Maharaj: All right, all right! From that romantic poetry let us come back to philosophy. Or “the son of a barren woman”. The expression exists, but it is not true. So this is how to understand the functioning of illusion – it exists, but it is not true. This is a reflection, a limited truth, so to say. Truth in that sense that it exists, but it is not real. Therefore Aristotle says: “We can say that if something does not exist, it exists as nonexistent.” Do you follow? It seems to be a little trick of the brain, but it is not, because it also proves – existence exists. And this is very important, because it shows that life comes from life, that existence comes from existence. The whole world comes from something, not from nothing. Because if it would have come from nothing, it would return to nothing. If you come from zero, you will go back to zero. But if the impulse comes from God, then this whole thing will return to Him.

Meanwhile there is this phase of vyakta, manifest phase, which is illusory, sorry, it is not real. Therefore we have to remove this veil of illusion.