Cultivating spiritual relationships and transcending fear
Krsna is never alone. When we think about Krsna, this means we think about all his devotees and associates, including the devotees we are connected in this life.
In material life, we always have fear. We have fear of death, we have fear of losing people we love. The reason we have fear is that we live in a temporary situation. Even the strongest and most powerful person can die from one moment to the next, without any warning. It is just like a continuous game of russian roulette, where every moment can be the last. The soul is eternal by nature, and thus we hanker for an eternal position where we don’t need to part from the people and things that are dear to us, but because we can’t find it in this world, we live in anxiety of losing what we have and not attaining what we desire.
We can see that in the beginning of the Bhagavad-gītā, Arjuna experienced fear due to the possibility of losing his relatives or losing his own life. This is exactly the situation most of us live in. Some become paralyzed by this fear, developing different types of mental issues, while most prefer to just forget, living their lives without considering what may come next. Unconsciously, they understand everyone dies, but they prefer to just live in the present, hoping that somehow death will never come. However, death doesn’t forget anyone, and one still has to deal with the death of dear ones, and with one’s own death; the only difference is that we don’t prepare for it, wasting our human life in material pursuits instead of solving the real problems of life.
How can we prepare? The only way of really preparing for death is by practicing devotional service and becoming conscious of our eternal identity independent from the body. Everything else is just coping. We can see that in the Gītā, Krsna goes on this path, immediately bringing Arjuna to this platform of understanding, before giving him other instructions:
“While speaking learned words, you are mourning for what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament neither for the living nor for the dead. Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be. As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.”
Connected with this knowledge of not being the body comes the realization that no one kills and no one dies, that Krsna hints at in text 2.19:
“Neither he who thinks the living entity the slayer nor he who thinks it slain is in knowledge, for the self slays not nor is slain.”
The whole material life is based on the misunderstanding that we are these bodies. Therefore, in illusion, I may think I’m killing someone, or that someone is being killed, but this is a false concept, since the soul never does, and the body is never alive. Considering these two points, how can someone be killed?
However, even though we may intellectually understand we are the soul, this doesn’t immediately solve the problem of fear and lamentation, because even though we may understand that our relatives assume new bodies after passing away, we don’t want them in other forms we have no contact with; we want them here, in the forms we are attached to. Similarly, one may not be very happy with the idea of assuming a new body after death, preferring to maintain the body he has now, in the environment he is habituated to live in.
Krsna brings us to this path gradually through the Bhagavad-gītā, starting with the explanations about the path of karma-yoga, the first step in re-establishing our connection with Krsna. Once we start to develop a loving connection with Krsna, we start to build our relationships with other devotees around this eternal relationship, and these relationships also become eternal. Different from relationships between materialists, which are based on the body and end with death, relationships between devotees are based on their eternal identities as souls, centered around their relationships with Krsna, and that’s what makes them eternal. We may not know what identities we will have in the spiritual world, but as long as we understand we are eternal servants of Krsna, it is already possible to develop spiritual relationships based on the understanding of this eternal identity.
Attachment is present in both spiritual and material relationships. The difference is that in material relationships, attachment is directed to the body, and to the material happiness it can give us, while in spiritual relationships, the attachment is properly connected with our service to Krsna, and thus transcends the change of body.
Krsna is never alone. When we think about Krsna, this means we think about all his devotees and associates, including the devotees we are connected in this life. In a higher stage, it includes everyone, since everyone is eternally connected with Krsna. Even relationships with non-devotees can be made transcendental when we see them as eternal servants of Krsna and try to remind them of their original Krsna Consciousness.
The secret is thus to transfer our attachment from the morbid fixture with the body to our eternal connection with Krsna and our common service to Him. When we do that, we see there is nothing to lament or fear, because our eternal identities are much better than our current conditioned situation.
Can you imagine how much we will laugh when we meet in the spiritual world and remember all the nonsense we were doing here? What about meeting all the devotees we quarreled with in this life, now in their spiritual bodies, free from all traces of false ego? If we can get together even now, with so many contaminations, how pleasant it will be to interact without all these contaminations in the spiritual world.
We will not have to wait much, because the difference in the way time works in the material and spiritual world makes any amount of time here look like just a moment there. As soon as we go back, everyone we know will be there too.
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