“O scion of Bharata [Arjuna], O conquerer of the foe, all living entities are born into delusion, overcome by the dualities of desire and hate.” (Lord Krishna, Bhagavad-gita, 7.27)

Download as podcast episode (right click and save)

इच्छाद्वेषसमुत्थेन द्वन्द्वमोहेन भारत
सर्वभूतानि संमोहं सर्गे यान्ति परन्तप

icchādveṣasamutthena dvandvamohena bhārata
sarvabhūtāni saṃmohaṃ sarge yānti parantapa

“Pardon me for the confusion, but I sometimes get the miseries mixed up. There are the three sources of misery, I believe. From the heavens. From other living beings. From within. Then there are also the four miseries of life. Is that right? So many miseries to go around. After a while, I think I have had enough. I get it. This world is a horrible place. You don’t have to convince me.

“In all seriousness, I think the four miseries, which are often repeated by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, are birth, old age, disease, and death. Three within the list make total sense. Who wants disease? Otherwise sane and rational people suddenly hide out in their homes for months at a time, at the slightest hint of a respiratory illness going around, with which they are not familiar. Old age? I hear people complain about that all the time. The aches and pains. The memory loss. The trouble with digestion. Of course, there is death, which is the final end. It appears to almost always be painful.

“I think I struggle with the first misery, though. Why is birth considered a misery? Why does it have equal standing within the list? Try explaining this to parents expecting their first child. They are excited. They are happy. They want the family to expand. I believe that is one literal translation for the Sanskrit word strī, which refers to a woman. Strī expands; they bring new life into this world. How, then, can that expansion be considered a misery?”

“And as far as disease and old age are concerned, everyone gets practical experience. No one wants to be diseased, and no one wants to become old, but there is no avoiding these. Unless we have a pessimistic view of this material life, considering the distresses of birth, death, old age and disease, there is no impetus for our making advancement in spiritual life.” (Shrila Prabhupada, Bhagavad-gita, 13.8-12 Purport)

To assist in our understanding, we take a hypothetical situation of a father running a business. It is new to the family. It is a business he personally started, and now he hopes for the next generation to take it over. The children are individuals, and so they each have their own ambitions in life. One child is particularly fond of pleasing the father. After much encouragement, bordering on threats, this child decides to join the business. It is only for a summer, during a break from college.

Each day is different. One day, the child has a good time. They learn about prices. They learn about inventory. They like that there is a purpose to the day. They have some responsibility. They can see the relationship between individual choices and the subsequent reflection on the bottom line.

On another day, there is struggle. The child witnesses what appears to be a verbal altercation. The father is battling against one of the vendors. The squabble is over pennies, but the father later explains that it is these pennies which later add up to thousands of dollars. That could be the difference between earning a profit and going out of business.

The ups and downs continue. The child is sometimes happy. They are sometimes sad. At the end of the experience, they wonder what they have really gained. Life goes on. The happiness did not last. The arguments were horrible to experience, but then that is the nature of business. The child wonders why anyone would volunteer for such an ordeal.

We take this same experience and extrapolate over an entire lifetime. Stretch across an entire region, applying to each individual within a larger population. Expand it further still, to the people of the past and those who will appear in the future. Birth is the catalyst; it is the initial cause of the variety in experiences.

In other words, birth is a misery because it introduces duality. High and low. Winning and losing. Up and down. Profit and loss. Male and female. Intelligence and simplicity. Based on the likes and dislikes, we have the duality of friend and enemy.

At this point someone may argue that there is nothing special to identifying duality. That is how the world works, after all. How can birth be considered a misery when everyone has to endure it? This viewpoint is due to ignorance of a higher way of living. That higher mode has a corresponding realm, which is known as akshara. It is avyakta at the moment; we cannot see it, but it certainly exists.

स यदानुव्रतः पुंसां
पशु-बुद्धिर् विभिद्यते
अन्य एष तथान्यो ’हम्
इति भेद-गतासती

sa yadānuvrataḥ puṁsāṁ
paśu-buddhir vibhidyate
anya eṣa tathānyo ’ham
iti bheda-gatāsatī

“When the Supreme Personality of Godhead is pleased with the living entity because of his devotional service, one becomes a pandita and does not make distinctions between enemies, friends and himself. Intelligently, he then thinks, ‘Every one of us is an eternal servant of God, and therefore we are not different from one another.’” (Prahlada Maharaja, Shrimad Bhagavatam, 7.5.12)

Someone like Prahlada Maharaja does not draw distinctions between friend and enemy precisely because he is in that higher mode of living. He is not subject to duality because of his connection to transcendence. That is the only way to overcome all the miseries, including birth. Otherwise, as Shri Krishna describes in Bhagavad-gita, the souls in this world are struggling with the senses, which include the mind. They fall into the trap of assigning highest priority to search for attraction, when aversion is a natural byproduct of that attraction.

Interestingly, birth loses its status within the misery category when there is association with transcendence. From this, we can deduce that the meaning of life is not just religion, but elevation to a higher way of living. Mahatmas like Prahlada show the way. They are under the protection of the divine energy, since they have tossed aside duality in favor of constant consciousness of the highest reality, who is the Supreme Lord.

महात्मानस् तु मां पार्थ
दैवीं प्रकृतिम् आश्रिताः
भजन्त्य् अनन्य-मनसो
ज्ञात्वा भूतादिम् अव्ययम्

mahātmānas tu māṁ pārtha
daivīṁ prakṛtim āśritāḥ
bhajanty ananya-manaso
jñātvā bhūtādim avyayam

“O son of Pritha, those who are not deluded, the great souls, are under the protection of the divine nature. They are fully engaged in devotional service because they know Me as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, original and inexhaustible.” (Lord Krishna, Bhagavad-gita, 9.13)

In Closing:

The many conditions consider,
How birth originally to deliver.

As friend or an enemy to call,
On happiness or distress to fall.

Duality from beginning to end,
Miseries for many lives to extend.

Transcendence immediately the way out,
Shown in Prahlada, above and devout.

Categories: questions

Tags: dailyprompt, hare krishna, life, poem, poems, poetry