Radhanath Swami defines compassion, gratitude, contentment and determination
Compassion
Great souls feel compassion for the suffering of living beings. They do not see anything in an impersonal way. To the degree we love God, to that degree we’ve a spirit of compassion to greater expanse of all living beings. Some people are compassionate to their family. If you expand that love more, then it may extend to your relatives or to your community, or to your nation or to humanity. But as your love expands, it extends to every living being. The greater the love, the greater it is expanding to more and more of God’s children. And when you actually love God then you have love for every living entity because you see every one as part and parcel of God and the pain of any living being affects your heart. That is compassion, and if the great souls did not have that compassion, they would have no business of coming to this world of birth and death.
Gratitude
Gratitude is to seek beyond the immediate circumstances that come upon us, and to actually seek the essence of that situation. To seek the essence is real wisdom, and the essence of every situation is that we can feel and find a beautiful opportunity to grow if we are grateful: Grateful for success and failure, honour and dishonour, happiness and distress, health and disease, victory and defeat, heat and cold, pleasure and pain. And ultimately, in every situation, is the opportunity to take shelter of the higher power of God. It is in that taking shelter that we find that life has inconceivable treasures at every moment. To seek the essence, to look for the hand of God in every situation — this is the actual definition of success from a spiritual perspective.
love Gives, Greed takes
People are passing out of colleges with all sorts of big, wonderful, fancy degrees, but they are greedy. They use all of their big education simply to fulfill their greed. Their greed is never satisfied; they are frustrated and make a mess out of society. Is that what we wantIJ
Our consciousness by nature is eternal, full of knowledge and full of joy. In a real joyful state based on truth, there can be no greed. Real joy and love only wants to share themselves with everyone else. The nature of love is to give; the nature of greed is to take. The real pleasure is in giving the love of our hearts. That love is already in our hearts. But our consciousness is impure. We are not aware of who we are. Through the process of purification, our consciousness becomes clear; it becomes transparent. Through the transparent consciousness, we can experience God at every moment. And when you perceive that God at every moment, you realise, not that your feel, or you believe or you think, but you realise that whether someone calls that God Allah or Jehovah or Krishna or Rama or Buddha — God is the supreme object of love and the source of all that exists.
Finding Contentment
People are discontent. Because of this discontentedness, there is no peace in the world. The scientists and the technologists are thinking, ‘If only we can make a very, very luxurious type of lifestyle, then everyone will be content’. Now we have our big skyscrapers and people are jumping off to commit suicide. We have our big, big airplanes and the terrorists are putting bombs in them. We have our rocket ships and they are exploding in mid-air. We are spending billions of rupees of taxpayers’ money for whatIJ looking for some contentment, some peace in life. Who has found itIJ Show me one person. You could show me someone who says, ‘Yes, I’m very happy.’ But bring them the next day when circumstances change and they lose what brings them happiness. What thenIJ Things change.We are not against modern technology. We are against the mentality that is motivating it, which is greed and discontent. Human life is meant for the ultimate pleasure, the ultimate contentment, and the ultimate realisation of love of God. Without self-realisation, a human being is miserable and unfortunate.
Time creates change
Time creates change. So what is really happening under the influence of time is not death, it’s change. The soul is not dying. The bodies, they don’t die, they cease to exist. They are just transformed. Ashes, when ashes gets transformed into something else, becomes dust, goes into the earth. So really what time does is create change.We want to change, we want to transform from material consciousness to spiritual consciousness and into deeper and deeper states of spiritual consciousness.
Determination
The story is given of a sparrow who laid her eggs on a beach. Unfortunately, the ocean stole away her eggs. She vowed, “Ocean! If you don’t return my eggs I am going to dry you up.” The ocean simply roared back. So she began taking one drop at a time in her tiny beak and carried it to a distant place. Do you think it was a threat to the oceanIJ But she was determined against all odds, and that determination attracted the higher power of Garuda, the gigantic bird carrier of lord Vishnu. He ordered the ocean to return her eggs, and thus the mighty ocean was defeated.
Right now the eggs of our God consciousness — humility, devotion and love of God — are utterly drowned in the bottom of this huge ocean of pride, egoism and spiritual lethargy. like the mother sparrow, we have no hope of getting rid of them. But if with determination of that little bird, we decide, ‘I am going to do it no matter what,’ then God will take the job upon himself. He will deliver our souls from this ocean of ignorance, pride, egoism and laziness.
Seeing God’s love in Suffering
When a parent sees a child has potential for a bright future but that child is wasting his future away, by even jeopardising his whole life in engaging in mischievous, criminal, lethargic activities, then what does the parent doIJ That parent tells the child, ‘Don’t do this, do this. Sometimes the parents take away things that the child wants: Take away cigarettes, take away the friendship of people taking drugs and alcohol.
Now to the child this is the punishment, it is cruel, but to a sane person it is love. Similarly, the sufferings of this world are actually the acts of love of God to teach us a good lesson about what we are supposed to do and how we are supposed to do, so that we can receive the transcendental gift of love of God in later part of life. It is our rightful inheritance.
The writer is an ISKCON spiritual guru