The Lure Of The Negative

Ravana,powerful king of Lanka and a great warrior,caused his own downfall owing to his extreme arrogance.Duryodhana,another mighty king of Hastinapur,ultimately had to perish in the battlefield of Kurukshetra as a result of greed and jealousy.King Bali was exiled to the netherworld by Vishnu in his avatar as a dwarf,Vamana,all because of the kings untrammelled charity.

The characters mentioned above were no ordinary people,still they were overwhelmed by the captivating passion of their respective characters so much so that they failed to retract themselves even on repeated good advice.It is surprising that though charity is not known to be a negative quality,its excessive practice perhaps begets a suppressed ego in the mind,which is responsible for ones downfall.

Why do we let ourselves get lured by the negative If we look at the physical world,we find that negativity is present ordered things have shown the natural tendency to become disordered sooner or later.For example,a delectable snowcapped mountain melts spontaneously to bare its black rocky surface.A beautiful palace in course of time gets reduced to a heap of rubble.Theres entropy;theres chaos in the universe.

According to scientists,even the elegantly ordered universe will some time or other die,though it is likely to happen only in the distant future.The entire workable energy of the universe is gradually but decisively being wasted to a degraded form of energy or negative energy,a thermodynamic consequence.Thus,the very system of nature is so programmed that it is invariably destined to follow the path of negativity that is,towards total chaos in course of time.

It is interesting to see that the human mind which is considered to be the most ordered and conscious system in the world is not left untouched by the negative effect of nature.Negativity is all-pervasive,it seems.

In the Bhagavad Gita,Lord Krishna says that there are trigunas or three primordial qualities of nature,namely,sattva,rajo and tama gunas,and the human mind is greatly influenced by their effect.However,the impact of these gunas on mind is altogether different.Of the three,greed,anger and ego are the direct fallout of rajoguna which is also mentioned as ragatmaka.According to Shankaracharya,the connotation of ragatmaka is that rajoguna,unlike the other two,is prone to colour everything that it comes in contact with.Then it becomes virtually impossible for the doer to detach himself from the mirage-like negativity.Because of the entropy factor,the destiny of the material world is perhaps fixed as the latter has no inherent power to resist the destruction,whereas this can not be predicted with certainty in the case of human mind vis-a-vis rajoguna.The uncertainty marks the difference between the two worlds indicating that there is still hope for human beings to continue to evolve to higher states of consciousness.This is made possible because of the combined presence of will power and divinity within all human beings.And this is cultivated with sadhana or meditation with the guidance of an enlightened guru.

Meaning of the Mantra

Once someone asked about the meaning of the holy names and Srila Prabhupada said its like a prayer to Krsna saying "Oh Lord please engage me in your devotional service". This is so powerful and if we think of the meaning of these words we may understand that means surrender, means we are thinking of the Lord and not in our own sense gratification, our own material desires and personal needs - we are thinking of how we could improve our service in order to satisfy the Lord, also we are accepting more and more service to His lotus feet.
We sometimes maybe offer to Krsna many prayers but we need to mean them, to really make them with our hearts and engage our senses on that too. Here is a prayer asking for service from the Sri Sanatkumar Samhita:


"O Sri Sri Radha-Krishna, you are like two great oceans of mercy. Please be merciful to me. I take shelter of you. I surrender to you. Please engage me, a sinner and offender, in your service."

Sri Sanatkumar Samhita 5

Chanting is a great service, when we chant we invite Krsna and Radha to our hearts and offer Them our service, our senses, our time, our voice and our love so They can take care of our whole life and engage us like They want to. This means we are surrended and we have complete faith the Lord will be there for us, to protect us any time in any situation we are in and we accept anything They give us. When we achieve this stage of complete faith we may understand our position as eternal servants and advance to pure chanting as our goal of life.

I pray so I can be blessed by the vaisnavas to be able to achieve this level and through strong faith I maybe serve the Lord much better than I do now.


In this material world the conditioned soul is very much distracted from his original all-knowing, all-blissful nature as Krishna's eternal servant because he is carried away by the so-called taste of material sense gratification. This artificial taste is encouraged and exploited by the materialistic propaganda mongers who make a handsome profit by misguiding the people in general promoting cigarettes, liquor, prostitution, meat eating, etc. The foolish sense enjoyer tries to become happy by squeezing as much pleasure as possible out of these things, but because there is no factual pleasure in sense gratification, the poor soul is ultimately left in a state of frustration and bewilderment. If, however, he will reconnect with his original transcendental nature diving deep into his eternal identity as the servant of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, he will taste a pleasure that is unlimitedly sublime and will go on increasing forever.
Chant:
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare