Bhagavan Sri Krishna – The Divine Perfection : 4. Swami Krishnananda

31/01/2019
(Spoken on Sri Krishna Janmashtami, August 25, 1978)

4.
This agony can be stated to be a restlessness of the spirit in ourselves. It is not a call from the body or mind merely; it is not the call of outer life merely, but a call of the total that we really are. And this totality is not confined merely to our individual personalities; there is an individual totality. For example, we are totals in ourselves, each person is complete in himself or herself, but we are satisfied with being ourselves alone. We have a social sense which keeps us being head-on into contact with other persons and things in life so that we are not satisfied with our own individuality. This is because the perfection that we are, the completeness that our individuality is, is not a real completeness. It is a segmentation of a larger perfection, as it were, to which we are obliged to move.

This is why in spite of individual perfection, academic qualification to the top level, even possession of material wealth, everything that is accessible to human beings, notwithstanding the possession of everything for oneself, one feels restless. There is everything that one can think of – a bungalow to live in and things to sustain oneself physically and socially, prestige in life and what not – but there is insecurity left on account of some lacuna in this so-called perfection of a comfortable and secure life in the outer pattern of our existence. This is why we try to go to realms which we have not reached yet. We go to the moon, we try to go to Mars, we try to explore higher realms in the astronomical universe so that we might come into possession of more and more of things under the impression that our present imperfections would be made good.

But this is a futile attempt. Just as a bungalow cannot make a man happy, a hundred houses, millions of dollars, and even the possession of all the planets will not make us happy. If all the planets are to be under our control, we will be as miserable as a person who has a hundred bungalows under his control or millions of dollars in his pocket. It is, therefore, a sheer ignorance and a stupidity on the part of the human being to imagine that perfection is going to be achieved by running to the other planets. It is something like going to another village, another town, another country. If that has not satisfied us, this project is also not going to satisfy us. It is only an extension of this little activity of moving from one physical realm to another physical realm.

All this is an indication that we have not become properly awakened to the fact of what we actually need. We are running after phantasms and mirages which promise satisfaction to the ignorant longing of the untutored mind of the individual, a perfection which plays hide and seek, by which it never keeps us in peace and also never allows us to come in contact with it. We are tantalised by this sense of perfection in us. This tantalising mirage of perfection is what keeps us hoping and expecting certain satisfactions and perfections of which we have no knowledge today.

To be continued ...