Darshan with Swami Krishnananda during 1996

by Swami Krishnananda

32. Unconditional Love

(Darshan given on May 10th, 1996.)

A visitor: This love that just keeps spilling out and overflowing, how can it be limited in any way? And how can any kind of conditions be put on it?

Swamiji: If you want to put conditions, you can, but if you don't want to put conditions, it need not be conditioned. It depends upon your will. If you want to love only certain things and not all things, it is conditioned love; but if you can love everything equally, that is unconditional love. It is up to you to decide.

Visitor: I go with unconditional love.

Swamiji: Think over it properly. Can you love God and the devil equally?

Visitor: There is no devil.

Swamiji: The very idea that you are existing is contrary to the Ultimate Reality. Who told you that you are existing separately? That itself is the beginning of the problem. You may not call it the devil, but it is something contrary to God's existence. You are not thinking that only one thing exists. You are also thinking that you are existing, and you are making a statement about something else; that creates duality. When you speak, you are not speaking about yourself, you are speaking about something. That 'something' and yourself creates a duality.

We have to be very cautious in the conducting of our thoughts. At different times, we feel different things. At different stages of evolution, we have different types of experience. Sometimes we feel everything can be done by us, that we don't require anybody's help. Sometimes we feel that nothing can be done by us, that everything is spontaneously taking place. Both these feelings will arise in our mind at different times.

There are people who sometimes feel that everything is hopeless, that we can't do anything in this world. That dejected despondency can also arise in certain conditions of mind. It is not that everybody will feel like that. There are conditions, circumstances, which may create such feelings. Those who have lost everything – all relations have died, their own life is at stake – what do they feel at that time? You ask that person. They will feel something else. They will not even believe that there is such a thing called justice in the world. Though they may not be right in thinking like that, the tragedy in which they are placed will make them feel like that. They curse God Himself: “Such a God exists that everything has gone from me, and I myself am not secure.”

Does God exist? Draupadi in the Mahabharata puts such questions. I don't know if you know Draupadi's story. The Mahabharata is an interesting epic of India. She cursed God Himself. “I don't know whether such a God exists who has put us in this tragedy,” she said. That is the condition where the mind breaks, and cannot tolerate the experiences through which it is passing. There are experiences which are intolerable, and many people pass through it.

Everybody is not born with a silver spoon in the mouth. There are different experiences which anyone can expect. Great kings have been pounded to dust, empires have become one with the earth. Great potentates who ruled the earth, and thought that they were masters of all things, have gone into thin air. Why do things happen like that? Is it not a tragedy?

People cannot swallow all these things. They don't know what is happening. Then war takes place, and nobody knows what will happen as a consequence. Who goes? Who comes? Nobody knows. Now, who is doing all this?

Only a person who is involved in it will know what feeling will arise at that time. You must be in the thick of a tragic war, and then you will see what you feel at that time. When you are far away from it, your thought is different.

Suppose a person is a prisoner of war and is thrown in a concentration camp. What will he feel at that time? Will he believe in God at that time? He may or may not. It shows the conditions through which the mind has to pass, and it cannot swallow every condition. Certain things it can swallow, certain things it cannot; it breaks.

It is a very great thing for a person to expect anything in the world; even the worst you have to expect, so that when it comes you are not surprised. You should not say, “Oh, this I never expected.” There is nothing which you cannot expect, even the worst hell itself; let it come. Even that you are expecting. Because you are expecting it already, you can face it. But if it comes as a surprise, then you don't know how to handle it.

As we are not omniscient, as our personality is not connected to every event in the whole cosmos, we cannot know what will happen at what time. The reason is, we are outside the operating medium.

We many a time feel that certain things should happen; also, simultaneously, we feel that certain things should not happen. Now we have got dual feelings there, also. Why should we say that certain things should not happen? We have created a duality in creation itself, because those things which we do not want to happen are unpalatable, and even destructive to our egoistic personality, our individuality, our so-called dear body and mind. There are things which are contrary to its welfare, and they are called bad things, and those which are contributory to its welfare, we call good things. So, our idea of good and bad is connected with our personality's reception of it – how we receive it.

All people cannot happily pass through the various tests which perhaps God will inflict upon us one day or the other, as a punishment to the ego, which is asserting itself. Our ego is the demon. It is the Lucifer, if at all there is any such thing as that. The affirmation of individuality is a Lucifer, and God has thrown him down, upside down, with head down and legs up; that is how we are seeing – upside down. We see the outside as inside, inside as outside. This is what has happened to every one of us.

The world is not outside us; yet, we are seeing it as outside. This is the punishment that is meted out to us by God: “You will see everything topsy-turvy, you fellows, because you have asserted yourself as independent of Me. Go! I will put a flaming sword in heaven, so that you cannot enter.” These stories in the Bible are not mere jokes; they are all symbolic.

Another visitor: After passing away and leaving the physical body. . .

Swamiji: You will be reborn – take another birth – to fulfil all the desires.

Visitor: Do you only go to the so-called astral plane, or it depends upon the individual?

Swamiji: The mind, which is the psyche, which dissociates itself from the physical body at the time of death, creates around itself an atmosphere of physicality by intensely thinking the desires that it could not fulfil in the previous birth. Rebirth is nothing but the condensation of thought and the manufacture by the mind of an instrument suitable for the purpose of fulfilling only those desires which it could not fulfil in the previous incarnation, which is the body.

Only one set of desires can be fulfilled through that newly formed body, not all the desires. So again, when it finds that body is inadequate for the fulfilment of other desires, the body is cast off. Again it takes another birth for the fulfilment of another set of desires. Desires being endless, this series will not end until enlightenment takes place.

This psyche, this mind, this consciousness of individuality realises its folly in thinking in this manner, and unites itself with nature and the Cosmic Being, God Almighty. Until that time, this process will go on. Then, there is no rebirth afterwards. When you identify yourself with the Cosmic Existence, rebirth stops. There is no further birth.