Q and A with Srila B.R. Sridhara Goswami
Student: How will a person be able to read the universal wave when his mind is fully engrossed with local interest of different kinds? How can one detect the universal interest, the universal wave?
Srila Sridhara Maharaja: Only one who has fully eliminated all kinds of local interest and is eager to understand the universal wave, he can see it clearly. Athesv abhijnah svarat: what is the purpose of the movement of this world? The answer is clear – it is for Itself. Reality is for itself – not to satisfy many but to satisfy one.
All the waves are meant to satisfy that One, and if we can put ourselves on that level we can understand the truth; otherwise not – in which case, we engage in thievery. We are far from the truth when we cannot see that everything – all waves are flowing towards the satisfaction of the One –svayam-bhagavan. We are laboring under a deception, we are deceivers who are not just deceiving ourselves but the world as well. Everyone, all the baddha-jivas are more or less cheaters.
That is our position and we must be relieved of such misunderstanding, self-deception and environmental cheating if we are to be placed in our proper position. Thereafter we may go there and find that universal wave – actually see it – have darsana. Darsana means to see; but how to see? That must be learned. What to see? How to read what is going on within myself and outside myself? That is proper understanding – proper education. A proper understanding of one’s own self as well as the environment is proper education. That education must be Vedic. The standard must be drawn from outside this area of maya – this area of misunderstanding; the standard must be drawn from the perfect realm through Veda – revealed truth.
We must accept revealed truth and bid farewell to so-called scientific knowledge and other kinds of perceptions that are all erroneous – based on false experience and false information. It belongs to me; it belongs to him; it belongs to them. This calculation is all false. We have to get wholesale relief from this mania!
And what’s more, we must not only get relief from this misconception, from misunderstanding the external waves, but we must attain a positive position – to learn to understand the wave, the vibration of Goloka. Goloka is the most universal, most fundamental plane. If we can harmonize ourselves with that plane, we will be led to Vrindavana or Navadvipa and there, we shall see things as they are.
