Recently, during a Bhagavatam class at Bhakti Center, a devotee asked a nice question that I tried to answer. My answer was well-received by many devotees. So I thought of putting it here.
Question: Krishna’s pastimes are given to us to maintain the eternal path of religion. But it is also true that Krishna’s pastimes are very sweet and funny. How to synthesize the serious notion of maintenance of the eternal path of religion and the sweetness of His pastimes. Is the serious notion necessary to understand and get deeper faith in Krishna’s pastimes? What is the best way to hear about Krishna’s pastimes?
Answer: In my humble understanding, as humans, we operate with two very important faculties in our lives. One is rational and the other is emotional. In one sense, they can be connected, but they’re often separate. The proportions of how much each faculty impacts a person in their life will be different in different people, circumstances etc., but both faculties do exist simultaneously.
Krishna is our original maintainer (eko bahunam yo vidadhati kaman). He does various things to maintain us. Through the revealed scriptures, He maintains our rational faculty by bestowing upon us the knowledge of tattva or philosophy and He maintains our emotional faculties by giving us his sweet and nectarine pastimes full of loving exchanges (lila). He sometimes does both through pastimes that are attractive to our hearts and appealing to our minds at the same time.
That being said, the purpose of all philosophy and pastimes is to raise our consciousness to the spiritual realm, where we transcend our limited material reasoning and emotion to spiritual reasoning and emotion. Spiritual reasoning and emotions revolve around only one thing: pure selfless love for Krishna and how that love can be enhanced more and more.
That said, for us as practicing devotees, both the serious notion of maintenance of religion and the sweet Krishna’s pastimes are important. Too much focus on philosophy can potentially make one hard-hearted and/or speculative whereas too much focus on the esoteric aspects of lila can put one into a sahajiya-like mentality.
From my seniors, I have heard that our sadhana (reading and hearing) needs to involve both these aspects. So yes, the serious notion is necessary for us to get deeper rational faith in Krishna and the sweetness of the Krishna’s pastimes is necessary so that we understand the ultimate purpose of all philosophy, which is to invoke our love for Krishna.
It is a process of revelation in terms of the harmony between these two aspects. But we could start with some form of theoretical faith at least. And when we keep associating with devotees and practicing spiritual life, our preconceived notions slowly get cleared and we can start seeing the synthesis.
I hope this answers your query. Hare Krishna.
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