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Monday Morning Greetings 2023 #11 – Why Do We Make God Work So Hard?

March 13th, 2023

I just arrived in the USA from India and left for Colombia yesterday. My computer also just came back from being serviced, so I wasn’t able to complete a new Monday Morning Greetings for this week. This is a reprint from six years ago.

 

Why Do We Make God Work So Hard?

 

June 5, 2017

I have an image of an aspect of my life that has this certain background music. I can’t exactly describe that tune in writing. But it is the background music for the cartoon image of a happy-go-lucky soul who is walking down the street oblivious to the impending disaster ahead and then either slips and falls or gets a pie thrown in his face. He gets up with confidence and begins walking with the same obliviousness to his impending danger until the same thing happens again and again. Let me see if I can describe this more vividly: It would be like the cartoon character Goofy, created by Disney in the early thirties, who, in each episode, haplessly fumbles over the same task repeatedly.[1]

 

Actually, this is not how I see my life, but there is a specific aspect of my life that I like to describe in this comedic sense, as it seems to be a fit to an interesting definition of comedy that I had first heard about from a friend and a professional comedian. He described comedy as tragedy plus time. I am not exactly looking back at tragedy in my life, but more like a pattern of folly that seems to so much fit this hapless image of one being oblivious to one’s folly and falling prey to it again and again.

 

About a month ago, after making a mistake in not only how I was thinking about something but also in how I had reacted to it, and then seeing the anxiety it caused, I had a very strong realization that seemed to correct and complete my vision of the world. I was surprised because I was convinced that I was already seeing the world perfectly clear, but I had one doubt. This pattern has been repeating itself every year, often several times a year, for the last 42 years, since beginning Krishna consciousness. I always think that I am seeing things clearly, until some upheaval, big or small, comes along that gives me a newer, more complete vision and with the same certainty as before. I often share this story with others with the background music of Goofy to express how hapless we are in walking the world with a vision of confidence, although destiny repeatedly turns our world on its head again and again.

 

I think my folly, however, is not unique, for until one’s mind is completely pure, it is the nature of the mind to see the world through a defective lens without even realizing one is looking through it. I think that therefore my story should be, in a sense, everyone’s story on the spiritual path. Our natural confidence in how we see the world should be repeatedly shaken by destiny to help give us newer and higher visions of reality even though at the time we are probably not aware that we are seeing things through a distorted lens.

 

In reflecting on how many thousands of components of vision have been added to my life to improve my vision of reality and reflecting on how many more realizations I probably require in the future, I am humbled. Reflecting in this way also helps me to realize how many unlimited components of truth one requires to actually be tattva-darśana, one who sees the truth, and how hard Krishna has to work, so to speak, to bring us to that point. And that leads to my final realization and the title of this post:

 

Why do we make God work so hard?

 

 

[1] From Wikipedia: “Goofy is a tall, anthropomorphic dog with a Southern drawl, and typically wears a turtle neck and vest, with pants, shoes, white gloves, and a tall hat originally designed as a rumpled fedora.”

 

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