Waves of Devotion

Dhanurdhara Swami July 29th, 2024

Jayadvaita Swami would confidently throw down the gauntlet to his audience: “What could be more important than self-realization?!” The question-and-answer booth at the New York Ratha-yātrā was surrounded by intelligent and inquisitive New Yorkers. Some took up his dare, yet no one could meet his challenge.

 

When I watched those exchanges, I immediately thought about the time Śrīla Prabhupāda highlighted the importance of self-realization, but in a different way. Śrīla Prabhupāda was asked to explain the difference between a human being and an animal. I loved his reply: “A human being can ask the question ‘why am I suffering?’” Śrīla Prabhupāda was raising the same challenge that is found in Jayadvaita’s inquiry, but we need to dig deeper to understand how.

 

The question “why am I suffering” implies another important question: “what did I do wrong?” Suffering or pain is not necessarily a bad thing if we look at the issue philosophically. For example, if you did not suffer when accidentally resting your hand on a hot stove, you might not lift it off the stove and therefore could be seriously injured or even die. Suffering or pain, similarly, inspires one to seek the cause of one’s suffering and fully eradicate our problem at its root. But an intelligent person does not stop with the question “what did I do wrong?” There are deeper levels to the inquiry.

 

As soon as we ask, “what did I do wrong?” another question naturally arises: “what should I be doing?” But one more question must be asked.

 

The question “what should I be doing?” naturally inspires an intelligent person to inquire about his nature: “What I am made of and what am I made for?” For unless you realize the answer to that inquiry, how you can know what to do? For example, Ayurveda describes disease as a “crime against nature.” When there is suffering in the body, to answer the question of what went wrong and what should be done about it, we need to discover the natural condition that we violated, which is the ultimate cause of our woes.

 

And this gets us back to our initial inquiry and why no one could meet Jayadvaita Swami’s challenge: “What could be more important than self-realization?” Unless one realizes one’s true nature, which is called self-realization, how can one be fully in alignment with one’s being and avoid the suffering which is simply an indication that something is wrong? And this discussion also gets us back to Śrīla Prabhupāda’s insight about the difference between a human being and animal. The inquiry into suffering, which is the specialty of a human, also leads an intelligent person, as we have progressively shown, to the most important pursuit in alleviating suffering—self-realization. So, the challenge still stands: “what can be more important than self-realization?”

 

athāto brahma jijñāsā

“Human life is meant for inquiry into the Absolute Truth.” (Vedānta-sūtra 1.1.1)

 

 

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