Dear Prabhujis and Matajis,
Hare Krishna! Please accept my humble obeisances! All glories to Srila Prabhupada and Srila Gurudev!
This is in continuation of the previous mails transcribing the lecture by our beloved Guru Maharaj spoken in Durban, South Africa on 19th December 1994. In the last mails the following three points were explained.
1. Our eager search for the reality
2. The importance of hearing to clear our consciousness.
3. The basic underlying spiritual unity among all.
I shall post the other points in this and the ensuing mails.
4. Do Not Complicate the Situations
"We have created a situation in our life that we have increased our unnecessary demands and because of increase of unnecessary demands, we have lost the simplicity in our lives and because we have lost simplicity in our lives, we are fighting and quarrelling. For gold, we fight; for fruits we fight; for grains we have to fight; for everything we have to fight. Fight. Fight. Fight. Kali. That is why this age is known as Kali-yuga. Husband comes to the wife, fights. Wife comes to the husband, fights. Father comes to the son,fights. Brother comes to brother, fights. Sister comes to brother, fights. How long we are going to fight? Fighting is not our constitutional position. But we have made it our constitutional position because our life is not simple.
I will read you one passage and you will understand how we have complicated the situation. This is from one of the followers of Mahatma Gandhi from India. He is known as Vinobha bhave and he has very nicely thought over about this point, as to why we are creating a complex situation. Please hear and we will try to understand the point.
The author was in the village and in front of his house, there was a nice farm and that farm was producing cotton. The owner of the field sends it to a man who collects it. There is a local business man who collects all the raw cotton. This man sells it to a dealer, who sells it to another who transports it to Bombay which is a harbor city in India. So from all the villages, the cotton is collected and sent by train to Bombay. Now the whole cotton is in Bombay where it is sold to the shipper who ships it to an English port, Manchester.
The whole bunch of cotton is sent to Manchester, where it is sold to a factory which turns it to spun and sends it to another factory where it turns in to woven nice cloth and sells that cloth to a dealer who ships it back to Bombay. The cloth is coming to Bombay back where it is sold to a dealer, who again sells it to the village salesman who sells the same cloth to the owner of the field. This is the whole round, you know, complicated round. The cotton grew in his field, travelled all the way to Bombay, all the way shipped to English port, spun and woven and again it is sold back to Bombay and to the village and to the owner of the field.
By playing ball with the tons of cotton, they expose it to the hazards of, mites and termites, cold and fire, theft and shipwreck, strikes and the rise and fall of market, crises and wars. For this ball game, thousands of miles of railway lines are needed, ports, docks, warehouses, customs offices, inspectors, policemen, courts and prisons, offices, banks and stock exchanges, armies, guns, colonies and enslaved people, factories, machines and millions of workers always on the verge of rebellion. This is the result of that ball game. Now the author concludes. The proper economy is that let the owner of the field get hold of a spinning wheel and turn it until his whole family and the whole village is clothed. It is so easy. Take the cotton and spun the thread on his own spinning wheel and everything we can avoid.
This is how we have complicated the situation. Not only the cloth. This is only cloth example, but I will give you the example of tooth paste. We have complicated it to such an extent that we are destroyed totally. In our village, never we had the tooth paste. I remember that time. Never. It was just salt mixed with turmeric powder. That is all and salt is a local product. Turmeric is grown in the field, dried, grinded and mix it and your paste is ready. And gargle it nicely with fingers. Finger is always antiseptic. It does not require any sterilization. It is Krishna’s sterilized instrument. But we do not believe in Krishna’s sterilized instrument. We believe in our sterilization and that is why we want a brush and the brush with all the paste and obnoxious material, creates cavity in our tooth and then we are very proud that we have five cavities and then we go to the dentist who fills in all the material inside and you cannot talk. Then other ten cavities are created and the whole mouth is full of steel and teeth are mashed. This is complicated situation. I remember that only with salt and turmeric powder, we could avoid all these factories of brush and tooth paste and all the obnoxious advertisements. A beautiful lady is shown in the advertisement and she has 32 teeth. But I am definite that the lady who uses this tooth paste will lose 32 teeth in 32 days. This is the horrible situation we have created."
Maharaj in his own humorous way goes on to explain his experience of a rich man in the village undergoing the dental treatment and the complications created on account of that. Krishna willing, I shall be posting the same in the ensuing mail.
Thank you very much.
Yours in service of Srila Prabhupada and Srila Gurudev,
Vaijayantimala devi dasi
Abu Dhabi.
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