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By Gopiparanadhana Das

yena sva-rocisa visvam rocitam rocayamy aham yatharko ‘gnir yatha somo yatharksa-graha-tarakah

So, in our material consciousness we think that Krishna is very distant. Even after practicing devotional service for many years. We vaguely perceive the presence of Krishna in His holy name. When we come to the mangal-arati we are vaguely aware that Lord Caitanya and Lord Nityananda are standing there on the altar. Or maybe we spend the whole mangal-arati not giving any attention to Them at all. Anyway. Our material attitude is to think that God is very far away when He isn’t very far away. What to speak of His transcendental manifestation in His name and His Deity form? Even in this material creation God is very intimately represent. We are not aware properly of the fact that nothing is simply mechanical in this universe. There is personality and intelligence behind everything. Nothing, nothing is just mechanical. Because there is a demigod controlling every material function of the universe.

Of course, we create our machines. We’ve built our internal-combustion engines and built automobiles. Yeah. We don’t use horses anymore to go to the market. We think this is a great improvement–the automobiles do not pass stool all over the streets. We do not have to feed hey to the automobile. But actually the automobile is more trouble. The horse manure is not so bad as the things the car emits. In thousands and millions of years there were no automobiles, just horses. Even all the horse manure that was emitted by the horses didn’t destroy the earth atmosphere, didn’t destroy life on the earth. Didn’t give millions of people cancer and other horrible diseases. But what comes out of the backside of the automobiles is killing people and can destroy the whole earth if it is not controlled. Could and possible this could happen. I’m not saying that will happen. I am not making a prediction. It is theoretically possible.

In America every year 40 thousand people are killed in automobile accidents, not counting how many people die of cancer from the filths that the automobiles put in the air. The American people think that the Vietnam war was the great national tragedy. In Washington D.C. there is a very large memorial, a big black wall. It is simple all the names of 43 thousand Americans who died in Vietnam are on that wall. The people come and they look for the names of their friends and family members and they touch the names. But that war lasted thirteen years and not that many people died. Every year 40 thousand people die in automobile accidents in the same country. So the great national tragedy is the presence of these horrible machines on the streets actually. But we are very proud. This is our creation. God didn’t create an automobile. And even if there are demigods, they may control the air, the wind, the national forces but they cannot control the automobiles–we control them. This is foolishness to think like that. How does your automobile work? What makes it go? So, they answer, the internal combustion. We put petrol in the car, it goes to the carburetor and it is dispersed into the fine… and then a spark is made by electricity from the spark plug and there is a small explosion in a very small chamber and that pushes a piston and an axle turns around. That’s very nice but how it is possible? How do you make that little explosion? Oh, we just have benzene, we make explosive gas and then we ignite it with electricity. Well, where do you get your benzene from? Who put it there? You say you dig it out of the earth. Who put it under the earth? Who arranged for that? Did you? Did Henry Ford arranged to put all the benzene under the earth? So, they say, no, no, no. 50 million years ago, 100 million years ago many trees died and they got buried under the earth and that made many dinosaurs died and their bodies disintegrated made benzene. Oh, who put those trees and dinosaurs on the face of the earth 100 million years ago? Did the engineers in the Ford company designed this? Anyway. We can haunt them and insist what is the source of your creation and they have to admit: every piece of the car–the glass in the window, the metal in the body, benzene–everything used is provided by higher source. Lord Brahma put the dinosaurs and the trees on the surface of the earth. And even before him Lord Vishnu created the laws of nature. He created the law that makes an explosion when you put a spark of electricity on your gas of benzene. He put the steel, the iron on the earth, and the sand that you make glass from. Even if your car is built mostly out of plastic; that is created from trees and other natural substances. Lord Brahma made all these arrangements.

So, we try to ignore the fact that there is a higher intelligence, the personality behind everything that happens in this world. When there is chaos, when there is confusion we can describe that stupidity. But when there is order, when there is beauty, when things work right there must be intelligence. There must be very vast intelligence, that make the universe so orderly. We don’t read very often in a newspaper about planets colliding into each other, even small ones. That would be a great catastrophe. Imagine how many people would die if two planets bumped into each other. But there is very good intelligence managing the universe; things are not as chaotic as they could be. That intelligence is working so expertly that we don’t even see his presence. That’s the sign of his expertise. When the manager of an organization is very expert then you don’t even notice how he is managing, it is all invisible. He is trained up his assistance and everybody else to know exactly what to do properly. He doesn’t say or do anything. By not doing anything, he is perfectly in control. He can spend half a year in vacation in Cypress. This is expert management. The universe has the most expert management. We even don’t notice his presence. There is a vast bureaucracy, 33 million demigods that work. And we are not even aware that they are controlling everything minutely. When we want to move our hand we just think, I want to move my hand, and we move it. Or we even don’t think about it, we just do without thinking. We don’t have to go to six bureocrats and give each of them some bribe in order to move our hand. Everything happens automatically, or we think that it happens spontaneously. And we think to move my hand like this is such an easy thing. It’s not so easy. In the hand there are over hundred bones and many hundred different muscles. And just to simply take my hand and grab on some simple item is a very extremely complicated process. The greatest computer scientists in the world are trying to design robots who can do these simple things like walk, like pick up things. Just to imitate these simple functions of life. With all their energy and effort they are not very successful yet. Of course, they can make a robot with wheels that just rolls on the floor; that they can do. But to give it real legs and real feet and make it walk in a real way is very difficult. They built a good model of a leg, of a foot with so many different pieces; all the pieces are there. They have all the programming, all the electric wires going into the leg and foot. But when they try to make this artificial men actually walk, they find it so complicated: what to tell him to do, what muscles to move which way and what time? And these walking robots simply fall on their faces over and over again; they even can’t walk. When the child starts to walk he falls on his face few times. The parents encourage him and then after a few dozen times he stops falling on his face. But if the child simply fell on his face over and over again for ten years and never learned how to walk straight, the parents would get frustrated and give up. They would buy a real chair and tell him to sit there. We don’t realize what vast intelligence is required to manage even the simplest functions of life. But the demigods possess this kind of immeasurable intelligence. And they are active; they are directly involved in every little thing that we do. Every time we move one finger the demigods are active, they are actively paying attention. This is the whole aspect of material existence that don’t pay attention to.

We see the external picture. We don’t realize that there are millions of people behind the scenes, controlling the events. Everything is very personal. There is whole hiarchy, the whole bureocracy of persons managing the universe. If you visit South India and see some of the large temples you see this. In the center of the temple there would be a sainter or the altar of Lord Vishnu or Lord Siva. But outside the temple on the walls of the whole compound there are large towers, gopuras. Maybe sixty or eighty meters high. And in some of these temples the towers are very uniquely decorated with statues of hundreds of demigods. And sometimes these statues are painted with very bright colors. So, there is a very spectacular sight. And you can see that the whole universe is actually full of personalities. There are so many demigods controlling everything. Of course, there are many people in the universe. You can walk on the street of a busy city and see thousands of people. But what are they doing? They are just looking at the ground and reading a newspaper, shuffling alone, they are not doing very much. This is not very impressive. There are thousands of people on the street but they are all living very small lives; they are not very impressive. But imagine a street on Svargaloka. Thousands of demigods walking up and down the street. Each of them have a body more effulgent than the sun. And each of them are so intelligent that they can control the events all over the universe. And all these citizens, unlike competing sorceress or shamans who are trying to destroy each other, they are living together peacefully. This is a very vast intelligence, this is a very great civilization that we are hardly aware. Even people in India who worship demigods don’t realize what the demigods are. How directly involved they are in their own lives? Yeah, in India, ‘melkiy torgovec’ in the morning opens up the shop and he waves the stick of incense at mother Maha-laksmi picture on the wall. He thinks Maha-laksmi, the wife of Lord Vishnu, lives on his wall and her job is to put money in his cash-register. He has very small understanding of the influence of the demigods, actually mother Laksmi is influencing everyone’s life very more, much directly. Even those who worship demigods don’t realize how the demigods are involved in everything. Just like I approached a very important person to fulfill a very unimportant purpose. I may be a beggar on a street and I am trying to get a few thousand rubles from somebody. I am sitting on a ‘perehod’ on the street, on the steps, and trying to stop…, trying to ask people to give me a few thousand rubles. And a man who is a great millonar gives me a few thousand rubles, I could have asked for thousands of dollars but I asked for thousands of rubles instead. He is flying all around the world to stay in hotels where he pays two thousand dollars at night just to sleep. He has so much money, he doesn’t know what to do with it. But you ask him for two thousand rubles.

So we are approaching the demigods or God himself and asking for little, unimportant things. Just like there is one story of an old lady who was living in Vrindavana, who was very poor. And in order to survive, in order to buy a little food to eat she had to work very hard. In Vrindavan there is nobody to give her a job sitting as a cash-register or doing some… waving your stick when the trains come by. She had to find her own work, so she went to the forest and picked up all the dead branches of the trees. As many as she could carry she put it on her back and carried it to the city to sell for firewood. And in that way she could buy a little flour to make some capatis and she survives. I’ve seen there are many such old ladies in Vrindavan, they are very poor. We can see, they go to the market and ask how much one lemon costs? And the man says, two rupees. And she just sadly touches the lemon to her forehead, shakes her head and put it back, she can’t afford it. So she has survives somehow by bringing these sticks from the forest. But this old lady one day when she crippled and all the sticks fell off her back, a big pile of sticks. And she started crying, she didn’t know how to find and pick up all these sticks again. She just had no strength to do it. And this was what she was thinking about, “How I will pick up these sticks again?” But this is Vrindavana, and Krishna cannot tolerate His devotees to suffer in Vrindavan. So young Krishna personally appeared to her. He said, “My dear mother, Why are you crying? My responsibility is to see that nobody here in unhappy.” He asked, “What can I do to help you? I’ll do anything I can, what is in my power.” She said, “My dear young boy. Please help me in one thing, you put these sticks back on my back.”

Like that we approach Krishna asking for the silliest little things: He can give us everything. We go and think that Krishna, He lives on the altar, He lives in a beadbag, and He is here to help us to go through our daily lives. We open the curtain and wake Him up, and pull an arm in a beadbag and we chant on it, and after two hours we put the beadbag away. And while we are chanting our japa we ask Him, “Krishna! Please put these sticks on my back. Please give me material success. Please fulfill my ideas, what I think is important. Krishna, I need a special help to survive in the material world, otherwise it is impossible. These other devotees are making my life impossible, please, help me solve these problems.” This is our meditation during the japa. “Krishna, please help me, I can’t stand my room-mate.” But we don’t realize, the first of all the demigods are perfectly managing everything. But if we are worried that the demigods are just living entities like us, they are not perfect, we can’t trust them completely then we can finally realize even behind everything that demigods do Krishna is directly, personally in control. Yena sva-rocisa visvam rocitam rocayamy aham. Brahma says, I am creating the light of the universe indirectly by the light created by Krishna. The sun rises in the morning and creates light. Brahma arranged that, Brahma made the sun to move in its orbit and generate its light. We can trust, the sun will rise in the morning because Brahma is an expert engineer and manager. And even if we don’t completely trust Brahma, we can understand that it is not his power, his own power. If we want to wonder how can just a living entity like us be so powerful and expert. The answer is this is not his power. Brahma himself says, this is not his power. The wonderful power, light of the sun that has a power to illuminate the whole universe was not created by Brahma. He is simply managing it. Just like in a museum, the worker takes the very valuable picture painted by Rembrandt and puts it on the wall. He is an expert, he knows how to nicely put a nail on a wall and hang the string so that the painting is hanging straight. But he is just a minor assistant. The real genius was Rembrandt who was able to take an empty canvas and create that painting. Like that the Lord Brahma is simply taking the sun which is the light of the Brahmajoti, it’s the natural light of Krishna’s body. Brahma takes a little spark of that Brahmajoti and hangs it up in the sky. So behind the relatively great intelligence of the demigods there is always the absolutely great, infinite intelligence of Krishna. And that infinite intelligence and mercy of Krishna was present in this universe not only at the beginning of creation. It’s constantly present even know. Every morning.. just like when.. there was one painting by Rembrandt that was valued three million dollars, the metropolitan museum in the New Your city purchased that painting for three million dollars. I do not know if they actually did this but it says a story that every day it was hanging and people watched it and when the museum was closed they put it away in a safe. The painting was Aristotle contemplating on the statue of Homer. And everybody in New York, everybody from whole area came to look at this painting. Even people who were not at all interested in art where just curious to see what they can spend three million dollars for. Of course, this is also very attractive for the thieves. So, they say that every night they locked it up in a safe, they didn’t keep it hanging on the wall at night. Like that, Brahma takes the sun off the wall every night and puts it away. And in the morning he puts it back up in the sky. This he is able to do by the special mercy and the intelligence provided to him directly by Krishna. And by Krishna’s mercy he has that power. Every little thing we do, if we tell to move the finger, the demigods, some demigod is giving that power. And every time that demigod exerts his control, Krishna is directly involved and allowing that demigod to understand what to do and have the power to do it. Therefore the very first line, the very first verse in the Bhagavatam says, anvayad itaratas carthesv abhijnah svarat. Krishna is, in two ways, omniscient and omnipotent, He knows everything and He is powerful to control everything. He knows and controls everything: anvayad itaratas ca. Anvayad means indirectly, and itaratah means otherwise. In other words, indirectly and also directly. Indirectly Krishna knows and controls everything through the demigods. But God is not removed. God is not distant. He is also directly in control and directly knows everything. Only that aspect is very secret. If we are gross materialists, we think everything happens mechanically. If we are very intelligent, very pious, we can understand that the demigods are actually controlling and managing everything. And only for the most fortunate and the most intelligent person, can actually realize how Krishna is directly in control of everything. They are directly aware of everything. Even the great demigods themselves are not always aware of this. We should not be satisfied to become demigods or even great sages. We should want to understand the cause of all causes. And enter into the loving service of the cause of all causes. That’s only possible by raising to the standard of pure devotional service.