Letters

Many people say that they feel great peace and joy while meditating, praying, or chanting. What is the cause of this feeling?

This feeling comes from the experience of our home within. All of us have experience of the relief we feel on returning home after a long day’s hard work. This subjective feeling is so universal that it has become a phrase. When we find a particular place comfortable and relaxing, we say, “I feel at home.”

Solid structures can offer rest for our physical bodies, but where can our stressed and distressed minds find relief and rejuvenation? For that, analogous to the outer home for our bodies we need an inner home for our minds. In fact, all of us already have our inner homes, though we may not think of them in that way. But just as we return to our outer home when we have nothing pressing to do elsewhere, our mind returns to our inner home when there’s no pressing activity to occupy it elsewhere. Therefore, by observing the default thoughts of our mind, we can discover our current inner home, which may be about movies, sports, our bank account, our romance, and so on.

Unfortunately, none of these inner homes offer lasting shelter: a movie may turn out to be irritatingly mediocre; a sports match may hand us the very result we didn’t want; an economic crash may empty our bank account; what began as a romance may end as a tragedy. Thus the very thoughts meant to calm our disturbed mind may end up agitating it further.

Then where do we find a secure, infallible inner home? In God, say the great wisdom traditions. God is the supreme source and reservoir of the highest peace, joy, and love. When our minds rest in Him, we discover the ultimate inner home.

Meditation, prayer, and chanting are all spiritual techniques that connect our mind with God. The Vedic wisdom-tradition explains that among these techniques, hearing the divine sound of prayers and God’s holy names is the most efficacious. This divine sound acts like an elevator that quickly transports our mind to the loving, soothing presence of God.

Are such experiences mere sentimental imaginations? Possibly. But then the fact stares us in the face that such experiences have been reported as tangible realities by millions of people all over the world throughout history. Moreover, the healing effects of such spiritual experiences have been objectively documented by hundreds of scientific studies in the field of mindbody medicine.

Therefore, when we spend so much time and money to choose the best possible outer home, why not be a bit open-minded, invest a little time daily in chanting Hare Krishna, and check out the option of a better inner home?

If God is good, then why does He allow suffering?

The pains of the world serve as protectors from a far greater pain. The Discovery Health Channel’s Mystery Diagnosis episode that aired on November 21, 2009, had an intriguing title: “The Boy Who Never Cried.” It featured an infant, Baby Carson, who suffered from an extremely rare disorder called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis (CIPA). Children with CIPA feel no pain, nor do they sweat or shed tears. They are highly vulnerable to injuring themselves in ways that would ordinarily be prevented by feeling pain. For example, they often have eye-related problems, like infection due to having unfeelingly rubbed the eyes too hard or too frequently or having scratched them during sleep.

CIPA children like Carson often play recklessly, being unafraid of banging into anything. From a child’s short-sighted perspective, obliviousness to pain may seem a blessing that grants fearlessness. But from a mature parental perspective, that same obliviousness to pain is seen as a curse that impels foolhardiness. Parents of a CIPA child often have one prayer: let our child feel pain.

If intellectual maturity can grant us insight into the benefit of pain in this particular case, is it not possible that spiritual maturity can grant us insight into the benefit of pain in general? Such maturity comes by acquiring spiritual education and spiritual experience.

Spiritual education, as given in the Vedic scriptures, helps us understand that we are spiritual beings, souls destined for ever-increasing happiness in a loving relationship with God in His eternal abode. Due to imprudent desires, we choose to enjoy separately from Him in this material world, where everything, due to its temporary nature, frustrates our quest for permanent happiness.

Spiritual experience comes when we chant the holy names of God in devotion and relish the sublime shelter and supreme joy of remembering Him. Then we comprehend that God loves us and wants to give us the best: constant happiness, no suffering. The sufferings of this world are caused not by God, but by our own bad karma. He allows our own due sufferings to come upon us to:

• Protect us from the futile and fatal illusion that we as spiritual beings can be happy in a material setting.

• Provoke us to redirect our desires to the spiritual level, where we can reclaim the eternal happiness that is our rightful God-given destiny.

Those of us who have never had the opportunity for spiritual growth may find this analysis abstract and impractical. But, given that the pains are inevitable at the material level, instead of fruitlessly complaining or passively enduring them, why not dynamically try to transcend them by growing up spiritually?