Hare Krsna!
This is continuation on previous post, dated Tuesday, October 4, 2022 - Eternal Spiritual Time.
These are 2 podcasts by H.H.Sivarama Swami, posted on
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Atmarama asks a question.
He wants to hear something more about eternal time.
And that time in the spiritual world is not the same as time in the material
world. And that's correct. In the material world, time has past, present and
future. And there's a sense, the measurement between beginning of an event to
the end of an event, thing, person, everything. That is the passage of time.
And so Krishna says:
ādy-antavantaḥ kaunteya
(BG 5.22)
whatever has a beginning has also end. Aśāśvatam
- everything is temporary in the material world. So we look back at a past
which starts with our birth, our beginning, and we know that there's going to
be a future as we get old and pass away. And that's going to be the end. At
least that's the end of this life. It's not the end of the soul, but it's the
end of this life. So that's material time and it applies to everything. It
applies to universes, mountains, every living entity, everything is temporary
in this world. As the measurement of that temporariness, how temporary
something is that is done by the media of time. Now, at the end of Brahma
samhita, it says that in the spiritual world that eternal time doesn't pass
away for just even a moment. In other words, every activity is eternal because
everything is eternal. So we're eternal acts are eternal, objects are eternal.
The spiritual world eternally exists. It doesn't come into being at some point
in time. So it's also everything is eternal. Which will mean that the only way
that works is when everything is existing within the eternal present.
Nonetheless, there's certainly a sense of past, present and future. For
instance, if Krishna's eating, that is an eternal activity. But then following
his eating, after that eating, then he washes his mouth and hands and feet and
after that he takes rest. All of these activities in their sense continue on.
They are eternal. In other words, they are always happening. And yet at the
same time, there's a sequence of these eternal events. Similarly, the residents
of Vaikuntha have a sense of past and past events for a few reasons. One is
that when they enter into the material world and experience different events
like birth and childhood and growing up, then they may remember that when they
go back into Vaikunta. But they don't think that happened in the material
world. They think that they were born and that happened here in Vaikunta,
although it wasn't that way. They were always eternally existing as they are.
Similarly, they look to the future. For instance, when it's just the Lord who
goes to the material world to exhibit some pastime. And the residents of Vaikuntha
or Vrindavan are waiting for the Lord to reappear. So they're looking forward
to a future. So, activities as everything else have eternal significance. Time
is also eternal events. Things are also eternal. Therefore, they're always
existing in the same present, but at the same time there's a simultaneous
experience of past and future. How that's all going on? Well, I can't say any
more than that because I haven't read anymore. And these are quite
extraordinary things. Bewildering things. But then, so many things are
bewildering to us conditioned souls who are very limited and who can only
understand those things that we experience. And even with those things we have
difficulty understanding them. What to speak of things that are beyond our
experience? Hare Kṛṣṇa.
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Hare Kṛṣṇa.
I have a question here, and that question is from
Atmarama das. And he wants to know about eternal time in the spiritual world
and how it works. It's complicated question. Shastra speaks little of it,
although there is mention and the acharyas, like Thākura Bhaktivinoda mention.
So I can't say too much. Say what little I do know in Brahma samhita,
the conclusion of Brahma samhita then Brahma says:
sa yatra kṣīrābdhiḥ sravati surabhībhyaś ca su-mahān
nimeṣārdhākhyo vā vrajati na hi yatrāpi samayaḥ
(Brahma Samhita
5.56)
So not even a nimesha goes away, not even
passes by. Nimesh is like a second. So what lord Brahma here is glorifying the
spiritual world, where there's oceans of milk flowing from the cows and not
even a moment of time passes away. So our time that we experience here in the world
has a past, a present and a future. I did this for the Hungarian translation.
So, I have a few petals, rose petals from Lord Caitanya's garland after garland
here as well. But these are rose petals that fell out. So I'm going to now one,
two, three. I just dropped a rose petal onto my table. And that event now
happened 30 seconds ago in the past. It's gone. It has passed away. It no
longer exists. It may exist as something that I remember. And now, 1 minute
later, petal number two, and that has also passed away. And then petal number
three, petal number four. All events, successive events, one after the other.
Now they have all passed. In the spiritual world. When you do this, the event
of the first petal falling, it is eternal. It continues to exist. The second
petal event continues to exist. 3rd, fourth all four petals coexist in that
eternal time. They're not passing away. The minute doesn't disappear off into
what we call the past, but rather they're eternally there. I can give the
example of that. They're parallel coexistent .That they continue to coexist
side by side. Okay, don't ask me how that happens. I'm going to just give the very
useful or useful philosophy that it's Krishna's inconceivable potency -
acintyāḥ khalu ye bhāvā
[Mahābhārata, Bhīṣma parva 5.22].
Yes, it's inconceivable. I can't even understand what
time is here in the material world .What to speak of what it is there. It's a
shakti of Krishna time here. But more than that, it's really very hard to put
your thumb on exactly what it is. And great devotees, they experience actually
this coexistence of pastimes. Now, if I ask devotees to remember what I did
five minutes ago dropping the petals, they will have a memory. That impression
remains within the mind, but it's just a mental image. I'll give an example -
in Śrīmad Bhāgavatam, Krishna's childhood concludes with the Brahma vimohana
lila bewilderment of Brahma. And after that comes Krishna's boyhood. And then,
of course, after that comes his kaiśora pastime, so his boyhood
pastimes. And that starts with killing Denukāsura. And what should happen next
is killing Pralambāsura. But that isn't what you'll find in Krishna book or Bhāgavatam.
What does happen is that Śukadeva Goswami's ecstasy inspires him to narrate
Chastising Kaliya. And that's going back to Krishna's childhood. Now we would
say, oh yeah, he remembered that. He forgot that pastime. However, in the
concept of eternal time or spiritual eternality, Śukadeva Goswami didn't just
remember, he actually eternally sees those pastimes going on side by side
because they never pass away. They are always there. And he was very attracted
to narrating that, or he wanted to also narrate that. And so he did, and so he
went back to that. So there are examples like this in Shastra in which eternal
associates of the Lord, great devotees, where they don't necessarily stick to
the chronology of past times. Not because they forgot, not because they
remembered, but because they're seeing path for them. Past and future is all
present.
mattaḥ smṛtir jñānam apohanaṁ ca
(BG 15.15) ,
just like Krsna says that for me, I know past, present
and future. How does he know it? He doesn't remember it. He sees it. Everything
is existing. So that's like a taste or an idea, that's a real taste of what
this eternal time is like. And devotees who like, they can do research on it.
Others can just meditate on it. This is a good philosophical meditation - siddhānta
baliyā citte nā kara alasa (CC Adi 2.117)! Hare Krishna.
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