Posted on: 20 Nov 2019
Swami replied: Devotion is inversely proportional to ego. Ego makes you aspire for having a following of your own devotees. Devotion makes you become a devotee of God. Several preachers have a big ego, but they are not consciousness of it and it leads to their downfall. The preacher should feel that he is a servant of God and that God is speaking through him. Every day, if you think about God as the overall Controller of this universe and if you feel that you are just a zero before God, your ego will vanish gradually. Ego is the first problem which prevents you from recognizing your contemporary Human Incarnation. Rāvaṇa could not recognize Rāma only due to his ego. Even Duryodhana, Śiṣupāla etc., could not recognize Krishna due to egos. Ego is followed by jealousy and both together cover your eyes like cataracts and prevent you from recognizing the divine human form of the Incarnation as God.
Ego is the form of your total misfortune. It causes you to lose the golden opportunity of recognizing the contemporary Human Incarnation of God present in the world, right before your eyes! After death, you will be in an energetic body and will go to the upper worlds. There too, you will find God in the common medium. As your soul will be present in an energetic body, God too will be present in an energetic body. The same ego which prevented you from recognizing the God in the common human medium on earth, will then prevent you from recognizing the Energetic Incarnation of God. You will neglect God in the energetic medium too. Ego thus makes you lose God here as well as there due to the repulsion between common media.
Every soul has the inherent tendency to want to rise up in life and become more and more famous. This tendency gives rise to and causes the growth of the ego. Jesus said that as much as you try to multiply yourself, so much will you be reduced by God and as much as you reduce yourself, so much will you be multiplied by God. When a soul attains miraculous powers, the soul develops the climax of ego and finally becomes a demon, who claims to be the very God from whom he got those miraculous powers. Even though we do not possess miraculous powers, our ego is so big that we are unable to recognize the human form of God present before us. What will be the result if we get miraculous powers? We will certainly insult the God present before us.
A genuine Human Incarnation of God does not perform miracles, as far as possible, to avoid hurting the egos of devotees. He performs only a few miracles in the initial stage, to attract devotees and overcome the starting trouble for His mission. Even when He performs miracles, He interprets them to be some normal incidents that have occurred accidentally. God knows very well that if He exhibits even a single miracle, devotees will cling to Him so much that they will not give up until they use the miraculous power of God to solve at least one of their worldly problems. Miraculous powers induce ego even in the human being-component of the Human Incarnation as in the case of Paraṣurāma. Ego is more dangerous than cancer.
| Shri Dattaswami | Parashurama Ravana Shishupaala