Posted on: 09 Feb 2005
There are four strong bonds, which hinder spiritual progress.
An Avadhuta can be only that soul who has cut all these four bonds. A Sanyasi can cut the first three bonds but not the fourth bond. A Sanyasi takes food, drinks water, sleeps. The Sanyasi avoids taking a wife but he cannot avoid the desire for sex. Eating, drinking, sleep and sex are the four biological needs of the body. The Avadhuta lives maintaining his body without these four needs and his body is beyond the rules of nature. His body is a divine body maintained by the superpower (Maya) of the Lord. The state of an Avadhuta is complete liberation and such complete salvation is possible only by the complete grace of the Lord. The Avadhuta is just an inert house of the Lord. There is no soul in that body. The soul is also a part of nature and so the soul becomes a part of the inert house of the Lord. The Avadhuta thinks, talks or does anything only by the will of Lord. He is called as a Siddha [accomplished one] and is not a Sadhaka [spiritual aspirant]. Even a Sanyasi is a Sadhaka who is still traveling towards that state. However, a stone can be also equated to Avadhuta because it too has complete salvation. However the Lord does not dwell in it. Salvation must be attained through devotion to the Lord, which will lead to the state of Avadhuta. If simple salvation is attained without devotion it will lead to the state of a stone.
Among the first three bonds, the strongest bond is the bond with the children. The wife can help in the spiritual effort (Sadhana) and therefore she is called as ‘Saha Dharma Charini’. The time spent to satisfy the biological need with the wife, is a matter of an attraction of a few minutes or at the maximum a few hours. This little time is negligible compared to one’s long lifetime and the energy dedicated to the Lord. But the bond with the children persists at all the times and requires the expenditure of energy continuously. The bond with money also increases due to this bond with children. For the sake of children, people become corrupt and try to rob others. In this process they do a lot of injustice. The strength of this bond is reduced by realization and with this, not only is individual salvation in the upper world achieved, but justice in this world is also easily established. This is the reason why Lord Krishna spoke about the detachment of worldly bonds for the establishment of the justice. He said that He was born to establish justice, but He does not speak about the rules of justice, in the Gita. The government, police and even the courts quote the rules of justice, but none can establish real justice. People always try to misinterpret these rules and win their case. In the Gita the Lord attempted to bring detachment of these bonds, which are responsible for the injustice. He attacked the problem at the basic level.
Therefore, injustice in the world is proportional to the strength of the bond with one’s children. This bond also hinders spiritual elevation. Unless the strongest bond is cut, salvation is impossible. Without salvation, the single bond with the Lord is impossible. You can analyze Vyasa, Arjuna and Dhritarashtra who represent three levels namely, above average, average and below average respectively.
Vyasa is the greatest Guru and his birthday is celebrated as Guru Purnima. The divine prostitutes who are of the lowest level mocked at this highest Guru due to this strongest bond that he had with his son. [When Vyasa’s son Shuka, walked out of the home to seek God, Vyasa, who was attached to his son, ran after him, pleading him to stop. The divine damsels saw that Vyasa, the greatest Guru had so much blind love for his son and mocked at him.] Vyasa was running after his son and was mocked at by the prostitutes. He was not mocked for his bond with the divine lady called Ghritaachi because it was just a temporary bond for a few minutes. She gave birth to Shuka with whom Vyasa had a permanent bond for twenty years. For the sake of his wife he wasted only few minutes but for the sake of his son he wasted twenty years.
Arjuna was also bound by this strongest bond. He was killing all his relatives on the order of the Lord. He was prepared to leave his kingdom, but when his son Abhimanyu died, he stopped the war. The war is the work of the Lord to punish evil people. Therefore, his bond with the Lord was not stronger than his bond with his son. Therefore Lord performed the ‘surgery’ and broke this strongest bond by making sure that even the other children (Upa Pandavas) of Arjuna and his brothers got killed at the end of the war. The Lord wanted to uplift Arjuna. The Bhagavad Gita was the medicine, which could not work to break the strongest bond of Arjuna. Therefore, the Lord performed this surgery and uplifted Arjuna and the other Pandavas too since they had surrendered to Him. The Lord uplifted Vyasa by giving him a lesson through the mocking of the divine prostitutes. For Vyasa the medicine was sufficient but for Arjuna, surgery was required. Since Vyasa and Pandavas were His devotees, the Lord did everything for their upliftment.
Dhritarashtra was not a devotee. He knew that Krishna was the Lord. He had seen the Vishwarupam. He advised his sons to arrange a feast and attract [bribe] the Lord into helping them. He had tried to grab the wealth of his own brother Pandu, who alone had conquered the whole kingdom. When Pandu went to the forest, Dhritarashtra was made the representative of the king. He became blind with this strongest bond and did not mind to do injustice to the sons of his own brother. The whole wealth actually belonged to his brother. [Duryodhana, Dhritarashtra’s eldest son was evil and wanted the entire kingdom for himself. He was powerful, arrogant and ruthless.] Yet if he [Dhritarashtra] had passed an order as a king, his son, Duryodhana could not have opposed it. Dhritarashtra even had the support of the most powerful Bhishma. Bhishma had taken an oath that he would protect the king. Therefore he need not have feared his son. Dhritarashtra’s wife Gandhari, always found fault with her husband and her evil sons, but in the end, when all her children were killed in the war, even she gave a curse to Lord Krishna, forgetting that He is the Lord. Such is the strength of this illusory bond! Dhritaraashtra represents today’s people. People are trying to earn money for the sake of their children and they are prepared to do injustice to any extent for this. Like Dhritarashtra they want to please the Lord by worship, so that He may help their children. Therefore, if the sadhaka [spiritual aspirant] can cut this strongest bond, the other two bonds can be easily cut.
The Gopikas represent the state of a real Avadhuta. In the absence of Krishna, they forgot all the biological needs of the body and they jumped into the fire when they heard that Lord Krishna had left the body. They not only could cut the bond with their bodies but also the bond with their lives. The Lord could cut their other bonds by dancing with them, by attracting their children to do mischief and by stealing their butter. By the dance in Brindavanam (Raasakeli), the husband-wife bond was cut. Their own children stole butter on the order of Krishna and due to this the mother-child bond was cut. By giving butter to Krishna, which was their hard-earned wealth, their bond with money was also cut. Thus, only the Gopikas could cut all the bonds and achieved the highest grace, which is the fifteenth uppermost world, called as Goloka.
In the case of Hanuman, He fought with Lord Rama for the sake of his mother to protect king Yayati. Therefore the Bhagavatam, which contains the story of the Gopikas at the end, is the most sacred scripture, which could give salvation to Parikshit in seven days. The very first verse of Bhagavatam speaks about this strongest bond of Vyasa. The love in these worldly bonds can be cut only by the love for the Lord. A diamond can be cut only by another diamond. These bonds with human beings can be cut only by the bond with the Lord in human form. The bond with formless God, or the bond with a form from the upper world like Vishnu and Shiva, or the bond with a statue or a picture cannot cut your family bonds. These are stones, which fail to cut the diamond. The Gopikas could cut these human bonds by their bond with Lord Krishna who was in the human form.
Your question is very important because it deals with the actual journey towards the goal. For us neither the analysis of the goal nor the analysis of a soul is as important as the analysis of the path and journey. The goal can be realized even after reaching it and it need not be known now itself. Since the soul is traveling towards the goal, the soul is not already the goal. Knowing this one point regarding the soul is sufficient. All the concentration is to be put up on the analysis of the real path and the mode of the journey.