It Is All For the Best
Srila Bhakti Raksaka Sridhara Deva-Goswami Maharaja explains the perfect vision of the environment. Originally published at Sri Gaudiya Darshan.
Deep vision of the extreme causal stage means to survey the extreme cause of every incident and not survey the surface; to not be satisfied by reading the surface but instead look for the depth. A deep politician does not look at the surface of things but at their depth: “What is the cause of this dissatisfaction, of this movement? There must be something deeper.” The deepest inspection of the environment should be that everything is coming, flowing, from the ultimate cause, and he is friendly. There is nothing to complain against him. For a peaceful life, I am to adjust. If I do not find peace in my life, then the cause is within me, not outside. This is the direction.
A German scholar once said, “The Bhagavad‑gita has hammered on this point: ‘Don’t care for the consequences, and concentrate yourself wholesale on how to discharge your duty. Concentrate there wholesale and never on the consequences. Never allow yourself to remain in the relativity of the consequence. Your whole attention, cent percent, must be engaged in the discharge of your duty. That is the basis of the final, peaceful adjustment you can make in your life. You will be able to find peace everywhere if you can adjust yourself in this way.’”
So oil your own machine, and don’t go to oil machines that are outside of yourself. Oil your own machine, and leave the rest to he who represents the whole.
karmany evadhikaras te ma phalesu kadacana
Bhagavad-gita 2.47
ma karma-phala-hetur bhur ma te sango ’stv akarmani
At the same time, don’t leave your duty. You must do what you feel to be your duty. Otherwise, you will be paralyzed like the Sankarites and the Buddhists. Your dynamic characteristic must be maintained at any cost. You are an infinitesimally small spark, but you have some small duty, so concentrate wholesale there. Don’t allow yourself to be paralyzed: “When I have no right to the fruit, then why should I do it?” Don’t be misguided by this insane tendency. Be active to the fullest. Put your whole energy into your duty; be fully awake there. Don’t allow yourself to go to sleep, to slip into dullness or apathy. Then you will find the relativity of the perfect world standing firmly before you.
This is the advice of Bhagavatam and Gita. Gita gives the basis, and here Bhagavatam gives the result, the positive side:
tat te ’nukampam su-samiksamanah
Srimad Bhagavatam 10.14.8
It is goodness all around you; only you are self‑deceptive, you are the deceiver of yourself. You are wrong in your vision. The environment is all right. You are the culprit yourself. So, your whole endeavor should be to perfect your own self, to cure yourself. That is what is necessary.
Sitting at home, will you find that everything has come to you? No. Rather, you have to go back to God, back to home, and to go from your present ego to that conception means to go to God’s land where everything is peaceful and good. There is a maxim, “It is all for the best,” and in the Ancient Mariner of Coleridge, it is said:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
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