Everyone Worships Something | Free Will and the Object of Our Affection
5/20/202656 min
Everyone worships something. The rock star, the ideology, the bottle of wine, the beautiful person across the room. Dostoevsky identified it as an incessant, painful longing: so long as man remains free, he strives for nothing so persistently as to find someone worthy of complete surrender. We have free will — and where we invest our affection becomes our most important choice. In this episode Raghunath and Kaustubha explore that longing alongside the Vedic text's most sacred passage — where the gopi girls of Vrindavan invest everything in the very source of rasa itself.
Srimad Bhagavatam 10.29.12-19
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First 90 secondsKaustubha Das· Host0:00
We're all searching for happiness. We're all searching for bliss. And we're searching for some kind of shelter or some kind of, um, something that sustains us and nourishes us and satisfies us.
Raghunath· Host0:14
Mm.
Kaustubha Das· Host0:15
A- and so as, you know, as long as we're free, we're striving incessantly to find that.
Raghunath· Host0:21
Mm.
Kaustubha Das· Host0:22
And, and, and the, uh ... You know, it's interesting that you talk about shelter because even if you look at, let's say, like, yours and, say, like Parmananda's kind of, um, who's, who's been a member of both your bands. Kind of like the progression, you know. When you get to Bhagavatam, it reveals that here's the progression that things go through. They go from, let's say, karma to jnana to bhakti. Like, what is youth of today and what is straight edge? It's jnanic, right? It's like a refusal. Uh, n- jnanic means it's negating everything. And so we don't do this, we don't do that. Even that [laughs] actually, that was like, uh, the Minor Threat song, right? I don't do this.
Raghunath· Host1:09
I don't do this.
Kaustubha Das· Host1:10
I don't do that.
Raghunath· Host1:10
I don't do that.
Kaustubha Das· Host1:11
I don't do that.
Raghunath· Host1:11
At least I don't do this.
Kaustubha Das· Host1:12
Yeah. [laughs] Or, or, yeah, actually it's kind of like- At least I can do this.
Raghunath· Host1:15
Yeah ...
Kaustubha Das· Host1:15
you know, uh, don't smoke, don't drink, what do you do, you know? [laughs] In other words, your, your, your, your whole, the, the whole movement was about what we don't do. And it was, and that was good. It was like those are things that were good not to do, you know?