We can’t grasp the Truth – we can only let the Truth grasp
us by Chaitanya Charan Das Based on Bhagavad Gita Chapter 10.
There can be many truths, but they are different from the
Truth, the knowledge about life’s highest and deepest reality – God. While we
may grasp some truths about the world by shedding our intellectual sweat, we
can’t grasp thus the truth about the one who is beyond the world. It is only by
divine grace that we finite beings can gain some insights into the one who is
infinite. The Gita (10.11) identifies Krishna’s grace as the illuminator that
dissipates inner darkness – darkness that keeps us seduced by material things
and keeps our consciousness trapped at the material level.
We can’t comprehend God by stretching our intellects as
someone might stretch one’s body to pull down an out-of-reach fruit on a tree.
Understanding God is not a matter of grasping but of being
grasped. We can’t comprehend God by stretching our intellects as someone might
stretch one’s body to pull down an out-of-reach fruit on a tree. We comprehend
God by letting our consciousness be raised upwards from the material level to
the spiritual level by divine grace that manifests through the process of
bhakti-yoga, somewhat similar to the way a rescuing rope from a helicopter lifts
a refugee out of a disaster zone.
Of course, we shouldn’t minimize the value of our God-given
intelligence, but we shouldn’t over-estimate it either. Our intellectual effort
is important, but it alone won’t yield fruit if we try to fathom God from our present
material level of consciousness. Our intellectual effort is useful to the
extent it convinces us of the dual needs to submit to the divine and to hold on
to the process of grace revealed by the divine for raising our consciousness.
When the Truth, manifesting in the highest form as the
supremely loving and lovable all-attractive Supreme Person Krishna, grasps us
in a bond of pure spiritual love, we get elevated and liberated into a life of
eternal happiness.
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