Namaste, and thank you for being with us for another episode of Ulladu-Narpadu! Today we’re going to look into verse three – this is when it really starts to get good! [laughs]

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Everybody is looking for something. All our activities, all our desires, all our hopes and dreams, our thoughts, our plans, etc. are based on this universal impetus towards Self-realization. We may know it, or we may not know it, it doesn’t make any difference – we can’t stop, until we attain it. Suffering is the goad. In Vedic culture there’s one mudra, Aṅkūṣa-mudra, which is like this... No, I’m not giving you the finger! [laughs] It’s very indicative of an elephant driver’s goad, which is a pole with a sharp end, that he uses to get the elephant to move, sort of like spurs on a horse rider. So, because of this goad of suffering, or ambition, desire, we can’t stop, we can’t help ourselves. We have to act, we have to move, we have to do something to better our condition. As long as we have a condition [laughs], as long as we are conditioned. [laughs]

So, let’s look into this verse a little deeper. First he said, “What use is it to debate?” My level of realization, my level of insight, my level of consciousness is going to be different from yours and from everybody else. We’re all unique individuals, we see things in our own ways. What use is it to debate? Are we really going to change anybody else’s minds? The only way we can force someone to do things is by coercion, by some kind of force, and of course that immediately rules out any change in consciousness, or any change in outlook. So the master teachers of the world have never used force, the greatest teachers.

Now, at a lower level of religious teaching there are moral principles, and rewards and punishments, to get people to do, or believe, certain things. But these are inferior. Why? Because they use force and coercion. Rather than allowing a person to work on themselves, and giving them methods by which they can get deeper insights, the religions try to set a code of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s bad, and force people to fit it. This is the Procrustean bed of morality. [chuckles] Procrustes was an ancient king, and he had this bed, and you had to fit in the bed, and if you were too long, he would chop things off until you were short enough, and if you were too short, he would stretch you until you would fit! Either way, it wasn’t a very nice, pleasant stay... [chuckles] And the same is true of morality: morality, manmade laws... They say they come from God, but come on! It’s really from our tastes. And my taste is different from your taste, which is different from everybody else’s! Because we’re all unique, we’re all individual, we’re all at a particular stage of advancement in our march toward Self-realization.