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"The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave
Awaits alike the inevitable hour;
The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
Gray's Elegy.
Memento mori | Enlightenment
After he wrote that, he was
—still he's a minor poet,
but then he was really an unknown ...
but after he wrote this poem they published it in some newspapers,
he remarked, he said, "I woke up one morning and I was famous."
However high you go,
ā-brahma-bhuvanāl lokāḥ punar āvartino 'rjuna (Bg: 8.16),
it all ends up in the same place: the grave.
It's all finished at that time.
That's not a morbid thought, it's called "momentum mori":
things that remind us —death reminders—are enlightening,
because that's the situation that we're in.
Every day, the news ... death is front page news.
The famous die, the wealthy die, the rich die,
the beautiful die, the young die.
Dealing with the mortality issue
is not cowardly; it requires some courage.
When someone get's cancer in America, especially a famous person,
they all—some representative, a friend, someone—will come
and go, "Bill's a real fighter, he's gonna fight this thing."
You know there's a place in Ireland
where they'll accept a bet on just about anything ...
I'm betting on cancer.
Anyone wants to take m—, I'll bet, I'll always bet, on cancer.
"He's gonna fight this thing" ... and he's gonna lose.
So the great atheist Christopher Hitchens, he died last year.
Even he mocked this stuff, he said,
"It's as if to say," if they write in the obituary,
"'After a long struggle with mortality, he succumbed.'"
Death is an inevitability for everyone,
so, before another death occurs ...
that's what it says.
Tasyaiva hetoḥ prayateta kovido
na labhyate yad bhramatām upary adhaḥ (SB: 1.5.18);
in many places, the Bhāgavatam's imploring us:
while you have this opportunity before you,
dharmaḥ svanuṣṭhitaḥ puṁsāṁ viṣvaksena-kathāsu yaḥ
notpādayed yadi ratiṁ śrama eva hi kevalam (SB: 1.2.8).
Even to devotees it's saying,
if the end result of whatever it is you're doing
is not increased attraction for hearing and chanting about Kṛṣṇa,
you're wasting your time.
In another place: kāmasya nendriya-prītir
lābho jīveta yāvatā jīvasya tattva-jijñāsā
nārtho yaś ceha karmabhiḥ (Sb 1.2.10);
a formula is given, how to balance the mundane and the spiritual,
and what is being said?
You only need to accumulate the mundane
to the point where it allows you to engage
maximum energy in spiritual culture.
That's the right balance, that's the right formula.
Otherwise it's just to be ignorant.
I've seen goats in Kolkata,
they're on their way to the slaughterhouse,
and how you know ...
they put red paint on the neck.
And the guy's herding them over,
then they get into the line and you'll see:
while they're waiting to get their heads chopped off,
a male goat mounting a she-goat
and having sex with the she-goat—
he's gonna have his head cut off in three minutes.
Hello? H-h-h-h-h-h-hello?
"The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not wa-a-a-ant."
Have to be forward; look.
Mṛtyuḥ sarva-haraś cāham (Bg: 10.34):
Kṛṣṇa says, "If you don't get it any other way,
mṛtyuḥ sarva-haraś cāham, I come before you as death
and take away everything."
When my brother, who was a theist when he was younger,
wanted to be a priest,
then got "educated" by enlightenment teachers
and became an atheist and then a doctor and everything
—I could say this if he was in the room.
Anyway ... he's a surgeon, big time neurologist,
but when he was 37 he went in to operate one day
and he keeled over onto the operating table
and they had to operate on him,
he had an attack of gastroenteritis or something.
And so it looked like he was gonna die—
the doctors weren't telling us, they thought,
"Prepare yourselves that he's going to die."
And our family's noted for the sense of humour ...
Anyway, so I went to see him and I opened the door
and I said, "I heard you called for a priest"
but he wasn't laughing at the time,
and he turned to me and he went, "It's God! It's God!"
Not that I was God, but what he meant was:
"What happened to me, it's God!"
And he said, for those who don't get it any other way,
he got it momentarily.
But then he recovered, gradually, gradually,
and then resumed his position as an atheist—a so-called atheist.
I think he's a closet theist, a Kṛṣṇa-ite at heart,
and he's counting on me, he's betting on me.
He does pay attention.