Do Certain People Not Deserve to Read the Scriptures?

Questioner: Namskar Acharya ji. Pardon me for not remembering exactly but in one of the shivirs where we had read ‘Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna’ to come to terms with this expression called ‘Adhikar Bhed.’

So therein Ramakrishna was saying that, “now in modern times there cannot be any Adhikar Bhed, which earlier existed in the ancient times with scriptures.” So, what was this Adhikar Bhed and why cannot it exist in the modern times?

Acharya Prashant : There are two times of Adhikar Bhed, one is that comes from the Varna tradition, so that for obvious reasons cannot exist today and should not have existed at any point. So that is the principle kind of Adhikar Bhed, that has been practiced in this country. The other kind of Adhikar Bhed is the one, that Acharya Shankar talks of, “you have to display your maturity, your merit, your preparedness.”

Now the first one has to be discarded because it is based on birth, body, coincidence, a lot of nonsense. The second one, gets discarded in deep love. And therefore, both get discarded. First one has to be discarded right in the beginning, the second one gets discarded at the end.

If the teacher is half genuine, then the kind of Adhikar Bhed that has been traditionally practiced, you will learn only if you belong to a certain kind of birth or family or community. I said, “Even a half teacher would not listen to this kind of distinction, ‘Bhed’ is a distinction.”

The second kind of distinction that the teacher is supposed to honor is more serious. “Is the student capable of at least sitting still? Is the student a kleptomaniac? Can the student listen with attention for even five minutes? Is the student too fond of money? Is the student too fond of sleeping? What if he falls asleep in the middle of the discourse?” Are you getting it? Is the student even desirous of liberation? So, these criteria have to be addressed. That’s the second kind of Adhikar Bhed, that you find in the ‘Sadhana Chatushtaya System.’

The second one we said, too, gets dropped at the end, it gets dropped in compassion, in compassion, you don’t deserve it but come. In modern times you hardly find anybody who is very deserving. So probably, what Ramakrishna meant was if I start looking for very deserving people, I will just keep looking my entire life. His own disciple kept looking for just a hundred students, his entire life and never got them. Ramkrishna had lesser ambitions, he wanted just one. He was lucky, he got him.

Vivekananda had a bigger canvas. He wanted to transform the entire country and then probably the entire world. He wanted a hundred, but didn't succeed. So, if you keep being too observant of merit, there is a problem, a practical problem. Obviously, nothing like it if you can get meritorious students. But you have a limited lifetime, you cannot keep waiting for decades. So, what does the industrious one, the keen one, the loving teacher do?

He says,” irrespective of the raw material that I am getting, I will refine my manufacturing process. If I cannot get the right raw material, I will take my manufacturing process two notches higher. Even from a very ordinary kind of raw material I will try to create winners.” And in that lies the genius and the glory of the teacher. Because anybody can produce a superior kind of output from superior input. But to be able to turn iron to gold is the characteristic, as traditionally said, of the great teacher.

So that’s the challenge that Ramkrishna faced, Vivekananda faced and would be faced even today. It was not easy for Ramkrishna to enroll even Vivekananda, do you know that? Vivekananda was a tough nut to crack. For many years he just kept coming and going back, and coming and going back and he was doing all these things. Vivekananda was an English educated modern youth. He had not been brought up to become a monk. In fact, when he first met Ramkrishna, he was hardly impressed.

It was when Vivekananda fell upon hard times, it was then that something else opened up and he started frequenting Ramkrishna a little more and then the two got intimate in the student-teacher sense and things proceeded from there.

All is possible, if first of all the intent is there. Love comes first. So that’s the reason why since more than a decade I have been clamoring, “It’s all about your inner honesty. If you have the intent, it will happen, that same intent we are calling today as love.” If you are failing it’s not primarily because you lack in wisdom or knowledge or this or that. The most fundamental reason is that you are loveless.

If you are still in bondage, come on accept it. The reason is that you don’t love liberation strongly enough. You are not prepared to pay the ultimate price. Nothing else. If that very, I don’t have a better word so I’m calling it a sentiment, a feeling, a leaning, an inclination. Language falls short here, you see. If you don’t have that leaning, if you don’t feel that charm, that compulsion, if you don’t feel arrested, if you don’t feel compelled and possessed; no amount of knowledge or lecturing can help you. It’s that special sentiment, and not the ordinary kind of sentiment, it’s a very special sentiment. It requires a highly emotional person to go beyond the ordinary emotionality.

And that’s why saints have cried and wept and expressed emotionality like no other ordinary emotional person. And they were the ones who knew where emotions came from. They know all emotions abide in the body, arise from the body and all that thing, we know all that, right? And you would be thinking, how if saint Kabir or saint Nanak often found in behaving in such emotional ways! Not just behaving, even speaking or writing, how does that happen?

It’s the man, the real one, lover of liberation, is a highly emotional being, very, very, sentimental. It’s just that his sentiment has an upward, sublime quality. He’s not dry, not rough, not rigid. He is not a mass of dead rock. He is a throbbing vitality. You could call him meta emotional, hyper emotional. Are you getting it?

And unless that thing is there, you will remain as you are.

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