It is said that the universe is unreal and everything is God’s lila, play. Then why does it happen at all? Why does God want to be entertained? — Vinithra, 25 years, Chennai
■ God doesn’t do lila, play, for his entertainment; we create our own lilas and then blame God for them. God has a lot on his plate. He may not have the time for playing different lilas with billions of people with divergent views and contrasting emotions.
We are caught in the web of our own desires, hence we create our myriad little lilas. If things don’t turn out to be the way we had imagined, we blame God and His lila for our misery.
Just like a spider who spins its own web and later destroys it, we can also destroy the web of desires that engulfs us. Why not? Aren’t we the ones who created it in the first place? To break the illusion we have to go deeper within, because the lila maybe external, but as its directors, we have to find out what’s going on within.
Nature destroys what it creates; this is its simple rule. Prakriti is in constant flux, hence our body, mind, intellect and ego also experience constant change. There is no lila in that. People act according to their vasanas, desires, and samskaras and this results in raga dvesha, attachments and maliciousness. When things don’t work out the way we want them to, we blame it on maya. But the universe doesn’t work according to our needs or desires; it has its own laws. We can’t force our desires on the cosmos.
We have to understand that lila is actually ensconced in our chitta, consciousness. We should develop a spiritual practice to be able to see it and realise our real svarupa that is satchit ananda. ■
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