02.07: Let’s stop serving God as advisors

The essential effect on Arjuna of hearing the Bhagavad-gita was a thorough re-evaluation of his own role and relationship with the Supreme, Sri Krishna. Before hearing the Gita, Arjuna saw himself as the controller and Krishna as the cooperator.  After hearing the Gita, Arjuna saw Krishna as the controller and himself as the cooperator.

Often things “go wrong” and thus rudely remind us that we are not the controllers– as happened with Arjuna when he was confronted with the “wrong” task of fighting his own relatives. When things “go wrong”, we covertly hold on to our cherished desire to be controllers by taking on the role of advisors to God and start advising about how he should be doing things – as did Arjuna in the first chapter of the Gita. Advising God is one service that everyone loves to offer to God – even, and especially, atheists whose normally non-existent God pops into existence whenever they feel like advising him and vanishes into non-existence after gratefully accepting their counsel. However, as Arjuna experienced in the start of the second chapter of the Gita, such advising God only frustrates and confuses us: frustrates us because we can’t change the inevitable will of providence and confuses us because our mind keeps coming up with new and self-contradictory advices.

If we surrender to Krishna and become open to hearing his version of things – as Arjuna did in Gita 2.7, then we slowly realize, as did Arjuna by Gita 18.73, that everything was going according to God’s perfect plan; the only thing that had gone wrong was that we had assumed the wrong role of controllers and advisors to God.