From the newsletter of Sri Sri Radha Gopinatha
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The ball is everyone’s object of attention, but is it anyone’s object of love? The players (and the audience) give it attention only because they hope to get what they want from it. Similarly, we may sometimes become others’ object of attention, but do we become anyone’s object of love?
The sad truth is that most people are interested not in us per se, but in what they can get out of us. Finally when the ball gets damaged, it is casually tossed away. It becomes reduced from the cynosure of all eyes to an unnoticed trash item. Similarly when our bodies become tired by age, we are tossed away, retired. We become relegated from the center of our homes to an unknown corner. Teams win and teams lose, but the ball never wins it just keeps getting beaten. Similarly, the body, school and company, country – the things with which we identify – sometimes win and sometimes lose, but we as souls never win we just keep getting beaten -beaten by bodily miseries, social miseries and environmental miseries.
Human society must be focused on what is truly beneficial. Why waste our lives and misdirect our lives by taking these sports so seriously?
Krishna Consciousness is not against recreation. In fact, everything we do chanting, dancing, feasting is recreation. A devotee understands higher and lower forms of recreation and which kind of recreation is beneficial for spiritual progress. he purpose of sports is that it is supposed to bring happiness. But if we take it too seriously from point of view of winning and losing, it brings only misery. Even if we win this time, the next time we lose, we will be miserable. Have you ever thought of the plight of a cricket ball? The ball is sometimes kissed, sometimes beaten. Sometimes raised high, sometimes flung down. Sometimes chased after, sometimes thrown away. In the game of life, dont we find ourselves in the same predicament? We are sometimes loved, sometimes hated. Sometimes taken high by success, sometimes flung down by failure. Sometimes adored, sometimes neglected.
But we have one freedom that the cricket ball doesn’t have. The ball can’t quit the game, we can. The Vedic scriptures explain that our fascination with sports is natural, but misdirected. As eternal spiritual beings, we don’t have to play the miserable game of material life. We have a birthright to enjoy eternal sport – in the team of the supreme sport-star, God, Krishna. the kingdom of God is an eternal sporting arena, where Krishna enjoys loving sports with His devotee friends, where “every walk is a dance and every talk is a song.” (Brahma- Samhita 5.56). here all our desires for enjoyable sports are completely fulfilled – not by vicarious imagination, but by vivacious participation!
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