Question: How should we deal with people who clearly are out to cheat the world, and clearly are more inclined towards evil than good? What should be our attitude towards them?
Radhanath Swami: To a certain extent we have the power to change our environment, but ultimately it’s very limited. We may not be able to change the whole world or how people think or how people act or why people do what they do. Of course we can try our best to help, but there is one thing that we can always change and that’s ourselves.
If we live by the power, if we live with that potential of devotion, if we carry God’s grace in our lives and express it through what we do, that’s the greatest way in which we can influence others, and there will be many people you do seriously influence. And of course there will be other people you may not be able to influence so much. But you can be transcendental to that. We cannot always change everything in this world but we can change ourselves and that gives us this great strength to be an instrument of change in others.
So how to deal with people like that? There are certain universal laws of spirituality. It is said that we should hate the disease but not the diseased. In Bhagvad-gita Krishna tells ahaḿ bīja-pradaḥ pitā, that he is the father and mother of every living being. So that means everyone is our brother and sister, everyone is inherently divine. Everyone is part of God, but due to disease of the ahankar, the ego, one becomes incriminated in ever increasing bondage of lust, envy, anger, pride and greed, and one becomes a servant of these things.
If our mother is sick we hate the disease but we love our mother. So when our brothers and sisters, in the form of whoever they may be in this world, when they are acting in such a cruel, evil or selfish way, it’s the symptom of terrible disease. If we see it that way, instead of hating them we will actually feel compassion for them. To feel hate for a diseased person, that hate burns our heart; it doesn’t heal our heart.
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