ENJOYING THE FRUITS OF A POISONOUS TREE
In the Upaniṣads the example (of the lord and the living entities) is given of two birds sitting on a tree. One bird (the jīva, or living entity) is enjoying the fruits of that tree, and the other bird (Paramātmā) is simply witnessing. In the Bhagavad-gītā (13.23) the Supreme Personality of Godhead as Paramātmā is described as upadraṣṭā (the overseer) and anumantā (the permitter).Thus the Lord simply witnesses and gives the living entity sanction for sense enjoyment. The living entity in material nature thus follows the ways of life, enjoying the three modes of nature. This is due to his association with that material nature. Thus he meets with good and evil among various species.
Srimad Bhagavatam 5.14.12
sa yadā dugdha-pūrva-sukṛtas tadā
kāraskara-kākatuṇḍādy-apuṇya-druma-latā-viṣoda-pānavad
ubhayārtha-śūnya-draviṇān jīvan-mṛtān svayaṁ jīvan-mriyamāṇa upadhāvati.
SYNONYMS
saḥ—that conditioned soul; yadā—when; dugdha—exhausted; pūrva—previous; sukṛtaḥ—pious activities; tadā—at that time; kāraskara-kākatuṇḍa-ādi—named kāraskara, kākatuṇḍa, etc.; apuṇya-druma-latā—impious trees and creepers; viṣa-uda-pāna-vat—like wells with poisonous water; ubhaya-artha-śūnya—which cannot give happiness either in this life or in the next; draviṇān—those who possess wealth; jīvat-mṛtān—who are dead, although apparently alive; svayam—he himself; jīvat—living; mriyamāṇaḥ—being dead; upadhāvati—approaches for material acquisition.
TRANSLATION
Due to his pious activities in previous lives, the conditioned soul attains material facilities in this life, but when they are finished, he takes shelter of wealth and riches, which cannot help him in this life or the next. Because of this, he approaches the living dead who possess these things. Such people are compared to impure trees, creepers and poisonous wells.
PURPORT
The wealth and riches acquired through previous pious activities should not be misused for sense gratification. Enjoying them for sense gratification is like enjoying the fruits of a poisonous tree. Such activities will not help the conditioned soul in any way, neither in this life nor the next. However, if one engages his possessions in the service of the Lord under the guidance of a proper spiritual master, he will attain happiness both in this life and the next. Unless he does so, he eats a forbidden apple and thereby loses his paradise. Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa therefore advises that one’s possessions should be given unto Him.
yat karoṣi yad aśnāsi
yaj juhoṣi dadāsi yat
yat tapasyasi kaunteya
tat kuruṣva mad-arpaṇam
“O son of Kuntī, all that you do, all that you eat, all that you offer and give away, as well as all austerities that you may perform, should be done as an offering unto Me.” (Bg. 9.27) Material wealth and opulence attained through previous pious activities can be fully utilized for one’s benefit in this life and the next if one is Kṛṣṇa conscious. One should not try to possess more than he needs for the bare necessities. If one gets more than is needed, the surplus should be fully engaged in the Lord’s service. That will make the conditioned soul, the world and Kṛṣṇa happy, and this is the aim of life.
SB 7.5.31 – TEXT 31
na te viduḥ svārtha-gatiṁ hi viṣṇuṁ
durāśayā ye bahir-artha-māninaḥ
andhā yathāndhair upanīyamānās
te ’pīśa-tantryām uru-dāmni baddhāḥ
Persons who are strongly entrapped by the consciousness of enjoying material life, and who have therefore accepted as their leader or guru a similar blind man attached to external sense objects, cannot understand that the goal of life is to return home, back to Godhead, and engage in the service of Lord Viṣṇu. As blind men guided by another blind man miss the right path and fall into a ditch, materially attached men led by another materially attached man are bound by the ropes of fruitive labor, which are made of very strong cords, and they continue again and again in materialistic life, suffering the threefold miseries.
IN THIS MATERIALISTIC LIFE THE
CONDITIONED SOUL GETS NOTHING BUT MISERY
Srimad Bhagavatam 5.14.27
In this materialistic life, there are many difficulties, as I have just mentioned, and all of these are insurmountable. In addition, there are difficulties arising from so-called happiness, distress, attachment, hate, fear, false prestige, illusion, madness, lamentation, bewilderment, greed, envy, enmity, insult, hunger, thirst, tribulation, disease, birth, old age and death. All these combine together to give the materialistic conditioned soul nothing but misery.
PURPORT: The conditioned soul has to accept all these conditions simply to enjoy sense gratification in this world. Although people declare themselves great scientists, economists, philosophers, politicians and sociologists. they are actually nothing but rascals. Therefore they have been described as mūḍhas and narādhamas in Bhagavad-gītā (7.15):
na māṁ duṣkṛtino mūḍhāḥ
prapadyante narādhamāḥ
māyayāpahṛta-jñānā
āsuraṁ bhāvam āśritāḥ
“Those miscreants who are grossly foolish, lowest among mankind. whose knowledge is stolen by illusion, and who partake of the atheistic nature of demons, do not surrender unto Me.”
Due to their foolishness, all these materialists are described in Bhagavad-gītā as narādhamas. They have attained the human form in order to get released from material bondage, but instead of doing so. they become further embarrassed amid the miserable material conditions. Therefore they are narādhamas, the lowest of men. One may ask whether scientists, philosophers, economists and mathematicians are also narādhamas, the lowest of men, and the Supreme Personality of Godhead replies that they are because they have no actual knowledge. They are simply proud of their false prestige and position. Actually they do not know how to get relief from the material condition and renovate their spiritual life of transcendental bliss and knowledge. Consequently they waste time and energy in the search for so-called happiness. These are the qualifications of the demons. In Bhagavad-gītā it says that when one has all these demonic qualities, he becomes a mūḍha. Due to this. he envies the Supreme Personality of Godhead; therefore birth after birth he is born into a demonic family, and he transmigrates from one demonic body to another. Thus he forgets his relationship with Kṛṣṇa and remains a narādhama in an abominable condition life after life.
In the Padma Purāṇa, man’s sinful activities have been analyzed and are shown to be the results of sin after sin. Those who are engaged in fruitive activities are entangled in different stages and forms of sinful reactions. For instance, when the seed of a particular tree is sown, the tree does not appear immediately to grow; it takes some time. It is first a small, sprouting plant, then it assumes the form of a tree, then it flowers, bears fruit, and, when it is complete, the flowers and fruits are enjoyed by persons who have sown the seed of the tree. Similarly, a man performs a sinful act, and like a seed it takes time to fructify. There are different stages. The sinful action may have already stopped within the individual, but the results or the fruit of that sinful action are still enjoyed. There are sins which are still in the form of a seed, and there are others which are already fructified and are giving us fruit, which we are enjoying as distress and pain, as explained in the twentieth verse of the Seventh Chapter.
The demoniac person, who has no faith in God or the Supersoul within himself, performs all kinds of sinful activities simply for sense gratification. He does not know that there is a witness sitting within his heart. The Supersoul is observing the activities of the individual soul. As it is stated in the Vedic literature, the Upaniṣads, there are two birds sitting in one tree; the one is acting and enjoying or suffering the fruits of the branches, and the other is witnessing. But one who is demoniac has no knowledge of Vedic scripture, nor has he any faith; therefore he feels free to do anything for sense enjoyment, regardless of the consequences.
DEMONIAC MENTALITY
The demoniac person thinks: “So much wealth do I have today, and I will gain more according to my schemes. So much is mine now, and it will increase in the future, more and more. He is my enemy, and I have killed him; and my other enemy will also be killed. I am the lord of everything, I am the enjoyer, I am perfect, powerful and happy. I am the richest man, surrounded by aristocratic relatives. There is none so powerful and happy as I am. I shall perform sacrifices, I shall give some charity, and thus I shall rejoice.” In this way, such persons are deluded by ignorance. (BG/16/13-15)
The atheistic, or godless, civilization is a huge affair of sense gratification, and everyone is now mad after money to keep up an empty show. Everyone is seeking money because that is the medium of exchange for sense-gratificatory objects. To expect peace in such an atmosphere of gold-rush pandemonium is a utopian dream.
THE CONSEQUENCES
Thus perplexed by various anxieties and bound by a network of illusions, one becomes too strongly attached to sense enjoyment and falls down into hell. (BG/16/16)
The demoniac man knows no limit to his desire to acquire money. That is unlimited. He only thinks how much assessment he has just now and schemes to engage that stock of wealth farther and farther. For that reason, he does not hesitate to act in any sinful way and so deals in the black market for illegal gratification. He is enamoured by the possessions he has already, such as land, family, house and bank balance, and he is always planning to improve them. He believes in his own strength, and he does not know that whatever he is gaining is due to his past good deeds. He is given an opportunity to accumulate such things, but he has no conception of past causes. He simply thinks that all his mass of wealth is due to his own endeavor. A demoniac person believes in the strength of his personal work, not in the law of karma. According to the law of karma, a man takes his birth in a high family, or becomes rich, or very well educated, or very beautiful because of good work in the past. The demoniac thinks that all these things are accidental and due to the strength of his personal ability. He does not sense any arrangement behind all the varieties of people, beauty, and education. Anyone who comes into competition with such a demoniac man is his enemy. There are many demoniac people, and each is enemy to the others. This enmity becomes more and more deep-between persons, then between families, then between societies, and at last between nations. Therefore there is constant strife, war and enmity all over the world.
Each demoniac person thinks that he can live at the sacrifice of all others. Generally, a demoniac person thinks of himself as the Supreme God, and a demoniac preacher tells his followers: “Why are you seeking God elsewhere? You are all yourselves God! Whatever you like, you can do. Don’t believe in God. Throw away God. God is dead.” These are the demoniac’s preachings.
Although the demoniac person sees others equally rich and influential, or even more so, he thinks that no one is richer than him and that no one is more influential than him. As far as promotion to the higher planetary system is concerned, he does not believe in performing yajñas or sacrifices. Demons think that they will manufacture their own process of yajña and prepare some machine, by which they will be able to reach any higher planet. The best example of such a demoniac man was Rāvaṇa. He offered a program to the people by which he would prepare a staircase so that anyone could reach the heavenly planets without performing sacrifices, such as are prescribed in the Vedas. Similarly, in the present age such demoniac men are striving to reach the higher planetary systems by mechanical arrangement. These are examples of bewilderment. The result is that, without their knowledge, they are gliding toward hell. Here the Sanskrit word mohajāla is very significant. Jāla means net; like fishes caught in a net, they have no way to come out.
The argument of the atheist that one cannot be punished for one’s misdeeds unless proved before a qualified justice is refuted herein, for we accept the perpetual witness and constant companion of the living being. A living being may forget all that he might have done in his past or present life, but one must know that in the same tree of the material body, the individual soul and the Supreme Soul as Paramātmā are sitting like two birds. One of them, the living being, is enjoying the fruits of the tree, whereas the Supreme Being is there to witness the activities. Therefore the Paramātmā feature, the Supreme Soul, is actually the witness of all activities of the living being, and only by His direction can the living being remember or forget what he might have done in the past. He is, therefore, both the all-pervading impersonal Brahman and the localized Paramātmā in everyone’s heart. He is the knower of all past, present and future, and nothing can be concealed from Him.
THE FRUIT OF THE POISONOUS TREE
(as you sow, so you shall reap)
We’ve all heard the old saying, “The end justifies the means.” That means it doesn’t matter how you get what you want, as long as you get it. You can lie, cheat, steal, hurt people, destroy lives—whatever—as long as you accomplish what you set out to do. On the flip side, a reference to “the fruit of the poisonous tree” is a legal doctrine which means that if the way you get or achieve something is illegal—lying, cheating, stealing—then the results of those methods are inadmissible in court.
But why should we care what’s accepted in court or not? We’re not lawyers and few of us will ever have to go into a courtroom. Or so we think.
The fact is that God is a god of justice and therefore, He operates in an actual courtroom in heaven. Moreover, He responds to us as if we were in a court of law—because we are.
The point? “The fruit of the poisonous tree.” Since God is a just judge, how we do things is a top priority to Him. In heaven’s courtroom, the end does not justify the means. In other words, God pays close attention to what we do to accomplish our goals—even if they’re good goals—and He absolutely will not bless any endeavour which is accomplished dishonestly or in a way that takes advantage of or harms other people. The results or “fruit” of a “poisonous” method of doing business (whatever biz you’re up to) is not acceptable in God’s courtroom. We can try to justify our actions to anyone who will listen—including the person in the mirror—but if our actions or behaviours are dishonest or detrimental, then God will not only not bless our work, but He’ll oppose it.
For example, if students cheat on a test, they may score a 100 but I won’t give it to them. They’ll get a zero. That’s the penalty for cheating because the end does not “justify the means”. Of course, that all hinges on whether or not I’m smart enough to catch them, but I don’t recommend judging what we can “get away with” with God in terms of what we can pull over on other human beings. I’m not God and I don’t have the advantage of omniscience the way He does. In other words, just because I don’t see it, doesn’t mean He won’t.
But how’s this work in terms of the bigger picture? Let’s say a student “gets away with it” the first time. Okay, but one, two or even three things will happen: One, he’ll get caught cheating somewhere down the line, sooner or later, because no liar is that smart. Two, if he doesn’t get caught in school, he’ll move onto other methods of cheating in life: on taxes, on timesheets, on a spouse. Why wouldn’t he? And three, his character will become completely corrupted because in his mind, the end truly does “justify the means.” Why shouldn’t it? It always has.
“as you sow, so you shall reap” means: if you did bad things in the past, you will get bad results in the future, if you did good things in the past, you will get good results in the future.
Man sows the seed to attain what he desires to reap. Even so, man does evil deeds and reaps the fruits of pain. He who does virtuous actions reaps good fruits. One reaps the fruits according to his Karmas or actions.
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