In the previous episode, we had witnessed Bhagawan Bala-Krishna performing the beautiful and rapturous “Kaaliya-Nardhana”, which captures the Gokula people and the animals into divine bliss. This is yet another instance wherein Bhagawan Bala-Krishna conveys a message to His ardent devotees that He alone is the savior of this world. We had witnessed how Bhagawan Bala-Krishna danced over the heads of Snake Kaaliya and playfully brought down his arrogance and greed. As we witness this beautiful episode of the “Krishna Leela”, there are few important spiritual and management lessons that we need to learn here. Let us discuss some of them in today’s episode.
First and foremost, with the divine “Kaaliya-Nardhanaa”, Bhagawan Bala-Krishna propagates the message to the world that “Abhinaya” (Dance) is yet another beautiful methodology to experience Bhagawan and attain “Moksha”. Just like how we had witnessed earlier with regards to how music is one such methodology, here, Bhagawan Bala-Krishna indicates the significance of dance as a form of capturing the “Bhakta’s” attention towards Him. Thus, to the visual treat of the Gokula people, Bhagawan Bala-Krishna performs the divine “Kaaliya-Nardhana”. This is one way of looking at it.
The second and the most important way of looking at this episode of “Kaaliya-Nardhana” is that, Bhagawan Bala-Krishna conveys how arrogance and greed are prime enemies to mankind and how these two bad qualities prove to be detrimental to one’s spiritual growth. Snake Kaaliya was an embodiment of arrogance and greed. He was arrogant because he had in him the world’s most treacherous poison that can kill any living being in this world. With that, Snake Kaaliya thought that he could bring the entire world under his control by taking all living beings to ransom. Secondly, Snake Kaaliya had the greed to be the supreme power and authority in this world. Having power and authority is not wrong, but if not used judiciously, the leader is going to face all sorts of problems. This is exactly what Snake Kaaliya is illustrating here. He had all the powers in the world. But because he tried to use them to destroy living beings, Bhagawan had to intervene and show him his place.
Apart from this, we shall now witness why Bhagawan Bala-Krishna performed the divine dance. As we might have heard many times from our elders – “Arrogance – If it breaches the limit, it goes directly to the head!” In other words, we might often seen the usage of this term called “head-weight”. This term is often used to describe people who think too much about themselves and not being humble and down to earth. For instance, if a person is good at some art form like music, he / she should realize that there might be many such people in this world who might be as good as him / her in music, or better than him / her in it. Just because this person sings well and gets appreciation from others, it doesn’t mean that he / she would go around the world and boast around. If this person is going around doing so, it means that his / her ego level has risen beyond a permissible point. Once the ego level rises to uncontrollable levels, it starts getting to the person’s head directly. Once this ego reaches the head, this becomes arrogance. This is why we use this term called “head-weight” to describe a person who has a lot of arrogance and self-pride.
Having understood what is “head-weight” here, we can now come back to the Snake Kaaliya’s context – As Snake Kaaliya was becoming arrogant by the day, he had enormous head-weight that nobody in this world is as powerful as him to stop his atrocities. Thus, his bad actions were on the rise. It is at this point, Bhagawan Bala-Krishna decided to teach him a lesson. He thus danced over Snake Kaaliya’s head(s) to illustrate the point that arrogance starts from the head and if one has to bring it down, he / she should start bringing down the ego from the head. As Bhagawan Bala-Krishna is pressing each and every head of Snake Kaaliya, his arrogance and ego came down, and eventually he realized his folly.
Thus, these are some of the most important messages that Bhagawan Bala-Krishna is trying to convey through this divine “Kaaliya-Nardhana” episode. We shall continue with this discussion in the next episode as well, as we move on with the next divine “Leela” of Bhagawan Bala-Krishna! Stay tuned! 🙂
The Indian Dharma 