‘Go on, Deva, pick up your Vajra and kill your enemy.
Fate controls the lives of all beings, and their deaths. The only exception is the Parama Purusha, The Absolute - Supreme Self - Pure Awareness. The worlds and their Gods live and indulge in karma by the will of this Being, the Kaalatman - Time Self.
Knowing none of this, men identify themselves with their mortal bodies, forgetting the eternal Lord - Awareness, within their hearts.
He controls everything, and we are deceived that we are the doers.
No moment of our lives is in our hands. When fate wills, we are born. Fortune and misfortune, labour and rest, bright and dark, good and evil befall us, each in their time, as ordained by destiny. One should cast a cold eye upon these opposite things: honour and dishonor, poverty and wealth, victory and defeat, pleasure and pain, and yes, even life and death. This is the only wisdom.
And this wisdom can be obtained only with God’s grace. The man who knows that sattva, rajas and tamas are but the modes of nature, not the essences of the Self - Awareness, who is always an actless witness to the interplay of these gunas, that man is illumined and freed from the bonds of samsara.
Look at me, O Indra, You have vanquished me and sloughed off my arm with your Vajra. Yet, I shall fight you, and never give in to my last breath. That is my dharma.
A field of battle is a final gambling house: life is the stake, arrows the dice and our men and beasts the board across which the dice roll. But, finally, only Time knows who will win and who will lose the day, who will live and who die.’
Indra was silent for a long moment, gazing at this amazing adversary, this calm and enlightened Demon.
He joined his hands to show respect for his enemy, then said with a laugh, ‘Danavas, you are truly a Siddha! - Enlightened. Why, you are more, you are a true bhakta - devotee, the highest sort, of the Lord who rules the universe. Ignorance does not blind you, and you speak in wonderful wisdom at this moment of your direst peril.
Great Vritra, I bow to you that laugh in Death’s very face! The Lord’s maya - cosmic illusion, does not delude you, Asura. I am astonished that you, a demon, rajasic by nature, as such a devotee of the sattvik Lord Hari - Vishnu
A bhakta like you drinks from the ocean of amrita - immortality. What do the ditches and gutters, which are the pleasures of Devaloka - Heaven, mean to you, Great Vritra, noblest of my enemies?’
-Bhagavata Purana, Ramesh Menon
