The devotee is saying, “You're such a bad father to me; there's never been an example of such a bad father in this whole world! You're allowing me to get abused by your maidservant maya!”
The question here, the confusion, that we can address is that, is it possible for any power of God to be amangal or do any amangal work? Amangal means inauspicious, bad, evil. When maya is Krishna's power, is it possible for maya to cause any wrong situation to exist, anything bad to happen? No, it is impossible for any power of God to be amangal or do any amangal kām. Then, what is happening here? Actually, what is happening here is that maya is doing what's best for us. Maya is the servant of our father, Shri Krishna, and maya is in fact our first teacher, our first Guru.
We don't belong to maya. We are not mayic beings. We simply have a mayic house, a mayic vehicle that we're living in, this body. But we are Divine beings and we belong to Shri Krishna, but we're turned away from Him and turned towards maya, willingly, willfully, stubbornly turned towards maya and away from Shri Krishna. Now, Shri Krishna can send Saints in the world. He can make the Vedic knowledge available in the world.
Those Saints can teach us and try to guide us towards Shri Krishna. Shri Krishna Himself can take avatār in this world, and yet none of that would have any effect if maya was not here to put us in our place. You see, we say there's the carrot and the stick, right? There's two ways to get somebody to do what you want to. You offer them the carrot, which means like a horse. You say,
“Come here, horsey, have this carrot.”
You want the horse to come in this direction. So if the horse allows himself to be drawn forward by the carrot, then there's no need for the stick. The stick means you give him a smack and make him run in that direction. So we can encourage someone lovingly to go in the right direction. That's what Saints do. That's what God does. They come in this world. They try to inspire us and lovingly encourage us to go towards Shri Krishna, which is where we really belong. That's where our real happiness is. And we stubbornly say,
“Nope, you're wrong! You Saints are crazy!”
All the millions and billions of people running in this direction after maya, saying that there's perfect happiness in maya, even though we haven't gotten it. We're about to get it. Everybody's saying that. And there are a few Saints over here quoting Vedic scriptures and saying,
“No, they're all wrong. They're all crazy. True happiness is in this direction (towards Shri Krishna).” The happiness you experience in the world is only your own imagined experience. It is not a stable, real happiness.
“Unlimited, permanent, perfect happiness is none other than Shri Krishna. Stop running in that direction. Come in this direction.”
And we say, “No, I think you few Saints are crazy. All these billions of people can’t be crazy. So, I'm going to keep running in this direction (towards maya).”
Then the stick comes. That's maya. Maya is the stick.
Maya says, “Look, Krishna is my Swami as well. And He's your father. Go to Him!”
And we say, “Nope, I'm coming to you!”
So maya says, “OK, then I'll give you some smacking around.”
Maya gives us unpleasant situations, suffering. And we suffer life after life after life in this world, but then we blame maya. We say,
“Maya is bad! Look, maya is giving me all this suffering!” But maya is not bad. Maya is the stick.
Maya is saying, “Look, if you come to me, you're just going to get transitory happiness and plenty of suffering.”
