TAKING A HUMAN LIFE

Can taking a human life ever be justified?  Swami Prabhavananda said that it all depends.  There are people who feel they must protect other persons, who must protect their homes and their country.  If they didn’t, human society would collapse, they feel.  For them, killing another human can be justified.

It is different for a spiritual aspirant, however.  If the aspirant has reached a stage of unfoldment in which he is continuously absorbed in the thought of God, then it becomes impossible for him to take another person’s life. He sees no enemy.

Then, such a person is also unlikely to take the life of any other living thing.  Vedanta teaches the principle of ahimsa: “nonviolence, abstention from harming any living being in thought, word, or deed.”  He is disinclined to harm even insentient beings, objects, the environment, as well.

It is an extreme example, but an aspirant would never dream of flying a B-52 airplane on a “carpet bombing” mission, as in WWII and the Vietnam War.  Such bombing, also known as obliteration bombing, destroyed every insentient and sentient being in its path, leaving behind only a wasteland.

An aspirant will abstain from such things not necessarily for moral reasons, although that may be part of it, but because he knows that all insentient and sentient beings, indeed everything in existence, the entire universe, is Brahman, God.  Why would he attack God?  It is union with God that he seeks not the death of God.