On who is a judge...

The Chief Justice of India is all the national principles of justice compressed at a single point. It is the whole nation speaking, it is not Mr. So-and-so; there is no Mr. So-and-so in the Chief Justice. He is not a human being at all. It is the whole nation speaking. Now, I go beyond the nation - the justice of the Cosmos. What would be the proper thing in the light of the justice of the Universe? Instead of seeing with two eyes, one sees with millions of eyes; then there will be no partiality or even duality.

'Impersonal' means that one does not belong to any side, nobody is your friend and nobody is your enemy. The universe has no friends and enemies, because the so-called enemies are inside it only and the friends are also inside; so, to whom does it belong? It is like electricity - is electricity a friend of anybody or an enemy of anybody? It can cook your food, heat your stove and move the railway train, but it can also destroy life. God is not merely creator Brahma and protector Vishnu but also destroyer Rudra. God can do anything. He creates this beautiful earth and maintains it in a gorgeous manner and destroys it also by flood, ravaging earthquake, tempest, high waves of the sea - thousands dying. Then, what is the work of God, what are his functions? We do not have to give any credit to Brahma who created the world, nor praise Vishnu for maintaining it, nor curse Rudra for destroying everything. If a case goes in favour of somebody, we cannot say that the Judge is a kind man because the person who won the case will think - "very kind Judge, very wonderful Judge". Suppose the Judge passes a death sentence on someone - "horrible, horrible" will be the cry.

Now, what is the nature of this person who is giving acquittal to somebody and granting the wish of somebody and wanting to remove the life of somebody, also? What kind of person is he? Is he a good man or a bad man? He is not a man at all, the whole point is this; he is not a man. Is the sun a friendly being or an inimical one? Without the sun we cannot breathe, we cannot exist without the sun. But he can create sunstroke and kill someone, also. Now, why does the sun kill a man thus? The sun's existence itself is a protective function, but he never asks anyone to walk in the hot sun and get sunstroke. Whose mistake is it? You curse the sun because you had sunstroke. The Judge is a symbolic embodiment of law. There is a policeman who puts on one kind of dress, a Judge puts on another kind of dress, there is a Collector who puts on one kind of dress - but they are not human beings but functionaries varieties in law. We have an inveterate habit of looking at things from a personal point of view. The policeman is the embodiment of a function. He is a function only, he is not a man, you should not call him a man, it is an operative force working through a particular individuality because the force cannot work without some medium, just as without a wire, electricity cannot work. It does not jump on our head directly, it wants a wire connection.

Extracted from a discourse by Swami Krishnananda.