CHEWING THE CHEWED (LAST PART- PART4)
KKS Lecture 1st Jan 1998, Radhadhesh, Belgium:
When You come to that point and realise it, then you develop a little attraction for….Krishna. Of course you may still have a little attraction for your balloons, so in this building, balloons are not allowed and of course you have to tie them outside. And you leave your balloons outside. Of course we smuggle a few balloons, we got a few balloons that we have not blown up yet and we blow them.
Because this habit of blowing balloons, creating some phantasmagoria is very very very nice…..”It’s good playing around!”
So this tendency is deeply within us and as long as we want to play with balloons Krishna will let us do it. Come back to this world and play and play and play. And enjoy enjoy enjoy and suffer and suffer and suffer which you can’t avoid…..watching the balloons get popped…Ahhhh! That hurts!
That’s the nature of balloons,…some balloons just take off, never to be seen again. So dreams get destroyed so it can go very sudden, very sudden, when you thought everything was stable and steady suddenly….the whole world can turn around. So in this way gradually we give it up. When we come to Krishna and realise Krishna is…when you feel a little attraction for Krishna and then we can begin to do some service for Krishna. One should begin to serve Krishna, he very quickly becomes attached to that service. Devotional service has a special taste. And once you start doing it you develop an attraction for doing it. That attachment can save you. That attachment can save you from all attachment to other things because that attachment will gradually destroy all other attachments. Therefore if you have a little attachment to Krishna do as much service as you can, do as much as you can for Krishna. Even if you have no attachment for Krishna do as much service out of curiosity to see what will happen if you do.
Just…. because you will see devotees at least they are not cut throat, they may not always be nice to each other, but at least they are not cut throat, not like in a commercial world…today the big cheese, tomorrow we trample on you, you’re worn out, we have taken every drop of juice out of you, now you are to be thrown away, you’re disposable,,,that is the hard commercial mood, doesn’t exist in the devotee world. So when you say let me just live with the devotees because it seems like a nicer world…fine you may do that too…it’s not the goal, but we don’t care what the reason is why you come. There are four types of people that come to devotional service: Those who are looking for a better material position, so if you think it is here come, you’re welcome; Those who are trying to escape material distress: Those finally the best of them is the one who is looking for spiritual life. Those ones who are curious, I forgot to mention, the one who is curious and then there’s the one who is interested in spiritual life. And what is the qualification of one who is interested in spiritual life…he knows he is not the body. He is not concerned with the so called benefits of the body, he knows he’s the soul and therefore he is only interested in his eternal relationship with the source of his very soul, The Supreme Personality of Godhead, which after many many births have just recognised…Yes Lord Krishna…then he is very fortunate. So this is the message of Bhagavad Gita, one should understand this is not the message of a movement, this is not the message of a group of people, Hare Krishnas, this is not our message, we are not the proprieter’s of this message, we have not invented it, nor have we made it…..we have simply received it from the ancient Vedic tradition where we find the Bhagavad Gita is a scripture in the format of the Upanisads which are very ancient Vedic scriptures and so is the Bhagavad Gita. So it is bringing us a message from which in it self, in this literature is recorded 5000yrs ago and is according to that literature much older than that, it brings us that. It has been followed throughout the ages and it has now come to the Western World and we are wearing these Vedic clothes and hair do’s or no hair do’s….whatever you want to call it, we do no hair! Whatever may be, but it should be understood that even what I’ve been saying here is basically an ancient message which I have just presented in my own modern colloquial words, but it’s not that the substance of what I said is new or there was one conclusion which I said which was my own conclusion…..No …each of these conclusions are the conclusions of these ancient scriptures, of course my example of balloons and bubblegums are contemporary examples of modern times but this is only to illustrate it according for us, the people who live here in these days….. My examples of movies that I brought in are simply again there to further illustrate the same ancient conclusions which are here in the Bhagavad Gita. So one should not even if one feels that the way he speaks I do not like it, the way he looks when he speaks I don’t like it, in fact I don’t like his glasses and his nose neither or anything about him. I can understand that ..I agree with most of these things but one must look beyond the person who is presenting and his imperfections, at the knowledge he is presenting that comes from that source of Vedic scripture which according to that scripture it’s self is revealed by the Supreme Personality of Godhead…Ok I’ll stop with that, thank you very much…any questions or comments?
Devotee speaks…
Maharaja: Ok, Personality or identity are words of course that you can look up in the dictionary and you can see…but besides that, in this material world our personality, it’s very hard for us to figure out what our personality is ………..because we have our pure personality, our pure ego and we have our false ego so the false ego is covering the pure ego, infact it can cover it so much you can no longer see it anymore, what the pure ego is and actually a lot of the personality that we are experiencing here as our character, our nature, our individual being may be our false ego and therefore may be very little coming through of our eternal natural personality…although something is coming through …but still you can not be sure what your eternal nature is at the present stage where you are conditioned by your false ego. So we are all conditioned by false ego therefore we undergo a process of purification and pure identity will manifest. Of course we know that everyone is the eternal servant of Krishna in his pure identity but how he is the eternal servant of Krishna will only be manifest after prolonged and dedicated devotional service when we come to pure devotional service. Then it will be known how you are actually related to Krishna in devotional service and that’s your pure identity….any other questions…ok thank You very much…All Glories to Srila Prabhupada!
