When we think that there is no taste in Krishna Consciousness and that it is all about austerity, and all about sacrifice, and we cannot see any nectar, then maybe we should open our eyes! That might help, because it’s hard to see when your eyes are closed. I’ll give a bit of an example:Imagine that a feast is being served out. Seventeen preparations – each one of them is delicious. It is served out in our traditional system where everyone is sitting in rows, and they go around with buckets and serve them out to everyone who are in the rows – but it happens to be the case that you are sitting in the back row. When they are starting - they serve the rice, “ But hey no subji? Come on – no subji!”
No subji - so you sort of munch on your rice,
“Subji! In this line there is no subji!”
When the subji is finally coming and then the puris are not there. So you are munching on the rice and the subji, ...
“There’s no puri…puri garaam…puri…puri!” (laughter)
The puri is not coming and each time it is like that – we are missing out in this preparation…..
“Ghulab Jamun?”
You finally get the ghulab jamun, and then, “ Sweet rice?”(laughter).
What a feast! It is our lucky day and by the end you had taken the whole meal and you hadn’t tasted one bite. You haven’t tasted anything, because all of the time you were thinking of the next preparation. You have eaten everything and your belly is about to burst and you didn’t taste anything at all!(laughter) – and this is how we are practising our Krishna Consciousness.
When there is the darshan of Radha Gopinath, we stand in front of the deities and we just sing every morning:
” Govindam âdi purusham tam aham bhajami” meanwhile our mind is going:
“ Govindam âdi purusham what will be for breakfast today?”(laughter).
That’s the situation - the taste is there but we are inattentive. We are not only inattentive in chanting, but also inattentive in our living – that is our problem. We live inattentively:
(mimicking) “ We walk through the woods with our head in the clouds and we don’t see what is going on! Life goes by to the left and to the right and we don’t notice anything that’s going on!”(laughter).
That is the situation….so we must just simply relish what is there. It’s there – it’s all here – there is so much nectar!
(mimicking) “But we are just walking through the whole process of Krishna Consciousness, and the biggest problem is that there is no taste. It’s so austere and so difficult and so on”.
It’s because we are sleeping and we are not watching, what is there. We are not going for the juice, when it’s there - it is everywhere – there is taste, and all we need to do, is to be more attentive. Let us try and discover where there is taste.
This is the fact that in Krishna Consciousness, one must become a nectar hunter. One must be a nectar hunter. One cannot just wait for it to come!
(Kadamba Kanana Swami, Chowpatty, 11th December 2010)
