Sharanagati

(from a lecture of Swami Tirtha, 05.01.2019 morning, Sofia)

(continues from the previous Friday)

Question: I just want to ask about something you spoke of yesterday. It was about love – that it comes and it goes. Most of us have experience about that. While divine love, you said, when it comes, it never goes away. But I’ve heard some stories and I saw some bhaktas who fall away, they just disappear. And my second question is about perfection: you said about three ways towards perfection and that actually our way is mainly through kripa, mercy. And I want to ask about sadhana. Can we have too much sadhana, which is making us fall away? Because I spoke with some bhaktas and some of them gave me examples – someone is so dedicated and becomes more and more tired, and then just disappears. Because different bhaktas are sometimes sharing their experience. For example, Prabhupad said to one bhakta, “When you do it, you develop love.” But can we do it too much without being prepared, doing sadhana without love, and actually get the opposite? Like getting tired and going away. 

Swami Tirtha: Oh, so many questions. Let’s start at the beginning. I think basically your two different questions focus on the same problem: whether we have something or we don’t have anything. Spiritual achievements are so delicate, so hidden, that it is very-very difficult to measure them by any means that we have. Due to our material life and conditioning – in studies,  in this competition spirit – we always want to measure things and achievements. Humans organize Olympic games to measure the achievements. By the way, that’s a total failure, it’s a business, it’s not sports anymore. It’s chemistry and business – how to make more money. If your national chemistry is ahead of the supervision, then they can invent those chemicals that will make you run faster without being noticed. So it’s got nothing to do with real sports. And therefore my humble suggestion, if we want to improve, is let’s go out and walk or run or wrestle without all this business involvement and then kick out all the television when they start to propagate this as sports events. Come on, this is totally fake! 

Sorry, I am a little emotional, because illusion steals all the best ideals that we have, it corrupts the best ideals. But we are trained to measure things. And what is the meaning of maya? If you try to measure God – that’s illusion. So if we try to measure our spiritual achievements – how many rounds have I performed, how many books have I sold, how many I don’t know what have I accomplished – that’s this Olympic spirit. It’s not enough. With this we cannot buy Krishna, we cannot buy divine love. It’s not enough. So we have to get rid of this achieving and measuring mentality. Because Radhika is very delicate. The more you want to capture Her by force, the more She is running away from you. 

So, if this inner transformation doesn’t happen, but you try to show all the external symptoms of a devotee, sooner or later something might happen. It’s not enough to show the external conditions or requirements, but we need this inner transformation. Bhaktivinoda Thakur said that the problem of this age is that there are no selfless preachers. From this we can understand that even the preachers sometimes have this mentality, this competition spirit – how to measure devotion. We have to be very careful about this thing. Because the real transformation will happen in the heart. And why is the heart hidden – and now I am talking about the spiritual heart – why is the heart hidden so deep in the constitution of a human being? So that only the chosen ones and Krishna can read the heart. But He can read it, they can read it. If we are not sincere, they can read this. Even if you perform all the rituals. If externally you show that you are 108% devotee, but internally nothing happens – they can read it. But they can read the opposite as well: you look like a very weak human being, fallen, full of mistakes and shortcomings and lack of knowledge, but if there is one drop of sincerity there in your heart, you will be saved. We cannot buy Krishna with any qualities and achievements that we perform. We cannot. 

Once somebody told me, “The holy name has become bitter on my lips”. And it was very shocking for me, because we have understood that the holy name is very sweet. How is it bitter for him? So next time when I met a godbrother of my Gurudev, a very elevated superior, I asked him this question. Then he was staring at me and finally said that “If it has become bitter, it was not the holy name”.

(to be continued)