Sharanagati

If you love someone and let’s say this is a great romantic love affair – sometimes it happens, right? For two days, two weeks… Then you come to your senses… Anyway, romance exists. But usually these romantic feelings are frustrating, because your ideal guy is just running after another lady, or that beautiful princess has chosen another guy. Then you are frustrated. Yet if you are really a lover, then you have a chance to associate to that person through his or her name.

Or – to put it in another way – if you are a father or a mother, you love your children very much. Still, after fifteen-twenty years of fully serving them and dedicating all your energy and love to them, starting from wiping the ass for three years, changing the diapers all the time, and running to supply them with food… So you take all the trouble, and after twenty years what they will say? “Bye-bye, my father, I go my way!” Still you have the chance to call the names of your sons or daughters. And through this you can associate with them. And although they are independent grown up personalities, in your dreams and in your prayers you can include their names. And then the mother and the father are satisfied. Although they cannot directly enjoy the company of their beloved ones, at least some connection, some memory, some reality is there.

So, the conclusion is that there is no distinction between the name and the named. And if we have a touch, a taste of that, then our understanding will be revolutionalized.

Question of somebody: For me is easier to accept that the name and the named is the same when it concerns some conception like God or something, but not when it concerns some person or something material.

Tirtha Maharaj: God is not a conception.

Somebody: I meant something that is not in a concrete form.

Tirtha Maharaj: God is in a concrete form. How can you love Him if He is not concrete?

Somebody: Yes, but you don’t see Him!

Tirtha Maharaj: Maybe you don’t see, I see.

Somebody: You know that He exists and you feel Him, but it is not as the concrete, physical things.

Tirtha Maharaj: That’s true, God is not a physical experience. He is a metaphysical experience. But as you are not matter, not physical, you are also metaphysical, so there is a chance to have this metaphysical experience. On the material plane you think that you see, but you don’t see, you are blind. In the material sphere you think that you hear, but you are deaf. You think that you touch, but you are disabled. Yet connected with the Supreme, all your senses become like meta-senses. And Krishna can give us the eyes to see Him, can give us the ears to hear Him, can give us the smell to smell Him. This is the perfection of the senses. If we can see the beautiful form of the Supreme Lord, this is the accomplishment of the eyes. Everything depends on the fine tuning, on the purification of your senses. God is a person, God is a concrete form. But we must have the eyes to see that form. We must have the inner eye, the spiritual eye to perceive His beauty. But it is possible.