Way to Death

Jayadvaita Swami: Yopayati means “she”, the woman described in the previous verse, the attractive woman who is described as “pramadha”, “pramadha” means one who is creating craziness. One who drives a man mad. Beautiful women, attractive woman. Sanair, she approaches slowly. Sanair means slowly. It’s not that she sees you, she throws her arms around you and she says, “Let’s have an affair, and then you can marry me and work for me for the rest of your life”. Slowly, slowly. Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura says, “First she pretends she is not interested”. According to an authoritative book on body language there is one device: you are not looking at her but while you are not looking at her she looks at you and keeps looking at you, and keeps looking at you until you get the creping feeling that someone is looking at you. Then, because you get this feeling that she is looking at you, you turn toward her. And that’s when she turns away. And it is done with a certain gesture – what are you looking at me for??! And that, of course, creates further interest. Now, that she has turned away, he is totally confused, this is what is called in the hypnosis the “confusion technique”. Now he is confused, was she looking at me, or was she not looking at me? I thought she was looking at me but now I was looking at her. He is completely bewildered and he does not know what’s going on except that his mind is drown in thinking about the women – was she looking at me, or was she not looking at me? Was I looking at her?

So sanair, slowly the woman attracts the man. One of our ISKCON teachers of young ladies confided with me that at a certain age the girls discover that if they move in certain way, dress in certain way, they can melt the guy down. And that power becomes a kind of fascination for the girl, she has to use it.

So women all over the world would act in a way that’s attractive, it’s just their nature. They are constructed by the world’s great expert, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. He says, “mama maya durataya”, my illusory energy is practically unsurpassable because I did really god job in constructing it. Particularly in the form of woman. Some place in the second canto, I think, it is said that Lord Brahma after creating so many things saw that the material energy was not sufficiently manifest, and therefore he created the form of the woman to finish the job.

So the woman is naturally made in such a way that she will be attractive to man and she will act in a way that will be attractive to man. Even if she is chaste and she is shy, that will be attractive to man. How chaste and shy that girl is! That will be attractive. Women are by nature attractive because Krsna made them in that way.

So sanair maya, maya means that what it’s not what you think it is. Yopayäti çanair mäyä yoñid deva-vinirmita. The woman who slowly attracts one tam ikseta, one should see in this way – atmano mrtyum, as death. And not just an ordinary death but atmano mrtyum, death for the soul. Death of this body, that’s inevitable. For one who is born death is certain. But this is atmano mrtyum, death for the soul. The killer of the soul is mentioned in Isopanisad. How does one kill the soul? The soul is described as eternal, everlasting. So how do you kill the soul? You kill the soul by identifying it with material energy. You kill spirit by identifying with matter. Soul is sat cid ananda but matter is temporary. Matter is a source of misery and covers knowledge. So when the soul is identifying with matter then it is practically killing himself. Or if you get the soul to identify with matter you are killing the soul.

And how is the soul identifying with matter? By association, attraction between man and woman.

pumsah striya mithuni-bhavam etam
tayor mitho hrdaya-granthim ahuh
ato griha-ksetra-sutapta-vittair
janasya moho 'yam aham mameti

The attraction between male and female is the basic principle of material existence. On the basis of this misconception, which ties together the hearts of the male and female, one becomes attracted to his body, home, property, children, relatives and wealth. In this way one increases life's illusions and thinks in terms of "I and mine." (Bhagavatam 5.5.8)

Therefore in the “Transcendental teachings of Prahlad Maharaja” Prabhupada says that maya begins when you see a girl and you think – she is nice. Sex attraction. This sex attraction is the cause, or the binding force of this material existence. And therefore Lord Kapiladev is advising, see with this vision, when you see an attractive girl slowly coming forward to offer service, see your own death approaching you, your spiritual death. Ikseta, one should see in that way – maya is approaching me, trying to kill my spiritual life.

“Trnaih kupam ivavrtam”, the attractive woman is described as a blind well. A blind well is a well that is out there in the field and is covered with grass. An ordinary well is dangerous, you might fall into the well, but a blind well is super dangerous because you don’t know it is there. You think that’s just ground but actually it’s a well. And real wells are deep. And if it’s out in the field and you fell into it no one knows you fell in the well. They go looking for you hours late and you are gone by then. You cry for help but nobody is hearing you and you are lost. So this is the blind well, the unsuspecting person falls there, there is only grass, there is nothing substantial there, just little bit of grass.

So Lord Kapiladev very graphically and strongly says that this is what you are thinking you are going to enjoy. You are naive, you are fool. You are fool, you are naive, you think, here is something for my enjoyment. You don’t know what’s there. Here is it what is really there. You are totally in maya, you are thinking there is ground there, but it is a well. Just like Duryodhana became bewildered when he went to the palace of the Pandavas and he mistook the water for the land. So Kapiladev says you are naive, you think here is nice, attractive girl who is coming to do some service to me, how nice. And you don’t see that it is your spiritual death that is approaching you.

Prabhupada explains, it is through service, this is a particular danger that the woman is made in such a way as to serve. And when she comes forward to do a little innocent service, the man becomes attracted but now there is a death. When there is a service offered or service rendered there is a debt incurred. I will do something for you, but now you feel, or I will make you feel, although you should not feel, that now you have to do something for me. Human relationships are full of this. There is a service account; I have done that much service for you and now you have a debt, you owe me a favor. I have done something for you, so it is understood, though might not be written down, that you should do something for me. The more favors I have done for you the more favors you owe me. And that’s how it works in politics, in friendship. Anyone who receives service owes a debt to the person who rendered the service. That’s natural and that’s what makes human relationships.

So here the woman comes sanair sanair, slowly, slowly. Just to offer a little service. And the man thinks well, that’s nice. But he does not put into account that by offering the service she is offering you the opportunity to become indebted to her. Just like the banks, they offer you credit cards, preauthorized, because by taking advantage of their service you become indebted to the point where eventually they take over your house, they take over your life. And it all started with a free offer of a preapproved credit card.

So the man unsuspectingly accepts the service. And now there is a debt, now he feels she did something for me. If it is slow and subtle enough he thinks, this is a nice girls, she did some nice service for me. He may not even think about it, but it’s there, in his consciousness. Amongst so many girls, she is a nice girl because she did some service. And now he feels that he wants to reciprocate, or that he owes to reciprocate, in some small way. And now that he reciprocates in a small way she also reciprocates in a small but slightly bigger way. And then he reciprocates and she reciprocates and it builds on like that, gradually increasing the size and velocity until the relationship becomes active, or should we say, manifestly active.

So one should be very careful about that. Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura sais:

“Knowing the man’s detachment the women shows her lack of desire and approaches him with the guise of service. She then becomes a source of trouble. The well is thinking: let the man fall into me. Therefore no one should go near that blind well.”

If you know that out in the field there is a blind well you stay away from the whole field. You stay away from the whole area.

“No one should go near that blind well, whether one is completely indifferent, having bhakti, jnana or vairagya, whether one is unconscious because of eating or sleeping, or even death. One should avoid women completely.”

This is the implication of the blind well. One should be so careful. Even in married life, Prabhupada mentions, that one should not liberally associate even with one’s wife, so that life becomes only about you and your wife. This is one of the advantages of the join family system when several brothers are living together with their wives, 2-3 generations together. You get parallel societies – one male and one female, so that the men associate with men and the women with women. And it is not just about two people living in constant juncture, dealing all the time with their minds, their desires, counter desires, in relationship which is bewildering and entangling. It’s restricted. The men had their section, the women had their section. And they did not spend all their time in association with one another, the family did not mean husband and wife and children, it meant a larger circle of people so that it was not just about the man and the woman.

So therefore the association between men and women in the Vedic system is restricted. Brahmacary – no association, sannyasi – no association, vanaprastha – no sex, and grihasta life – restricted association. Not unlimited sex, not even unlimited association. Limited association. Because this association is such a cause of bewilderment. Prahlada Maharaja also uses the same example, the blind well which is killing one’s spiritual life. One should be very careful about this.

I had practical experience. The first book that I edited was 3 canto of Srimad Bhagavatam. So before the book was published I had the opportunity to read the 3 canto and especially the instructions of Kapiladev. So I was little informed. While I was working at ISKCON press doing typing and editorial work, there was one, at that time young lady, who was also sometimes working at the press and sometimes doing pujari work at the New York temple. And every day she came in the afternoon, she would have come from doing the four o’clock offering to the deities and she would bring me little cup of fruit, every day. Krsna prasadam, Krsna’s mercy.

Devotees: Ha-ha!!

Jayadvaita Swami: But because I was prepared from Lord Kapiladev, I graciously accepted that cup of fruit every day and gave it all away to the devotees and never touched it. Because if I have accepted it that meant accepting service. And accepting service means accepting indebtedness.
This is a practical, high-magnitude problem in our society, that sannyasis accept service from women, especially young women and they become indebted. There was one GBC man who wrote a letter to Srila Prabhupada concerned about some advanced ladies who were proposed to serve the sannyasis. And Prabhupada said no. Prabhupada said, “It is not possible, Sannyasis may have no connection with women.” The sannyasis become leaders of the society or they become Gurus and then service is offered. We make spiritual advancement by serving the sannyasis or senior devotees, temple presidents, or Gurus. But one should be very careful when the service is offered by a woman because one becomes indebted.

And this is not theoretical; we have lost a lot of men. By this slow process, sanair sanair, it starts with little service, then little more service, then it becomes gratitude, then it becomes reciprocation, appreciation, then dependence, or feeling that if she is not there, why she is not there, if she is not serving me, why is she not serving me, and it grows and it grows and it becomes a disaster.

What intelligent person would say yes, I want to work hard my whole life so that we may buy curtains…and everything else. What person, seeing all the troubles that result of association of man and woman, would want to do that? What intelligent person who have done it once and burned himself, would want to do it again, and a third time?! This is called maya. As far as possible one should avoid this maya completely. If one can, one should avoid it completely. If one is serious about crossing the ocean of material existence one should be very careful about association with women and with men who are too attached to women, because they are contaminated. If we associate with such men we will catch their disease.

So Lord Kapila is very strong here, there is an empathic order for those who are serious about spiritual life and we should not minimize the value of His instructions. We should avoid this tendency to mingle, men and women “innocently” mingle, that should be cut down as far as possible. That association should be restricted. It should be as little as possible. And one should associate with Krsna by serving Krsna and by chanting the Holly Name of Krsna, being always engaged in Krsna’s service.

Suresvara Prabhu: Maharaja, since elsewhere in Prabhupada’s books it is said that the men form is also a form of maya for the women. A woman may think, where are the warnings for us? The men are being warned about us but where are the warnings for us about the men?

Jayadvaita Swami: Because men and women are different, the warning for the women is: “One man”. For women to be without the association of a man would be more difficult because the woman is weaker and requires security and support. Men don’t require anyone to support them. They can go independent. But women are designed in such a way that security is very important to them, protection is required for them, and that means a man. The father in childhood, the son in old age, and in youth - a qualified husband. So the Vedic literature, being very pragmatic and realistic, does not instruct women, “stay away from men”. It says instead, “be married to one and then stay away from the rest”. Women are advised to be chaste and that chastity is a form of protection for them also. A woman who is unchaste unnecessary attracts the attention of any man on the block and all sorts of trouble comes. So as the man is advised to avoid the association of women, the women are advised to be chaste and also avoid the association of men. I was just reading, when Krsna entered Dvaraka the women went up to the roof tops to see Him. They did not go down to the street to elbow out the men and mix. That means they maintained their dignity and chastity.

Women are attractive. This arouses the attention and aggressiveness of the men. Therefore in the modern way of life women dress super attractively and act super friendly and so on and it works against them. They are thinking we are free, we are equal, but what is that actually, they are setting themselves up to become victimized. The men become more attracted and more aggressive and then they file a complaint that this man sexually harassed me. But in their unrestricted position they become eligible to be victimized. I go to the Middle East every year and I see that the Muslim ladies always travel 2-3 on the street. They are covered and they maintain their dignity. And the western women come there also with their clothes and they basically announce to the world that “I am a prostitute and if you have the right amount of money I am available”. No dignity. And they are simply used. And they don’t become happy by being used; they go for therapy, for abortion, for this, for that, that’s not happiness. And in the same time USA is making propaganda how the women in the Middle East are being oppressed. There may be some examples of oppression, but the basic principles are nondifferent from the Vedic principles, that the dignity of the women should be maintained. They themselves should maintain it and the men who are responsible for them should also take care of this.

Suresvara Prabhu: But it seems that if the men take these instructions of Kapiladev seriously there will be no men to protect the women…

Jayadvaita Swami: Everything will be over. If everyone takes this advice there will be no more marriage, there will be no more sex and no more humans, human civilization. But that’s not going to happen.

Question: What should be our attitude when we see temple presidents and sannyasis accepting service from women?

Jayadvaita Swami: Well, your attitude might be - better them than me.

Devotees: lol!

Jayadvaita Swami: Those who are looking for spiritual master, for spiritual guidance, you might note it. You might note it that I like this person, he gives nice instructions, but he accepts a lot of service from women. You might take note of that. And you will not be unreasonable or foolish to take note of that. Before accepting a Guru one should observe him for one year, right? What do you observe? How he is dressing? One thing you should observe is is this person intimately associating with women. Is he accepting service from women, if he does, under what conditions, under which circumstances, to what extent? Some sannyasi he has got number one of his followers is a female, and a female is doing his laundry, and is his secretary… You might wonder and you might be justified. And if it really looks bad you might be justified to go to one of his friends and tell him I am concerned about this person. He is such an important person, responsible person, and looks like he is too close to Krsna dasi. You might be even concern to the point of raising the alarm which might be very kind think to do. What you should not do is to get to your computer and start typing messages on internet. Unless you really want to be uncultured person who does not know how to act, what to do and what not to do.

We see that even advanced people sometime accept service but with great care. Srila Prabhupada accepted service from ladies but he was very careful about it.

Question…

Jayadvaita Swami: First thing is she is attractive. May be she is chaste. But she is attractive. She is not lusty, she is not doing anything. She is just attractive. That’s already a problem. That’s what Kapiladev is saying, he does not say that the lusty woman is a problem; He says that the attractive woman is a problem. For someone who is trying to get out of the material energy, it’s not anything wrong with her, it’s him! He has a mind and the mind is attracted to that beautiful woman, that’s a problem. It’s not that she is evil, lusty, unchaste, acting improperly, it’s just that she is attractive, that’s the problem.

Question: I appreciate the class but it seems that our movement is going through phases were we have conservatives and liberals. So in some areas of the world this kind of thinking is seen as backwards…

Jayadvaita Swami: So you think that Lord Kapiladev is backwards? What does this says about your thinking?

Question: That may be correct but I just saying, in some areas of the world…

Jayadvaita Swami: But if they think there that Lord Kapiladeva is backwards, that area must be very much backwards…

Question: But these people say that since our movement is growing we have to become more liberal in order to attract new more people.

Jayadvaita Swami: How many sannyasis we have lost because they were too strict in their dealings with women? Let be real open-doubted – name one. Name one sannyasi who has fallen down because he was overly restrictive in association with women. And if you wanted to go the other way, because we will go the other way, name those who have fallen down because they were careless. We will be up in the 30, 40, and 50 in about 10 minutes. Within 5 minutes. Right? So where is the problem then? Is the problem that we are too tight in association with women, we are avoiding them too much, we are not mixing enough with them, we are not free and liberal enough, is that why we have lost so many valuable men? Is that why many areas in the world have seen their book distribution going down from here to there? Because people were too restrictive about association with women? Or is it the other way?

Candramauli Swami: Is it true that if you accept service from anyone and if you don’t give it back then you have to take birth again?

Jayadvaita Swami: I never read statement like this but service creates debt, no doubt. If you accept a service from anyone it creates debt. But if you are Krsna conschious all debts are paid. And if you keep the service that someone rendered to you for yourself not redirecting it to Krsna then you create debt for yourself. Because our job is to redirect all service we receive back to Krsna and we are not supposed to keep it for ourselves.

Question: The message of Lord Kapila is strong and transcendental, how the women can use it for their benefit?

Jayadvaita Swami: They can reverse the information and understand that the material attachment to a man is also a source of trouble. Ultimately men and women have to be attracted to Krsna.
We have to understand what the material illusion really is, what sex life really is, and then only we can understand what is Radha-Krsna.

Question: This verse is so discouraging for us, women; how to overcome this material platform of low birth and to think of ourselves as spirit souls?

Jayadvaita Swami: Women should not think I am a woman, she should think I am a servant of Krsna. This warning is given to men, it is not given to women so that they start thinking I am terrible, incompetent to serve Krsna, everyone should think I am a spirit soul, a servant of Krsna. But women should know that they can serve their society, community, family, by chastity. Women should know that this modern society is not good for them. Materialistic society encourages this, you are expressing yourself, you are expressing your femininity, your womanhood. We have different culture where women become exalted by self restrain, by dignity, in that way they help the men in the society and they help themselves. There is an article in a feminist Indian magazine called “Restrain as a feminine strategy” which is available on internet. And although we might not agree with everything the author says, she has pointed out that by sexual restrain women get power. Women should know that by self restrain they get a position of power. And the lady who wrote the article gives examples about the life in a community or in the family where women opted for self restrain and how they obtained a position of power. And you can think of Sita, how empowered she was that armies were mobilized for her. Chastity has power, it is a power position. And women don’t want to be powerless; women want to be empowered. By sexual looseness one disempoweres himself whether you are a man or you are a woman. So if you want to be powerful, like the question, o, I don’t want to be discouraged, no, take it as opportunity to become powerful. How do you become powerful? By serving the Supreme Powerful. Krsna says everybody is eligible for devotional service, it is not only the men, everybody. Take it as a power position.

Question: If I was a young lady interested in Krsna conschiousness and I came across to this verse as my introduction to Krsna conschiousness that would not be nice, I could only hope to take birth as a man. How would you present this verse to a newcomer, a female?

Jayadvaita Swami: Well, I just did. This might not be our introductory verse when we go out to preach, but everyone should understand the basic principles that we are not this body, that we are spirit soul, so if someone is discouraged that you are talking about me in this way, but no, I am not talking about you, I am talking about someone’s body. The first point is that you are not this body, man or a woman. I have to act in certain manner because my body is there, I have to take it into account, but I don’t think I am this body. And what it is said for the body does not pertain to me, I am spirit soul, part and parcel of Krsna, what’s this have to do with me? So I am not a man, I am not a woman. And if the newcomer stays long enough around she will find out that actually the woman is more empowered first, on the platform of chastity, and second on the platform of Krsna consciousness. Women who are chaste are more powerful than those who are not chaste. A revolutionary concept for the West.

But even modern women who are not Krsna conscious, who are not Christian, who are not religious, this is another article, that in the best colleges of USA there are societies of women who want to be chaste. Because they see it as a power position. As a feminist platform. Not as a religious platform, not as a traditional platform, as a feminist platform. We are sick and tired of being exploited, and we are exploited because we are loose. And these guys want us to be loose so that they can victimize us. And we are sick and tired of it, we are going chaste. These are women who are not religious, who do not belong to a Muslim or Hindu culture, who are just smart. So for the women chastity is the power platform and the best chastity is Krsna consciousness, so if you are a woman and you want to be empowered, chant Hare Krsna.

Devotees: Jaya! Haribol!

Question: Prabhupada advised the devotees to see women as mothers and as mothers, can we serve Vaisnava men?

Jayadvaita Swami: The example is Sacidevi, the mother of Caintanya Mahaprabhu. When He took sannyasa she was grief-stricken, that now my Nimai will leave. But she thought that, for my own happiness I would like to keep you here, but I can’t do that because I have to consider your happiness, your purpose in life. So she said you please stay in Puri. She did not say you please stay at home. So that means she considered what is the best for the spiritual advancement of her son. So if the mothers of the sannyasis and the brahmacharis think in this way, what would be the best for the spiritual advancement of my son, that will be good.

Question: On what stage in Krsna consciousness one can become free from the perverted love?

Jayadvaita Swami: On the stage of Krsna prema. Then one is immuned against the influence of the perverted love. Like Haridas Thakur, when the prostitute came, after same time she just fell on the ground because nothing worked. Because he was situated on the platform of perfection. Everyone who is situated on a lower platform should be careful. And even those who are situated on that platform are careful, to set a good example for others. We have the example of Srila Prabhupada who chastised his servant for allowing him to be alone with his 70 years old sister. Prabhupada was that careful. “Why did you leave me alone with that woman??” That very old sister of his. “Why did you allow me to be alone with that woman”? That’s how careful Srila Prabhupada was; and we are not on the level of Srila Prabhupada, so how careful should we be if we are serious about spiritual life and going back to Godhead.
All right, thank you very much. All glories to Srila Prbhupada.

Devotees: Haribol! His Holiness Jayadvaita Swami Maharaja ki-Jaya!

The Bhagavata Science of the Mind

by Suhotra Maharaja




Suhotra Maharaja: This song expresses the whole purpose of this seminar. It is written by Govinda Dasa Kaviraja. He is addressing the mind as a separate personality and we are going to show you how true that is:

O mind, just worship the lotus feet of the son of Nanda, which make one fearless. Having obtained this rare human birth, cross over this ocean of worldly existence through the association of saintly persons. Day and night I remain sleepless, suffering heat and cold, wind and rain. For a bit of flickering happiness I have vainly served wicked and miserly men. What assurance of real happiness is there in all of one's wealth, youthfulness, sons, and family members? This life is tottering like a drop of water on a lotus petal; therefore you should always serve and worship the divine feet of Lord Hari. It is the desire and great longing of Govinda Dasa to engage himself in the nine processes of bhakti, namely hearing the glories of Lord Hari and chanting those glories, constantly remembering Him and offering prayers to Him, serving the Lord's lotus feet, serving the Supreme Lord as a servant, worshiping Him with flowers and incense and so forth, serving Him as a friend, and completely offering the Lord one's very self.

So, as you can see on the blackboard this seminar is called “The Bhagavata Science of the Mind”. The word “science” is a translation of the word “tattva”, so many of you also attend our course on Bhagavatam which we offer here since December four days a week. So we told you about this class that here we are going to take off our gloves when it comes to tattva. We are going to go very deep in the subject of the mind, what it is, how it works the way it works, why it gives us so much trouble and how we can be free of the trouble.

Actually we can never be free of the mind. This is the first very important thing, if you take notes you should write that down. To think that there will come the day when I will not have a mind, that’s impersonalism. And I am saying this because I heard this sometimes being preached in classes in ISKCON. I found this very remarkable. But actually this is impersonalism. Why is that? Because even in the material world, you will find this in 5 Canto, that the mind is ruled by Soma, the moon, and behind him is Aniruddha. Soma is the Lord of rasa in the material world. So that means we taste the material rasa through the mind and through the purified mind we taste the spiritual rasa. So those who are talking about negating the mind, getting rid of him altogether, this is actually impersonalism. I call this “The male disease”. Male intellectuals have tendency to this form of extremism and later on they end up in very embarrassing circumstances.

Because, as Bhagavatam says, every one of us, sannyasi, or brahmacari, or grihasta, man or women, has eleven wives. Actually we have one wife, the mind, and she has her 10 attendants. That’s way you see here in Bengal so often the pictures of Durgadeva, Sakti, as a woman with 10 arms. Because the mind is feminine, it is canchala, which is a name of the Goddess of Fortune. She is flickering, unsteady, she goes through phases and her 10 arms are the 5 jnanendriyas and the 5 karmendriyas. So every one of us, does not matter if you are wearing safran, or whatever you are wearing, is married to a ten-armed woman. Even if you are wearing a sari. You are in a marriage and there is no divorce, there is no divorce whatsoever.

Therefore we start in our introduction; there is a Bengali saying that wherever one may travel in this life seeking to forget old problems and to start a new life, one must bring his mind along with him. Sometimes we try that. We have got some problems with certain devotees and we decide I will go to some Promised Land. It is amusing that this Promised Land is America for the Indian devotees and it is India for the western devotees. Indians can’t wait to get their green card to get the hell out of here; meanwhile the western devotees are so anxious to come to India. But actually India is the best place to come to turns with this problematic mind because this is the punya bhumi, particularly holly places like Vrindavan Dham and Sridham Mayapur.

So we have to learn how to learn what the mind is, how to control it, how to make it our friend. That’s what Krishna says in Gita – the mind can be your best friend. Imagine what it would be if the mind was so eager to chant and listen and be absorbed in Krishna, as it is now eager for sense gratification. What a friend that would be. If you had a mind who just by hearing “Krishna!” would want to rush – I want to go there, Where is Krishna, this is like the mind of Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu. And this is Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s movement and we are devotees only by His blessings. And His full blessings is this type of mind. Like when at Puri, He saw the sand dune and He saw Govardhana. This is called divine madness. In a sense it is crazy if your mind is hallucinating. But in Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu this is the perfection and we should all be anxious, eager to be blessed by a drop of Lord Caitanya’s madness so that our mind may become so easily overwhelmed by Krishna consciousness. By the stimulants of remembrance and love for Krishna.

So that is the real manasa yoga, the yoga of the mind that bhakti-yoga offers us, not annihilation of the mind so that only buddhi remains, that’s jnana-yoga. And as I mentioned, I often think about it as “the male disease”. Ladies, especially the humble ones, often admit, they are mental, and they might lament that this is bad qualification. But of you know how to deal with your mind it is not a bad qualification at all. We are all mental actually and we should begin by admitting it.

I like to give this example of the history of philosophy of one Arthur Schopenhauer who among western philosophers was really hardcore, hardhearted…if you see his picture you wince, you know…He is German and he has got this disgusted look on his face all the time, because he was, among the western philosophers, one of the first to be influenced by Buddhism. Buddhism is sunyavad, voidism. Buddhists say life is suffering and we just have to negate it. Throw out life and the mind. He just wanted to be a pure intellectual. But he was a very angry and frustrated person. He lived in apartment building and he had a neighbor, an old woman who was kind of nosy and whenever he would come out of his apartment her door would crack open and she would look, what are you doing? So finally he got so disturbed by her doing this that one day he just reached in through the door and pulled he out and threw her down the stairs. She was seriously injured and the court decided that he had to pay her a life support for the rest of her days. He used to furiously write all these books full of negativity and hatred towards the world. He was one of the first European philosophers to actually use the word “maya” – everything is just maya, illusion. So this was his mood. And as I said, it was really expressed on his face. While writing one of his books he received the news that this woman finally died. And you can see in the notes of the manuscript he wrote: “The bitch is dead.” So this is the actual utra-masculine, ultra buddhi mentality. But you can see although he was trying to be purely intellectual, pure logical, his whole thing was just about emotions – just that they were completely negative – anger, frustration, he was completely under the control of his mind. Just the darkest aspects of the mind.

This is what happens when someone becomes so fascinated by the vikalpa function of the mind which is rejection. The mind has two functions – sankalpa – this are the things that are accepted because they are pleasing for the senses, like this is nice music, this is a nice looking girl. And everything that repulses the sense the mind puts it in the category of vikalpa. So those who try to be pure intellectuals that is the place where they end up – in the vikalpa aspect of the mind.
We want to begin with an introduction to the subject which will not immediately takes us to the depts of tattva just to talk about the mind, what it is, that it is a very real thing, you see. The good news is that it is not us. That’s the good news, but as I said we can never get rid of it. Why? Because it is energy of Lord Aniruddha and Lord Aniruddha is an expansion of the catur-vyuha which expands for the purpose of creation starting with Vasudev who is in transcendence, then Sankarshan, Pradyumna and Aniruddha. And Aniruddha, the mind is His energy. The feature of Aniruddha which is in everyone of us is the Paramatma, the Supersoul and He is manomaya in the language of Vedanta-sutra, the Lord of the mind, the Ruler of the mind.

So the shape of our mind, the form our mind is in is very indicative of our relationship with the Lord. I remember hearing a lecture by Srila Prabhupada, he said if you are feeling sad, depressed, unhappy, morose, that means you are in maya. Because the Lord is anandamaya-purusa, He is that person whose very form is of bliss. Like the sin is called jyotirmaya, jyotir means full of effulgence. You can’t look at the sun because it is so bright, this is the nature of the sun, in that sense maya means “the nature of”. So the nature of the sun is to be full of light, full of brilliance, blindingly so. So the Lord is ananda-maya, He is just streaming bliss from His very form. His form is bliss and bliss streams of Him, so if a devotee is Krishna conscious he is blissful. He simply shares in the blissful nature of the Lord. And if we are obsessed with our problems and our clouded thoughts how terrible we are, and how terrible people are around us, and how many bad things have happened to us and this and that, being negative, Prabhupada said, we are in maya.
So the mind is like a speedometer in a car, you need a speedometer to know how fast you go, otherwise you are breaking the law. If your speedometer does not work and you are driving you can say, “I did not know officer, my speedometer does not work.” Well, sorry, you still get a ticket for speeding. So the mind is very useful in this sense, we can judge our advancement in Krishna consciousness by how much our mind is attracted to Krishna. How much bliss, how much transcendental happiness we are experiencing in the mind. So the mind is a very real thing.

There are some essential points I put down here. These are the five essential points of the whole course. Having accepted that the mind is real thing listed in Bhagavad-gita as a part of the Lord’s creation, and although it is subtle it has real substance. Here are two quotations from Srila Prabhupada:
Since the mind is a product of the mode of goodness, if it is fixed upon the Lord of the mind, Aniruddha, then the mind can be changed to Krishna consciousness.
Listen to this. The mind can be changed to Krishna consciousness. Do you get the full impact of what Prabhupada is saying here? We talk about Krishna consciousness, we talk about the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, in a sense we are talking about the International Society of the Mind, the pure Mind. Nothing else than that. The pure state of the mind, that is what the society is meant to bring about.

So it is stated by Narotam das Thakur that we always have desires because the locus of our desires is the mind. That’s why the mind is the chief sense because the senses fulfill desires but these desires come from the mind. They often come from a place beyond our conscious mind. When we talk of the mind we generally talk only about the part we are aware of, but the mind goes much deeper than that. But that’s for later. So here we continue with the quotations:
It is stated by Narottama dasa Thakura that we always have desires. Desire cannot be stopped. But if we transfer our desires to please the Supreme Personality of Godhead, that is the perfection of life. As soon as the desire is transferred to lording it over material nature, it becomes contaminated by matter.
The essential point is that the mind, which is contaminated by material attraction, has to be bridled and concentrated on the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
In these two quotations there are five basic points. They are the basis of the whole seminar.

1. The essential substance of the mind is the mode of goodness which is the energy of Lord Aniruddha who is the localized Supersoul feature of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.


2. When this sattvic substance is dedicated to the Lord it is transformed into Krishna consciousness, the state of infallible goodness above the three modes of material nature. That is called “turya”, or visudha sattva, or vasudev sattva, transcendence, and that’s the constitutional position of the jiva. Or this is the jiva in its own glory, as we sometimes read in Srila Prabhupada’s translations. This is the pure mode of goodness. The material mode of goodness it is impregnated with rajogun, tamogun. Just like there is that old joke. It is acceptable joke. The father of a teenage girl hears the rumor that his daughter of which he was so proud of being so chaste and virgin is actually pregnant. So this disturbs him very much so she comes home from school and he sits her down and he says, “Dear, I need to know the truth, are you pregnant?” Her face goes red, she looks down and she says: “Just a little bit, daddy.” So just a little bit pregnant means in 7-8 months you are going to be a lot pregnant. So similarly to be just a little bit in maya, to be in the mode of goodness but to have just a little bit of rajogun, tamogun, means that in time they are going to become very obvious. When a woman is 7-8 months pregnant it is very obvious, you see. So that’s not good enough for Krishna consciousness.

3. To dedicate the mind to the Lord we must channel the flow of our desires towards His lotus feet. Now, this is very important, I want you to understand this point very clearly. Because it may sound to you like I am introducing some personal ideas, but no, I have really prepared this course and I am going to show you that this is really what Prabhupada is saying in his books. Hence there is no question of “controlling the mind”. In that very masculine, logic, as I explained, “I am going to take charge here” way. No way, the mind cannot be controlled in that way, it cannot be fixed in that way, it cannot be pacified in that way – simply by our own strength. Desire has to be reformed. Then the mind can be controlled. Our quality of mind is a subject to the quality of our desires. This is where we start. The project of controlling the mind is not, as I told on the morning Bhagavatam class, like that bhakta, I heard about it from Visnujana Maharaja…as I always like to say, he was the person who thought me the meaning of the word God-brother. I always so fondly remember him…So he told me this story about a bhakta in LA who had a harmonica holder he use to wear around his neck; instead of harmonica he had a picture of Krishna…so he walked around the temple with this picture of Krishna always in front of his face. This was his idea of always remember Krishna and never forget Him. As Visnujana Maharaja said, he did not last very long…So there is no question of controlling the mind, even in this way, by keeping a picture of Krishna in front of your eyes 24 hours a day, without reforming desire, without addressing our desires. If your mind is full of desires you can…there are so many examples we can give from India, there are pictures of Krishna everywhere, deities of Krishna everywhere, and what is going on in the place is sinful activities everywhere. The prakriti-sahajyas perfect this. Because they are not in control of their desires and they have some philosophy to rationalize it and say we are Krishna’s devotees.

From the logic of the above mentioned point 2 it follows that the original condition of the mind is Krishna consciousness. So it is not that we are trying to get rid of the mind, to blow it up, or to dissolve it in acid, or leave it behind, bloke it up in a closet and throw away the key. Our original state is Krishna consciousness – jivera svarupa hoya krishnera nitya dasa. In a sense we can say that it is the mind that defines the jiva. Of course, Krishna has His mind too but that is infallible. Infallible and unfathomable. That original condition of the mind is contaminated as soon as our desire flows towards lording it over matter.

4. That what we know as our material mind in essence is simply the condition of material attraction. That’s sums up what the mind is. It is our state of being attracted to matter, gross or subtle, however it is, but one who is attracted to matter has a material mind. And one who is attracted only to Krishna has a spiritual mind, but it has to be a mind. Because we are jivas, we must always be attracted to something, we can never be independent. Madhvacarya makes an interesting point, that the soul is always…you see, in our Vaisnava vocabulary we have the term nitya badha (eternally conditioned) and nitya siddha (eternally liberated). Madhvacarya says that actually every soul, whether here in the material world or there in the spiritual world, is nitya badha, is bound. But it is a question of bound to what, those there are bound to Krishna, those here are bound to maya. But if you are jiva you are bound to something. And what you are bound by? The mind. This is what makes us jivas. This is what I really wanted to establish, that there is no question of negating the mind and that type of preaching has been very damaging in the past. So we want to correct that. There is very much place of psychology in Krishna consciousness and what we want to show you in this course is that psychology is one of the main topics in Srimad Bhagavatam, our problem is that we miss it, we don’t know where it is, although it is right in front of us. So we are going to point out where it is and going in it very, very deeply. So as I said, when it comes to philosophy, tattva, the gloves go off in this class. But now we are giving you nice introduction so that you feel comfortable with where we are going. But ones we get where we are going, it is going to be very deep, profound philosophy.
O, I think we can just go to the point which our dear Nita-Gouranga wanted to make about quantum physics and its relation to mental phenomena.

Nitay Gauranga das: I would like to talk mostly about the science of perception which falls into the category of psychology. I think the ultimate conclusion of this science of perception is that we don’t really have direct contact with the world around us and our representation of the world is at best subjective, perhaps, at times, entirely false. At the end we can’t trust our sense perception, it is not an accurate method to understand the world which is interesting in light of the Vaisnava Theology. The ideas we are going to talk about today come from a book written by Owen Barfield, he was a good friend of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. He wrote a book called “Saving the appearances – a study of idolatry”. He begins his book posing a question – what is real and what actually exists? He gives a example of a tree and a rainbow and he asks does the rainbow exists in the same way as the tree does? So rainbow we see always far of in a distance, but everybody has an experience of a rainbow, we can get a group of people together and we can say, hey, do you see that, and they will say yes, we see it. But you can’t touch the rainbow, you can’t come close to it.

So we can say in that sense that the rainbow is real, we can see it, we all can have a perception of it, but may be not as real as a tree is real. We can touch the tree, we can smell it, perhaps we can pick up a fruit from it and eat it, we can kick it, it is real in the realest sense that real can be, as far as we know it.
He makes an interesting argument that just as the rainbow is composed of rain and moisture and light and us observing it, us having our eyes open to it, in the same way the tree is composed by particles and we can perceive it. According to Vedic Psychology this is an interesting idea, I can’t remember the Sanskrit term right now but there are three aspects of perception – 1) something exists in the world, it has physical properties, it is real, 2) the physiology, the fact that we have the ability, the perceptual apparatus to perceive this object, for example, there is that green plant over there, I have eyes that can perceive that green color, and 3) the psychology, the fact that I am conscious of it, I want to noticed, I notice it, I see it, I am not blocking it up, these three aspects of perception are there therefore I see the plant .

Suhotra Maharaja: The Sanskrit terms for these three are adhibhautik, adhidaivic, and adhyatmic.

Nitay Gauranga das: Right. He wants to make the argument that the particles of the tree or in this case the particles of the plant can be akin to the rain drops of the rainbow and are actually they are of the same substance. Because this is not my field I will just read a paragraph out of this book which is terribly interesting:

“And yet we also know that the very material of which the tree is made is itself made of other things – molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles, which are made of even smaller, elementary particles, which themselves are made of, well, something that is increasingly difficult to describe using the idea of a thing. Charges of energy, probability fluctuations, quarks, and all sorts of others increasingly…entities some of which are said to exist only for most inconceivable fraction of time, while others are said to move from future to past and not, as most of the particles, the other way around. The world of elementary particles is, science tells us, what is really, really there. According to the new physics the only really real things are the mathematical equations. The old model of the atom… has been obsolete for decades, as has the idea of trying to model the behavior of these mysteries non-beings…When popular science writers talk about atoms as the building blocks of the Universe they are perpetuating a misconception. The Universe is build of no thing. Except perhaps for mathematical formulae, something that the ancient philosopher Pythagoras suggested millennia ago.
But then how do we get to the tree? When I look at it I do not see electrons buzzing… what I do see is a tall structure…with genuine green, grew and brown color…so how is this so?”

Then what he says is that what we see is a representation of energy. It is part of our psychological disposition towards something that creates it actually. There is something there but we don’t know what it is exactly. But we do know that it is something and our seeing that as a tree, or a plant is our way to interface with something which is much more complex than that – the energy, the building blocks of things that are really, really there.

If one aspect of the perception is missing there is nothing to perceive and no object actually exists. So in this case if we say, OK, there is this building we are under right now, if there is nobody to observe this building, to perceive it, it is just a energy…the way we perceive this building is just a representation of this energy so if we are not here to perceive it, to interpret it in our mind then it is simply an energy and nothing more.

Suhotra Maharaja: I would like to make a comment and I think these are like summary comments. One thing that comes out of this is that everything we are experiencing is actually mental phenomena. The sense are simply the portals of the mind to access something that is out there that we really don’t know what it is. So the senses are the portals of the mind to this “out there”, and what we are experiencing is all within the mind. You see. Everything we experience in this world is formed inside our minds. So we are all living inside of our own heads. But from this we should not come to the conclusion that, there is a philosophy called solipsism, which conclusion is that I am the only conscious living entity in the universe and the rest of you are just my imagination. Because we all agree that we can count the same number of pillars here, we talk about the same greenery over there, there is shared experience which indicates that there is objective reality. But whatever it is we are getting only indirect impression of it in the mind. This mental picture that we have…may have no resemblance at all to what is really out there, we don’t know.

The second point I wanted to make, it is made in that book too, is that this is a very excellent argument against the theory of evolution. When you see those nice books that show dinosaurs, and before the dinosaurs where those amphibian creatures and these 18 feet long fishes, and finally they say earth was just steaming ocean of chemicals, and there was this fiery ball that come from the sun, they tell you that with such confidence. But the problem in all this…is that this is all from the human perspective. But according to evolution there were now humans then. So the thing could not have looked that way. They could have no looked as those pictures show. If, as they say, there was no consciousness, then it was just energy and you cannot talk about ball of fire been thrown out of the sun and bubbling chemical soup, you can’t talk about that, all you can say is that there were some formless energies, that’s all that you can say was there. In reality that is the logical conclusion of what we just read.

In this way science totally undermines itself. Therefore Prabhupada once said, my mission is to kick the scientists in the face with a boot. Everything they say is full of contradictions. They talk so confidentially about the evolutionist theory but on the other side the quantum physics theory totally disproves it.

Question: If all is just in our mind then what about the demigods and the Spiritual World?

Suhotra Maharaja: Let’s clarify what we are saying, we are not saying that all the material in the universe is in the mind, what we are saying is that our experience is only in the mind.

Question: But then what about the sages who visualize in their mind different demigods like Brahma, Sarasvati…

Suhotra Maharaja: They were in a state called turya, beyond the mind. The great sages which gave us the Vedas were on the platform called turya, the fourth stage, beyond the modes of nature. At best the material mind is in the mode of goodness. By bhakti yoga one goes beyond this material realm to the spiritual realm which’ is the realm of the Lord’s mind.



Suhotra Maharaja: So Nitai Gouranga Prabhu is going to continue with the Freudian drive theory. Of course this is Freud’s theory, actually Srila Prabhupada, although he spoke very strongly against Freud for being so atheistic and for propagating seeming solution of human’s problems totally devoid of any reference to God, in fact Freud’s purpose was to overturn religion with his system of psychoanalysis. Prabhupada charges Freud for that, but there is one aspect of Freud’s theory which Prabhupada readily acknowledged to be true and that is his drive theory. That ultimately everything in the material world, not only human beings but what every living entity is doing is based on sexual attraction, the sexual drive. Nitai Gauranga will proceed now.

Nitai Gauranga das: Freud actually was not trained as a psychologist; he was actually trained as a neurologist. In the course of being a neurologist and at that time there was a phenomena known as an hysteria, the literal meaning is floating uterus, at that time they thought that the uterus will start float in the body and cause an erratic behavior. I think around Freud time already it was suspected that this was not exactly what was going on. So hysteria meaning erratic or illogical behavior. Neurologists came across this quite often because, well not quite often but from time to time they would come across something they called glove anesthesia, someone who does not have feeling in their hands and the doctor would poke around the arm in a certain places, do you feel that, yes, I feel that, well, the nerves in the arm are connected to the nerves in the hands so there is really no way that there can be no feeling in the hand and at the same time to have feeling in the arms so this is not a neurological problem, this is psychological problem.

So Freud began using treatment with hypnosis with patients who had hysteria. In the process of bringing people on the hypnosis he found that under hypnosis people would often bring up conflicts that they were having or traumas that happened in the past, these would be the first things that come out of the hypnotic state. And as they went through the process of talking about their traumatic experience… the symptoms of hysteria would diminish and they would feel better. The glove anesthesia would often leave and the hysteria would often leave. And then Freud began to think about things psychologically. When I say “think about things psychologically” that means try to consider something beyond the superficial explanation of things. In the example of glove anesthesia we see that it is not a nervous thing, there is something much deeper going on, that’s what it means to think psychologically. And in Freud’s case, what he considered thinking psychologically is to somehow make the unconscious content conscious, how to make people aware of the unconscious, how to dig in the unconscious and to resolve the conflict or the trauma which is causing the erratic behavior.

Freud eventually moved away from hypnosis because, one, he was not a very good hypnotist, and two, probably more importantly, at that time the endeavor was being made to establish the psychology as a rational science and as Freud once said, hypnosis seems just “too mystical”. So it could not be considered a hard science if you work with hypnosis so he discarded the hypnosis and instead went to what he called “free association”. Free association means that the patient makes an effort not to censor anything that comes out in his mind. If he does not make an effort to hide things the unconscious content that has a direct relation to the patient’s trauma will become manifest and the person becomes aware of these issues and be able to deal with them and perhaps with the help of the psychiatrist solve them.
Besides free association Freud used a process called analysis of the transference. In one sense transference means how one person relates to another, in this case how the psychiatrist relates to the patient, but not just how they deal, but what are the pathological patterns in their dealings. That means that the patient is taking content from their previous trauma that they are generally unaware of and superimposing it on the psychiatrist.

Question: Why did Srila Prabhupada call Freud one of the three big demons of the modern world?

Nitai Gauranga das: I would say one reason would be that he propounded a theory of religion which was not favorable. He considered religious activity to be a form of neurosis. There are drives inside the religious activities, there is nothing genuine about it.

Further he propounded a world view that a man is not a rational, that he is irrational. When people speak about the most important proponents of atheism he is one of the main six.

Suhotra Maharaja: Yes, to get back on the antireligious point, he proposed that the idea of God came simply out of everybody’s’ relationship with his father. God is kind of metaphysical mental projection of the relationship with the father. And it is not healthy because we should grow up and become independent from our parents, so similarly we should give up this god-idea. And just to elaborate on the point Nitai Gauranga made that religious behavior is neurotic, Freud would say that when every morning we reach for our beads and chant 16 rounds this is like there are crazy people who always are washing their hands, it is exactly the same type of behavior – crazy, they have to chant on their beads over and over again because there is something wrong up here.

And another thing is that I read some Freud and he makes comments about the Indian yogis and they are also extremely negative. Not a lot was known in Europe at that time about yoga, they were just discovering it, but anyway, he was really making a mockery of the whole thing. Because enough was known in Europe by that time that yoga is the traditional Indian psychology, of calming the mind, of fixing the mind through meditation. And all the practices like yama, niyama, asana are meant to control the mind. And he was saying really extremely negative things about the whole concept of yoga. I never read that he said anything about bhakti yoga but you could include bhakti yoga also because in our bhakti yoga there is an equivalent for all the astanga yoga practices. We give it different name and of course we engage in activities rather than trying to stop the senses but there is an equivalent, so he certainly would have not appreciated the Hare Krishna movement.

So of course this thing, as I came to understood form a God-brother of mine, it was a mistranslation form German to English, but still in the English-speaking world which is the most influential at the moment, and in the USA Freud use to be very big and still have some influence in England, so in the English speaking country the Freud term for an ideal personality who has worked out through all these neurosis’ and is sane as much as a person can be, the term for this is the “genital personality”, a person who is totally at ease with his sex desire and has no neurosis about it.

It is not necessary that he himself was an advocate of the “free love” in other words the free expression of sexuality but the logic of his system very strongly leads in that direction.

Samskara class

by Bhakti Vidya Purna Swami



Starting with the vivaha, so jati karma is performed by the relatives, the girl is being bathed before the marriage. The boy’s name is written on the leaf and so this is the first time she is being touched by the boy, not directly, but through the water. It creates a very interesting samskaras in that you are connecting the touch of the boy with purification so it should be on a pure platform, not a mundane platform.

You are asking Lord Visnu to bring the bride and groom together, she has been performing her duties according to Krsna consciousness. You can see those who want to have children perform austerities, so by the autsterity of performing her religious duties, creation is there.

Taking prajapati as the second face, then one sees the Supreme Lord. Devotees are always absorbed in seeing the Supreme Lord. In other words, you are showing where the mundane connects to the transcendental.

Then we have sampradanam, giving away the bride. The groom is welcomed by the girl’s father. The father gives his daughter away. He accepts.

After other elements of purification, then the girl is coming. They come out, she goes around seven times. They exchange garlands, now they interact. Exchange of garland means they are married, gandharva. This marriage is brahmana. By she giving the garland, she accepts, then he accepts her. The boy has also accepted through the father to take that responsibility.

The hands are stuck together – a bond. Flowers & kusa grass, everything will be very pleasant and also very pure according to ritual. The father gives her away and his responsibility is done.

Then you have the kama-stuti. The boy recognizes the L in all the aspects. . . You are performing your duties and seeing the l everywhere. The attraction one finds in family life, wife, children is actually Krsna. It is cupid, Pradyumna. It’s not just you say, “Oh, it’s Krsna. . .” and then you want to enjoy Krsna. You have to serve Krsna.

That means you have to take care of the girl as if she is the property of Prajapati Visnu. She is not just your wife, you can do whatever you like, she is the property of Visnu and you have to take care of her like you would take care of deity stuff.

If we notice here, the love is something else and we come in contact with it. You can take it in the external, his love, her love, but this is in line with the Lord and the material energy, you have attraction for the material energy, that is Krsna, but if it is done in accordance with guru, sadhu, sastra, that is also Krsna. It is going through the universal form and coming through the universal form. You get the experience, but it is not yours. As soon as you take it yours, you don’t have the experience. It’s God’s and he gets the experience, but he is kind to allow you to also get the experience, that is the yoga-maya. He is enjoying, you take part in the pastime to assist him in that and you enjoy, too. The servant enjoys like the king, but he cannot claim it as his. The attraction and attachment, if you see it in relation to Krsna and that it is not yours, but Krsna’s, you will experience it, but you will see that this wife, children belong to Krsna, everything is Krsna’s, I use it for Krsna.

A marriage is the most central point in human life. Anything else you do may be a big party or not. Marriage is always. Everyone goes to weddings. It is the most central feature of human society. Anyone will be paying much attention here. This is the more intimate aspect of the marriage ceremony, romantic, but it is all about Krsna. You are creating an experience generated around K, that is samskara. Otherwise, samskara just means impression. If you see a billboard that attracts your attention, that is samskara, it leaves an impression. But this is about Krsna. GBG has created this to connect the material with Krsna. If you’re a family person, how many hours are you chanting or in the temple or taking Prasad? This is how it works, through the influence of the samkaras. You remember all these aspects.

Tying the knot, father ties. Go through so many other couples so perfectly matched.

Things that are going to be, improper activities, therefore you would be punished for that, so cows represent prosperity, may it not be influenced by our previous bad activities.

The most important part is establishing the fire, the other parts of lighting the fire are not so important. They are for keeping away raksasas and things like that.

Finally, tying the bride’s hands. The first part, before tying the hands, that can only be done if the girl is never married by the Vedic rite before or never given away by her father before, so that part you wouldn’t do. You would do the father accepting the boy, the girl circumambulating, the exchange of garlands, tying the knot, and then go into the panigrahana. The cloth, that is for the long life of the husband. This is where he blesses her.

Then sindhur danam. That would be performed in the core wedding. The sindhur, you’re dealing with activity here. Fire is there, carrying offering, breaking through all obstacles. The idea is by performance of sacrifice, your activities, it should dissolve material existence. When the wood is burnt, the fire is finished. That knowledge used for dealing with material energy is used to burn up the material aspect. Then you deal with the devotional aspect. The technical aspects, rules are not as important for those who have already burnt it up. By performance of proper activities, everything becomes nice. Then it is like streams of rushing water, it is powerful emotional exchange. No one wants a ho-hum family life. Nowadays it is not very popular, but that is why there is not very exciting family life. Rasa is based on proper performance of Krsna consciousness.

Soma, the moon, when they are very small, they are very cute. Gandharva, when they grow and develop fine features. In puberty, agni, then they can get sons. The highest wealth is sons. The husband deals with the wife in all aspects. All aspects of his dealings are meant to elevate in Krsna consciousness. He understands this, then his marriage life is successful materially and spiritually. Otherwise, neither.

Again, gain and safety, Bhagavad-gita. That is what the living entity is looking for. Religious principles are performed, you get gain and safety, that is the feminine view. Let me be taken care of there so I will be confident and safe, then there is happiness. If you want women to be gentle, you have to be gentle with them first. May I enter into his house in bliss and safety, so it is already like that. May I enter that.

Aja samskara is for the bride’s welfare, protection from death of sons or anything from previous karma.

Laj-homa, this is now the main thing. The mother of the girl puts her foot on the stone bc by her training she has learned good qualities, she knows how to deal with men, how to cook, all the feminine arts and sciences. Pp says it is the third generation that will really make it happen, so don’t worry.

Annihilate, that would mean the six enemies, obstacles in devotional service. May you not become influenced by the elements opposed to devotional service. That is the fixed. So far we haven’t heard one husband says jump, wife says how high.

Then she pours the laj, puffed rice, without opening the fingers – focus to bring them together. Wife always wants the husband to live long, but devotion should flourish. They are assisting each other, so their own commitment to each other will increase. You connect everything to Krsna and you get Krsna and all your material things will be taken care of. The marriage stays together for those who are religious, follow principles. All techniques for making marriage work are written into the ceremony.

She has performed her duties well in her house, now she’s going to her husband’s house. The same enemies the wife is not to get effected by. Now she’ll also help the husband remove enemies. Water is the rasa again, according to guru, sadhu, sastra, that you get your rasa, and it cleans. The point of grhastha asrama is how to become cleansed of those desires. By working with it, you correct yourself. If you work with it according to sastra, you will be free.

I find it is better to explain before the samskara. You sit down with the family and everybody and give details of how they tie the knot and all. It is worthwhile even bringing the people and showing them their part in it, like a rehearsal. All the Vedas have the same main rituals, but this is according to sama veda. If you want to add things to this, their traditions, that is added on to this, but you shouldn’t have where you are halfway through the wedding and you do something and someone from the crowd stands up and says that is not proper. You tell them beforehand that will not happen because this is the way we do it, according to our veda.

Cleaning of these things is still done through rasa. We tend to think it is by penance, but penance here is performance of duties. It doesn’t make sense to us, why would we do any activity and we don’t get a result. When I say, get involved and don’t expect any result, everyone just sits with a blank face. It doesn’t soak in because it is a new concept for us. Buddhi-yoga is a new concept for us. Not karma performed with knowledge without attachment. These are all different ways of how this naiskarma is being performed in family life. Your life has to be the same when you walk out the door, but it is through inferior mediums. The material still connects, but it is through the universal form. This is how you do that. We have to maturely deal with the concept of marriage – deal with it as a tool for Krsna consciousness realization. Everything connected to Krsna.

We’re talking about our acaryas’ definition of reality. The attraction – it is real, but how do you deal with it, how do you connect it with Krsna? They don’t.

If the priest thinks it is going to fail, why get involved? If you follow this, it will not fail. It is a science. The whole male-female experience is going on right now, it is happening in the universe. You happened to get a portal to connect with it.

The smarthas perform the ritual, but miss the experience. The other ones don’t know that the experience will be gained by the ritual. They think it has to be spontaneous. The smarthas just want to do what’s right. They’re both wrong, though the smartha is more pious than the ritual, but they may develop false ego, which will be detrimental for their advancement.

Girl has made sacrifice. . . Through sacrifice one becomes free.

Groom does the final offering to Acyuta, the infallible.

The seven steps. There are seven instructions. The first: Don’t let the left foot cross beyond the right. Right means religious, proper, left means against that. The tantric, black arts, are left. Always follow the duties.

First step, duties. Second, one will have influence, if you are strong, relationships will be strong. You can create good in life.

From strength comes power, you can uphold your vows, then happiness, then cows, wealth, then one is satisfied and one is able to properly focus on his spiritual activities. The last one is an instruction to maintain the previous seven instructions, including the one before the first.

Be my companion. . . The central principle is companionship because that remains for life. Romance comes and goes. That is when you can get something done, you can help each other, assist each other, make plans, do so many things as companions. Companion is based on these other principles under which you should function.

She has to accept. It is the woman who keeps the bond. If she has hope, she will maintain, if she has no hope, it is gone. She will maintain it if he performs his duties right.

Sprinkle water. May proper performance of religious duties, the rasa gained from that, bind them together. The wind god, he is guru, maintained by following the order of guru. Serving under the cit potency keeps us bound together.

Blessings.

Things are done in a way very subtle way here.

Yajna for taking out inauspiciousness that may be in the girl, physical girl, because they come from something else. Clear all those things. Doesn’t mean what she will look like, it will change the mood, which technically changes what she looks like.

She looks at the polestar.

Bhojanam.

Let your heart. . . They are each going to work for each other.

Life airs means action.

They are going to follow the path back to Godhead. The crossroads because that is where yaksas can stand. Where there are obstacles, may that be removed. May we pass the hard journey pleasantly, they don’t say it is going to be a nice time.

(It’s not so much what you have, but what you do with it. If there is a high compatibility rate, there is less chance that false ego and lack of training is going to destroy the marriage. If someone is really well trained, they are more likely to make it work. Why would the marriage be arranged to someone who is not compatible if they are well trained? Main thing is you have to be working according to authority. It is how you deal with it and handle the marriage. There is not a kavaca you can do or a mantra you can chant. It’s a hard journey. Something that gives you the most result is generally the hardest. Conjugal rasa gives the highest experience in the material world means it is the most difficult.)

Q: Will samskaras remove auspiciousness in the chart?

A: No, unless you do something about it, nothing is going to happen. It is only in action that you get any result. It is not a magic thing that you do once and forever you get result. Samskara, as an activity, is trying to teach you that by your proper Krsna conscious endeavor, you will get a result. It is not that by a little mantra you will get rid of it. It is what the mantra is saying that will do it. It all has to do with you. You deal right, it deals right.

By worshipping the Lord and devotees, everything becomes auspicious.

Q: Some stop after seven steps?

A: Garlands, sindhur, laj, going around the fire, seven steps, that is the marriage. Others are blessing and purification for the girl. If you are doing a remarriage, you wouldn’t do all the rest anyway for a girl who has gone through a Vedic marriage. It is already done. She doesn’t have to go through it again. After the seven steps, you go to the Vaisnava homa.

Garbhadanam

Visnu is the creator, Acyuta is infalliable – infalliable forms. Jagadisa is the one who is running the whole thing. Nara-narayana is also the Lord of the Bhagavat philosophy. Through Garbh Visnu, who is creating everything. He is presenting the child, but that child should be given through the medium that is Krsna conscious, Bhagavatam.

Pumsavana

Third month of pregnancy, whenever the fetus begins to move. The moon in a male constellation.

Protecting child from things while moving around.

Sumanta-nayanam

Four, six, or eight. To protect the child. Neem is purifying, mustard clears obstacles, banyan expands, ? pleasing to Krsna.

Mind starts developing in fourth month. Won’t be so mental.

Part hair.

Sosayanti

**

Child is clean and still connected to the mother. Important nutrients that go through the umbilical cord in those 5-10 minutes.

Namakarana

Blessings of the planets because they are the ones running one’s life.

Annaprasana

Dealing with life airs. According to Ayurveda, all disease comes from stomach. If digestion is good, disease does not come up.

There are over forty such samskaras, but only the ten main ones are mentioned here.

Q: Does it guarantee a male child?

A: It has the potency to do that, but you have to see if everyone along with it is potent – parents have to believe it, priest has to be qualified.

Study very nicely and then practice it. Know what is there and the mentality should be proper. Every one of these you perform, you will take karma. There is no cheap life of a priest. That is why brahmanas get daksina. Ksatriyas, vaisyas don’t get daksina because they don’t do that.

The central thing is the Vaisnava homa. From there, you add on. You can do it just in that way, or you can expand it more, or you can add on other things.

Q: In vivaha, there is so much. How do you know what to simplify?

A: The full thing is only there for the first marriage of a girl. If it’s a first generation girl, you count it from when she joined. You don’t worry about whatever happened before. At initiation, it’s a new birth. If it’s our own girls, then it’s a different story. If it’s a remarriage, then you cut out everything because it has already been done, only the vows connecting to the husband. Seven times circumambulating, the garlands, sinhur, foot on the stone, fire three times, laj homa, and saptapati gamana. That’s for remarriage or if you want to keep it really simple. That much is complete wedding. All the rest is purificatory for the girl.

The groups of mantras, you can chant the last line with all the names of Visnu. Up to the point of the father saying you are the one I accept for my daughter, you can stop there and not do the rest. You can drop the go-moksa or just chant the mantras. That is just taking a little bit off.

VIRTUE AND RESPONSIBILITY

H.H. Devamrita Swami’s lecture on Srimad Bhagavatam 3.13.1-3, Gour- Purnima festival, Mayapur 2008




3.13.1
Sri Sukadeva Gosvami said: O King, after hearing all these most virtuous topics from the sage Maitreya, Vidura inquired further on the topics of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, which he adored to hear.

PURPORT
The word adrtah is significant because it indicates that Vidura had a natural inclination for hearing the transcendental message of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and he was never fully satisfied though continuing to hear those topics. He wanted to hear more and more so that he could be more and more blessed by the transcendental message.

3.13.2
Vidura said: O great sage, what did Svayambhuva, the dear son of Brahma, do after obtaining his very loving wife?

3.13.3
O best of the virtuous, the original king of kings [Manu] was a great devotee of the Personality of Godhead Hari, and thus it is worth hearing of his sublime character and activities. Please describe them. I am very eager to hear.

PURPORT
Srimad-Bhagavatam is full of the transcendental topics of the Personality of Godhead and His pure devotees. In the absolute world there is no difference in quality between the Supreme Lord and His pure devotee. Therefore, hearing the topics of the Lord and hearing of the character and activities of the pure devotee have the same result, namely, the development of devotional service.


H.H. Devamrita Swami:

Today, in this short time we gave for class, I will try to speak about virtue, responsibility, and also about the transformation between the Lord and His devotees.
We hear from Srila Prabhupada’s purport that in the absolute world there is no difference in quality between the Supreme Lord and His pure devotee. We can see that phenomena of the absolute world are so prominently displayed, apparently within this material world, during the pastimes of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu and His associates. How the Lord and His devotees melted in regard to each other’s transcendental qualities. Particularly let us meditate on Lord Caitanya’s meetings with Haridas Thakur in Jagannatha Puri. How they approached one another and the reaction upon their meeting together. Naturally Haridas Thakur offers his full dandavats in the dust of Lord Caitanya and Lord Caitanya picks him up and they both embrace and cry unlimitedly in tears of ecstatic love. This is happening often during the interactions of Lord Caitanya with His associates – constant embracing and shedding tears of pure love. In this way they are displaying, even in the material world, the interactions between the pure Lord Who is always supremely pure and His pure devotees.

Krishnadas Kaviraja Gosvami presents an extraordinary inside into this situation of the embrace and the mutual shedding of tears of pure love. He explained that the Lord became transformed by the qualities of Haridas Thakur and Haridas Thakura became transformed by the qualities of the Lord. How is it that the Supreme Lord is so affected by His devotee?

We should be careful about impersonal understanding which is so prevalent, especially pop-impersonalism, in the western countries these days. In this “understanding” one thinks, “because I feel good that means Good feels good.” Or, “because I feel miserable, the God must also be miserable”. This is not the mutual transformation Kaviraja Gosvami is referring to.

In this mutual transformation everything takes place on the transcendental platform. The Lord becomes transformed by the pure qualities of Haridas Thakur. It is not that the Lord becomes transformed by the mundane qualities of the living entities under the influence of the modes of material nature. So there is a difference how Krishna becomes affected by His parts and parcels. As we know the Lord is aloof from the actions and reactions of the material energy but in Caitanya lila He shows how He cannot resist coming under the influence of His pure devotees, to the extent that He even becomes transformed by them.

Haridas Thakur tells Lord Caitanya, “don’t touch me, don’t touch me, I am the lowest among men, I am so sinful…” and Lord Caitanya replies, “I am touching you for My own purification because your transcendental qualities don’t exist in Me”.
In this mutual transformation we should remember that one is always the Prabhu, the Supreme Master, and the other is always the servitor. Not that it becomes quantitative mix up. Yet, although the Lord is who He is, He is eager to partake in the transcendental qualities of His devotee. In fact He is more eager, Srila Prabhupada explains in this section, the Lord is more eager to serve the devotee that the devotee is eager to serve Him.

Our ascent to reviving of proper qualities in relation to Krishna is driven by hearing about Krishna. Our understanding of virtue is far different from the mundane conception. First of all, it is the prime principle of Lord Caitanya’s sankirtan movement that virtue is broad about by hearing about Krishna, speaking about Krishna, Krishna katha is transformational. We are not dealing with religious belief – we shall be saved because we believe in certain way or because we have certain external religious characteristics, no, we are saved because of the transformational activities of hearing and chanting about Krishna which actually produce virtue and good qualities.

When Srila Prabhupada was on Jaladuta in the Boston harbor he frankly assessed the situation – a population drowning in passion and ignorance. How will this people ever become Krishna conscious? And then he expressed his deep realized experience of the transformational power of talks about Krishna, Krishna’s holly name, although the situation is impossible, because of the power of hearing about Krishna the situation can be salvaged and indeed even the most fallen living entities can achieve perfection, all because of the transformational potency of Sri Krishna sankirtan.

In this way we are not speaking of religious faith as it is ordinarily understood, we are speaking about a bhakti laboratory process of transcendental sound vibration entering the ear and the heart and producing virtue and divine qualities to the extent where, at the level of complete purity, the Lord becomes eager to be transformed by the qualities of His devotees.

It is becoming very difficult for people today to understand what virtue is. In fact, even from the material point of view, we very rarely hear about virtue and wisdom of political leaders running for office. They don’t promise to people, “I will be virtues, I have wisdom”. Everyone promises, “I will bring about more economical development for you, I will bring about more wealth in your pocket.” Politicians around the world remind themselves, quoting one famous American president…that’s what the people want, they want money. They want to see how their financial prosperity is increasing. These are the issues. Nobody goes around and says, “I have virtue, I have wisdom, I will train the population in virtue and wisdom.” People don’t want to hear that. Because their judgments of what is good and bad are so economically driven. Economic principles have become the virtues.
So therefore the question is, at the exchange between two persons, is that exchange mutually beneficial for both of them as each person perceives it. So much so that I may be selling you something that will not do you any good from one person’s point of view, but if you think it does good to you and you give me money and I am pleased with that money – that is mutually beneficial exchange. And there should be great hesitation of applying laws of restriction on such mutually beneficial exchange.
We were speaking about that at the Chowpatty temple a week ago. That to varying degrees this has become the main organizing principle in the society nowadays, how to have exchange where one person gives the product, the other person gives the money, and both of them are more or less satisfied by the exchange. This is the perfection of social organization to varying degrees. There may be some restrains in this country on selling certain kinds of things, restrains in another country or lack of them but to varying degrees this economical principle is the foundation of society today. So people don’t know anymore what virtue is outside of situations which can be financially calculated.

Here is a popular example that is given amongst so called thinking persons. Who is more virtuous, Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, or Norman Borlaug? Now, you might think, obviously, Mother Teresa is more virtuous. She was an ascetic, she was always living amongst the poor, clothed very simply with very sad eyes upon seeing the suffering of others. Whereas look Bill Gates, filthy rich. The richest man in the world. How can be any virtue there? And who is Norman Borlaug? Anyone here knows who Norman Borlaug is? He is accredited with saving one billion people’s lives. Because he is said to be the father of the agriculture revolution.

What about Bill Gates? He has used his fortune to establish charities to eliminate malaria, other scourges of the developing world. So you may say that he is certainly not a saintly person, you may say he is filthy rich, he is greedy, but look what he is doing for millions of people.

And then look at Mother Teresa. She prayed a lot. And she gave poor people very primitive medicine. In other words they died, but they died with lots of prayers around.

The social psychologist has pointed out that you are have been fooled by the aura of sanctity. But when you look the hard facts Norman Borlaug is the savior of the world. One billion people have been saved because of the policy of the chemical agriculture. Look at Bill Gates, countless persons were being saved by malaria, and look at Mother Teresa, just because she acted saintly and clothed herself as a true believer and prayed a lot, and spoke a lot of religious platitudes, how many person did she actually saved? Therefore we must have completely different understanding of what is virtue. In other words, the traditional religious understanding of virtue has no practical impact in this world against the philanthropic deeds of persons you would never call a saint. So you must re-think your understanding.

Furthermore, you tend to think of virtue as an individual characteristic that can be cultivated; you can individually develop these virtual qualities. You scripture says srinvatah sva kathah Krishna punya sravana kirtana, by hearing about Krishna real virtue, real piety develops in the heart. All right, that’s your individual thing, but let us look at the facts. We can see from the facts that generally, there are always exceptions, but generally morality is situational. People decide what to do and what not to do based on the situation. Research has shown this. I will give you an example.

It has been shown by social psychologists that if you are passing in the front of a store that is selling fresh made bread and the street is filled with the smell, you will be more prone to do a good deed than someone who is walking by the cloth store and there is no smell of fresh bread around.
Secondly, if you are find money, immediately after that you are more prone to help others than otherwise.

A third example – if you are reading a book and in the book you see words like virtue, goodness, charity, immediately after that you are more prone to help someone than someone who is reading a book and sees there words like horror, terror... Academics have spent lots of time and money researching these crucial situations. 
Now, what happens when there is a global tragedy like war? Is it that terrible persons start doing terrible things? No, according to social research, good persons are put in terrible situations and therefore they do terrible things. There are exceptions but this is the general rule.

There is some lesson in all of this for the devotees of the Lord. Look at Brahma’s situation. He has just dealt with the four Kumaras. Each of these four boys represents something very needed for the human society. Tapas, yoga, vairagya, sankhya. Lord Brahma is considering the whole universe’s situation. As we heard from His Holiness Radhanatha Maharaja, he wants to create a social structure where people can achieve their goal of being in the material creation which is to revive their Krishna consciousness. He turns to the four Kumaras and gives them a justifiable request. Will you please procreate? So that we can build up a system in the world by which people can achieve the ultimate goal of life. The four Kumaras tell him “No, we are not interested to enter into all those activities”. This is showing, the Acaryas point out, that the four Kumaras want direct bhakti and don’t want to be involved so much with the varnasram system. But Lord Brahma is thinking of the well being of all the conditioned souls in the Universe. He knows that generally the living entities are influenced by their situation. So he has the responsibility to construct a situation in which people can gradually advance toward the ultimate goal of life because they are influenced by favorable circumstances for reviving their Krishna consciousness. He wants the four Kumaras to help him there but they refuse.
Now he has Svayabhuva and he is requesting Svayambhuva, you please procreate and also take responsibility for managing, for protecting the living entities and Svayabhuva Manu graciously accepts with great love, yes, I will do what you say.
It is not so easy to take responsibility like that and we are finding this to be so in our Krishna consciousness. Who will take responsibility of Srila Prabhupada’s movement as his disciples are leaving more and more and aging more and more? Is that everyone is jumping for massive responsibilities? Is it that everyone is eager, when these old-timers are moving out so that we can take their spot? It does not seem like we have many. But Lord Brahma also had the same problem. Because what is going to happen is that Svayabhuva Manu in fifth canto he is going to retire. And the only person he can turn to is Priyavrata. All other options in the hereditary line have been exhausted. Priyavrata is in seclusion receiving transcendental education from Narada Muni. Prayavrata has his mind set on remaining a brahmacari and having nothing to do with worldly rule and management. This presents a problem for Brahma and Svayambhuva Manu because who will manage the world so that the living entities can make gradual spiritual progress? And, secondly, how can Svayambhuva Manu fulfill dharma by retiring from his managerial duties?

The situation was so intense that Lord Brahma had to personally appear in order to lovingly break Priyavrata’s determination. This was going to be a difficult job, Bhagavatam explaines, because who is Priyavrata’s instructor? Narada Muni. Narada Muni has Priyavrata completely focused on brahmacarya, no management, no worldly responsibilities.

Brahma understands, this is going to be a difficult task, therefore he comes with many great sages…The first thing Brahma says to Priyavrata is “I have been in contact with the Supreme Personality of Godhead, don’t be jealous of His order…The living entities is bound by the laws of dharma.” At the end Priyavrata and Narada Muni were very happy to follow Brahma’s order.

In our ISKCON society we don’t see that the devotees are jumping to take up responsibilities. And in many places there are no devotees to take up responsibilities. So what to do? Srila Prabhupada explains that this Krishna consciousness movement should always be a great challenge. In that way the devotees will always be enthusiastic to follow the regulative principles, without that feeling of a challenge they will become lethargic under the grip of the material energy.

How is possible to feel that challenge that there is something wonderful I can do for Krishna and even if that service requires austerity and purification I will sign up for it? How to create that spirit so that the Krishna consciousness society can go on? It is not an easy thing to do as we see even Brahma himself he had a problem…Priyavrata did not want to have anything to do with management. Brahma gave him a hint – don’t use your intelligence to reject the order of the Lord but to follow it. The solution was yukta vairagya as enunciated so brilliantly by Rupa Goswami. Priavrata decided to rule with detachment in this way he combined the instructions of his Gurus – Narada and Brahma.

I remember a letter from Srila Prabhupada where he explains something that is sad and joyful at the same time. The letter was written to a leader who was disappointing Srila Prabhupada. And Srila Prabhupada writes there that “I am hearing such things about you which make my heart sad. I have given you such big opportunity to be a big leader on behalf of Lord Caitanya and I hear these things.” And we can say – these things happen, how we are disappointing Srila Prabhupada sometimes, not living up to his expectations. And then Srila Prabhupada concluded, “Nevermind, I know Lord Caitanya will send me the right persons to lead this movement, if not you - someone else.”

This is the conviction of someone who knows – Krishna’s plan will prevail – who will be those who take the extraordinary opportunity to take part of this plan.
If you look at the situation, let’s talk about the first world, we see that people become practically insane because they don’t find a meaning in life, they are so disturbed by stress and anxiety, and this is affecting our preaching. You see, in our line we have the command to reestablish the Daivi Varnasrama. Just like the four Kumaras wanted the pure bhakti but Svayambhuva Manu took it as his job to make favorable circumstances because indeed, most people are influenced by their circumstances. We see Srila Prabhupada taking the command from Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura and Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswami wanted that we make some attempt to make some type of structural arrangement so that even those who are not enough strong to be Krishna conscious on their own be influenced by favorable environment and thus they gradually revive their Krishna consciousness. We remember the last year of Srila Prabhupada presence among us a devotee asked him – “Why this talk about Varnasrama dharma, Lord Caitanya’s policy is to simply chant Hare Krishna, that’s what it’s all about?” And just to make a powerful point Srila Prabhupada said, “Lord Caitanya is from the spiritual world, we are different. We want to help people.” It does not mean, of course, that we should not chant Hare Krishna, it means that Prabhupada, in extraordinary compassion, wanted to help people to make gradual progress in Krishna consciousness.

Now this Varnasrama dharma has proven to be a great challenge for us. And sometimes the challenge has been so great we don’t even talk about it anymore. But what can be done, this is our parampara inheritance and we have to struggle with it. It is a fact that most people are influenced by their circumstances. Put a person in a good situation and it is highly probable that this person will do something good. Leave a good person in a terrible situation and the good person will do terrible things as it has been seen in so many atrocities and genocides.

We have a lot of work to do and we have a lot of responsibilities to be taken. Sometimes even Lord Brahma becomes perplexed, what to do? We will see that after Svayambhuva Manu agrees, father, whatever you ask I will do, where should I be located, where should all the people stay? The earth has fallen into the Garbodaka ocean and Brahma said yes, that is right, how this situation can be fixed? And while Lord Brahma is thinking in perplexity Lord Varaha emerges from his nostril.
We are also thinking in perplexity, how are we not going to forget about our parampara inheritance, that Srila Prabhupada wanted that favorable circumstances be constructed so that the people can become Krishna conscious. That’s why he pushed Varnasrama dharma. It seems so difficult, it seems even inconceivable, but what can we do, this is our line. Particularly in the first world we see massive social degradation, people becoming crazy because of stress, lusty affairs in such a young age, it seems that the 60 and 70 that was the Satya yuga. And Prabhupada came and got all the hippies form the Satya yuga who did not really do anything that was degraded until they were 18 and now all that degradation begins at the age of 11 and 12. This has affect in our preaching. In my humble opinion, I have seen this around the world, devotees are perplexed that young people they are nuts, everyone is so economically obsessed, what to do? Perhaps we need to take another look at Srila Prabhupada’s strategies, maybe there were not antiquated or outmoded or they were not dreamy at all, how indeed to create a situation where people can become good, and how to take out people from a terrible situations where they will do terrible things because the situation is terrible. That is a different way of looking at varnasram dharma and our parampara inheritance. Thank you very much. Hare Krishna.