“Remembering the instructions of Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu to always be engaged in propagating the glories of Krishna’s holy names for the upliftment of the fallen souls is the only shelter for the fallen soul aspiring perfection in this present Age.

The alternative passages are actually traps of Maya which will lead one to fall:
1. Into the pit Mayavadi Conceptions or
2. Into Entanglement in Materialistic Activities under the three material modes.

His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada has so kindly given the world a spiritual society in which every thought, word and deed can be engaged in Yukta-Vairägya — pure devotional activities offered to Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead.”

“The new favorable contacts we make are like an uncut diamond. It is valuable, but its true value only becomes realized when it is cut and polished.

That process is like the cultivation of the new people and building the relationships with them. Finally when the gem is fully cut and polished it becomes so Valuable.

That is when the devotees are more fully developed in their Krishna consciousness and ready to take up temple service or serve in a Nama Hatta Bhakti Vrksa group (cell).”

“Srila Prabhupada said in Krishna consciousness we need to emulate the Coconut or Palm trees which can bend under the stormy weather, but after the wind stops they bounce back upright. Stiff big trees often get blown over.

So please tolerate all kinds of difficulties and remain fixed in your Krishna Consciousness no matter what kinds of tests come. Always try to serve Guru & Gauranga under all circumstances.”

“Maya is also a devotee of Krishna whose duty is to keep the criminals in jail. She never releases anyone unless they become a pure devotee of Krishna. But when someone becomes pure, she gladly accepts defeat, because her whole purpose is to help people surrender to Krishna. This is her success.

She expertly keeps the living entity in illusion until he understands that he is the eternal servant of Krishna, thus preventing the criminally minded living entities from creating havoc in the completely harmonious spiritual world. ”

“We accept particular bodies in our dreams to be ourselves. We may dream that we are king, or dream that we are pauper, or a woman. In the dream we are thinking “This is me.” When we wake up, we find that it was a dream and that the temporary dream body is disappeared.

So in a similar way, by the influence of material nature, we get a particular body in this life, and we identify with this body that it’s ourselves. When we actually wake up to our real eternal identity, we find that this temporary body is not our real self.

When we dream, it lasts for a few seconds; we sleep during night five ti six or even seven hours. We have this temporary body for say hundred years or fifty years, or seventy years. So relatively speaking, that seems much more real.

Dreams may change often. In relation to our eternal self, this temporary body which we get from the material world is also just like a flash, a very short period of time. Therefore, it could be compared to a dream.

When we are in a dream, it seems real to us. We are experiencing happiness, pleasures, sadness, anxiety or fear, depending on whether it’s a nice dream or nightmare.”

“When Srila Prabhupada was sick, he said, ‘Don’t pray to Krishna that I should stay here, pray that if it pleases Krishna, if it is His desire that I stay, then please allow the spiritual master to be healthy.’

The devotee has no demand on Krishna. If Krishna wants something to happen, the devotee accepts that. Within Krishna’s desires, if Krishna has different options, if it’s all the same to Krishna, then the devotee may express that he likes this particular thing.

But if Krishna has some other plan, the devotee doesn’t want to interfere with it, but wants that Krishna be pleased. This is the difference between pure devotion and mixed devotion.”

“Hare Krishna” is so powerful, (that) in kali yuga you can become Krishna conscious. What to talk of satya yuga when people were chanting…they were completely freed of sins.

In Satya Yuga and the previous yugas, if your father bought something bad you will get a karmic reaction. But in Kali Yuga YOU have to do something bad.

So don’t do anything bad. Yamraja is watching…Krishna is watching too! You want to send a thought, drive it out of your mind..No I won’t do that!”

“In human society the constant struggle for existence also manifests as the ‘ Battle  to Succeed’ in life.

In material vision ” Success” means to amass Wealth, Fame, Followers, Influence, Prestige and Power. These qualities spring from the material mode of passion and keep us prisoners of material desire.

The process of Krishna consciousness is meant for elevating one above material bondage to the transcendental platform of Eternal Blissful Knowledge.

Therefore, Krishna conscious devotees have been advised by Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu to “Pull out the Weeds” of Material Desires and Bad Habits from ones life in order to make Unimpeded progress in Krishna consciousness (Real SUCCESS)”

“Although the loving exchanges of devotees in conjugal love appear very similar to the loving affairs of the material world, it has nothing to do with material affairs like that.

So, it is said that even great scholars get confused. Sometimes great scholars in India cannot understand these pastimes with the queens of Dvaraka, or with the Gopis – the erotic pastimes. They don’t realize that even the soul is the energy of Krishna. Therefore, Krishna is the only Purusha in the sense that He is the only enjoyer. He is the Supreme Purusha and all the energies are His Prakriti.

So it is natural that in the pastimes in the spiritual world, some devotees engage in the service in Krishna’s pastimes as His gopis or His wives but in the spiritual world there is no procreation. There is no sex as we know it in the material world. There is simply loving sentiment, but the Lord and His devotee take these different forms, these different relationships.”

“We cannot win Krishna simply by Offering Gifts, for everything belongs to Him. Krishna cannot be won even by performing Great Service, for all energy and ability stems from Him alone.

All we can offer Him in all our activities is our Pure Devotional Mentality. The Lord is known as Bhavagrahi Janardhana, or ‘The Lord who accepts the devotional attitude of His devotee.‘

This is the secret of how to win the Eternal Service of Lord Krishna. ”

“Scriptures are only as good as they are studied. If nobody is reading the scriptures, if all the books are lying in the bookshelf unread, unstudied, unreferred to, then people will gradually start to forget what’s the meaning and application of those scriptures.

So the example is given here like a dirt road which in the rainy season is not being used, so it gets grown over by grass.

So there are some people, they don’t know really what the scriptures say and somebody just directs them in a particular direction and so that way they get mislead. This is the danger.

So Srila Prabhupada wanted that his followers should not only distribute his books but they must study them in detail.”

“Srila Prabhupada is explaining who within this world is intelligent.
krsna yei bhaje sei hayata catura – One who worships Krishna, he is the most intelligent.

Caitanya Mahaprabhu also said the same thing in the Caitanya Caritamrta:
krsna je bhaje se bada catur, krsna-bhakta hena chara – A person who worships Krishna, he is the most intelligent.

A non-devotee is insignificant, and his association is undesirable. In the material world everyone has forgotten their eternal relationship with Krishna. They do not remember that Krishna is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the source of everything.

Without knowing the supreme position of Krishna, they consider themselves important and attempt to enhance their position materially. Due to this spirit, they become bound by the laws of cause and effect.

Sometimes they may rise up to heavenly planets, or they may descend to hellish planets and suffer the results of their sinful activity.”

“I have some disciples who are pilots or engineers of this big airline, Boeing 747 and so on. And they tell me that to a get license you had to learn how to fly without seeing!

You had to fly only by instruments, because your senses will mislead you. At those altitudes and the varying pressures you may think you are going left, and you are going right. You may think you are going up but you are going down. Senses are adjusted for walking on the earth, not for 39,000 feet above sea level or 8,000 or whatever. So therefore you had to depend not on your senses but on the instruments. If the instrument says ‘you are going up’, you are going up. Whatever your ears are telling you, whatever your sense of balance is telling you, you have to watch the instrument.

So, like that, even in spiritual life, we have to follow the shastra. Even if our sentiment tells us something else, or ‘this is a very good thing’, we have to follow the shastra, we have to learn to fly by the instrument. Fly by the guidance given to us by the Sadhu, Shastra and Guru.

Where, people in this material world, there is good and there is bad. But ‘material’ good and ‘material’ bad, it’s all material. There is a higher spiritual reality, and that we need to know!”

“Sometimes Prabhupada gives an example that when the spiritual master is present and giving a class and disciple is thinking of something else, so even though the spiritual master is present he is not taking full shelter. And if some one when guru is not present and feeling separation from his spiritual master then they may be more closely united to the guru than the one who may be present with the guru but thinking something else.

So we take the opportunity when the spiritual master is present to service, to take more association, to get attached so that when he is not present we feel his separation and really focused that is the procedure for taking full shelter. Sometimes Prabhupada also appreciated that there are disciples who plan on the road to be with Prabhupada but he said disciple who are taking responsibility for me, they are actually more close. So if we take some of the burden of the spiritual master and to help him in securing some kind of service, some responsibility we are becoming closer to the spiritual master.

Often Maharaj said that we should take shelter and that is also a procedure to take shelter; chant pranam mantra and offer all your service to Krishna through the spiritual master. Then we actually thing we are doing offering to Krishna through Guru and parampara.

Then while we are taking initiation; taking instruction; serving the guru; following his instructions. Sometime the guru is helped by different siksa gurus. In that way there is help from different ways to the spiritual master.”

“Usually the concept in religious books of different religions is that heaven is a place where there is a lot of enjoyment. Quran talks about the various types of sense gratification you can enjoy. The Mormons consider heaven to be a place to get back together with your family and then live there forever after. Family members are happy and there is no suffering and everyone is basically God conscious.

But this concept of heaven fits in with the upper planetary systems in the (material) universe, where people are pious entities who follow the laws of God, and they have good material sense gratification.

But according to the Vedas, one doesn’t stay there eternally. One comes down from there, from those planets and is forced to maybe take birth in the human form of life or as an animal, according to their Karmas. One can be on the heavenly planets for thousands or millions of years of our calculation, so one thinks one is there for a very long time but in terms of eternal time it’s a drop in the bucket, so to speak. It’s just a small period of time, which quickly passes by.

So, the real goal of life is to go back to Godhead, back to the original Spiritual Kingdom of God. But in the Spiritual Kingdom of God, there is no material sense gratification. Everything is in relationship to the service of the Lord.

That means, as long as one is thinking about their personal sense gratification, as long as that is their goal of life, namely how to make their own bodies happy, they are forced to come again in the material world.”

“Prabhupada said that just like a lawyer will go to the court and present before the judge the laws and the legal precedence. They can’t go to the judge and just say “Well, my dear lord, your honor, you know I think that this person should be set free regardless of what the law says because he is a nice guy, even though he is a serial killer.” Nobody is going to listen to such sentimental statements.

Everything has to be backed up by legal references, evidences and so on. So in the same way, even in our spiritual life, whatever we do, we should be able to back it up with the words of the spiritual masters and with the advice or the examples of great devotees and saints lives. Sadhu-sastra-guru. Basis of everything is the SCRIPTURE.

Whatever the Guru or preacher says, everybody always has the rights to question that if; ‘what your saying is stated in the scripture, could you tell us where?’ Because that’s the way we substantiate everything with our vedic disciplic succession. We can’t do anything which is not supported by the Vedas and Prabhupada has stated it many times that in KC, we always follow the Vedic version.

“Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakura, a great acarya in te Brahma Madhva Gaudiya line, mentioned that those people who live close to the railway station miss the train more frequently than others. They tend to think,”The railway station is right here, just next to my house and i can go there anytime. “But when the train comes,they rush to get there,and before they reach,the train leaves.

On the other hand, someone who is living far away thinks, “Oh, I have to go one hour ahead to get the train.” So he reaches the railway station well ahead of time and waits there.

Similarly, we should not be lazy or negligent with our spiritual life thinking that we are in India, the holy land. Then we may miss the vimanam, going to vaikuntha. We should book our ticket well in advance and be prepared to go to the spiritual world.

Caitanya Mahaprabhu says that in kaliyuga, to get a ticket you simply have to pay the price.Do you know what the price is ? We have to chant the holy names, Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare / Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare.

“In the world today, many countries who recently fought one another are now allied, due to changing political aims. And in a few more years, the situation will change again.

This is so because material relationships are based on temporary sense gratification, either individual or collective. Since such relationships are temporary, they have no permanent value.

However, the pure relations between the individual soul and the Supreme Soul are eternal and COMPLETELY SATISFYING. This complete satisfaction cannot be found within this material world; here we find only illusory bodily relationships.

So here Srila Prabhupada warns us not to be mislead into pursuing lusty desires. If we become absorbed in material desires, we forget Krishna, our real spiritual protector, and by chasing after sense gratification, we become victims of Maya, who binds us to the cycle of birth and death.

“Just like a criminal on the dunking stool, sometimes he is submerged in the water, and sometimes he is in the air. But either way, his position is miserable. This is the condition of the materialist.

Because Arjuna understood his relationship with Krishna, his fighting was of a different quality to Duryodhana’s. Arjuna fought in a mood of pure devotion, without attachment to the fruits of action. Krishna told him, “If you simply fight for Me, I will give you shelter and you will come back to Me.” This is the devotee’s special position.

The materialist, however, because he is unaware of his eternal loving relationship with Krishna, gets no real benefit from his endeavors. Ultimately his efforts end in death.

But the devotee, even though appearing to die, gives up his material body and goes back to Krishna.