(8/18) Patience Is a Virtue

His Divine Grace Om Vishnupad
Srila Bhakti Nirmal Acharya Maharaj
Sri Vyasa-Puja Adhivas, Tarakeswar,
Evening, 28 September 2019, part 8
Translated from Bengali

Please do not talk nonsense. If you think about the Lord, He will arrange everything – money, food. He will provide everything. There is not reason to worry about anything.

I have arranged with several devotees to help with accommodation. So, those of you who have not got a room can take prasad in the evening and go together with them to stay the night at their homes. Their houses are nearby. Do not worry about anything – stay the night anyhow, it will be alright. When you have guests at home, what do you do? To accommodate and serve them, you give up your own room and all comforts. So, do not be afraid of austerities. You must have patience and tolerance for the Lord. Srila Prabhupad and Guru Maharaj always said that devotees are always tested for patience. How must patience do you have? How much can you tolerate? This is the examination all devotees must go through in their lives.

Children start going to school when they are very small, and when they reach the age of fourteen or fifteen, at the end of their secondary school, they take exams. If they study hard, they pass the exams and get a secondary school certificate. Here too, you come to practise spiritual life, but if you do not have patience – if you cannot tolerate and quickly lose patience; if you do not have such qualities as forgiveness, mercy, kindness and humility – then you will lose.

So, there is no reason to be worried. If you are hungry, you can come to the back of the temple – there is a lot of food for everybody. There is muri, rice, vegetables. You can come to the storeroom, get something there, eat it and come back. If you get sleepy in the middle of the day, it is actually not good; but if you cannot help it and need to take some rest, you can come upstairs – there is very nice breeze on the veranda, you can rest there nicely. So, do not mind anything – some struggle is necessary to go through.

Soon we will be going to Vrindavan – there, we stay at many different places. Sometimes, ten, fifteen or even twenty people have to stay in one room. When we went to South India, we also had quite hard conditions, but we did not even notice how the two week had passed. Come with us to Vrindavan, Puri, Karauli, Jaipur. There are some hardships, but do not mind it – come and do the parikrama of the holy dham. Gaudiya devotees have three main places: Nabadwip Mandala, Ksetra Mandal and Vraja Mandal...

If you want to practise Krishna consciousness, you must have patience and tolerance. It is always necessary to be patient and it is always necessary to tolerate everything. Do not get restless or impatient – you will not get anything if you do not have patience. You went with us to South India, and there you visited a place called Kurmaksetra. You also took prasad at the house of Vasudev Vipra. Vasudev Vipra worshipped Kurmadev, a tortoise incarnation of the Lord. He had leprosy, and many insects lived in his body. He tolerated it. It was the result of some offences he had committed in his previous lives, but in this life, Vasudev Vipra's quality was such that whenever worms fell out of the sores on his body, he would pick them up and put them back into the sores. He would say, 'This body will rot or be burnt one day anyway, so let these worms be. If they are happy to eat this body, let them eat full stomach and be happy.' You can see that when people throw away dead bodies of dogs or cows, so many insects swarm in those bodies. So, Vasudev Vipra thought that his body would also rot like that, and he did not mind all those insects eating him even while he was still alive. Even when bodies are thrown into the Ganges or some other river, many insects get into it and start eating it, so why worry so much about these bodies?

You always think, 'I want to eat more', 'I want more clothes', 'I want to sleep more', and so on. We always think about eating, sleeping, defending and procreating. We must always be alert about this. Do not forget about these things. We must always be careful about these things, we must always control ourselves.

The problem is that we always forget about these things, that is why we cannot practise Krishna consciousness. We have got this life to practise Krishna consciousness, but because we forget about it, Maya gives us so much material happiness, sadness and austerities. Maya gives us all kinds of suffering – we have material problems, problems with our daughters, sons, husbands and other relatives. All these sufferings come through Maya, the illusory power of the Lord. May we leave everything and become crazy! If we do not know anything except the Lord, if we do not know anything, do not understand anything except Krishna, then Maya will not be able to create all these troubles and suffering in our lives. Those who have become like that do not suffer, do not feel any austerity – nothing can disturb or hurt them anymore. Because we live in subservience to Maya, she makes us suffer so much, but if we were to live in subservience to the Lord, Vaishnavs and guru, then Maya would not make us suffer.

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Language: Bengali

READ OTHER PARTS:

1) Disciple's Dependence
2) How Does Devotion Come?
3) Indispensability of Guru's Mercy
4) Stop Threshing the Husk
5) Disciples' Hypocrisy
6) Strong Desires, Wrong Desires
7) Identifying Yourself with Kirtan
8) Patience Is a Virtue
9) Internal Hypocrisy
10) Unhappy Mind
11) Kirtan Is Not a Show
12) Cook to Perfection
13) Install Gurudev in Your Heart
14) Submission without Resistance
15) Service Is Not a Rite
16) Vaishnavs' Ornaments vs Demons' Ornaments
17) Vaikuntha Vani
18) Absolute Self-Submission