(3/5) Move Forward

His Divine Grace Om Vishnupad
Srila Bhakti Nirmal Acharya Maharaj
Preaching programme, evening class
Translated into English from Bengali
15 February 2020, part 3

There are many gurus in this world. So much so that there has been created a guru business: by becoming a family guru, you can get a lot of money and prestige, you get people to pay obeisance to you and give you donations. You can find many such obeisance-taking and donation-taking gurus in this world, but there is a great scarcity of genuine gurus. At the same time, although rare, it is still possible to find a genuine guru, but it is much harder to find a genuine disciple.

I know that many of you have taken initiation from sahajiya gurus who actually have no right to give initiation, but you took initiation from them out of some sense of duty, and now you think that if you leave those gurus, they can curse you. You must know that a genuine guru will never curse anyone—a genuine guru rescues even those who criticise and abuse him. This is the behaviour of Vaishnavs belonging to the line of Mahaprabhu. Even if somebody insults or speaks bad to Vaishnavs, they lower their heads and touch their folded palms to their heads—they embrace their offenders and show them much affection. Such is the transcendental love of a genuine guru. If a guru says, "I will curse you", "I will do this", "I will do that", it means that they concern themselves only with taking your obeisances (pranam) and donations (pranami). Such gurus can never pull you out of this mortal realm and give you relief from illusory bondage because they are within that bondage themselves.

That said, we are not saying that you must change your guru; we are not telling you to show no faith or respect for them. We always pray to be able to give honour to everyone (sakale sammana karite sakati). But if you go to primary school, it does not mean that you must stay there forever—you must progress to high school, then go to college and university. If you go to primary school, does it mean that you will never go to high school? If you pass high school, will you not go to college? Will you stay in primary school forever? Similarly, you must move on in the line of devotion. You must progress to college and university. The problem is that you are not ready to give up small things to attain something big—the biggest obstacle is the greed of your tongues. You eat everything thinking that you eat whatever pleases your soul, but the soul does not want to eat any goats, cows, sheep or cats. You can see that there appeared a virus in China that came from bats. There are also viruses that come from snakes and rats. There are people who even like to eat cockroaches... All this is not your soul's food. If you can genuinely grasp sadhu-sanga within your heart, if you can truly hear Hari-katha, then you will feel enthusiasm. Otherwise, if you do not have desire, nobody can make you chant the Holy Name forcefully.

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Language: Bengali

READ OTHER PARTS:

1) My Question to You
2) "Theirs Not to Reason Why"
3) Move Forward
4) Gift of Willpower
5) Ultimate Remedy