(8/10) Pillars of Spiritual Life

His Divine Grace Om Vishnupad
Srila Bhakti Nirmal Acharya Maharaj
Preaching programme in Hooghly District, evening
Translated into English from Bengali
21 February 2020, part 8

There are many gurus in this world: there are caste gurus, ancestral gurus; but the number of spiritual masters is very small. At the same time, while you can still find some spiritual masters in this world, the number of disciples is even smaller. One time, somebody asked Srila Prabhupad (Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur), 'You have so many followers, are they all your disciples?' Srila Prabhupad replied, 'No. Not everybody who is here is my disciple.' Disciples are those who can take chastisement: who can place it on their heads and mould themselves accordingly. The others are not disciples. What is called a spiritual life? Srila Prabhupad explains it also.

If you serve other jivas, your soul can get benefit. Service to jivas (souls) is not giving them medicine. If you give somebody some medicine, it will help them now, but after that another disease will come. You must have heard that there is some coronavirus now in China. My God, you can open pharmacies at every corner, you can open hospitals in every village, and scientists can create thousands of wonderful medicines, but Lord Yamaraj will create millions of more diseases! Can you complete with Lord Yamaraj? I saw yesterday in the paper that this virus has now come up. This is all you can see in newspapers. Are there any good news in them? There are not; there are only bad news in newspapers. Newspapers only write about what bad things somebody does, what faults one or another party has. Newspapers are filled with prajalpa and gramya-katha. They do not write about good things that happen. You can do ten good things and one bad thing, and newspapers will write only about the bad thing you have done. But we are not like that. Gurudev says that if somebody has ten good qualities, we will talk about those ten good qualities. One time, two brahmacharis were fighting in the time of Srila Prabhupad. When they complained to Srila Prabhupad, Srila Prabhupad told them, 'Quiet!' and then told each of them, 'Glorify him for ten minutes, tell me about his good qualities.' This is what he taught us. So, as I was saying, serving jivas does not mean giving others medicine. Service to jivas (jiva-seva) means bringing to this path the souls who are averse to Lord Krishna. Srila Prabhupad called this 'jive-seva' (serving souls), and Mahaprabhu called this 'jive daya' (being kind to souls).

The second principle of spiritual life is taste for the Holy Name. How does this taste come? Suppose you have a fever and your mother cooks very nice dishes for you, will you enjoy eating them? You will not like their taste. In the same way, we have other desires, other thoughts inside us, so how will we feel taste for chanting the Holy Name? That is why when you tell some people to chant the Holy Name, they say, 'Oh, my hand is sore, I cannot chant.' You tell them, 'Then chant with your mouth!' and they say, 'When I chant with my mouth, my mouth starts paining.' But when you eat, you do not feel pain, then why do you feel pain when you chant the Holy Name? It means that we do not want to chant the Holy Name. The problem is not that we do not have time to chant – we do not want to chant.

We must always think about this.

As long as we have some desires towards this world, we will not be able to hear these things. I will not take much of your time, I will just tell you one very nice story narrated in Srimad Bhagavatam and finish after that...

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READ OTHER PARTS:

1) Detach Yourself from Illusion
2) Tenacious Tenants
3) Nurture Natural Devotion
4) Eternal Loving Worship
5) Essential Admonition
6) Where Is Substance?
7) How to Capture the Lord
8) Pillars of Spiritual Life
9) Undiluted Spiritual Life
10) Power of Sambandha-Jnana