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SRI GAUDIYA GITANJALI : INTRODUCTION
Sri Bhaktisiddhanta Vani
‘Devotees dedicated to the Lord’s service are eternal servants of Sri Guru
and eternal servants of Sri Krishna. Devotees eternally serve Sri Krishna
following their guru with faith and in strict adherence. If someone
tries to practise Krishna consciousness without faithfully following their
guru and Vaishnavs, this is not service to the Lord – it is service to
maya. If someone does not faithfully follow their guru but,
following their own ideas, behaves virtuously, visits holy places, performs
the sixty-four practices of devotion to the Lord, practises renunciation,
austerities, Nama-sankirtan, japa, meditation or engages in any
other devotional(?) practices, they do not do even a little service to the
Lord thereby; rather, they are simply fulfilling their desire to gratify
their own senses.
‘When service to the Lord appears to be sense gratification in disguise, many
people are often cheated by such disguised enjoyment. A deceitful show of
service to the Lord motivated by the desire for fame, wealth and women is not
“service to the Lord” – it is simply hypocritical cheating of oneself and
others.
‘Service to the Lord is based on following your guru and Vaishnavs
with chaste submission. Pretending to serve the Lord without faithfully
following your guru is a nonsensical idea compared to “jumping over
the goda to eat grass”. In the conditioned state, one cannot gain
entrance into the Lord’s service without faithfully adhering to their
guru and Vaishnavs, and even in the liberated state, when one serves
the Lord in the spiritual body, constant adherence to one’s gurudev
continues.
If one does not faithfully follow Sri Gurudev – the eternal embodiment of the
Lord’s shelter (asraya-vigraha) – and his followers, then one, in
essence, only commits the offence of worshipping one’s own self.’
—Sri Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur
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