Be Small to Be Big

His Divine Grace Om Vishnupad
Srila Bhakti Nirmal Acharya Maharaj
Speaking to the devotees in Singapore
13 November 2011, part 2

You must keep some time for the Lord, for the Guru... Without Their causeless mercy we cannot think about the Guru and Gauranga, but at the same time:

কৃষ্ণ যদি ছুটে ভক্তে ভুক্তি মুক্তি দিয়া ।
কভু ভক্তি না দেন রাখেন লুকাইয়া ॥

krsna yadi chhute bhakte bhukti mukti diya
kabhu prema-bhakti na dena rakhena lukaiya

"If you ask Krishna for anything except devotion, He can give you those things—bhukti, mukti, liberation, and so on—but He will hide devotion from you. You will not get devotion."

(Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita, Adi-lila, 8.18)

Devotion is very rare. We offer something to Krishna, we pray to Krishna, but we do it seeking our own material enjoyment—Krishna will always giving that material enjoyment to us and make us happy, but He will not give devotion to us. This is written in Chaitanya-charitamrita—Mahaprabhu Himself says it.

কৃষ্ণ যদি ছুটে ভক্তে ভুক্তি মুক্তি দিয়া ।
কভু ভক্তি না দেন রাখেন লুকাইয়া ॥

krsna yadi chhute bhakte bhukti mukti diya
kabhu prema-bhakti na dena rakhena lukaiya

"If you ask Krishna for anything except devotion, He can give you those things—bhukti, mukti, liberation, and so on—but He will hide devotion from you. You will not get devotion."

(Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita, Adi-lila, 8.18)

If we ask Krishna for something material, He will give that to us and make us happy, but He will hide devotion from us; but if some devotee asks Krishna for devotion, they will get devotion easily then.

We must understand that some difficulty can always come, and I know that too. You must harmonise with everything. For example, if you make a family, there is bound to be some fighting—just as if you make some association or a club (a football club or a cricket club), there will also be some fighting. Our Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Math is also like a small association. If somebody has ego, then they have a problem. Ego is nothing—our main goal is to serve our Guru, to serve our Gurudev's Mission. Some small problem can come, but it means that Krishna is testing you—He is testing you to see how much you can tolerate, to see how much patience you have.

A manager must first of all be a servant—a president must be first of all a servant, a secretary must be first of all a servant. Even if we are to fight with some opposition group, we must be always humble to our own people. We must be always humble and tolerant with our own brothers, our own men. Those who want to be the temple commander, the temple manager must be first of all a servant. That is the main point.

Gurudev said that if you want to be a temple manager, you must first be a good person—it is not necessary to be a big devotee, to show big devotional activities. You must just be a good person and must have good qualities—be humble, tolerant and give honour to others.

There is one devotee in charge of a temple who always chastises other. One day, I told them, "If you think you are a manager, if you think you are a Vaishnav, then you cannot serve this Mission. Only if you think you are a servant of the Vaishnavs, can you serve this Mission, otherwise not." Such quality must come to us—we must be a servant. The problem is that everybody wants to be a master, nobody wants to be a servant—everybody wants to be a prabhu, but not everybody wants to be a servant, that is the main problem in our spiritual life...

Somebody knows something and they say, "I know more than you!" That is a problem. We do not want to learn from others, we always want to teach others... We always want to speak, but we do not want to listen, that is our problem in our spiritual life.

Once, a sannyasi from Mayapur came to some gathering. He said, "I want to speak too," and I heard Gurudev say, "You want to speak, but why do you not want to listen?" That is our problem. We must always want to hear, to listen.

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