(4/12) Know Thyself

His Divine Grace Om Vishnupad
Srila Bhakti Nirmal Acharya Maharaj
Kadigachha, Festival anniversary,
4 March 2019, evening, part 4
Translated from Bengali

Srila Sanatan Goswami Prabhu asked Mahaprabhu five questions:

(1) Who am I (কে আমি, ke ami)?
(2) Why am I suffering (কেনে আমায় জারে তাপত্রয়, kene amaya jare tapa-traya)?
(3) How can I get relief from this suffering and austerity? How can I get benefit? (কিসে হিত হয়, kise hita haya)?
(4) What is the eternal goal (সাধ্য বস্তু কী, sadhya vastu ki)?
(5) How can I attain this main goal (সাধ্য বস্তু কী করলে পাওয়া য্য়, sadhya vastu ki korle paowa yaya)?

Why do we suffer from the three-fold material miseries in this world? Many people think that this year people will not be able to eat potato because there have been heavy rains and it has been cold. Everything is in His hands. Everything happens in this world by His wish – not even a leaf on a tree can move without His will. But we forget Him. Everybody, 100% people, in this world only worry, 'What will I eat? What will I wear? Where will I sleep? Where will I live? How can I get money? How will my family run?' We are busy with all these things twenty-four hours a day, but we forget where we come from and how we have come to this world. You think, 'Oh, no, no! My parents have given me this birth.' This is not so. If I take my blood and the blood of my parents and compare it, I will see that it is the same blood (the same group). So, my parents give me this body, but they did not give me that which I am. When I leave this world, all my parents, brothers, sisters, friends, disciples, everybody will cry, but 'I' will be gone from this world. What is this 'I'? When we were small children, we were taught, 'This is my hand', 'This is my head', and when somebody asks us, 'Who are you?' we say, 'I am Samanto', or 'I am Deb', or 'I am Datta', or 'I am Ray', and so on. This is only your name, but who are you? You can ask yourself this question. These are your two hands, two eyes, two ears, this is your nose, mouth, and so on, but who are you? This is something that is present within all living entities – in mosquitos, in us, in elephants and in every small fish – it is the soul.

জীবের 'স্বরূপ' হয়—কৃষ্ণের 'নিত্যদাস' ।
কৃষ্ণের 'তটস্থা-শক্তি', 'ভেদাভেদ-প্রকাশ' ॥

jivera 'svarupa' haya—krsnera 'nitya-dasa'
krsnera 'tatastha-sakti' 'bhedabheda-prakasa'

'By its intrinsic nature, the soul is an eternal servant of Krishna; souls come from the marginal energy of Krishna and are simultaneously one with and different from the Lord.'

(Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita, 2.20.108)

You can see this lightbulb, or tubelight, here that gives light to the whole veranda. For this lightbulb to give light, it must be connected to a powerhouse through a transformer. This is how a powerhouse can illuminate a whole village. The sun illuminates the whole world – a single ray of its light can illuminate a whole room. So, there is a sun and there is a sun ray; there is a powerhouse and there is a lightbulb. A jivatma, or a jiva soul, is like that, too: it is a ray coming out of the Lord (Paramatma).

Another question that came is this. We live in this world, and every single day we kill millions of living entities just to stay alive. How so? You can understand this yourself. All of us breathe, inhaling and exhaling air – there are many organisms that live in the air, and with every breath we take, they enter our bodies and die. We inhale all these millions of organisms when we breathe. When you cut rice paddy plants to get rice, you also kill the plant. When you bring a cabbage or potato, you also cut the plant. There are many living entities living even in water, and we kill them when we drink water. Whatever plant you take, you have to cut and kill it, and those who eat meat kill even more – they kill hens, cows, goats, frogs, snakes, dogs, and so on. But what is the solution to all this killing? How can we live without killing all these living entities? When you make an action, there must be some reaction. Every child who went to Class 8 and 9 knows it. That is Newton's third law: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But it is necessary to learn about how it is possible to avoid reaction.

Nobody tells you that you must leave your families. I know that you have families, children, and so on, and I am not going to tell you, 'Prabhu, leave everything like I did, come to the temple and become a sannyasi.' If somebody can do that, it is good, but I am telling you to do this. What you can do is you can turn your family into Krishna's family. You can do farming (grow rice), you can carry on your work, but do it for Krishna.

— : • : —

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Length: 56 min
Language: Bengali

READ OTHER PARTS:

1) Pure Hearts' Kirtan
2) Worship of Lord Siva
3) Proper Worship Comes from Proper Identification
4) Know Thyself
5) Pivoted Life
6) Short-Lived and Short-Sighted
7) Do Not Cheat Yourself
8) Devotional Service
9) Temple Is Not Made of Bricks
10) Spiritual Foundation
11) Stray Souls
12) Embrace Sheltered Life