(7) Destructive Self-Love

His Divine Grace Om Vishnupad
Srila Bhakti Nirmal Acharya Maharaj
Evening preaching programme,
13 March 2019, part 7
Translated from Bengali

The religion of this Age of Kali is Harinam-sankirtan. If you hire a band to come and sing kirtan and you sit and listen to it, this is useless. If I eat, will your stomaches get full? If they do, let me know. If you want your stomaches to be full, you have to eat yourselves. In the same way, if I come and chant kirtan, what will that give you? If I chant the Holy Name, I will get benefit, and if you chant the Holy Name, then you will get benefit. That is why we go house to house telling everybody, 'You must chant the Holy Names of the Lord. Worship the Lord yourselves. Serve the Lord yourselves. Earn your own qualification to serve the Lord. Earn this right yourselves.'

You bring up your sons and daughters yourselves – you do not call other people to come and bring them up. Sometimes, when somebody works, they hire a babysitter to look after the child, but that babysitter will not love the child the way you do. No babysitter can replace a mother or a father. So, when it comes to the Lord, we must love Him as our very own and serve Him out of such love. This is what is called love for Krishna (krsna-priti) – we must love Krishna and live for His happiness.

আত্মেন্দ্রিয়প্রীতি-বাঞ্ছা—তারে বলি ‘কাম’ ।
কষ্ণেন্দ্রিয়প্রীতি-ইচ্ছা ধরে ‘প্রেম’ নাম ॥

atmendriya-priti-vancha—tare bali ‘kama’
krsnendriya-priti-ichchha dhare ‘prema’ nama

‘The desire to gratify one’s own senses is kama (lust), but the desire to please the senses of Lord Krishna is prema (divine love).’

(Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita, 1.4.165)

If you do something out of love for Lord Krishna (if you want to please Him), that is called divine love (prema), and if you do something to gratify your own desires, that is called lust, or karma. If you do karma, you will be tangled in material bondage (karma-bandhan), and the result of such bondage is hellish suffering. You will have to keep coming to this world again and again and you will have to keep going away from this world again and again. You will never get relief from this kind of material world and existence. You will have to keep coming back to material family life – you can be born in a family of goats, pigs, cats, dogs. As you sow, so you reap.

You must always think about these things.

We must try not to think about our bodies, about our bodily happiness. These bodies of nine gates are perishable. If I come out of this body today, after a short time this body will start to decay and emit stench. If one does not get down to work fast (if one does not take it fast to the crematorium and burn it there), the body will stand to stink. This is what these bodies are. But we always think about these bodies' happiness, wasting our lives. Is there time for all this? Is there time for all this material life? Please try to practise Krishna consciousness. Try and you will see that you will be the greatest gainers. I know you do not like to hear these things now... If you can turn your life into a Krishna-centred life, then you will have to leave Maya's family and enter Krishna's family.

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