Soul-Searching and Hole-Searching

His Divine Grace Om Vishnupad
Srila Bhakti Nirmal Acharya Maharaj
Morning class, Sri Nrisingha Palli
4 March 2020, part 5, translated from Bengali

You can examine yourself and check it yourself—you are practising Krishna consciousness, you are chanting kirtans, you are giving lectures, chanting many rounds of the Holy Name, paying many obeisances, etc., but are you getting the result? We sing in one of the kirtans, "Prasada-seva karite haya, sakala prapancha-jaya (প্রসাদ-সেবা করিতে হয় সকল প্রপঞ্চ জয়)—"by honouring the Lord's prasad I conquer all worldly illusions." (Saranagati, 31.5) But are our worldly illusions, the five material diseases, going away? [Avidya (ignorance), asmita (false identification), raga (misdirected love), dvesa (aversion to anything that goes against one's enjoyment), and abhinivesa (being unable to give up unfavourable habits)]. Why are they not going away? This is our fault. We say that if you take prasadam, you can get this result, but we are not getting anything, because if you keep putting water into a glass that has a hole, it will never fill with water—all the water will come out. In the same way, we practise Krishna consciousness, but at the same time we also have holes and all the result of our practising life comes out from those 'holes.'

There are two things, dos-aropa and dos-kirtan. Dos-aropa (ascription of fault) means a person has no fault, but somebody else tells me that person is bad and I start to always think about it, my head becomes submerged into this thought, and until and unless I tell somebody about it, I cannot be at peace. Then, you come to another person to tell about it, and it becomes dos-kirtan ('you chant about somebody's fault'). You have not even seen that the person had done wrong, you had only heard about it, but you come to tell somebody else about it—this is called dos-kirtan. This is Vaishnav-ninda, sadhu-ninda, and this is the first offence against the Holy Name—criticism, or offence, of Vaishnavs and sadhus. On the other hand, those who criticise Vaishnavs are offenders, but those who listen to any offences of Vaishnavs are even bigger offenders. These are the holes in practising life—Nama-aparadh, dhama-aparadh, seva-aparadh, Vaishnav-aparadh. All good result of practising Krishna consciousness comes out through those holes. Always remember this and keep this in your heart.

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