It is not enough if you claim to be a devotee of the Lord. The Lord must recognise you as a devotee. Only then does one's devotion acquire value. Bhagavatam and other scriptures demonstrate how this kind of dedicated life can be led by any person who wishes to be devoted to the Lord. No one should feel that it is beyond his or her capacity to surrender themselves completely to the Lord. If there is firm determination, this can be accomplished. It is only through earnest endeavour that Divine wisdom can be got (Shraddhavan Labhate Jnanam). Today the world is afflicted with the epidemic of egoism (Ahamkara). There is really no basis for this kind of self-conceit. It is born of ignorance. It has to be totally eradicated. If everyone realises that the body has been given for the pursuit of righteousness and acts on that basis, they will most certainly realise the Divine.
What to do if it is not enough to be a devotee of the Lord? It can bring up some other questions and we ask ourselves, what is a devotee really and how do we know if we are one or not? It can feel heavy to face those questions and maybe we just don't feel like it.
Why should we always think about it?
We don't even understand his words and what about asking always questions? Knowing myself I would just like to think sometimes, not again, I don't feel like it just now. We don't even know why we went to him what about being that?
In our countries people are not convinced that there is something like a Lord and what about being a devotee of that Lord, nobody asks that question really, but we have to because we try to listen to his words.
All that is present in the first sentence only and we have not yet even started the second one.
It is not enough if you claim to be a devotee of the Lord. The Lord must recognise you as a devotee.
In the second sentence we get to the point.
He has to recognize us as devotees, who - the Lord. After I went beyond the first obstacle in my mind that I don't want to think about it or that we live on a place where people question the reality of the Lord and now how to be a devotee or even how to be recongized by him as one and we don't want to be bothered about it, now we have to face another reality, he has to recognize us as devotees.
If we don't want to think of the first sentence, how do we take care of the second one? We either just read it anyhow maybe we will get it somehow or later or we don't think about it at all and forget it on the spot again or the mind gets in a blackout and we find a lot of excuses why we don't listen.
Only then does one's devotion acquire value.
He is telling us why, because our devotion acquires value like that.
On that point we understand if people are not going into it and not thinking it over and they are not listening to his words, because we had to already face some very uncomfortable questions and the reality actually that we don't know and from not knowing we get now to the fact that it has only value if we do it, that makes it even less comfortable and we are on the point where we don't want to know really. We are not able to listen, we are not able to absorb it and we are not able to take it.
Bhagavatam and other scriptures demonstrate how this kind of dedicated life can be led by any person who wishes to be devoted to the Lord.
But in case we do it anyhow now we get to the real obstacle, we get to the scriptures. The Bhagavatam, it is a huge book with all the incarnations of the Lord, a holy book, but not for the West, we have heard of it and it is anyhow much too big to be even looked at what about understood by a Western mind, kind of impossible and now we are at the place where we cannot forget that we had to go to India.
We think or even know or think we know that we have met the Lord, we want to believe it, there could be some hidden doubts somewhere and we face the fact, we don't know how to see it and integrate it in our own life.
We somehow try to live with it and we cannot forget that we had to go to India.
His words remind us all the time on that fact that we had to go to India and also the fact that we will never be able to know the Bhagavatam as it is not part of our culture.
If we didn't stop to read already with the first sentence, because we don't want to be bothered about that question and we went on to the second and the third what is even more unlikely that we just know about the right conclusion, we get the feeling that it all has only a value if we put it into practise and the question is how to do that.
And if we got that far in reading his thought for the day now we have the biggest obstacle, the fact that it is based on Veda and if we like it or not, India and we had to go to India and that obstacle we cannot get out of the way either we go by it or not.
Most of us will get inside to the conclusion that we have to integrate it in our own culture as it is too much based on Veda and India.
No one should feel that it is beyond his or her capacity to surrender themselves completely to the Lord.
At that point Swami has already lost most of the Western readers and it is not anymore about his question why it is not enough to be a devotee of the Lord and how we put it into practise. We also don't listen anymore to it when he talks about firm determination or if we hear it like far away in the mind, we get only more determined to put it into our own culture and to find it here, after all God is everywhere. We focus on our own duties, it cannot be that we have to find him only in India.
If there is firm determination, this can be accomplished. It is only through earnest endeavour that Divine wisdom can be got (Shraddhavan Labhate Jnanam).
Swami talks about divine wisdom and closes that sentence in Sanskrit what confirms our first impression that it is all somewhere far away and in India and we again cannot forget that we had to go to India, it is impossible to forget in reading or listening to his words, but we like India, it is a beautiful place, at least at the ashram, but we know we will never know the Bhagavatam, we don't know, it is impossible to know, too big, too strange, too different and we have his words in Sanskrit we don't know as well. It is a feeling like we will never get there.
Today the world is afflicted with the epidemic of egoism (Ahamkara).
Now Baba talks about the world and includes everybody in that sense, that brings it closer to us again. The whole world is based on the ego, with other word, body consciousness. It is explained as Kali age, the age of ignorance. We live in ignorance thinking the body is all there is at least in the West, we have the doubt that God exists. Also in that sentence we have the difference and what makes it worse, Swami calls it even an epidemic of egotism. That means it is a sickness that has befallen the whole world.
There is really no basis for this kind of self-conceit. It is born of ignorance. It has to be totally eradicated.
He is telling us that we have to eradicated the sickness in the world. Arriving that far thinking it over and listening to it we get tired, because the whole world is based on something that has to be eradicated.
If everyone realises that the body has been given for the pursuit of righteousness and acts on that basis, they will most certainly realise the Divine.
The whole world is based on egoism and body consciousness and is in ignorance and Swami talks about everyone, who is everyone if we think about the whole world? Is it the whole world or only the handful of devotees compared to the world sitting in this moment at his feet during that speech?
It is impossible to reach everyone as he talks about the whole world, who is in the pursuit of righteousness, that are the people sitting at his feet and if they realize that we got the body only on the pursuit of righteousness and act on that basis, we can realize the divine.
For most of the Westerners there will be again a problem here, because what is actually righteousness, what is right action, what is wrong action and what is Dharma if we don't get the message and we cannot forget that we had to go to India and we begin to look for it in our own culture to integrate it, because it seems too far away, what is righteousness and how will we ever be able to understand it?
The message of Swami is to hold on to Dharma, right action, but as soon as that is present, we have also the other human values and we have to listen to him quite a bit to get that part of it.
If there is Dharma, right action, there should also be Shanti, peace, Prema, love and above all Sathya, truth and then we have Ahimsa, non-violence.
We know it has to do with love. If it is not enough to be a devotee of the Lord, but we need to be recognized as such, how do we do that? It is all based on the heart and therefore, pure or divine love.
How do get there and most of devotees Swami has already lost anyhow by now and if we went on, it will stop here because we don't know. We don't know how to get to a right conclusion and how to listen to his words.
We remember that he was telling us in some other speech that to get pure love, we need three things, we have to understand peace, we have to accept truth and if we accept the path of truth (it is a path), we have to accept right action and if we accept the 'path of right action', we have three things, sathya, dharma, shanty and we will be able to experience 'pure love'.
We have the human values, the result will be ahimsa, non-violence.
As we have all the human values it doesn't lighten up if we don't have already a feeling about it, maybe we do if we know it enough and we listened enough to him to get a feeling for it, but not if we don't know.
On that point we get tired as it is just too much to absorb and most of the listeners got lost somewhere on the way in his words anyhow, if not with the first sentence, it is with the second or the third or the fact that we don't know the Bhagavatam and at the end we are crushed because we also don't know about right action and duty for sure and we try to put it into practise doing our best and he is telling us that it is not enough, it has to be recognized by him.
It is not just love listening to Swami's words, the message is heavy actually and the fact that we cannot forget in listening to his words that we had to go to India creates something like a blackout in the mind, we cannot think anymore, we don't know how to absorb it and we will never be our culture and therefore, nobody is listening to his words.
The message in it is not light and great and uplifting, it feels for most Westerners like nearly unreachable. It seems far away and heavy, too heavy to be absorbed or with other words or as friend of mine said not long ago, 'I don't want to hear and think about Sanskrit words anymore'.
Why did she tell that?
It is heavy and it makes her tired because she knows she will never know the Bhagavatam and she will never know Sanskrit and it feels like she will never get the message.
Do we need to know the Bhagavatam and do we need to know Sanskrit, no we don't?
We should just listen to his words, that's all and we don't need to know the scriptures. Nevertheless, we don't know and that will not change. We don't know of how getting to the right conclusion.
He knows and we have to listen to him, we don't know.
We can see like a big house and we call it the house of the immortals and he is the chief of the house of the immortals and we only recognize the immortal self as the same in us if we listen to an immortal being.
In fact, we are sitting at the entrance of the house of immortality and would like to get in, but as he is telling us, we need to be recognized by the guardian as devotee of the Lord first to be able to get in.
If we don't listen to his words, we have no way of recognizing our own self as the same immortal being. That is the badge we need to get into that realm or abode of immortality.
Or we could see the Vedic society like a city we can enter only if we get that badge and we have to pass the test first or we have to acquire it so that we are recognized by the Lord as his devotees, that will give us the badge to enter the abode of the divine.
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