(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 2011)
Time…..time is very short……very short. Can anyone think of who they were in their last life? One can go to India to some fortune teller. They will tell you of course, that usually it’s a prince or a sannyasi…yes…for a good price! I never heard of anyone who was a dog and somehow or other had some prasadam in that life! Or a worm who was being spat upon by a vaisnava!
But whatever it maybe, something went wrong in the last life and somehow or other we didn’t make it. Suppose we would have been already engaged in devotional service in last life – it is possible:
‘nehābhikrama-nāśo ’sti
pratyavāyo na vidyate’ (BG.2.40)
That there is no loss or diminishing in this devotional service, which means in the last life, we could have been engaged in devotional service, and in this life we continued to where we left off, which means we blew it last time – basically, and these are interesting thoughts to contemplate from time to time!
I’m sometimes thinking about it:
“My God…possibly I was deeply sunken into a sinful lifestyle and upraised by the mercy of the vaisnavas. Or I was already pulled up by the vaisnavas to somewhat level of devotional service and then I blew it….and what was it in me, that made me blew it in the last life, that is still there in me in this life?”
Well if you think life in that way then it is not so difficult to deal with. Everyone can find some quality. In my case it would be my stubbornness and my tendency towards independence, which I have successfully protected all throughout my Krishna Consciousness in various ways. For that I moved to India because there was more space. For that I took sannyas because there was more space!
So somehow or other one does not surrender to that one thing….that particular quality – stubbornness and independence, but what can we do? Krishna has ways! He pulls the rug from under us at times and just upsets our whole comfortable life…..he does that!
