(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 31 December 2012, Cape Town, South Africa, Srimad Bhagavatam 8.7.4)
We should care about devotees. It is difficult but we want to look after devotees. When it comes to saving people from material suffering, that is not our first objective. But we are not against feeding poor and starving people because no one should be starving.
So, we have concern for people’s material suffering; we want to help but we have to give spiritual knowledge at the same time. At times, I see beggars that are suffering. I feel some sense of, ‘I wish I could help them.’ There is a certain amount of hard-heartedness in our movement which is justified by this philosophy; it’s like, ‘Well, it’s their karma anyway.’
What can you do? It may be their karma but if we could, we would wish that we could shortcut that karma, because the process that we have can do that! But unfortunately, we not powerful enough to deal with everybody or sometimes we don’t have the power to ‘break the brick’. A thick brick; we just don’t have the karate expertise to get through; if only we did! But we can save people from their karma and we should save people from their karma, as much as we can.
