(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 20 October 2015, Chowpatty, India, Srimad Bhagavatam 10.69.41)
Question: It happens, especially in household life, that the desires for sense gratification are many times taking over our focus, although we try to keep Krsna in the center. Years are inevitably going by and those desires are still not being completely wiped off, despite our practices. In that situation, what should a devotee do to increase the process of becoming thoroughly Krsna conscious?
In all the ashrams, material desires are there. Only when one has fully awakened his attachment to Krsna, do material desires go away – not any earlier. So it is really about awaking our attachment to Krsna, and it is something we just do not allow ourselves to do. It is almost as if we ourselves are consciously the obstacles. It is as if we are saying to ourselves, ‘No, we will not appreciate Krsna because we are going to spend time with our material desires!’ These material desires, they are so strong, these material desires are always on our mind and we systematically think about them, every second of the day and we do not think of Krsna! You may chant sixteen rounds but not think of Krsna! You may read but you sleep at the same time – you do not think of Krsna and do not remember Krsna!
It looks like this is what we have been doing all this time! Sometimes I give the example of the mind (singing Govindam tune), ‘Govindam, adi purusam… what will be for breakfast today!?’ to show how the mind is absent and how we are so distracted in our spiritual life, out of habit. So let us become more conscious of what we are doing, let us appreciate more. We can actually start appreciating Krsna a bit more and make a habit out of that. It does make a difference, it really helps. So many wonderful things have happened and are happening in our lives and we should contemplate on those nice things and practice saying it.
‘The deities are looking so nice, what a nice darshan, such a nice dress, who designed it? And who dressed the deities? Who made the garlands? And all the other arrangements are actually so nice!’
One just has to stop being negative and rather be positive and recognize the positive by saying it. The more we make habit out of that then we simply realize that there is so much taste. And if we do not practice this, we will find that all this time, we were externally doing everything but not tasting it, because we were simply inattentive to Krsna, inattentive to appreciating things. In this way, all that we could see is, ‘Struggle, struggle… material desires! Oh, so much struggle with the never-ending material desires!’
Material desires. Let us analyze it – what is there, what is it? What is so good in the material world? A new phone… is it that good? Not really! A new wife… better than the old one? No, it is still the same. So we must consciously appreciate all the good things we have and the more we do so, the more these material desires will begin to look insignificant. If we are negative towards spiritual life, it means we are not appreciative enough, so we should be more appreciative of all the wonderful things in Krsna consciousness – that is the cure.