(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 02 August 2011, Flumserberg, Switzerland, Seminar “On the way to Krsna, we meet ourselves”)
Sanatana Gosvami makes an interesting statement about austerity for the devotees of Krsna which is: tapas or austerity does not refer so much to the troublesome austerity of the body as much as to one-pointed concentration of the mind. That is really nice – that our austerity is one pointed concentration of the mind. When I read that, it sort of struck a chord with me because we often speak about how difficult it is to fix the mind during chanting; we struggle with inattentive chanting. But I think it is not just inattentive chanting – it is inattentive living; we are guilty of inattentive living. Everything we do, we just do it automatically, inattentively. We do not remember Krsna in every situation. If simply in every situation we try to focus on Krsna, that would make a great difference.