In 2018, His Holiness Kadamba Kanana Swami took us to Mukharai, which is the village that used to be the home of Radharani’s maternal grandmother, Mukhara. Mukhara sometimes acted as an obstacle, but in other times, facilitated the secret meetings of Radharani and Krsna. Check out Maharaja’s full kirtan and lecture below, along with a few photos, at Mukharai during Parikrama 2018.
Love for Krsna is difficult to attain, as we all experience. We love to an extent. If I asked, “Do you have the taste for chanting Hare Krsna?”, some would say, “Well, I do not know.” But if I said that, “From tomorrow, you are no longer allowed to chant Hare Krsna”, you would all break the rule! We would rebel and chant anyway because it is no longer possible to ignore it. We cannot spend a day without chanting Hare Krsna. Our attachment to the chanting has actually developed more than we realised. When we meditate on Krsna’s exalted pastimes we should keep in mind that we must approach such pastimes with honesty. We must be honest about our own position. As soon as we start to imagine that we are more exalted than we really are, then we cannot approach the pastimes of Krsna and then we make it cheap. One quality of a Vaisnava is humility. Humility and honesty go together because when you are honest you realise, “I guess I am not God. I guess I am not the Almighty.” The next stage is, “Maybe I am not perfect. Maybe I have some faults, and I should write them down.” Three days later you have a cramp in your hand from making the list. When we start writing down all our faults there is no end to it. So honesty helps us realise our own shortcomings. That is humility. And therefore humility and honesty are pretty much synonymous.
In that mood of honesty and in that mood of simplicity we can carefully approach and respect these pastimes of Radha-Krsna
in Vrndavana. We can actually say, “I am not qualified but by the mercy of Mahaprabhu I can know about these things. Due to all this mercy, I am here and can think about these things for a moment.” The spiritual world is our goal. These eternal pastimes are what it is all about. We should not think, “This is not for us. It is for those who are advanced.” No, it is not too advanced. We should also understand these subjects, but hand in hand with that honesty.We are in Vrndavana to collect some spiritual fortune. That is why we came. We need something to take back; something that will give us a little more strength in our chanting and absorption in the Srimad-Bhagavatam; something to overcome our material desires which usually bother us like flies buzzing around. You can chase them away but they always come back. We need a tail to deal with all these flies. Animals do, and since we are two-legged animals, we also need one. For all these material desires we do have a tail; we have a sikha and the ladies have a braid. If you do not have a tail then you are in trouble and the flies will get you. I have got a mini tail that does not want to grow. What to do? Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that we need more spiritual strength. So this Vrndavana parikrama is for that. Going to these places gives us mercy by creating samskaras or impressions.
