(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 5 May 2019, Melbourne, Australia, Bhakti Vriksha Talk)
The acaryas were so absorbed in chanting that they did not want to do anything else. When Gaura Kishor das Babaji was chanting and would get hungry, he would simply eat some clay from the Earth. He was hungry, but he did not want to be distracted by going elsewhere to eat since he wanted to keep on chanting. How can we understand this, how can we understand such a high taste for chanting?!
It is said in the Sri Caitanya-carita by Murari Gupta that, “Gopinatha Acarya took the path of hearing Sri Nama Japa. Then fully intoxicated with Krsna-prema, Gopinatha would again and again cry out His names. He thus created a wave of song, dance and music, on which he would dance like the ocean flooding its shores.” Now, that is what you call chanting japa, right?! You are making a wave of a song, dance and music in chanting japa? This is another level! So, here we can see that there are levels of japa that we cannot even imagine, but the acaryas are writing about it! And then we are reading it and now we are imagining it. In this way, we get a little glimpse of what might be coming in the future.
We are maybe not yet chanting with pure love, but there is some hope. Through the spiritual master, we first become free from our temporary material conditioning. And then, we develop our eternal and ecstatic spiritual nature. So let us see how we progress in this movement, it is going to get more and more ecstatic as each day passes by!