Radhanath Swami on Nourishment for the Soul

If we don’t eat nourishing foods properly, then we will be weak. Now what happens if someone is starving? How much could he actually work? Similarly, spiritually too, we need food. Otherwise we may have big bodies, and we may have acute intelligence to do business, but spiritually we are just feeble weaklings. That’s what most big people are today. Nature, with one finger, just pushes them and they give in to greed, envy, lust and their selfish passions and motivations. They are just spiritual weaklings. They are starving. And the saintly person pities such an ignorant fool although the world is bowing at their feet deeming them great. So we need food to have strength and that strength will give us the proper perception. And what is the food we need? Offering prayers, chanting God’s names, hearing the truth, associating with saintly persons, doing proper worship with the proper state of consciousness. All these spiritual practices are like food. They give us strength by which we can maintain our spiritual, moral and ethical integrity under all circumstances and be fixed in our goal. And anyone can do that. We just have to stop making excuses that we can’t do it. If you don’t eat and you are weak, then eat. That’s what religion is about actually, the process of purifying our perceptions, the process of purifying our hearts, so that we can do our work with the integrity that will bring us spiritually upward rather than downward.

Radhanath Swami on Perception

One person is walking and sees a flower but that person is so passionate about going to the cinema, that he walks past the flower and doesn’t even see it. Another person is saying, “So what, it is just a flower.” He doesn’t see anything in a flower; “I want an I-Pod to listen to music”. A botanist is looking at the flower and starts digging into his books to know its Latin name or its origin. A person who loves a woman is seeing the flower and is saying, “Oh, how nice this will look in the hair of my girlfriend.” And a nature lover is saying, “Oh, what a nice flower.” Do any two people see the flower with the same perception? No. Because our consciousness, our motivations in life, are like spectacles or glasses and they all have different colours. If you have green coloured glasses, you see the whole world greenish. If you have yellow coloured glasses, the whole world is yellowish. If you have pink-coloured glasses, the whole world is pinkish. The whole idea is to have clear glasses, to actually see things as they are. For that we must purify our consciousness.

Radhanath Swami on Seeing God's Love Always

When we know God, we understand that He is perfect and complete and everything emanating from Him is perfect and complete. It may appear inconceivable and impossible to imagine how things in this world are going on perfectly. But the only imperfection is our vision. Our spiritual vision is clouded by the cataract of ignorance. But understanding and pursuing the truth, we can remove that cataract and see how everything within our environment is perfect, how everything is the loving grace of God. This is not simply an intellectual understanding, but we can experience it from the core of our heart - God’s expression of love in every condition of life. This is real peace. And it is not intangible, it is not something impossible. It is as close to us as our own soul. We are running in every other direction to find pleasure and peace. We simply have to redirect our priorities in life towards our soul and towards our service of God.

Radhanath Swami on Living a Fearless Life

To see every living being with equal vision is only possible when we understand who we are. We need to understand that we are part of God and every living being is a part of God. We cannot love God without loving every living being who are His children, who are His parts and who are so dear to Him. We should see God within the heart of every living entity and we should love every living being. Where there is spiritual love there cannot be any fear. Fear is due to lack of substance within our own hearts and our mind; it is because of lack of satisfaction and lack of love. When we understand the principle of love on the basis of the soul then we understand our relationship with God and we understand that our relationship with other souls is forever. With such profound knowledge we start living a fearless life.

Radhanath Swami on The Authorized Post Box

The deity is like a post box when the spiritual master personally authorizes and calls God to come into that particular form. It is like an authorized post box. Whatever you offer to the deity is accepted by God. But if you just construct your own box, keep it somewhere and drop a letter in it, that does not mean that the mail man will deliver the letter to the addressee. There are so many boxes but unless a post box is authorized by the government and by the postal department, it may look very nice but the effect is not there, the message is not delivered. So, similarly idol worship means to construct or manufacture a post box on our own without any sanction by the spiritual master, the saints and the scriptures, and without proper deity worship. What is made according to the scriptures is the authorized post box. Whatever you offer is accepted by God directly.

Radhanath Swami on Transforming Perceptions

The home is meant to be an ashram - a place to cultivate spiritual purification. It’s a place to cultivate love of God so when we hear about the Lord, when we read the holy scriptures, when we chant the holy names of the Lord, when we associate with spiritually minded people - all these transform our perception. We begin to see everything in terms of our spiritual reality. Even as business people, we may be doing exactly the same thing as some other business person who is motivated by greed, but with a different vision because of how we have cultivated our heart.

Radhanath Swami on The Importance of Knowledge

Knowledge is of great importance. If correct knowledge is applied to utilize the world’s resources properly then the whole world can be served. But if we use the same resources without proper knowledge then it would create disaster. For example, it took tremendous amount of knowledge to create atomic energy. The atomic energy can be good or it can be absolutely destructive, depending on whether we are applying proper knowledge or not. It depends on our conceptions and our consciousness. Knowledge brings love and compassion, and real love and real compassion brings real harmony to all living beings. The path of devotion teaches us the simple principle that we are all individual divine eternal units who are eternally connected to the Supreme Absolute Truth. And we are all meant to serve the Absolute Truth with proper knowledge, and in doing so, we serve each other. This creates real harmony.

Radhanath Swami on Defining Our Ideals

We all have to define in our own life what our ideals are. If we are cheating and lying for selfish motives then we are going to suffer the negative reactions. Is that what we want? But if we are trying to be honest and we are trying to do our work because it is our duty to our family and to our society, but we have to do certain things just because it has to be done with ethics, with morality, with integrity, then it’s different. So once again, what is your ideal? What is your motivation?