Radhanath Swami on Love and Trust

We find in spiritual circles throughout history that there has been great envy and fighting even amongst followers of the same religion. It is because certain persons, although strictly practising the religious rituals, scrutinizingly learning the religious philosophy and dedicatedly propagating those rituals and philosophy, never really humble themselves or strive to become purified of false pride. Unless they very diligently strive to become purified of false pride, that pride will creep into their spiritual life and cause them to be envious and inimical towards other devotees. This is the greatest danger. The illusory energy of the Lord cannot harm us in any way by attacking from outside. In fact, if we are sincere, the attacks from outside only make us stronger. But when the attack is from within our minds, when the seed of dissent and jealousy is dropped within our own minds, then that creates a sense of pride, and competition on a worldly level where, for the purpose of attaining land, control, influence, money, and support, we start to spread false propaganda against others and ultimately it becomes a fight, a war, a struggle for power. And in order to deal with that there has to be so much diplomacy, so much politics; eventually nobody really knows what’s true and what’s not true. One can’t be neutral anymore because there is a total breakdown of love and trust. The mission is crippled because it is love and trust among the devotees of the Lord that attracts the empowerment of the Lord. So we have to be extremely cautious and careful that wherever we see this type of false propaganda, criticism of devotees, seed of dissent towards others, and envy that others have something that we don’t, we have to immediately stamp it out. We have to stamp it out within our own hearts and mind, and stamp it out within the heart and minds of others. Otherwise everything will get spoiled.