Radhanath Swami on Yearning for God

We must understand that there is danger at every step. Terrorism is growing. It is said that two out of five people will die of cancer. Ecology is breaking down. There are floods, droughts, cities being washed away by the ocean. It is a very harsh society we live in today, a society with no tolerance or mercy.

People are competing so much for sense gratification, wealth, power, adoration, but a sincere seeker has nothing to do with this competition anymore. The most serious thing is to have a sincere yearning for God. This is our responsibility as human beings – to get to know Him and love Him. But we are always getting distracted by something – our needs, our health, or how we have been mistreated. Even if our excuses are accurate, the reality is that our soul is longing for God. He will reveal Himself in our hearts according to how we surrender to Him, how we make Him a priority in our life.

Radhanath Swami on Arrogance vs. Respect

We should see every living being with veneration. But when selfishness becomes prominent, we start thinking only in terms of ‘I’ and ‘mine’. There is no service attitude left in us. We always want to be the master and enjoyer of all we see. When the desire for our own prestige and enjoyment becomes foremost in our minds, our fellow beings appear insignificant. Due to egoism, we think, “I can judge others. I never make mistakes. If you stand between me and my aspiration of success and appreciation, you are my enemy.”

This arrogance destroys everything sacred within us. We need to show our love for the Lord by how we cooperate with each other. But we cannot do that unless we follow the Lord’s teachings of being tolerant, patient and respecting everyone. We must be on guard at all times, to not be judgmental or offend anyone, to be eager to serve, uplift, encourage, and sacrifice for the benefit of all.

Radhanath Swami on Protecting our Dependents

Every one of us is a leader in some capacity. We could be parents, teachers, managers, community leaders or big influential people with lots of followers. What is our duty to our dependents? Not just dynamic speeches, but giving them something that will really affect them. What pleases the Lord is the sacrifices you make in your life for the welfare of others.

Emotional care is especially important for everyone - make them feel valuable and appreciated for whatever little they may be doing. It could be just by a glance, a smile or a few kind words. Even when chastised, they should feel, "He is correcting me because he cares for me, he is helping me, he is protecting me." If this is achieved, they are inspired and will strive to accomplish whatever goals we set for them. If we chastise someone and it breaks their hearts, we are not doing it right. If they do not feel protected, whatever else we do is like building a house without a foundation. Everything will fall apart. If we are sincere, the Lord will empower us.

Radhanath Swami on Mastering Time Utilization

Time is a powerful and inconceivable energy of the Lord. It is so subtle and invisible, but it has the potency to consume everything that is animate or inanimate. It will turn to dust the highest mountains, evaporate the mighty oceans and burn out the sun. It will devastate all physical lives down to the little insect. Every rising and setting of the sun brings us closer to our impending death.

Time can be effectively utilized only if we use it for the purpose that the Lord has intended for us. We are unaware of what the future holds for us, but we have to prepare ourselves by engaging every passing moment in remembering the Lord, worshiping and serving Him. For the one who does this, with every rising and setting of the sun, he is one day closer to eternal life. Each moment is priceless because we can use it to absorb ourselves in the Lord. How are we going to utilize our moments? We have to make a choice to either be devoured by time or to move towards eternal blissful life in the spiritual world. This is the most serious choice a human being could make in this creation.

Radhanath Swami on God's Eternal Gratitude

God's love for us, His children, is unconditional. He never forgets anything we have ever done. Even if we fall down to our lowest nature, God gives us whatever reactions He sees fit to rectify us, but He never forgets what good we have done. He is always waiting for us to turn to Him to uplift us again to our original position. This principle of how we are never lost to God, no matter how little we have served Him, is a manifestation of His opulence of gratitude.

Fallen living entities like us can easily forget anything good that someone may have done for us, and take it for granted, but God never forgets. He's always making some arrangement to bring those who sincerely seek Him back to His abode. God does not simply see what we offer. He sees the sincerity and purpose of the offering. Yes, God sees our faults, and He corrects them in one way or another, but He also sees the service that we have rendered. And if that service is sincere in purpose, He is eternally grateful.

Radhanath Swami on Habits

The direction in which our life is headed depends on the choices we make at each and every step. These choices accumulate to form habits and it is our responsibility to ensure that we acquire only those habits which are progressive and beneficial to us individually and to the society as a whole.

A thought like following good etiquette originates in our mind and culminates in the physical expression of good etiquette. Such thoughts and actions that we experience collectively become our habits and eventually define the individuals that we become. Only when our habits are beneficial for the process of purifying our heart, we can begin to understand spiritual truths.

Radhanath Swami on the Lord's Inconceivable Potency

We witness miracles of the Lord everywhere within creation. We don't even realize that everything we see is inconceivable. The miracle of how we are conceived itself is inconceivable. Great scientists cannot do it. The most progress they have achieved are test tube babies, where they take a seed that God created and plant it in a womb that He created. All the materials that are absolutely necessary for creation are already created by God. They just use some scientific technology to put it all together.

What is it that God cannot do? The sun which is millions of times bigger than our earth, is a ball of blazing fire that always stays in the same place. Just to reach the planets we know about will take light years, which are millions of human life times, in our modern spacecrafts. The seasons come and go in order. How can we even propose to understand these inconceivable creations with our limited brains and our limited technologies? Can we even count the number of hairs, or the number of atoms and molecules in our body? Does an ant have the capacity to understand Mount Everest? We are at best like little ants trying to measure our little anthills, when everything else outside our horizon is inconceivable. The conditioned soul is just trying to challenge the Lord that "I will figure out what You have done." But that is not possible.

If we have to understand God, we should crush our empirical attachment to our mind and senses. Without that, there is no possibility of understanding Him, as we will then try to impose our own limitations of mind and body on God, considering His miraculous feats as mythology.