God has decided to give an offer to uplift ourselves from this miserable condition of life. How? By giving personal loans of His special mercy. God is our father, our best friend, and our ever well-wisher. He is supreme, so He can give unlimitedly—so much that you can’t take it all with your limited potential. This is the offer from that Supreme Person who owns and controls everything. When we take a loan from any bank of this material world, we undergo tension and suffer mental di...

“What does it mean to have a good marriage in Krishna consciousness?” I have never seen Prabhupada instruct his disciples to have a bad marriage because that would make a marriage “good,” meaning the couple will be so disturbed that they realize that they can’t be happy in the material world. If you advance in Krishna consciousness, you will naturally realize that real love is with Krishna and that there is no happiness anywhere in the material world.

"What's it like to go back home to Krishna?" wondered ten-year-old Kiran at the weekly gathering for children from our congregation. I responded by speaking about Goloka Vrindavana, our real home, where we aspire to go after our tenure in this world. "The spiritual world of Goloka is free from all school exams and home assignments," I told the kids. "It's all fun, day and night—no interruption in play!" "Wow!" Kiran replied. "But," he probed, "since we've been away for so long, will Kris...

As we look over the various cultures and religions of the world, we may ask if all religious systems are divine. Though they seem to conflict with each other on various points, still there are many areas of truth in which they all agree. Or you could say that some of the same essential truths can be found within each of them. And by a careful comparison, we can trace the essence of that truth back to what was originally explained in the Vedas, the oldest of all...

What makes Bg. 2.40 so encouraging is that Krishna recognizes our difficulty. He both prescribes a gradual path and presents us with information about the tremendous benefit that can accrue to us if we simply endeavor to practice devotion. Srila Prabhupada has stated that if someone would just read one page from his books or taste even a morsel of prasadam, he could be liberated. Similarly, even a little devotion can protect you from falling down into a lower species of life. Such devotion never suffers loss or diminution. Srila Prabhupada writes: Any work b...