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...

Religion without philosophy is sometimes fanaticism: Just as people can be healed by different treatments, people can become lovers of God by practicing different religions: Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, for example. The decisive test for a religion is whether it enables its followers to become spiritually healthy, to become lovers of God. In this light, religious fanatics are like narrow-minded proponents of a particular medical therapy who are ready to destroy the books and the infrastructure associated with other therapies.

Lord Caitanya says: one should offer ALL respect to others and should not demand or seek respect for himself. When your peers do better than you, are you happy? Do you appreciate what they’ve done or do you feel concerned or upset that you are not getting as much attention as they are? Do you sometimes not even acknowledge that they have, in fact, been successful (“Anyone could have done that. It’s no big deal”)? Do you seek more to be appreciated than to appreciate? Bhaktivinoda Thakura explains that grass doesn’t resist when it is walked on or thrown around. It doesn’t complain o...

"Please cancel my tickets," I said to my friend on the phone. "I won't be able to go." I hung up the phone and sank down onto my bed, my head in my hands. My friend had arranged my tickets for the trip to Jagannatha Puri and Mayapur I had been so eagerly looking forward to, and now I had to cancel. The past few weeks in my life had been very turbulent, so when my friends proposed a spiritual retreat to these two holy places so dear to the followers of Sri Chaitany...

Power, such a seductive thing. It begins when we are infants and learn that a shrill cry can get you immediate attention. First we cry because we need something. Then we cry because we want something. Soon we cry just because we know we can. A younger, weaker sibling has to do what we tell them to - we borrow power from our strength. When the skinny girl finds her curves she realises that a look in the right direction and a casual flick of her hair can turn the biggest chunks of muscle into putty - she borrows power from her beauty. A frustrated father, worked to the gr...

In a famous story from the Mahabharata, Krishna once met with Yudhishthira Maharaja and Duryodhana. Desiring to glorify His devotee Yudhishthira, Krishna requested him to find a person lower than himself, and asked sinful Duryodhana to find a person greater than himself. Yudhishthira had all good qualities. He was peaceful and self-satisfied. No doubt he had healthy self-esteem. Yet he could not find anyone he considered lower than himself. Again, this is the example of an advanced Vaishnava who...

As a snake-bitten man is brought back to consciousness by the chanting of certain mantras, so one in the unconscious state of material life can be revived by hearing the maha-mantra: In the Garuda Purana the stress on hearing is expressed very nicely. It is said there: "The state of conditioned life in the material world is just like a man Iying unconscious, having been bitten by a snake. This is because both such unconscious states can be ended by the sound of a mantra." When a man is snake-bitte...

In the interactions between the Lord and His devotees, both relish the highest happiness. Bhagavad-gita and other scriptures praise Arjuna for his close relationship with Krishna. Arjuna is known for his mood of friendship (sakha-bhava). Since relationships are by definition reciprocal, not only is Arjuna known as Krishna’s friend, but Krishna is known as Arjuna’s friend. Krishna drove Arjuna’s chariot and is therefore called Partha-sarathi, the “charioteer of Partha.” This name shows Krishna’s special relationship with His devotee Arjuna.

Frustration gives way to illumination during one extraordinary night in the life of a prostitute. While prostitutes are often depicted negatively in traditional literature, some religious texts depict them positively as testimonies to the transformational potency of divine grace. Thus, in the Gospel is found a story of a prostitute (considered by some to be Mary Magdalene) who was redeemed by Jesus. In Gaudiya Vaishnava literature such as the Chaitanya Charitamrita comes the story of the saint Haridasa Thakura, who delivered a pros...

Thakura Haridasa was present during most of the Lord Caitanya's pastimes in Nadia, and when the Lord went to Jagannatha Puri, Haridasa also went and took up residence there. Every day, after attending Lord Jagannatha's mangala arati, Lord Caitanya would come to see Haridasa Thakura and bring him some of Lord Jagannatha's prasadam. When Sri Sanatana Goswami and Sri Rupa Goswami would come from Vrindavana to Puri they used to stay with Haridasa Thakura. Haridasa, in order to maintain the etiquette, would not go near Lord Jagannatha's temple but would offer his obeisances ...

“Anyway, money can’t buy everything,” members of all social tiers often quip. Daily life, however, regularly belies this old mantra. Happiness and even love often seem to have a price tag, or at least a significant financial correlation. Whatever our level of income and indulgence, we all long for true happiness and genuine well-being, however defined. Shouldn’t personal contentment become enshrined as a basic human right, for all people, everywhere? Then again, what about the special ...

Over the years I have been approached by many a devotee in distress. Though I grew up in ISKCON and have been slowly cultivating my own Krishna consciousness, I am very much a neophyte. I was blessed by Krishna’s will in that I became a physician. I went forward to specialize in general and forensic psychiatric medicine. It is for this reason, I am often approached by devotees when their emotional life becomes overwhelming. Often they are told to chant better rounds or seek shelter of Krishna. Well, perhaps Krishna guides them in their heart to talk to someone like me. One of my t...

In each of its twelve cantos, Srimad-Bhagavatam, the "flawless ripened fruit of all Vedic scriptures," tells of miracles and mysticism, of the esoteric and extraterrestrial. We hear a cow, bull, elephant, monkey, and bird speaking deep philosophy. We learn of the four-headed creator who sits atop a lotus flower, of a magnificent aerial mansion, and of a five-year-old who pushes down half the earth with his toe and makes demigods suffocate. We learn of people giving birth...

Later, after becoming a devotee, I discovered that according to the Vedic teachings my assertions were right. But now I could understand something about the nature of that absolute reality: It is Krishna. Everything we see in this world comes from one of Krishna's many energies. But His illusory energy (maya) keeps us from perceiving things properly. Just as a magician can make us think we're seeing something that's not there, Krishna uses illusion to create our supposed reality. One mi...

A sign of a good leader is that he does not request those under him to do something that he is not prepared to do. So before we desire to distribute this Vedic culture to the whole world, we ourselves have to be following it in such a way that nobody can find even a minute discrepancy in our practice. People are too attached to their sense gratification and won't be so readily eager to give it up, and although they may have some attraction to the Vedic culture, if the mind can find an excuse for why they should not practice it, they will mo...

All the conditioned souls of this world tacitly harbor a utopian desire of obtaining perfect happiness. But this world is full of mixed happiness and misery. So the long cherished and long sought after perfect happiness is simply mirage or dream, reality of which can be experienced only in the spiritual world. Here we see that although the king had great opulence, beautiful queens, vast military power, several ministers and soldiers and so on, he was still hopeless and sorrowful.

SP writes : “When the Lord came, He was pleased with everyone; therefore it is stated here, krtsna-prasada-sumukham. The Lord knew that even the offensive doormen were His pure devotees, although by chance they committed an offense at the feet of other devotees……..On the part of the Lord there was no offended mood because He does not accept any offense created by His sincere devotee. But a devotee should be very cautious of committing offenses at the feet of another devotee. The Lord, being equal to all, and being especially inclined to His devotee, looked as merc...