During my last visit to Lithuania, before the initiations, I spoke about the difference between living a life of “have-to-do” obligations and engaging in devotional activities we “want to do.”
Since then, I have given additional talks on the same theme during my visits to the United States. This theme has become increasingly attractive to me.
Soon after my memorial talk yesterday, I reflected on Dhīrāśānta Gosvāmī Mahārāja’s life over the last three months since my visit to him in April.
It became increasingly clear to me that Dhīrāśānta Mahārāja, during the last several months, was, in effect, a living illustration of where my lecture was heading — what it looks like when the “want to do” has fully displaced the “have to do.”
The doctor’s verdict was framed entirely in the language of necessity: chemotherapy and radiation were necessary; this was the only alternative. He was speaking from within the world’s logic — a world that operates almost entirely on “have to.”
Dhīrāśānta Mahārāja’s response cut to the heart of the matter: “No, there is another alternative. It is to depend on God. And it seems that you do not see this alternative. And this is the best alternative.” He was not refusing treatment out of despair or ignorance. He was refusing to accept the “have to” frame altogether. Just as I said in the lecture that Kṛṣṇa is not interested in what you do externally but in the heart, Mahārāja saw that what the body “had to do” was beside the point.
He did not say “I have to face death somehow.” He said I want to face it in a particular way. The agency is deliberate, and the motivation is inward. This is exactly what I described in the lecture as the goal: not a devotional life spent fulfilling external obligations, but one animated by genuine desire.
The hospital represents institutionalized obligation — the regimen of actions the body is supposed to perform to sustain itself. He had to sign release documents, literally inscribing in writing that he was choosing to leave. He returned to an apartment in Kaunas, surrounded by devotees and deities. This maps directly onto the point I made in the lecture about the early āśrama devotees: what made their schedule transformative was not the list of duties but the inner connection — and what made the Deities and the holy name alive for Mahārāja was precisely that they were wanted, not merely maintained.
In the Lithuania lecture, I describe devotees whose minds are consumed with “I have to deal with my family, I have to pay bills, I have to…” — the body generates an endless cascade of “have tos.” During my last visit with Dhīrāśānta Mahārāja, he literally waved all of that aside with one gesture. The body’s demands were relegated to the background; discussion of Kṛṣṇa, Śrīmatī Rādhārāṇī, and the internal potency was where he placed his want. He used the word “life” and it was precise — it is the lecture’s higher taste made incarnate. The body is the “have to” world; Kṛṣṇa is life itself.
The contrast Dhīrāśānta Mahārāja draws between devotee care and medical care is the same contrast I drew in the lecture between want to and have to. Medical care is obligatory — the doctor’s protocols, the hospital’s regime. Devotee care, as he used the term, is freely given and freely received, motivated by love. When he said “now I can see that you are a true friend” and then “this is devotee care,” he was naming the difference between relationship by obligation and relationship by desire.
My Lithuania lecture ended with aspiration — praying, “I want to. I really want to.” The memorial talk yesterday showed what that cultivation, extended across a lifetime of sādhana and service to Śrīla Prabhupāda, finally produces.
Dhīrāśānta Mahārāja’s entire final period is characterized by wanting — wanting to depend on Kṛṣṇa, wanting to be with devotees, wanting to discuss the spiritual world, wanting to meditate on service to Śrī Śrī Rādhā-Śyāmasundara. The “have to” world — its treatments, its hospitals, its insistence on bodily continuation — could not make any claim on him, because he had cultivated desire to the point where there was simply nothing else.
In the lecture, I spoke about the principle. Dhīrāśānta Mahārāja enacted it.
Hare Kṛṣṇa