Sometimes, we get so caught up in external practices that we are still not remembering Krsna – we wear tilak for years, we hear and chant for years, we serve in a temple and yet we are not really thinking of Krsna as our first priority. Every day, we hear in a lecture how Krsna is the ultimate goal and how he is the priority but still we have so many other considerations – our position in the temple, how people are dealing with us, where do I fit, how am I going to be part of it all and so on rather than just remembering that our priority is Krsna!
The material world is an unreliable place! You never know, just when everything seems to be nicely arranged then suddenly something happens, the whole thing gets turned upside down, and the unexpected comes. What can we say, this is the nature of the material world!
Other times we are in a predictable routine. Prabhupada was explaining one verse which describes how a person is serving the senses, how a person is dedicating his life to his master, the senses, but neither the senses nor the person are satisfied. This is the nature of the material world we are serving that we are not satisfied and it will always be like this until we serve Krsna, until we become absorbed in serving Krsna, until Krsna is first. For the rest, you never know what is going to happen, there is no perfect material situation!
So in spiritual life even when we have a nice arrangement of living in a temple, if we don’t put Krsna first then we can cheat ourselves of a whole lifetime of what we think is Krsna consciousness! Actually we are still not really Krsna consciousness – we are kind of sniffing at Krsna consciousness and we are not really getting into it, not really getting absorbed. Krsna consciousness is very nice and attractive but we are not fully diving into it.
It is really not enough to just join a club or to be part of a temple! Sooner or later we come to that point, you can take 30 or 50 years and wait till you’re really old and then you think, “Well, maybe, finally… I’ll put Krsna first,” but then again, not everyone gets very old so this is the risk you take! You may want to wait until you are 80 years old but then, what if you don’t make it until then.
So there is not much time, there is not much time at all and it must be in this lifetime – we are not going come back again; we have to go back to Godhead in this lifetime!
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