God or Maya?

During the course of one life, the rules change four times. This is dharm. But devotion to Krishn is compulsory for all four orders and stages. Are you a brahmchari?  Then you should be doing daily prayers. What is the first verse of the prayer? First, you take water in your hand and sprinkle it overhead, and say this verse from the Padma Puran, "Whether one is impure, bathed or completely filthy, whatever condition he is in, even if he is the most dirty internally and externally, if he lovingly remembers Krishn, he is internally and externally purified."

There are only two types of cleanliness – one is external, which you do by washing with soap. Inner cleanliness happens by remembering Krishn. This first verse is compulsory for a student. This verseis also true for a householder, a partially renounced person, anda fully renounced person. Remember God. This is eternal dharm, natural dharm, Divine dharm.

In other words, there are two existences. This is a straightforward point.  Understand it simply. There are two eternal existences – one is God and the other is maya.  The one who accepts is the soul. The soul either accepts God or the world. There is no third existence for it to accept.

Kripaluji Maharaj states that if a soul accepts the world, it will wander in the 8.4 millions life forms; it will attain the world. If a soul accepts God, he will go to God’s Divine abode and be eternally happy. The philosophy is very straightforward in our Hindu religion.

What do you want? Do you want the material world? If so, then you should perform selfish actions related to mayic quality of rajas.  Do you want the hellish abodes?  If so, then you should perform bad actions related to the mayic quality of tamas. Do you want the celestial abodes?  If so, then you should perform actions related to the mayic quality of sattva. Do you want supreme Divine Bliss, spiritual happiness? Then love God and Guru. In any case, there is no difference in the expression of love, whether that love is for the world or God.  The same love is expressed towards both sides.  Saints don't have an extra sense. They also possess the same senses, mind, and intellect we have.  Just as you love your mother, father, brother, wife and husband and think deeply about them, and wherever you go you keep on remembering them, in the same way remember God and Guru.

There is nothing new written in the scriptures. It is extremely simple. You simply have to love God and Saint the same way you love the world. How do we love the world? There is a formula.  We become emotionally attached to and love the one who we hopefully expect will fulfill our self-interest.  If you find out your self-interest won’t be fulfilled by a person, you become detached from him. A father lost his son. From a distance the father saw, “I found him! That's my son!” He ran towards the boy and saw his face and said, “Oh! This isn't him.”  He became detached, immediately! No one has to practice this.

When our intellect accepts that our self-interest will be fulfilled by someone, we love them. If our intellect understands that our self-interest will be harmed, we do an about turn from them. Then, fighting, arguing, everything happens with the same wife, mother and son with whom we previously experienced 'love'.

So what is our self-interest?  This we don’t know. We are stuck here. Self-interest means in the best interest of the self.  ‘Self’ means ‘mine’, and ‘best interest’ means ‘self-interest’.  ‘Mine’ means ‘what belongs to me’ and ‘me’ means the soul. Because we mistook the body to be the soul, so we became confused.  Wherever we understood ourselves to be the body, we fulfilled the self-interest of the body.

We thought that the self-interest of the body could be fulfilled by our mother, father, child, wife, husband and money; we thought the self-interest of the body would be fulfilled by the world.  Why?  Because the body and the world are made from the same five material elements.

Both the world and the body are made from the same one substance. Where was the body formed?  From semen and ovum in a mother’s womb. So, the body is made from another body, isn't it?  We ate food from the world. From that food, bodily juices, blood, flesh, muscles, bones, nerves and semen were formed. Then a man came into contact with a woman, and in that mother’s womb, semen and ovum united and a new body was formed.  So the same materials that make up the world also make up the body.  When we thought of ourselves as the body, we acted to accumulate the sense objects of the world.

Everyone in the world is running every moment. Where are you going? “To find happiness.” Where will you get happiness? "When I get a million dollars, when I get a billion dollars..." But look, many in our world have a million dollars.

Ask someone in your own neighborhood.  You might think, "He looks very happy.  He has eight cars and ten mansions." Don’t look at that! Ask him what is going on inside his heart.  That poor fellow has to take sleeping pills to sleep. He is in such a bad state. He has mental tension.  There is a new disease: depression. Whoever you see has this new disease.  If you go to a doctor and if he can't diagnose your illness, he says, “You worry too much.” He says this to everyone. The doctor is the one who worries the most. He thinks, “No patients came today. My whole day was wasted.” Kripaluji Maharaj suggests that he should treat himself first.