Sri Brahmachaitanya pravachan -Sept.4

Be Prideless to Achieve Devotion

Vritti or impulse is only a reaction to the impact of the external world on us; It may be pleasure, pain, pride, desire, avarice, etc. It is the real spiritual task to keep this vritti steady. Diversion of vritti towards God amounts to devotion. Devotion to God results in the vanishing of sensuous attraction. Devotion is quite natural. Every one wants it, because devotion means fondness, and everyone is fond of something or other. However, devotion is not possible without becoming prideless, and you cannot attain God without devotion. No one except God Himself can give His love. The devotee and God are not separate. Therefore, just as God is omnipresent, the devotee is also present everywhere. The devotee gets merged into God, and therefore, like God, sees nothing but bliss everywhere. It is the essence of the spiritual path to realize and practise the feeling, 'I do no exist, You (God) alone exist' or 'I am He (God)'; and the only means to achieve this is maintaining continuous awareness of God.
There is only one way available at present to realize God, and that is to remain in His name. Just as the Ganga remains sacred in spite of a number of rivulets and currents pouring their flows into its waters, our prapancha also, howsoever dirty it may be, could stand clean and pure, if we keep constant remembrance of God. There is no alternative to nama-smarana. To renounce all that leads to forgetting God is vairagya, and to follow only such things which help in remembering God is viveka. Rama is really steelhearted in the matter of duties, but at the same time, He is equally tender-hearted towards his devotees. He abandoned Seeta for the sake of duty, while He protected Bharata due to His love for devotees.
Out of my advice to you, whatever you may practise, that alone will come to your help. All of you should practise nama-smarana; there is no other path of your welfare. If there is anything which is naturally available to you, which is devoid of any upadhi, and which does not depend on anyone, it is nama. Rama will certainly bless him who takes it with a pure mind and heart.



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Sri Brahmachaitanya Pravachan -Sept.3

Living in Nama Transcends Death

If a child falls sick the parents pray to God to spare his life; they vow that the child will be dedicated to God if it survives. This means that they will withdraw their feeling of possession or ownership over their child. How does it matter then, if the child dies today? It is only for their own happiness that the parents want the child to survive the illness.
How unwise it is to ask for avoidance of the ultimately inevitable death, instead of praying for deliverance from the entire cycle of births and deaths! If death is a certainty for everyone, why should we not aspire that it should be auspicious? Death which is not followed by rebirth is the most auspicious death. In fact, to forget one's real 'self', is equivalent to death. You should not therefore lose any opportunity to attain our objective while our mind, which is constantly fluctuating, is steady.
We are tormented by conflicting desires. Therefore it is necessary to kill the desire itself by constant utterance of nama. To remain in nama is to kill desire, which amounts to transcending death. The real way to avoid death is to belong to God. There is no fear of death when one realizes God, who is the destroyer of death. A realized soul is never afraid of death. To be merely alive is no life at all. One must have some objective or purpose in life, and that objective should be to remain in constant awareness of God. It should be considered a very fortunate day when one leaves this body while chanting nama.
In fact, we daily die and are reborn. If we sleep and do not wake up again, it is certainly death. Therefore, go to bed while chanting nama, so that you will wake up in His remembrance. However, to remember nama at bed time, you must have previous practice of it during working hours. Similarly, how can one remember nama at the time of death, unless one has been in the habit of constantly chanting it? Let us therefore, start the practice of nama-smarana right from today, this moment.
When Sant Tukaram says, 'I have seen my death with my own eyes, it implies the experience of complete destruction of desire.



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Sri Brahmachaitanya Pravachan - Sept.2

Living in Nama Transcends Death

If a child falls sick the parents pray to God to spare his life; they vow that the child will be dedicated to God if it survives. This means that they will withdraw their feeling of possession or ownership over their child. How does it matter then, if the child dies today? It is only for their own happiness that the parents want the child to survive the illness.
How unwise it is to ask for avoidance of the ultimately inevitable death, instead of praying for deliverance from the entire cycle of births and deaths! If death is a certainty for everyone, why should we not aspire that it should be auspicious? Death which is not followed by rebirth is the most auspicious death. In fact, to forget one's real 'self', is equivalent to death. You should not therefore lose any opportunity to attain our objective while our mind, which is constantly fluctuating, is steady.
We are tormented by conflicting desires. Therefore it is necessary to kill the desire itself by constant utterance of nama. To remain in nama is to kill desire, which amounts to transcending death. The real way to avoid death is to belong to God. There is no fear of death when one realizes God, who is the destroyer of death. A realized soul is never afraid of death. To be merely alive is no life at all. One must have some objective or purpose in life, and that objective should be to remain in constant awareness of God. It should be considered a very fortunate day when one leaves this body while chanting nama.
In fact, we daily die and are reborn. If we sleep and do not wake up again, it is certainly death. Therefore, go to bed while chanting nama, so that you will wake up in His remembrance. However, to remember nama at bed time, you must have previous practice of it during working hours. Similarly, how can one remember nama at the time of death, unless one has been in the habit of constantly chanting it? Let us therefore, start the practice of nama-smarana right from today, this moment.
When Sant Tukaram says, 'I have seen my death with my own eyes, it implies the experience of complete destruction of desire.

Sri Brahmachaitanya Pravachan Sept.1.

Our 'Knowledge' is Based on 'Body-Am-I' Feeling

Common people feel that sense-perceived phenomena can be instantly experienced, while divine or spiritual experience is purely a matter of inference and faith. I agree with them so far. I am not surprised that they do not abandon worldly life. I only feel sorry that they indulge in it heart and soul, under the illusion that it is imperishable, everlasting, despite evidence to the contrary. I don't mind their rejection of divine bliss as a sheer hypothesis, provided they accept the everyday experience that sensual pleasures are only transitory. Eventually it will lead to the conviction that divine bliss alone is permanent. It is immanent in us, and does not have to be acquired from elsewhere.
Modern civilization has catered amply to the pleasures and conveniences of the senses and the body in general, but the end-result has only been unhappiness. Imagine for a moment that plenty of means of pleasures of the senses lie to entice a man, but one cannot afford them financially, or enjoy them for want of physical capacity; the absence of capacity to avail of them will only lead to disappointment and unhappiness. After all, every individual cannot command all sense-pleasures, and so, after all the struggle of life, the net result is a sense of disappointment, unhappiness. Happiness and sorrow never really existed, they are only illusory creations of our imagination. Whatever is agreeable to the moment's fancy of the mind is pleasure, and whatever is otherwise is sorrow. Both these are the product of the illusion that the body is the be-all and the end-all, and so long as we live in that conviction, so long will all experience be necessarily polluted by illusion. That all creation, though pervaded by pure bliss, appears sorrowful is the result of illusion, which clouds our inner perception. The world, after all, is made up of so many individuals, each struggling for pleasure; how can a single person, in such a situation, get all pleasures for himself?
One cannot have guarantee of life. It can terminate abruptly, unexpectedly. Therefore, waste not even a moment, spend it in the constant awareness of God. To forget Him owing to a calamity or because of all-round happiness, is an equal loss.

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