Obstacles on the path of love

Sunday Lecture 21-jan-2018

Topic „Obstacles on the path of love (for God and all His parts & parcels)

Speaker:HG Bhakti Prabhava Swami Maharaja

Location: VCC Govinda

…based on from BG 3:34 (1)

Lecture notes:

In order to receive love, you must be able to give love.

In order to be give love, your heart is to be soft(ened).

But your heart has become hard by the sense of (mutual) exploitation (of the body, not your real self) that your relationships are based upon.

…which gets reflected in your mind in the form of lust, anger, greed.

I.e.

-the madness that you think "I am this body", and 

-the illusion that „giving pleasure to the body will make me happy”, and

-envy

all have made your heart hard, which prevents you from giving (and receiving) love.

.

Love means "giving _without_ asking something in return”.

The main obstacle to "only giving and not exploiting” is false ego, false identification (with the body).

.

The form of the spiritual body (i.e. soul) is covered by the form of the (mental) subtle body (with its  3 components: mind, intelligence & false ego), which itself is covered by the bodily senses.
The activity of the soul (spiritual body) is to DESIRE.
Our spiritual body is designed only for 1 purpose: loving service to God, acting out of love to serve God.
As soon as it DESIRES to serve any other (selfish) purpose, the subtle & gross body are created.

I.e.

The spirit soul is the cause of consciousness, and has 

• its own way of feeling/thinking/willing (mind)
• its own way of discriminating (intelligence) 

By misusing the spiritual body,

• the subtle & gross bodies are created, and 
• the functions of mind & intelligence (of the spiritual body) are being taken over by the subtle body, and
• the consciousness (of the spiritual body) is projected into the (newly created) subtle & gross bodies, where it gets contaminated: i.e. by false ego, consciousness starts to identify with the mind and intelligence (of the subtle body)
• we are transferred to the material world: temporary and full of miseries.

Out here, we are still in the „kingdom of God”, but in the prison section… where we get a change of covering (which we call death & birth), a change of clothing:  garment (gross body) & underwear (subtle body).

The law of nature dictates: the moment you try to enjoy & exploit, you will suffer. 

One with a pure consciousness will see all this to be a mere dream.

.

In the spiritual body, we also satisfy our senses… by serving the whole ! This whole is Krsna/God, and every living entity is a part of Krsna.

We can get happiness within the heart/soul, if we connect it with the source of that happiness: Krsna. But that connection (between the two) is now broken, and therefore we feel unhappy.

When you stop trying to become happy in this world, you will really become happy… because your happiness & distress are already fixed in this life, by your activities in your previous lives. You cannot change this !

The idea of „becoming happy 

by maintaining all your 

• attachments to that what gives pleasure to your mind & intelligence, and 
• aversions to that which gives distress to your mind & intelligence"

does not work:

it gives you 

• satiation („I have enough”), 
• but not satisfaction !

…because it only touches

• our body & mind, but 
• not our real self (the soul).

(e.g.

marriage as „regulation for sex desire” is good but not enough/perfect… because you still remain the servant of your senses & your mind.)

All these likes & dislikes to the body & mind give only temporary satisfaction, while we need eternal things (related to our source!) to become happy.

.

Your material mind (engaged in these "attachment & aversions", "hankering & lamenting”) is misusing the intelligence.

You can purify your mind from these tendencies by a method of the soul becoming attached to something else:

you first meditated on a particular enjoyment, which did not come as expected, which 

• frustrates you, 
• contaminates (as lust/anger/greed) your mind  (where the tendency to exploit & enjoy becomes more firm)
• contaminates your intelligence (which identities more and more with the body and all its designations). E.g. thinking „I am a man” instead of the fact „I got the body of a man”.

The point is:

because the subtle body is infused by these desires, it creates (under divine supervision) new bodies for taking birth again. 

In order for you to stop taking birth again, you have to destroy the subtle body, you must kill it… (in the first place) by chanting.

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(1) https://www.vedabase.com/nl/bg/3/34