Year 8

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

Once one’s self-conception of being the servant of Śrī Bhagvān has awakened, how can one leave that direct service to His lotus feet and again busy oneself in serving māyā?...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

The individual soul is a separable constituent of the guru. It is only when the soul happens to be associated with the guru, by his own free will and in a completely dependent manner, that he can be on the plane of the guru’s service to the Divinity...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

The next category of Divinity is the bhakta, or devotee... While the guru has the distinctive function as master, the servant has no such distinctive function... The mercy of the bhakta enables the dissociable soul to receive the mercy of the guru. The guru and the bhakta are the inseparable divine counterparts of one another....

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

The guidance of the guru is not curtailment of one’s spiritual freedom. Those who are eternally free also follow his guidance by the spontaneous, undeviating impulse of their perfectly pure nature....

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

The basic principle is that this animate world is made up of jīvas, and the inanimate world is constituted of matter. Of these, the jīvas have been manifested by The Supreme Lord’s taṭasthā-śakti (intermediary potency), and this phenomenal world has been manifested by His bahiraṅgā-śakti (outward, material potency). He is consequently to be deemed the cause of all causes...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

It is better to commit suicide by swallowing poison than to associate with people who desire things other than Śrī Kṛṣṇa, or seek to enjoy of such things. Having begun to serve Śrī Hari, if such a person becomes attached to things other than Śrī Kṛṣṇa, he is thereby utterly ruined...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

The fact is that once a person becomes truly conversant with the message of Śrī Caitanyadeva, about the function of transcendental love, all petty narrowness is eliminated once and for all...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

There is an old quarrel between those who assert that God has a material form and those who assert that God is the void – both of which are quite off the mark. It is unnecessary to pick a side in this futile and foolish debate. If humankind cannot rise above such palpably wrong ideas, we are sure to breed narrowness and sectarianism and to quarrel with one another...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

The idea of an organised church in an intelligible form, indeed, marks the close of the living spiritual movement. The great ecclesiastical establishments are the dikes and the dams to retain the current that cannot be held by any such contrivances...

by Śrīla Bhaktivedānta Vamana Gosvāmī Mahārāja

Only he whose mind and heart have become attached to Śrī Hari, śrī guru and the Vaiṣṇavas will feel an anxiety and eagerness in his heart to have direct audience of them (darśana). Certainly, all these subjects are realized only according to one’s qualification in sādhana-bhajana. Śrī Bhagavān will someday mercifully bestow upon you the qualification to realize all of this. Who can foretell in what form the drops of His divine mercy will be showered upon someone?...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

Her ageing father looked at the divine child with intense adoration, but when he was away, she liked to playfully meddle with his things, and even try on the flower garlands he had made for the Lord. Daily she engaged in ornamenting herself with these garlands...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

...Simply by breaking the external frame we must not conclude that we will all of a sudden become immeasurable. We are decidedly always measurable things. This measurement, or the very platform of finitude, is quite sufficient for us not to consider ourselves to be the Oversoul...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

Our saint did not hear the priest, as he had lost his senses for the time being. This infuriated the priest and he took a pebble and threw it at the saint. The pebble cut his face and drops of blood trickled from the wound. He came to his senses, opened his eyes slowly, and seeing the brāhmaṇa at a distance, realized the situation in a moment...

by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda

The sentiment that supplies the seat of love in the undeveloped stages of spiritual endeavour is that of reverence and faith in the transcendental truth of śāstric revelation. It is, however, only a distant glimpse of the Truth that remains unavailable...