krishna lounge

There is a great irony I’d like to tell you about.

People make plans for material happiness. Material happiness refers to happiness obtained through our physical bodies. This is necessary. Everyone has to take care of one’s physical body. The body needs to be fed, clothed, washed, etc. If it is hot we naturally take some clothes off, and if it is cold we put some on. That is just normal.

People make plans and endeavor for material happiness individually and collectively.

Individually:
People plan for education that will bring about security and prosperity for the material body. Thus people are on a constant lookout for better job opportunities. People make business schemes, honest and dirty.

Collectively:
People come together to form groups, clubs, organizations, societies, and nations in order to protect mutual material happiness. Often when this is done in relationships, people call it love.

The irony is that people who plan more for material happiness are the ones that are more disturbed and unhappy!!! I know this for certain as I have counseled hundreds upon hundreds such individuals.

The problem is that people don’t have their priorities set in the proper order. First priority has to be our spiritual life, not material. I am not saying that people need to stop endeavoring for material happiness or comfort. I am just saying that spiritual development has to be our first priority. There is a saying that one should eat to live, not live to eat. That implies that one should make an effort to procure food, but one has to keep in mind that the business of procuring food is not what life is all about it. We are spiritual entities who have material bodies. Thus our primary needs are spiritual. And we can observe that people who neglect their spiritual development are not the happy ones. They are the miserable folks. The point is that people need to learn to mend and bend their material lives in order to suit their spiritual development, not other way around. The fear for material maintenance is a big obstacle people need to overcome in order to reclaim their constitutional right: happiness.

How to cultivate and practice spiritual life tends to be elusive for lots of people. Here we reveal it.

Step 1 – sravanam
Sravanam means to inquire about spiritual life and related topics. By doing this we are going to end up reading a lot about it and ask lots of questions about it. More and more we inquire, hear, and learn, closer we get to the second step: kirtanam.

Step 2 – kirtanam
Kirtanam means to speak about spiritual life. Now we get to talk about it. Lots of inquiring and talking about spiritual subjects will naturally take us to the third step: smaranam.

Step 3 – smaranam
Smaranam means to remember. Because of all that reading, hearing, inquiring, and discussing we will naturally keep thinking about spiritual topics which are going to take prominence in our minds, even to the point that we’ll be dreaming about it.

Step 4 – karanam
Karanam means to do or to act. Learning, inquiring, talking and discussing, remembering and thinking about our spiritual development will eventually guide us to a spiritual practice. This is natural as thoughts always tend to eventually turn into an activity. Thus the cycle is completed.