Daunting Challenge

23 September 2008-Skopje, Macedonia--Yesterday I finally got connected to the internet by going to a cafe with a free internet zone. As I had no vehicle, Jordan, one of the local ISKCON members, had to take time off from his job to take me to the cafe. Today my normal system, using a Blackberry as a modem, which is supposed to be always operable according to T-Mobile, my service provider, is even worse. Yesterday we could connect with the emails although the speed was so slow that we could not download one. Today I cannot access my emails at all. This is one of the austerities of traveling and preaching all over the world. At our home base in Austin I have no trouble. But getting online on the road can sometimes be the most daunting challenge. It pains me knowing that although so many of my students and disciples have written me seeking spiritual guidance, I am restricted by internet problems from being able to reply to them in a timely manner.

Sankarshan Das Adhikari

Answers According to the Vedic Version:

Question: With My Attachments, How Can I Engage in Pure Devotional Service?

I was listening to one of your seminars on pure devotional service. You stressed that we should cultivate that mood within ourselves. I am very much attached to my family members and to the bodily concept, and I am not in a position to think that this material world is like a blazing forest forest fire. How then can I take up pure devotional service? Every time I think of taking it up I feel that it is like unnatural, external, artificial conditioning, and this causes me a a great sense of insecurity.

Your servant,

Nimit

Answer: Offer Your Attachments to Krishna

It is very nice that you are sometimes thinking of taking up pure devotional service. You should not let your feelings of attachment for your body and your family stand in the way of your seriously taking up Krishna consciousness. Simply you should see that your body, home, and family members are given to you by Krishna to be engaged in His service. If you think and act in this way, your material attachments will not be an impediment for your spiritual advancement.

You have been artificially, unnaturally conditioned by the external energy to identify yourself with the temporary material body. This conditioning has forced you to take millions of births and deaths in this material existence sometimes as an animal, sometimes as a plant, and sometimes as a human being. In each and every lifetime you were forced the laws of nature to suffer into so many ways. But life is not meant for suffering. Life is meant for enjoyment. So now take advantage of your rarely achieved human form of life to return to your original, natural, unconditioned state of consciousness in which one experiences an eternal existence, full of knowledge, and full of bliss by engaging in the pure devotional service of Supreme Person, Lord Sri Krishna.

Sankarshan Das Adhikari

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