My Eternal Spiritual Master Saved Me

I will forever, literally for all of eternity, remain the subordinate servant of my spiritual master, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. It is by his causeless mercy that I have been restored to my original pure identity as a servant of Krishna. For countless eons I was lost in the cycle of birth of death sometimes thinking myself to be a demigod, sometimes a human, sometimes a plant, and sometimes an animal. But now, by the pure loving kindness of Srila Prabhupada I have been freed from my prison sentence in this material existence and allowed to re-enter into the divine association of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Lord Sri Krishna. How can I ever repay the debt I owe to Srila Prabhupada? It is impossible. Therefore I must simply serve him for all of eternity as a small token of gratitude for his having saved me from the unlimited miseries of material existence by bringing me into the most blissful, ever-expandingly more exciting adventure of Krishna consciousness.

Sankarshan Das Adhikari

Srila Prabhupada With Sankarshan Das (standing directly behind Srila Prabhupada) (Photo is from the early 1970's)

Answers According to the Vedic Version:

Question: How Can We Fall from the Spiritual Sky?

Thanks for all your answers daily. I appreciate all your efforts in helping people to become Krishna conscious. I am trying my best to live a Krishna conscious life and hope I will have your blessings.

How to understand that we, the living beings, could ever fall from the spiritual world? In his purport to Srimad Bhagavatam 3.16.26 Srila Prabhupada explains:

"The conclusion is that no one falls from the spiritual world, or Vaikuntha planet, for it is the eternal abode."

But in a lecture he gave on the Bhagavad-gita on 6 August 1973 Srila Prabhupada states:

“We have also come down from Vaikuntha some millions and millions of years ago.”

I am bit confused by this. Can you please enlighten me in the right direction?

AK

Answer: We Only Dream That We are Not There

You most certainly always have my blessings for your rapid advancement in Krishna consciousness. I am trying my best to awaken the sleeping souls of this planet to their actual identities as the eternal servants of Krishna, but when someone wants to remain asleep it is difficult to awaken them.

Even though the two statements you have quoted appear to be contradictory, they are nonetheless both true. Such a phenomenon is known in philosophy as a paradox. Instead of thinking that one statement is correct and that the other is incorrect, we have to understand how both of them are true.

You are wondering how we could have fallen from Vaikuntha if no one falls from Vaikuntha. The answer is that both statements are true. We simply have to understand from the authoritative statements of Srila Prabhupada how both of them are true. Srila Prabhupada has explained this paradox as follows in his answer to a question by a disciple, Bhaktijana Das. This question was answered at the end of a Caitanya Caritamrita Lecture given on 18 February 1967 in San Francisco:

"You are liberated. You are liberated. Simply just a cloud has covered you. Drive away the cloud. There is no question that you were ever (conditioned). You are ever-liberated. That, the sky is always spiritual, but it is sometimes overcrowded with cloud, this maya. This is called maya. Actually, you are not conditioned. You are thinking. Just like in the dream you are thinking that tiger is eating you. You were never eaten by tiger. There is no tiger. So we have to get out of this dream. Don't you sometimes dream that tiger is eating you? Is there any tiger? You are simply thinking. So if you keep in Krishna consciousness, that nonsense thinking will go away. Therefore we have to keep ourselves always in Krishna thinking so that this dream will never come. If you are always awakened, then dream never comes. So keep yourself always awakened by Krishna consciousness."

In other words, no one really falls from Vaikuntha. Instead we have simply entered into a dreamlike condition in which we think ourselves to be somewhere else. We are dreaming ourselves to be in this material world. That's all. When we awaken from this dream by reviving our dormant Krishna consciousness, we will see that actually we were in Vaikuntha, the spiritual world, the entire time, that we never left the Lord's resplendent kingdom. We will then pick up where we left off. We will resume our activities as intimate associates of the Lord in His unlimitedly astonishing transcendental pastimes.

Sankarshan Das Adhikari