Sri Brahmachaithanya Pravachan – Sept.2

Living in Nama Transcends Death

If a child falls sick the parents pray to God to spare his life; they vow that the child will be dedicated to God if it survives. This means that they will withdraw their feeling of possession or ownership over their child. How does it matter then, if the child dies today? It is only for their own happiness that the parents want the child to survive the illness.
How unwise it is to ask for avoidance of the ultimately inevitable death, instead of praying for deliverance from the entire cycle of births and deaths! If death is a certainty for everyone, why should we not aspire that it should be auspicious? Death which is not followed by rebirth is the most auspicious death. In fact, to forget one’s real ‘self’, is equivalent to death. You should not therefore lose any opportunity to attain our objective while our mind, which is constantly fluctuating, is steady.
We are tormented by conflicting desires. Therefore it is necessary to kill the desire itself by constant utterance of nama. To remain in nama is to kill desire, which amounts to transcending death. The real way to avoid death is to belong to God. There is no fear of death when one realizes God, who is the destroyer of death. A realized soul is never afraid of death. To be merely alive is no life at all. One must have some objective or purpose in life, and that objective should be to remain in constant awareness of God. It should be considered a very fortunate day when one leaves this body while chanting nama.
In fact, we daily die and are reborn. If we sleep and do not wake up again, it is certainly death. Therefore, go to bed while chanting nama, so that you will wake up in His remembrance. However, to remember nama at bed time, you must have previous practice of it during working hours. Similarly, how can one remember nama at the time of death, unless one has been in the habit of constantly chanting it? Let us therefore, start the practice of nama-smarana right from today, this moment.
When Sant Tukaram says, ‘I have seen my death with my own eyes, it implies the experience of complete destruction of desire.

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Sri Brahmachaithanya Pravachan-Aug.3

To Become One with God is to be Ever-happy

The joy in which a real devotee lives defies description in words; indeed, the word ‘joy’ ceases to signify anything where the very idea of pain or sorrow does not exist. That joy has to be experienced to be believed. The true devotee sees God in all creation, animate and inanimate; that is, sees himself everywhere, like a person standing in a hall of mirrors. In other words, one who is one with God, that is, with all creation, never experiences anything but joy; sorrow or pain can only exist in plurality. A devotee may be an ordinary human to all appearances, but he lives continuously in a state of joy. That is how Saint Tukaram lived, outwardly as a common householder, and Saint Ramadas managed national matters politically; both of them were, at heart, completely detached from the pains and failures of life, raising their followers to their own level.
We common persons have never seen the path of pure joy. If we now want to walk along that path, it is evidently profitable to follow the advice, the guidance, of one who has traversed that path, and who, in fact, basks in that joy; in other words, implicitly follow the sadguru, just as we meekly follow a reliable guide when we meet one along an unfamiliar way. That, evidently, is the easiest and safest thing to do.
A person may eat salt, mistaking it for sugar; he will, nevertheless, get the taste of salt. Similarly, we erroneously imagine that worldly things lead to lasting joy, and invariably land in trouble. We imagine that the more numerous the amenities and belongings, the greater the happiness of life; this is a delusion never realized in practice. True happiness is that which is eternal, undisturbed; it rests only with God, who is Himself eternal. We can become truly happy only if we live in God. Just as one has to eat sugar to obtain a sweet taste, one must repeat nama to realize happiness.
All through life we pursue the mirage of happiness, and it never becomes a reality. We strive for the wherewithals rather than for happiness itself, like spending everything for elaborations of the fencing rather than on the farm itself. We strive to obtain this, that and the other, all of which, in the hour of final exit from the world, we have to leave behind.

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