A good friend of mine comes to the temple once per month for a darshan of the Deities and a sanga. I always look forward to his association. He is a straightforward, honest, intelligent, and very well-behaved devotee.
Our sanga is very simple – we eat sandwiches, discuss life challenges, churn personal realisations, analyse deeply our note-taking strategies and reveal to each other bits of writing from personal journaling.
We complete our sanga by going on a long walk. On one of these walks, we glorified our spiritual masters. When his turn came to share, he summarised the character of his guru in two words – “unapologetically himself”.
“My spiritual master is unapologetically himself”, he repeated on my request.
After our sanga ended, I returned to my room. I kept thinking about these two words, “unapologetically himself”. How thoughtfully my friend described his spiritual master. It resonated with me deeply.
If we practice devotional service sincerely, with an honest intention to advance spiritually, recognise our weaknesses and strengths and situate ourselves accordingly, then only we can become unapologetically ourselves.
A purport from Srimad Bhagavatam came to my mind;
The soldiers in this Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement must always possess physical strength, enthusiasm and sensual power. To keep themselves fit, they must place themselves in a normal condition of life. What constitutes a normal condition will not be the same for everyone, and therefore there are divisions of varṇāśrama. Ref. VedaBase => SB 8.2.30
I reflected further. A natural result of being situated according to our nature is that we will become the best version of ourselves.
There are many more benefits:
- our mental and physical health will improve
- our capacity to tolerate and solve life challenges will grow
- the quality of our service to the devotee community will increase tremendously
- we will become confident
- our faith in Krishna will become stronger
The goal of spiritual practice is a devotional loving service to Krishna. The first step to achieving that is to situate ourselves properly. The rest will be revealed as we practice the process and carefully study ourselves.
One can understand the nature of the Supreme by thorough study of oneself. Ref. VedaBase => Bg 2.16
Ananta Gopal das
30.5.2023
Bhakti Wisdom 