Bhagavatam-daily 7 – 11.06.46 – Krishna’s remnants make the lower taste unappealing

Is the source of the supreme auspiciousness in life thank you by you my dear lord that which has been enjoyed relished garlands and fragrances garments and ornaments the servant when the servants relish does remnants by that they conquer over your maya so there is in this verse is talking about how from the lord ultimately comes illusion and from the all lord comes release from illusion now actually it’s your maya he said what does that mean that means not that whatever maya does and whatever maya makes us do is what krishna wants us to it means that krishna is the controller of maya the two different things that not that whatever maya does and because of maya whatever we do that is not krishna’s will but krishna is above maya and krishna can control maya that is the important point when we say that maya belongs to krishna to understand the difference between these two if we have a exam with multiple choice questions and a teacher is given the exam and above the teacher is a principal so now the teacher teacher gives multiple choice in which a majority of the choices are wrong that does not mean that the teacher wants the student to take a wrong choice and fail the exam the purpose is to pass the exam purpose of giving the exam is to check the learning and the student does learn to help elevate to a higher standard similarly maya is like krishna’s examining authority but the thing is not so simple because these options in a multiple choice exam they just sit over there all five options and you have to choose one of them but in the material world some options jump out at us and some options seem to stay away from us in the sense that sense objects and sense gratification seems very attractive to us and in that sense the sense objects jump towards us or we jump towards the sense objects and often devotional activities don’t seem so attractive to us we tend to stay away from those activities they don’t seem so attractive and krishna also talks about this in 18.7 37 38 in the bhagavad-gita when he talks about the nature of different pleasures and he says material pleasure or pleasure in the mode of passion appears to be like nectar in the beginning that means it pulls us whereas happiness and goodness appear like poison in the beginning that means it pushes us away so or we push it away whichever we want to look at it so now this deceptive perception which we have of the options before us makes it difficult for us to make the right choice but if we can somehow stay perseverantly fixed then the initial layers initial appearances they pass and we can see beyond the appearance of substance and we will see that beyond the nectar there is poison in worldly pleasures and beyond the poison there is nectar in enlightened pleasures so how do we persevere and how do we save ourselves from the deception one way we could say is that just by the power of our will and our determination or even the power of our intellect knowing that appearances are deceptive but here uddhava is recommending another way he says that if we accept his remnants now the wonderful thing about the remnants is that they are they often appear materially also attractive prasad is even at a material level frequently delicious and the garlands the garments you know they are also nicely smelling or nice looking so krishna’s mercy comes to us in ways that are also sensitive from the sensory point of view not unpalatable often quite palatable but through them if we accept those remnants through them we connect with krishna and when we connect with krishna the result of that is we go we slowly but surely develop a taste for krishna and that taste of for krishna stays and then even if we turn towards worldly things and even if we try to enjoy worldly things we will not get pleasure in those things rather we will want the higher fulfillment of connection with krishna so accepting the remnants of krishna gives us higher taste although there may some pieces some seem to be some taste at the material level itself as our taste delicious that is good but beyond that there is also the contact with krishna that happens through those remnants and that contact through krishna is fortunately fatal for our for our material tastes we can we may still be at feel attracted towards sense enjoyment towards worldly objects and we may even indulge in those objects because of feeling attracted to them but we won’t get any pleasure in those activities because we already got satisfied got a higher taste we may feel that we’re getting some pleasure but it is very flickering it is a shadow pleasure it won’t be the kind of pleasure that we had experienced before we got the experience of krishna conscious pleasures and rather than at such times forcing ourselves to go deeper into those worldly pleasures hoping that maybe by engaging in more sensory pleasures i will get pleasure we can turn back towards krishna and actually if we just absorb ourselves in relishing his remnants then gradually the higher taste will become stabilized and the lower taste will get completely destroyed now um there is of course the process of devotional service centered on sadhana where we chat where we hear and that is the central process for purification that of course we need to do but along with that we also connect with the lord at a almost a material level not in the sense that things krishna’s remnants are material but krishna’s remnants are coming to us through materially accessible objects and those materially accessible objects are not just having material content they are also having spiritual potency and that spiritual potency when it comes in materially palatable forms it purifies us and it elevates us that’s why in our maha prasadam prayers we say at the end that by this taking this prasad itself so say jivha jai that we will conquer over the tongue and not just the tongue tongue is in one sense the pivot of all the other senses through the tongue when the tongue is conquered other senses also follow and become conquered so the point is rather than seeing krishna’s prasad as just worldly just some material object which we have to use as a ritual but if you remember conscientiousness krishna’s mercy and not just mercy at a bodily level for bodily maintenance in the biblical tradition they have oh god father thou art in heaven hallowed be thy name give us our daily bread and they’re grateful to god for giving the bread to sustain themselves materially and that is also a valuable level of gratitude to god but the gaudiya culture goes much deeper and says that actually devotional culture is it is not our attitude is not just for living in material world for but for actually for transcending material existence of by giving us the means to transcend the accessible relishable means of to transcendence in the form of prasad so that is what we are grateful to krishna for and this is the gratitude that uddhava is expressing