How can we sustain the momentum in spiritual life year after year?

From Shashi Shankar

After years of sadhna, we might feel that there is nothing happening in our life spiritually. How to sustain the momentum year after year?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Question. Question from Sashi Shankar Prabhu. After years of sadhana, we might feel that there’s nothing happening in our life spiritually.
How do we sustain the momentum year after year? Answer. It is generally by our commitment to a steady service. And sadhana initially brings about quite dramatic transformations in our life.
In terms of, say, we are able to follow the regulative principles, something which we are not able to do earlier. We are able to bring about, start doing many new activities, which also bring a sense of freshness and adventure in our life. But over the period of time, the purification becomes more internal.
And because the conditionings are much deeper, they take time to go away. So when a tree is growing, we can’t expect that every day that I water the tree, I watered one litre, so now the tree should grow by one inch. It doesn’t work like that.
But every single day that the tree is being nourished and protected, the tree is growing. So Chaitanya Mahaprabhu uses the same metaphor of a bhaktilata beej, the creeper of devotional service, growing gradually by that hearing and chanting are the water that gives nourishment to the bhaktilata beej. So if we are doing this regularly, we are making spiritual advancement, even if we don’t realize it, because it’s a subtle process of purification that is happening internally and increasing of our attraction to Krishna.
Generally, if we have a steady service, that connects and commits us to Krishna and to a community of devotees, then that service becomes our sense of tangible connection with Krishna. Although we shouldn’t rely only on the tangible connection, because in that tangible connection, sometimes we may face criticism, sometimes we may face failure. But at the same time, having no tangible connection also makes us feel as if nothing is happening in my spiritual life.
So on one side, if we have a tangible service, at the same time, we are also working on the intangible purification in our heart, then we are making spiritual advancement. And we have to admit to some extent that all of us are in rajoguna and living a purely sattvic life and expecting the purification, which is essentially a sattvic activity. In rajoguna, people like to do work hard physically.
Sattvaguna person who is a brahmana or a brahmanically oriented person, the hard work is actually internal. Battling with the undesirable desires of the mind and fighting with them and controlling them and curtailing them and ultimately rejecting and eliminating them. That is a lot of hard work once one starts doing it.
So that hard work is what a serious spiritual seeker is also expected to do. But when we, because we live in a materialistic society where everything is quantified and measured in terms of targets and deadlines and we also need some tangible achievements, so we can try to create some tangible targets for ourselves also. So, for example, I’ll distribute this many books or I will read this section of Bhagavatam during this period.
For example, I’ll complete one full canto of Bhagavatam during this time or some other targets like that. Targets give a sense of direction and progression to our spiritual life and we don’t have to make a fetish out of those targets and that I have to absolutely fulfill them. But it is important to have targets because they help us to move onwards steadily by giving us a sense of direction and progression.
We know where we are going and we can see also whether we are going in that direction. So in our service, even in our sadhana, we may not be able to quantify our chanting that way, but surely our hearing, our personal study, we can quantify to some extent and same way applies, we can create targets for our service depending on what the service is and what kind of targets are feasible. But by doing this, we will also be able to bring the sense of momentum to our spiritual life.
By having a tangible service, by knowing philosophically that intangibly the growth is happening just as a plant is growing every day when it is being watered and protected and lastly, by creating some tangible targets in our service, we can sustain the momentum in our spiritual life. Thank you.