If the desire for liberation is selfish should we desire liberation or not?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
so the question is that if attaining moksha is in one sense self centeredness but then we also want to become liberated so is there a balance between self centeredness and selflessness where we simply want to love Krishna and we also want to be free from misery and become liberated how do we balance between the two answer it’s not wrong to be concerned about ourselves if we if our life is focused on service to Krishna a devotee wants liberation so that the devotee can serve Krishna better we don’t want liberation just for liberation sake but we understand if we are liberated from the body we don’t have the we don’t have the limitations of the body we won’t have the distractions of the mind and then we will be able to serve Krishna better and so a devotee doesn’t focus primarily on evading suffering a devotee focuses on serving Krishna and as a part of the service to Krishna liberation will come as a byproduct so now we cannot artificially jump to the level of pure love when we don’t have pure love right now so we can have aspiration for pure bhakti although we don’t have pure bhakti and when we don’t have pure bhakti what will be our impetus what will be our motivation for practicing yes it can be liberation it can be purification when we become purified naturally we become liberated so is it a self-centered motivation if it is divorced from the ultimate goal of loving and serving Krishna then it is self-centered although this self-centeredness is better than the self-centeredness of seeking pleasure at the material level but it is self-centeredness but if it is not divorced from the ultimate goal of loving and serving Krishna that means we want to become free from the distractions and the limitations of the mind and the body so that we can serve Krishna better then that is not at all undesirable so one devotee Prabhupada I want to serve you life after life so Prabhupada replied don’t make me come back life after life to accept your service that means Prabhupada’s rule was that we can’t jump to a higher level artificially we should aspire to serve Krishna and naturally we can serve Krishna better in the spiritual world so that’s why we want to go back to the spiritual world we want to become liberated so our primary interest is not liberation our primary interest is service and liberation will come as a byproduct so what about a balance no we shouldn’t bother too much about whether I am being selfless or whether I am being self-centered we should focus at our level on how best can I serve Krishna so if the impetus for serving Krishna is self-centered doesn’t matter Rupa Goswami in the Bhakti Samasindhu says that at our level somehow or the other fix the mind in Krishna so even if it is self-centered it doesn’t matter right now just fix the mind in Krishna and gradually over a period of time we will develop selflessness so we shouldn’t blind ourselves to the ideal of selflessness but also we shouldn’t blind ourselves to the reality that we are far from selflessness right so at our level we just make sure that we keep practicing devotional service be it selfless or be it self-centered and as we keep practicing we will become purified and eventually we will attain the level of pure love for Krishna