Let your practices make you a spiritual fruit, not a religious nut Gita 18 66

Transcript

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Hare Krishna. Let your practices make you a spiritual fruit, not a religious nut. Religious nuts are people who are in the name of religion nutty.
They are fanatical, they are irrational, they are sentimental, they are judgmental and they are just disagreeable, unpleasant to be with. Now, when we practice anything, we need to practice it purposefully so that we become, our spirituality becomes activated within us and we become a spiritual fruit. That means, the fruit is the culmination of a tree.
The thing that can be most relished about a tree. Similarly, we, as we grow in our inner evolution through our spiritual practices, then we are meant to become spiritual fruits that our consciousness becomes something which we can relish and even others can relish and thus we move forward in our lives positively. Many people say nowadays they want to be spiritual but not religious.
Why? Because they want to have that spiritual fruit. But they have encountered too many people who are like religious nuts. Now, the Bhagavad Gita is very categorical that we don’t let our practice, we don’t follow our practices blindly.
In its conclusion, it makes a very categorical declaration. In 1866, it states sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja ahaṁ tvāṁ sarva-pāpebhyo mokṣayiśyāmi māśyachah So Krishna is saying sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja So here God himself is telling that just give up dharma, give up the religious formularies if they are not leading to mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja if they are not leading to loving surrender to the divine will if we are staying caught in our worldly conceptions in our parochial views in our sectarian designations, then we are not evolving and we need to rise above this. Any practice that doesn’t evolve our consciousness, not that the practice needs to be necessarily rejected, but we need to revisit how we are practicing it and we need to broaden our horizons.
So when we become a spiritual, when we become a religious nut, we stay irritated and we become irritating for others. We stay irritated because we see so many people not doing what we think they should be doing. Not conforming to our ideas of how people should be living.
And we naturally we speak in ways that irritate others also. But when we become a spiritual fruit, we become joys for ourselves as well as joys for others. So the Bhagavad Gita offers such a path where the essence of our practice is not adhering to certain externals, but cultivating a certain internal.
That is cultivating a consciousness absorbed in the all attractive supreme reality which brings us satisfaction and which makes us channels to enable others to also relish that satisfaction. So let’s practice our practices purposefully to become not a religious nut but a spiritual fruit. Hare Krishna.