When caring for our small children takes a lot of time, how can we enhance our spirituality?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Suppose As parents we have small children And taking care of them requires a lot of time Sometimes sleepless nights That’s why we can’t do much spiritual activity And even the basic spiritual activity that we do It often becomes just Ritualistic, just getting it done So how can we enhance our Spirituality at that time? See We sometimes have this Fragmented vision That this is spiritual, this is material And that is good At one level so that We give due time to Spiritual activities That means we Give time for our meditation For our scriptural study For our association with devotees So we can separate the material and the spiritual So that we give some good time for it The spiritual directly But after that we need to Integrate the two And see that our whole life can be Spiritualized So If our family responsibilities are there There are also ways in which we can Answer questions Say if we are taking care of our children So children are sent by God Into our life And by taking care of them we are doing Our duty to God So see there are three levels Of functioning. There is paradharma Which is we could say spiritual duty There is aparadharma which is material duty And there is adharma Which is irresponsibility Person doesn’t do anything at all So now The bhagavatam Is spoken To people Who are already very good at aparadharma At material responsibility So taking care of one’s family Taking care of one’s children It is assumed that people are doing that And then the bhagavatam Tells them don’t think that this alone is enough So if somebody thinks My aparadharma My material responsibility is all that I need to do And by that I am automatically devoted to God The bhagavatam says no You also have to have time for devotion to God So from the perspective of Rising people From aparadharma to paradharma From material duty to spiritual duty The bhagavatam often Strongly speaks against material duty In the sense that it says what is the use of it all It’s all temporary Ultimately you are getting attached, you are getting entangled So but it is from That perspective Of raising people from material Duty to spiritual duty It is not from the perspective of rejecting Or minimizing material duty itself Material duties Are also important There are You know As compared to irresponsibility And material responsibility Material responsibility is far far better than material responsibility So sometimes what happens We Divide things into material and Spiritual But within material there is a huge range There can be material responsibility There can be material responsibility And it makes a big difference In other people’s lives, in our own lives also How we act materially So the aparadharma Is also dharma The material responsibility is also A way we are Connecting with God That is not the only way we connect with God We need to go directly to connect with God also But this is also a way we connect with God And that’s why we should see Our material responsibility also as sacred Now Problem comes when we see Only them as sacred and we think I don’t need anything else Then it is a problem But if we think only the spiritual responsibility As sacred and we don’t think of the material responsibilities At all as important Then that is wrong You know in the early days of our movement Devotees had the idea that we should distribute books Prabhupada will be pleased if we distribute books And you distribute books And then there were devotees, householders Who also live in the temple And the mothers who had small babies They were told You just go out and distribute books Others will take care of your babies At one time one devotee She wrote to Prabhupada She said that I should heal my small baby And go out and distribute books Prabhupada said who told you that You know your children And other special souls sent by Krishna They are Vaikuntha children I am surprised that you are ready to give this up And go out and distribute books You just take care of your children So it is not just women taking care of children Prabhupada has given a general principle That our material responsibility is also important So From the perspective of Getting consumed by material responsibility Neglecting spiritual responsibility That should not happen But we should not reject the material responsibility as mundane It is also a way In which we can serve God To look at it from another perspective The spiritual growth is essentially A growth In selflessness The more selfless I become The more I grow spiritually And actually Every relationship Offers us an opportunity To become selfless Any relationship that I form You know if a man and a woman come together in marriage Then Before the marriage They can just do whatever they want But then they also have to think about their spouse And that brings some level of selflessness When parents have children That makes them more selfless So in the sense of Expanding the scope of our selflessness Our material Responsibilities And spiritual responsibilities They are like a continuum The same culture of responsibility That I have in material life I can take it further in my spiritual life So if we see our children As children who are given to us by God And by taking care of them also We are serving God So then we don’t have to say that That actually I am not doing bhakti So we do need some time But in our life There will always be phases And in some phases in our life Sometimes our material responsibilities May take much more time That’s fine Later on as the children grow up They don’t need so much time Then we can focus on bhakti more And if we can make some arrangements By which we can Make due time, maybe have some other Relatives or Day care people or whatever is required for helping And we get time for bhakti, that’s also fine But the important thing is When we are doing our duties We should not be half-hearted If I am doing my job If I am doing my housework I shouldn’t be thinking this is material, why am I doing it If I am doing it, let me be wholehearted in it See Arjuna When he was practicing His archery He was not thinking this archery is just mundane And he did not know at that time Eventually there is going to be a dharma yudha In which I am going to use my archery skills for Krishna’s sake He is a Kshatriya And as a martial guardian of society He excelled in his archery And eventually Krishna Provided an avenue for him To use his archery skills And we saw how diligent he was He would learn in the day time And at night also he would keep practicing Trying to hit targets Even when he was not able to see them So that is also An aspect of Arjuna, sometimes we don’t focus on that So Arjuna was diligent Even with material responsibilities And that material expertise helped him eventually in his bhakti So we need to have an integrated vision Of Of our life That once our purpose is Krishna Then everything can be spiritualized And There are phases when the material responsibility May take more time, that is fine And later on We need to also give time for Krishna Give more time for Krishna Does that answer your question? Thank you