When we have to spend time on family duties, how can we stay strong in our devotional standards?

Transcript

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Hare Krishna.
Questions from Videsh Mahabharata Prabhu. When we have some duties to do towards family members also, how do we maintain our strength in our spiritual life by which we can take a strong stand internally and fight against temptation? This question is based on the Gita Delhi article, those who take a strong stand internally, stand strong externally. So, as we have primary duties towards our family members, how can we stay strong in our devotional life also? Answer, the two don’t have to be contradictory.
Our family duties and our devotional duties, they can be complementary. In fact, they can be symbiotic. Symbiotic means that when we do our spiritual duties more effectively, then that keeps our mind calmer, that helps us to think clearer and then that enables us to do our worldly duties also more responsibly.
And when we do our worldly duties properly, that also gives us realizations of the truths of Krishna consciousness. Living in the world after having assimilated the message of Krishna can be an ongoing education where we see how people act, how things happen in the world and all that can help us to learn more and more about in experiential way what Krishna has taught in the Bhagavad Gita. So, then both of them can work not just complementary but symbiotic, contributing to each other.
And for this, we also need to associate with senior devotees, senior grahastha devotees who are also practicing the spiritual life seriously and doing their material life responsibly and observe them and learn from them. We can read about Bhaktivinod Thakur and his life, how he balanced the various activities of his life and we can also learn from our own experience. But in principle, we should know that actually if we truly love our family members and want to do our responsibilities to them, we won’t think of our responsibility as primary because we are not the body, we are the soul.
So, primary means the most fundamental, the most important responsibility of ours is with Krishna. And then we have relationship with others. This does not necessarily mean that it has to work out that way in terms of time.
In terms of time, there will be different ways in which we will work out as per the practical situation. But in terms of our understanding, it is our relationship with Krishna, the vertical relationship that is eternal and the horizontal relationships are temporary. So, we need to balance both of them.
And that balance is something which we can learn by studying the philosophy properly, by associating with senior devotees and then both can go along together nicely. So, the important point is that we have some basic time for our spiritual life, for our minimum sadhana and we also find out what are the things that give us strength in our devotional life and do them so that we also have that feeling of being strong and then do our material duties. We don’t have to neglect our material duties because it’s often not just the quantity.
Sometimes when we do spiritual activities a lot of time, the nature of the mind is that it gets bored with doing the same activity for a long time. So, sometimes if we just spend a lot of time on spiritual activities, if I decide that I am going to study scripture for six hours, sometimes it may be a blissful experience and sometimes after one hour I may find that we start looking here and there, we start looking at the watch and then we just drag along. So, rather than just thinking of activities of spiritual life in terms of quantity of how much time we are giving, we can think of the quality and that way if we remember that I am never going to have infinite time for either my devotional activities or my material activities, that will itself act as an inspiration because that means, now if I have to chant my rounds, this one and a half hours is what I have got and this is the amount of time that I am ever going to have, tomorrow or day after or two years later or whenever.
So, then it is in this time that I have to improve my quality. So, let me put in the best that I can and then that can inspire us, let me do this. So, when we don’t wait for the availability of more time for improving the quality and remember that it is within the limited time that we have that we will be able to, that we will have to improve the quality whenever we make the result improve the quality, then we will be able to actually bring in the sense of urgency in our efforts for improvement and we will find that even within limited time, we can improve our devotional activities and often meditating on how improving our devotional activities can keep our mind so much calmer and may help us to think so much clearer, that can help us to do our devotional activities also much better because devotional service, the very fact of devoting ourselves to Krishna cuts down our lower passions, cuts down our lower desires and it inspires us to act more more purely, more selflessly, more sensitively towards others.
So, again we shouldn’t have that notion that in order to do our material duties we have to spend a lot of time. Yes, time is required no doubt but often the quality of the interactions that we have they also matter a lot and even if we are doing things for others, if we are doing them while being irritable, in a grudging mood, influenced by passion and ignorance, then even when we do something for others, others are not as much pleased but if we are, if we really do a small thing also but do it with our heart and express ourselves sensitively, lovingly, then the way, whatever we did, the way we gave the gift is remembered much more than the specific gift that was given. So, in both ways, if we think not so much in terms of quantity of time required for material life and quantity of time required for spiritual life but remember that just because all of us are finite human beings and we have only 24 hours in a day, the amount of time that we are going to have is always going to be limited.
So, better let me focus on trying to improve the quality and we will find that doing our spiritual activities properly to the best of our capacity and remembering that I have finite time only so I can’t expect more time to improve the quality that within this time only I have to improve my quality then we will be able to improve that quality and we will be able to get that inspiration, that insight that improving my spiritual life will also improve my material life in terms of the quality of time and the quality of responsibility, execution that I am bringing in the material life. In this way, we can make material life and spiritual life not contradictory but complementary and more than complementary, symbiotic. Thank you.