Science of Identity Foundation:

His Divine Grace
BHAKTISIDDHANTA SARASVATI THAKURA PRABHUPADA

Place: Sri Caitanya Matha, Sridhama Mayapur
Time: Tuesday, 24th February, 1925

The need for unalloyed devotion at the feet of Sri Rupa and Sanatana:

The living beings attain the ultimate goal of life by remembering and rekindling remembrance of Sri Rupa and Sanatana's pastimes. This place is as good as our spiritual master. The Vedas (Svetasvatara Upanisad 6.23) state:

yasya deve para bhaktir yatha deve tatha gurau
tasyaite kathita hy arthah prakasante mahatmanah

"Unto those great souls who have implicit faith in both the Lord and the spiritual master, all the imports of Vedic knowledge are automatically revealed."

THE call for the service of the Absolute must not be confounded with the call for the offer of any bodily or mental function to any limited concern of this mundane existence. The continuance of the aptitude for worldliness shuts out all possibility of spiritual awakening.

It is easy to deny the existence of the soul apart from and independently of the body and mind. It is not at all easy to prove that we can be satisfied with any form of mere bodily and mental existence. The body and mind bind ourselves to this world and its concerns. The ideals and prospects of living, which have been realised by their means up till now, have always been recognised as essentially unwholesome and trivial by the better judgment of the race. The world has always been in travail for bringing forth some ideal that is worthier than any mental concoction. This is the psychological urge of the religious quest.

Expressions such as permanent service and temporary service are familiar to most of us, we can easily understand the meaning of temporary service which evidently means service lasting for a time only but as soon as the words 'permanent service' as uttered although we seem to think that we understand what it means, we feel not a little difficulty in finding out what such a thing as permanent service actually is. The expression 'permanent service' would mean service that would continue for all time to come. Coming to the realities of the world, where we have been placed at the present moment we are disillusioned to find that although there is such an expression as permanent service, really speaking we do not find anything like permanent service here...

In these hard days when the problem of unemployment has been taxing the brains of the intelligentsia of the twentieth century, a discourse with the above caption, it is hoped, will not be out of place. The careful perusal of this short paper may give a ray of hope to the despairing minds of the unemployed.

All service-seekers owe it to themselves in the first place to analyse the object of their search in a thoroughgoing fashion. Service means obeying somebody else. Not a single person is to be found in this or in the next world who is not actually rendering service in some form or other. From the avataras (God appearing in visible forms), from the gods of heaven, down to the lowest and meanest insects on earth, no one can go on without doing service in his own way. Thus from the highest to the lowest all have got to do service. There is only one exception to this rule. It is He Who, according to His Own Sweet Will directly or indirectly receives the service of all of us.

~Insights by Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda

The search for wisdom is a great challenge; to act on wisdom is an even greater challenge. To accept that you are spiritual in essence, that you are an eternal spark of life force, is to open the door on a whole new life. There are many questions now, and there will be many more questions ahead.

~Insights by Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda

“The wise have explained that one result is derived from the culture [cultivation] of [transcendental] knowledge, and that a different result is obtained from the culture [cultivation] of nescience [ignorance].”

—Sri Ishopanishad, Mantra Ten

For one who lives a hedonistic life, a life of exploitation of others, the results are envy, anger, greed, impatience, disrespect for others, anxiety, depression, hatred, ever-increasing lust, forgetfulness, frustration, dissatisfaction, duplicity, fear of death and so on.

~Insights by Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda

We all set goals in our life and put our time and energy into trying to achieve them. But before spending our limited time and energy pursuing those goals, we should first ask ourselves, “Will this goal really give me the happiness I seek?” This is a very important question because if we don’t consider it, we could spend our entire life running at full speed, but in the wrong direction.

~Insights by Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda

We typically think that one who is recognized for his talents or worldly achievements is a “successful” person. Increasingly, people equate driving a Mercedes Benz, owning a large apartment, or wearing fashionable designer-label clothes with “success.” But from the point of view of yoga self-realization, it is a mistake to think that material wealth is real success.

~Insights by Bhakti Siddhanta Saraswati

It is a very patent fact that human life is very short, and that too, most uncertain. The man who walks about with full vigour, hopes, and forms expectations of future, and without the least suspicion of any blast, breathes his last the very next moment. He stops for a good while on his legs as it were. Such occurrences are quite common. Yet they are hardly taken proper notice of, except a passing one. They seem to leave no impression on the minds of the people, as would appear from their usual course of life and modes of activities. Of course, life would, indeed, be miserable and impossible if the horror of death was to haunt the mind at all hours.