To those who worship life itself...

Have you ever opened up a book and felt like that page was written just for you? Upon picking up Dear Sky, Letters from a sunnyasi, early this afternoon, I had a sneaky suspicion this is exactly what happened. Thus, I will share with you a page that hit me upside the head. The following is a letter written by H.H.Satsvarupa dasa Goswami in Trinidad on March 16, 1992:

To those who "worship" life itself,
Sometimes when I talk with people like yourselves I feel a little intimidated because you claim that Krsna consciousness doesn't give enough attention to life. In the Krsna conscious philosophy, we teach that the material world is actually an illusion because it is temporary. The material manifestation is real in that it comes from God and is God's eternal energy, but it is unreal because it does not last. Reality lies in what is eternal. However, we don't dismiss this temporary manifestation. Human existence is certainly poignant and full of opportunity. This life is a brief time in which a person can develop surrender to Krsna to the fullest extent. This assures his going to the eternal spiritual world in the next life. So that opportunity of this life is very precious.

I think my main point to you is this: your religion is contained within mine. By this I don't mean to deride or minimize your religion. Rather, I mean this as a prelude to a friendly exchange. We are part of the same family. But if one simply "worships" life without the transcendental goal, it is hardly a religion.

I have a particular viewpoint in Krsna consciousness. As someone who tries to serve through writing, I have a proclivity to capture the experience of life as it passes. This is Krsna's time and place: how can I reject it? And by writing down the day I can see how well I used this previous life. Krsna says in the Bhagavad Gita: "To one who always sees Me everywhere and sees everything in Me, He is never lost to Me and I am never lost to Him."

So I guess I'm also writing this letter indirectly to devotees of Krsna-to remind then that attention to temporary phenomena is important if the temporary phenomena includes our very life in this body and our attempt to become Krsna conscious. When we communicate with each other and share what is valuable, it's not just that we quote the sastra to each other or talk about the times that existed in Vedic culture five hundred or five thousand years ago. We have to talk about the present and share our love according to time, place, and person.

I request you, worshippers of life itself, please don't accuse this devotee of not thinking as you think. It's something that's always there consciously or unconsciously, even when I perform the transcendental activities in our temple. We can't escape it-the sensory input, the temporary thought, the sense of time passing, and the impossibly rich texture of this temporary life. This is especially true for someone like me who is in a transitional stage; I have two feet in this world and my eyes on the spiritual world.

I'm so grateful to Prabhupada that I'm not a confused piece of flotsam going through this life and making vain gestures or laments about the mutability of all things. I see this world, in all its mutability, as Krsna's energy. And sometimes I take a stronger attitude and see it as insignificant. But I have my moments of appreciation and an enduring respect that everything is sustained by Krsna, even in this material world.

Worshippers of life itself, I would like to hear from you, see any poems you write, or pictures you paint of this world. But my deepest hankering is for the spiritual world. Therefore my best use of this precious time is to absorb myself in the transcendental material that brings me directly to Krsna.

Vaisanva dasanudasa,
Satsvarupa dasa Goswami