Package Deal

A godbrother said that when you accept Krishna consciousness, it is like a package deal; you accept everything – the demigods in the higher planets, the four-armed forms, the thousand-headed forms, and so on.  Everything starts to be part of the same axiomatic truth – whatever is in the Vedas or whatever is taught by the spiritual master.  You do not pick and choose.  Besides, there is a reason why everything is believable.  If it is not “believable” to you, that is also understandable.  You do not have to comprehend it with your own brain – it is often beyond you.  Once you accept these premises, then you accept particular teachings that sound strange to outsiders on the principle of acintya, inconceivable knowledge.  And as we know, knowledge borne of the senses is defective.  The realities of other worlds don’t have to tally with our world.  The guru knows what is right.

Once you plunged into it, you began to accept it.  You saw American devotees painting pictures of Visnu with four arms.  There is Lord Visnu and He does have four arms, and it is not the most impossible thing in the world.  You have two arms and He has two more arms.  What’s the big deal?  There is spiritual form.  We started getting unstuck from our previous conceptions by Prabhupada’s grace.

This was a school where we sat in his apartment and asked questions, and where he lectured in the temple and taught us all these things.  We became different than other people.  We became his “confidential devotees”.  As he said in one lecture, “The other day some of our confidential devotees were talking together and we all concluded that Krishna consciousness is the great need of human society.”