by Radhanath Swami
Relationships
- Meaningful relationships require trust. To be worthy of receiving trust, we have to be trustworthy, and trustworthiness means being truthful.
- Healthy relationships are hard work. Those who put in that work usually learn to see things not through the eyes of ego but with humility, which makes apparently insurmountable differences seem insignificant.
- What’s the best way to cultivate spiritual relationships? Bhakti saint Rupa Goswami suggests these simple ways: Confidentially reveal your mind to your close friends. Listen to your friends when they open themselves up to you. Be giving; give gifts. Receive gifts from friends with gratitude. Offer friends sacred food (prasada). Eat with your friends. Be hospitable and invite them home for meals. Be supportive. Graciously receive sacred food from your friends. Affection is reciprocal.
- Humility, tolerance, patience: choosing these over ego when dealing with others helps us and pleases God, the Supreme Father, because any parent is pleased to see his or her children getting along.
- “Humility is not to think less of yourself but to think of yourself less.”
- Everyone has faults, but more important, everyone has a beautiful soul. We have the power to choose whether to focus on people’s virtues or their faults—to fill ourselves and them with positive or negative energy.
- Good character is a necessary foundation for meaningful, sustainable relationships and for a healthy community.
- All human beings need to feel appreciated, and this is especially true of family members.
- We should always remember that we have a spiritual responsibility to our family members and explore every possible way to remain united for our higher purpose.
- We must accept our family members for who they are despite our differences, while we ourselves faithfully adhere to the values we hold sacred.
- Pilgrimage is a special opportunity to receive the blessings of saints and deepen our relationships with like-minded people who walk with us on the pilgrimage of life.
Talents
- Both our possessions and our talents are divine property entrusted to us, and we are truthful when we recognize that and use them with humility and gratitude.
Love
- In an evolved spiritual culture, we love people and use things. Unfortunately, in today’s world, people are prone to love things and use people.
- Contentment lives only in the hearts of those who are grateful. When we’re grateful for the opportunities and gifts we’ve been given in both good times and bad, we can attract grace.
- We all have infinite importance, because God loves each of us.
- Love is selfless when it’s given simply to please another without any expectation of return. In selfless love, we consider our own risk, loss, or inconvenience secondary, if we consider them at all. Selfless love is offered in a spirit of gratitude, enthusiasm, and courage. It gives one the kind of inner satisfaction that makes all selfish pleasures pale by comparison.
- The dharma of every living being is seva, or loving service.
- For true love to awaken, we need to rise to a state where we approach the Supreme for love untainted by selfishness or material expectations.
- Choose to see adversity not as the consequence of a cruel, purposeless universe but as an opportunity to offer selfless love.
Responsibility
- As the most developed of all forms of life, humans are meant to be caretakers of the environment and the world’s other living beings.
- To be genuinely compassionate, to feel another’s suffering as your own, to make the serious, lifelong attempt, as far as possible, not to inflict pain on any living being, directly or indirectly, through our actions, words, or thoughts, is ahimsa.
- Our diet should be as compassionate as possible. Instinctively, we know the difference between harvesting plants and killing animals. Just compare the natural, invigorating scene of harvesting a wheat field or vegetable garden to the screams of horror, the morbid stench, and the pooling blood at a slaughterhouse. Still, it’s true that killing plants is also an act of violence.
Suffering
- The material world is a place of eventual suffering.
- Suffering is a universal experience. We all suffer physically and emotionally. But as we develop a deeper self-awareness, we learn to acknowledge suffering without identifying with it. Eventually we even transcend it.
Maha mantra
- Repeating a mantra frees the mind from anxiety and illusion.
- But which mantra should we chant? The Vedic literatures, and the Upanishads in particular, declare that this mantra is the perfect spiritual method for the times in which we live—an age of quarrel and hypocrisy. The mantra is: Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare
- The maha-mantra serves as a prayer: “O Radha, O You who bestow grace, O Krishna, O Rama, please engage me in Your loving service.”
Guru
- The defining characteristic of a guru is not the ability to perform miracles or superhuman feats but to lead an exemplary life of selfless devotion under all circumstances and to inspire and empower his or her disciples to do the same.
Prayer
- Prayer is how we express gratitude for the life we’ve been given.
- The key to prayer is to speak with sincerity, gratitude, honesty, and humility.
Bhakti Yoga
- Bhakti yoga teaches us that a dynamic life of devotional service, mantra meditation, and association with uplifting people creates a foundation for our spirituality that keeps the mind steady.
- On the bhakti path, surrender is the art of dedicating our abilities, resources, family—whatever we have—with love, to the Supreme Being, for his pleasure.
- Bhakti yoga has five potent, timeless practices that help the practitioner to awaken this love: 1. Living in sacred space (and tuning into grace), 2. Spiritual relationships and spiritual community, 3. Chanting the holy names of God, 4. Hearing from sacred literature, 5. Worshiping the Lord, however you know him, with faith and veneration.
Eternal soul
- At the time of death, you close your eyes and then open them again and you are home.
- Since the atma experiences time and the physical world through the body, understanding who and what we are begins by understanding who and what we are not.
- We are not the body we inhabit. We are not the mind either. We live in a body and mind.
- We are actually eternal. When we realize this, we become joyful.
- For the imperishable soul, this lifetime is like a single pencil point in a long line of many lifetimes with dots extending to eternity. If we can’t see beyond the present moment, we’ve missed the point.
- Karma never touches the atma, or soul. It is the body and mind that experience good and bad karmic reactions
Disclaimer: The key points of the book presented here are not a substitute for reading the book. To get the entire holistic message the author has offered requires reading the book.
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