Are we ready for the Challenge?

A lesson from a materialist

Hare Krishna!

Yesterday, I attended a social gathering on the occasion of the wedding of one of my acquaintances. He is part of an activist group (which I will not name for the sake of anonymity) which looks out for social problems and tries to activate the exploited to rise up and fight against the oppression. Even though the problems they try to solve are purely on the bodily plane, still their intention is noble, at least on the face of it. There are innumerable such organizations or activist groups. They have always been around and they will always be around in the future too. And of course, the problems they try to solve will also always be around. That is, they will never be solved, for the simple reason that the activists do not know the root cause of all the problems – lack of Krishna Consciousness. Lord Krishna confirms this in the Bhagavad Gita 17.28, “Anything done as sacrifice, charity or penance without faith in the Supreme, O son of Prtha, is impermanent. It is called asat and is useless both in this life and the next.”

But we will not go into that in this article. What I want to point out in this article is that even some of these people show a lot of dedication and determination to follow the way of life they believe is the best. This acquaintance of mine has married a spouse who is also a social worker. My acquaintance did not consider how physically attractive the spouse is, how educated, how much is the salary, and so on, but just considered that the two of them can together follow their chosen path. This was quite inspiring to me. We can learn so much from the lives of such determined people.

We, as Krishna Conscious people, have the highest goal in front of us. To become Krishna Conscious, and to make others Krishna Conscious. Do we know of a loftier ideal to follow in life? If not, then we must be prepared to sacrifice a lot of things in order to achieve our goal. We must be determined that no matter what, we will follow the path in the best possible way. This is what I learned yesterday from a materialist. Can we surrender ourselves to Krishna more than any materialist does to his/her ideal? Are we prepared to take on this challenge? Time will tell.

Your servant,
Abhijit.