 Don't Waste Your Life Playing Around in Misery" (Lesson C121) | ||
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I always remember the first time I spent the night at a Hare Krishna temple. I was a 21-year-old counter-cultural songwriter living in Berkeley, California, USA. The year was 1969. A very sweet and wonderful devotee name Makanlal Das, who I often met on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, invited me to come with him to spend the night at the Hare Krishna temple in San Francisco's famous Haight-Ashbury district. This was San Francisco's original ISKCON temple at 518 Frederick Street. I remember that we slept in the basement underneath the temple room.
After rising in the morning I took advantage of a string of japa beads that was kept hanging on a peg on the wall in the temple room for the use of guests, by chanting my first round of Hare Krishna japa. Then after the morning program when I was heading back to Berkeley the most amazing feeling of blissful exhilaration filled my consciousness. I was literally laughing in ecstasy as I crossed the Bay Bridge riding back to Berkeley. And then that evening when I was visiting some friends in Berkeley who were sitting around watching some mindless, stupid television show I got a profound inspiration.
I walked out of their living room taking shelter of their front porch to escape being sucked into that TV show and wrote a song which contained the line, "Do you think I'd waste my time playing around in misery when I am so close to Nirvana?" The experience at the Hare Krishna temple had given me the premonition that I would soon attain the spiritual enlightenment that I been so long seeking. I was thinking, "The last thing in the world that I want to do now is to let my consciousness be sucked the opposite direction into deeper illusion by an inane television show which is totally lacking significance, meaning, and profundity."
I always remember this valuable lesson which Krishna bestowed upon me. The so-called enjoyable things of this material world are simply a façade for misery. A devotee is not fooled by the façade. He instead focuses his consciousness on the Supreme Reality of which we all are a tiny part and harmonizes himself with that Supreme Reality through the bhakti yoga system.
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