Japa Mini-Course Installment 8
Paying the Price of Faith
You won’t be able to totally put your heart into chanting if you don’t fully trust Krsna. The maha mantra is a prayer for complete surrender. It is a plea to become an insignificant servant and allow your master to do with you as He pleases. But do you really, truly want this? What if these prayers were fulfilled? Would that be a problem for you?
In other words, is surrender something you fear at some level? If you are afraid you would be unable to handle surrender, how can you fully give yourself to a prayer that is asking for the very thing you fear? This is the great paradox we must overcome in order to reach the stage of pure chanting.
To inquire from a spiritual master there must be submission and surrender for the process to be effective. It’s exactly the same with chanting. If you are not chanting in the mood of surrender, if you fear (on some level) the results chanting will produce, you’ll tend to modify your mood to reflect the mood of St. Augustine when he prayed, “Oh Lord, give me celibacy, but not just yet.”
Faith is the basis of bhakti. It is defined as unflinching trust in something sublime. Pure love for Krsna is the maturation of this faith. Faith means that if I give myself to Krsna I need not worry about anything else; He will take care of me and do what is best for me. This deep level of trust is necessary to come to the level of pure chanting.
Of course, chanting is purifying and less than perfect chanting is better than no chanting. But it’s possible to chant for years (or lifetimes) and not let go of the very attachments that undermine proper chanting. This is so harmful that it’s listed as one of the ten offences in chanting (maintaining material attachments). Any of these offences are so detrimental that they will impede us from achieving the desired result of chanting, Krsna prema.
You are meant to come to the point of saying, “Krsna, I am yours and do with me as you please.” It is at this point that you can fully surrender to your chanting. And when you do this Krsna will take care of you - both materially and spiritually - better than you can take care of yourself. The question we all need to ask ourselves is, “Do I really believe this?”
Faith is a special kind of wealth, and it is the price we must pay for love of Krsna; for it is only through faith that we get the pure holy names, and it is only through the pure holy names that we get pure love of Krsna. Nityananda Prabhu is selling the pure holy names for the price of your faith. Are you ready to buy them?
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