Talks Excerpt 456. Swamiji answers questions about senses and sadhana.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

Now and then bhakti [devotion] will be weak, and now and then it’ll be strong. But when you become like the gopis – on hearing just one call of Lord Krishna’s flute, you leave everything and run – that is parama-prema. It is prema when we hear God’s voice calling us.

We have bhakti for God all right, we love God all right, but we don’t love Him so intensely that we can leave everything behind and run to Him.

Devotee: Why did Ravana have ten heads?

Swamiji: It has a symbolic meaning – the ten senses. Sri Rama had one head so all the senses were converged in truth, and that truth is one head. Truth always overpowers that which is untruth.

If one of your senses is out of control, you know how it runs riot in your life. But can you imagine what your position would be if all ten senses are out of control? Here it means the ten senses were not under Ravana’s control – though sometimes one was active or two were active, sometimes all were active.

Devotee: When we are too tired to do our evening sadhana, what should we do?

Swamiji: Now this is a very futile question. First of all, you say, ‘when you are too tired.’ How can you measure tiredness? If you can go to the lobby [toilet], if you can go to the table to eat food, if you’ve got time to have a few glances at the TV, then are you tired? You are not tired. But you want to leave your sadhana and give preference to something else which appears to be more important. But the most important thing is your sadhana. You must do your sadhana to the fullest.

If you are sick or if a doctor’s patient is dying; or if somebody is dying on the road, then you have the right to prostrate to the Lord and say, ‘Lord, you are in that person and you would run to his aid if you were here. Lord, whatever little sadhana I did may he get the merit of that instead of me.’

No compromise. You must adopt the attitude of non-compromise. A real sadhaka is he or she who has the attitude of non-compromise with anything except God Himself.

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These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.