Hare Krishna Prabhujis and Matajis,
Please accept my humble obeisances! All glories to Srila Prabhupada and Srila Gurudev!
We have been meditating on glorifying the Lord in the offerings titled, "108 Ways of Glorifying the Lord". In the last few offerings, we were seeing few of the glories of Lord mentioned in verse 8 of Isopanishad,
sa paryagāc chukram akāyam avraṇam
asnāviraḿ śuddham apāpa-viddham
kavir manīṣī paribhūḥ svayambhūr
yāthātathyato ’rthān vyadadhāc chāśvatībhyaḥ samābhyaḥ
Such a person must factually know the greatest of all, the Personality of Godhead, who is unembodied, omniscient, beyond reproach, without veins, pure and uncontaminated, the self-sufficient philosopher who has been fulfilling everyone's desire since time immemorial.
We shall continue to meditate on the next glorifications - self sufficiency and fulfilling everyone's desires since time immemorial.
Glorification 18 - The Lord is self sufficient: In the above verse svayambhu means self sufficient. The dictionary meaning of self sufficient is, "able to supply one's own needs without external assistance". Krishna is self-sufficient because He can expand Himself to satisfy His needs and wants. He doesn't require anyone's help. He's completely independent. But still He's so kind that He kindly comes in the form of arca vigraha and accepts services from His dear devotees. He gracefully accepts the bhoga that is offered to Him with love and devotion and returns it back as prasadam for us. That is His causeless mercy. He is never in need of our service. But just for the sake of our own purification, He kindly bestows us with opportunities to serve Him. In Srimad Bhagavatam verse 7.9.11, Prahlad Maharaj addresses the Lord as 'nija-lābha-pūrṇo' and Srila Prabhupada nicely translates this phrase as, "One who is always satisfied in Himself (He does not need to be satisfied by the service of others)."
Glorification 19 - The Lord fulfills everyone's desire: A poet has said that if all the trees in the world were pens, if all the rivers and seas in the world were ink and the entire sky was a canvas, and one was asked to write his/her desires, still this paraphernalia would be insufficient to write down all our desires. That is the amount of desires that one develops during our material life time. And the subtle mind stores desires from time immemorial which makes it uncountable. Now depending on our eligibility and what we deserve (not what we desire) our desires get fulfilled either in this life-time or in some other life-time. It is indeed a herculean task to keep track of each living enities karma and desires and accordingly fulfill their desires. To fulfill all these desires is not possible for anybody else other than our beloved Lord. He is the only one who has got the potency to do such an insurmountable and unperceivable task. Not only does Krishna fulfill the desires of devotees, but also atheists, karmis etc. Atheists do not want to remember Krishna but want to enjoy without Him separately and hence He gives them all kinds of reasons to forget Him. Karmis want material desires and worship Him and according to their eligibility, they get their desires fulfilled. Devotees want pure devotional service and He grants them that based on their level of surrender. In this regard let us meditate on couple of instances from Srimad Bhagavatam. One is the Brahma-vimohana lila. In this pastime, externally it appears as if Lord expanded Himself in the form of gopas and cows just to reveal His potency to Brahma. But Lord also wanted to fulfill the desires of all the elderly gopis and cows of Vrindavan who wanted to have Him as their child. So for one full year Lord became the son of each of them and both the mothers and the cows were extremely pleased and loving towards their children and calves respectively. Also one of the reason for Lord to enact the Govardhan pastime is to smash the pride of Indra. But the internal reason was that Lord wanted to give His continuous association to all the inhabitants of Vrindavan simultaneously. Earlier, when Lord was at His home, only Nanda Maharaja and Mother Yashoda were able to see Him. When He went to the forest to graze the cows, only His friends and cows were able to see Him. Since all the inhabitants of Vrindavan were sincerely desiring for His association, through the Govardhan lila the Lord granted them continuous darshan for 7 days and 7 nights. So let us sincerely desire to serve the Supreme Lord at all times.
Krishna willing, we shall continue our journey of glorifying the Lord in the upcoming emails.
Thank you very much.
Yours in service of Srila Prabhupada and Srila Gurudev,
Anand Patil
Wellington, New Zealand.
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