Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
When we were making Golden Volcano,
[Pizza-Love | Heart Disease]
Śrīla Guru Mahārāj said, “First”, he kept saying,
“Golden volcano—divine lava.”
And then he would say,
“Is lava love?”
Like that, “Is lava love?”
And then he would go on describing a little more,
“Golden volcano—divine lava. Is lava love?”
And so he asked me, “Are there any connections
between the word ‘love’ and ‘lava’?”
So, this is pre-internet, pre-digital,
when there were these things called libraries—
you probably read about them on Wikipedia.
So, we live next to a major university
with a pretty large library.
So I went there and I thought,
I’m going to consult what they call ‘OED’—
the Oxford English Dictionary,
it’s huge, like, each giant book volume
for a letter, like ‘A’, ‘B’ ….
So I thought, I’ll look up ‘love’,
because I couldn’t find any connection with that and ‘lava’.
So I find in the book, “L—Love”,
and it’s this book you read with a magnifying glass, the type is very small,
and seeing … going up and down the page,
and at last, it said, “Sanskrit—from the sanskrit:
‘lobha, lobhyati’”, which means ‘desire’, like, passionate desire.
Like we know, if you associate with Americans
for any particular length of time,
you’re likely to hear them say something like:
“I love pizza!”
So I can say, “Is that love? Pizza love, is that love?
Or are we back to hankering? Mundane hankering—
desire to consume something.
When it’s pizza we can smile and laugh about it;
when it’s another person it’s not so funny,
if you’re the one being consumed or devoured
by somebody’s *** or desire in the name of love—an attachment;
they’re so attached to this consuming tendency
that Guru Mahārāj says is identified in the pages of
the Bhāgavatam as ‘hṛd-rogam’— ‘heart disease’.
As he told that man: “What is the root cause of suffering?
What is this heart disease?”
This ‘I want’—thinking if I can acquire something
and devour that, consume that … We’re called consumers,
all over the world; ‘Consumer Protection.’
We’re consumers; if I can consume something,
I’ll find happiness and satisfaction and fulfilment.
And it’s really on the basis of remembering
the very high śloka,
vikrīḍitaṁ vraja-vadhūbhir idaṁ ca viṣṇoḥ śraddhānvito ’nuśṛṇuyād atha varṇayed yaḥ
bhaktiṁ parāṁ bhagavati pratilabhya kāmaṁ (SB: 10.33.39).
So, it’s so extraordinary that in this practical dealing and situation,
Guru Mahārāj would recall this śloka
from the rāsa-līlā section,
but use it in practical application
by saying —factoring in reincarnation—,
“When I was in the body of an elephant,
I ate a jungle, and that hunger wasn’t satisfied;
and when I was in the body of a stool eating pig,
I ate a hill of stool, and it was not satisfied.”
And interestingly, when Guru Mahārāj
preached to this man like that, the man started to cry,
because he was a little embaressed by what he had said before that,
like, “What is the benefit of establishing some place,
just talking about Kṛṣṇa? Why don’t we help people?”
And Guru Mahārāj said, “You’ll not help them that way.
Only by re-purposing attachment will you help them.”
So the man started to cry, and then he said,
“Swamiji, I believe in God”,
and Guru Mahārāj said,
“Your eyes are the evidence of that.”
Hare Kṛṣṇa.