Our spirtual process starts with hearing. After we become eager to hear, the cleaning of the material desires from the heart starts and as we become free from material desires we become progressively happier. However, it’s a long way back to Godhead. There is a very special verse in the Srimad Bhagavatam that explains how to make this process faster:

“By regular attendance in classes on the Bhāgavatam and by rendering of service to the pure devotee, all that is troublesome to the heart is almost completely destroyed, and loving service unto the Personality of Godhead, who is praised with transcendental songs, is established as an irrevocable fact.” (SB 1.2.18)

The verse mentions “nityaṁ bhāgavata-sevayā” (regularly serving the Bhāgavata). Srila Prabhupada explains that there are two Bhāgavatas: the book bhāgavata and the devotee Bhāgavata. As he explains: “A devotee Bhāgavata is as good as the book Bhāgavata because the devotee Bhāgavata leads his life in terms of the book Bhāgavata and the book Bhāgavata is full of information about the Personality of Godhead and His pure devotees, who are also Bhāgavatas. Bhāgavata book and person are identical.”

When Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu started His sankirtan movement, he very quickly filled Navadwipa with love of Godhead, which quickly overflowed and submerged the whole of India. At the time, not only the direct associates of Mahaprabhu were pure devotees, but also the distant associates, people who came into contact with them, the family members of the people who would come in contact with them, and even people who would come in contact with people who came in contact with them. In this way, Prema spread like a powerful virus, quickly taking over India.

However, just a few hundred years later, Vaishnavism had already degenerated into a conglomerate of sects that had little to do with the original movement of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu. Baulas were living degraded lives and chanting fold songs, just like hippies, Ativadis were worshipping Lord Jagannatha with the goal of becoming one with Him, Saki Bekis were dressing in saris and pretending to be Gopis while at the same time doing the most immoral things, and so on.

How could the original movement, where practically everyone was not only a pure devotee at the level of Prema degenerate so badly? And if it went so wrong the first time, what is the possibility of transforming the current materialistic society into a society of pure devotees, starting the Golden Age that is predicted in the scriptures?

Krsna has three main energies: The spiritual energy (or internal potency), the material energy (or external potency), and the marginal energy (the individual souls, who can choose between staying under the internal energy, or the external energy).

The internal potency composes all the spiritual planets and everything else that exists there. There everything is eternal, composed of eternity, knowledge, and bliss. It equals 75% or more of the creation, and 90% or more of all souls live there. All souls come originally from this spiritual potency and thus are eternally connected with Krsna with a bound of love. This love for Krsna, or Prema, is already inside the soul. More specifically, it is part of the soul, and can’t be separated or lost. As Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu explains:

nitya-siddha kṛṣṇa-prema ‘sādhya’ kabhu naya
śravaṇādi-śuddha-citte karaye udaya

“Pure love for Kṛṣṇa is eternally established in the hearts of the living entities. It is not something to be gained from another source. When the heart is purified by hearing and chanting, this love naturally awakens.” (CC Madhya 22.108)

One facet of our movement that bothers some is the frequent comments that women are Maya. This is the source of much exasperation since it leads to all kinds of negative interactions.

It’s easy to understand that this is prevalent amongst neophytes and that as devotees advance they gradually learn to have a more balanced approach to human relationships. However, why do we have to wait? Is there not a way to fix things from the start, so devotees from all devotional levels can just relate between themselves as normal human beings, without having to go through these different phases?

While this is possible, it can be difficult. The problem is that as long as a person is affected by passion and ignorance, his vision will always be clouded by duality, which will manifest as attachment and aversion. Nowadays, 99% of the world’s population is in this situation, and almost all new devotees come from it. As a result, practically all of us start from this platform of passion and ignorance, and we have to work hard from there to gradually progress into goodness.

Krsna appears in the material world in numerous incarnations. These incarnations are compared to many rivers flowing from an unlimited source of water. Ultimately, all great powerful beings, including the ṛṣis, Manus, demigods, descendants of Manu, and so on are plenary portions or portions of the plenary portions or are empowered by the Lord. All these different incarnations manifest from Lord Kisirodakasayi Vishnu.

However, Krsna is different. Although Suta Goswami initially includes them in the list of 22 incarnations given in the third chapter of the first canto of Srimad Bhagavatam, in verse 28 he reveals that Krsna is in a different category:

ete cāṁśa-kalāḥ puṁsaḥ
kṛṣṇas tu bhagavān svayam
indrāri-vyākulaṁ lokaṁ
mṛḍayanti yuge yuge

“All of the above-mentioned incarnations are either plenary portions or portions of the plenary portions of the Lord, but Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the original Personality of Godhead. All of them appear on planets whenever there is a disturbance created by the atheists. The Lord incarnates to protect the theists.”

This is a very important verse. Srila Jiva Goswami identified it as the paribhasa-sutra of Srimad Bhagavatam. According to him, each book in Vedic literature has one or a few verses that bring the conclusion of the book. That’s the paribhasa-sutra. All the other verses must be studied in the context of the paribhasa-sutra if one wants to properly understand the text.

A small detail about the life of Srila Prabhupada that many may not know is that in the early days of our movement after he wrote the Bhagavad-Gita as it is and Teachings of Lord Caitanya, Srila Prabhupada started writing a commentary on the Vedanta Sutra based on the Govinda Bhashya of Srila Baladeva Vidyabhushana, that he called the “Bhaktivedanta Bhasya”.

To justify the need for such a book, he wrote: “In India especially the system is that anyone who is the head of a religious institution must be well conversed with the Vedanta-sutras, and is expected to write comments on the Vedanta-sutra, without which one is not accepted as an acarya. Acarya means one who knows the purpose of Vedic knowledge. He personally practices them as well as teaches to his disciples the system of Vedic knowledge.”

Being the founder acarya of our society, Srila Prabhupada apparently considered that presenting his own commentary on the Vedanta Sutra, following the conclusions of the previous Vaishnava acaryas would help to solidify the reputation of our society as a bonafide philosophical school.

Srila Prabhupada went as far as writing a lengthy introduction to this book, which was later found and published by Kusakratha Prabhu as a preface to his own translation of the Govinda Bhashya.

Most of us know well the story of Ajamila. In his youth, he was a pure Brahmana who worshiped Lord Vishnu, but he fell into a degraded life after seeing a prostitute embracing a drunk man on the side of the road.

How did Ajamila fall so easily? A woman and a man embracing is a scene that most of us see regularly, for us it doesn’t seem anything special. How is it that it had such a profound effect on Ajamila, to the point of making him abandon his young wife and elderly parents and give up all religious principles to live with a prostitute? Does it mean that living a guarded life can actually prove a disadvantage in the long run?

One point to take into consideration is that Ajamila was able to remain pure part of his life, something that not many of us can clain. Most of us never really reach this stage of purity at any stage. We are bombarded by sexual stimulation since we are children and later get involved with different bad habits, which we have difficulty abandoning later. We may be able to restrict ourselves from grossly breaking the principles, but mentally we are often meditating on these things.

A second point is that the fall of Ajamila is actually quite similar to something that is very common nowadays: divorce and remarriage. It’s mentioned in the verses that Ajamila married the prostitute with whom he became involved. Putting it in modern terms, therefore, he divorced his first wife and married another. Something that is common nowadays.