Knowledge

Fearing that worship of persons or qualities might overcome them, men who pride themselves as scholars of partial understanding, take refuge in the formless and immutable, and in the end are deprived of the treasure of prema.

If these evil philosophies exist in your country, you should try to correct them. If this creates a confrontation with cunning and deceitful people, you should accept it for the sake of Śrī Mahāprabhu.

Religion in which various anarthas such as atheism, skepticism, materialism, and impersonalism are present, the devotees do not accept as religion. In fact, such religions are to be accepted as irreligion, cheating religion, reflection of religion, or non-religion.

If you gain this knowledge simply by listening to what people say, and looking through books, you cannot wage war with the enemy. When one listens in terror to the deep roar of the invading enemy, one cannot find this hidden knowledge. The senses etc. will be aroused. Therefore, going to war merely with knowledge is simply self-deception.

For one who has not yet received the nectar-laden teachings of the Gītā-śāstra, carrying the burden of other śāstras is simply another name for śāstra-gardabhatā (hauling śāstra like an ass).

Those who have analysed the system of avatāras according to the primitive state of humanity start with Ṛṣabhadeva. From the avatāra of Pṛthu, humans learned agriculture; similarly, it is seen that there are twenty-four avatāras corresponding to twenty-four types of conditions. The gradual evolution of humans is observed through the avatāras. In the avatāra of Nārada, the path of bhakti is established, and in the avatāra of Vyāsa, the Śrīmad Bhāgavata, which is the supreme basis of all knowledge, was revealed. Even through this evolutionary process, kṛṣṇa-tattva remains supreme.

With great enthusiasm I spent my time in the pleasures of mundane learning, and never worshiped Your lotus feet, O Lord. Now You are my only shelter. Reading on and on, my hopes grew and grew, for I considered the aquisition of material knowledge to be life’s true goal. How fruitless those hopes turned out to be, for all my knowledge proved feeble. Now I know that all such erudition is actually pure ignorance.

Nowadays, many people have an overestimation of their own knowledge without reading anything, and some become proud paṇḍitas by accepting the explanations of scholars without doing any research themselves.

Without properly exploring which substances are implied by the term ‘matter’ and what their various qualities are, no one is capable of clearly understanding conscious substances. For this reason, texts on material science should be respected, and the pioneers of that science should be rewarded.

Some devotees, desirous of bhakti, do not consider philosophical conclusions to be divisions of bhakti, and thus develop laziness in entering into them – however, that is not an auspicious thing because when one comes to know sambandha-jñāna in relation to Kṛṣṇa, one’s mind becomes firmly attached to His lotus feet. Hence, such true philosophical conclusions are the very root of pure bhakti.