Swami Tripurari: To Always Feel the Presence of the Guru

Student: Prabhupada made the statement that he always felt the presence of his guru and that his guru was always with him. So I was wondering if you could explain what that means.

Swami Tripurari: Prabhupada once told me that on one occasion. It was in 1977. Prabhupada had fallen ill and he was in Mayapur where the festival was. And the festival was two weeks in Mayapur and two weeks in Vrindavan. Prabhupada couldn't come down and give the lectures and so at a certain point it became clear that he was not going to proceed on to Vrindvan for the rest of the festival.

So I went to see him and I told him that I wasn't planning on going to Vrindvan for half of the festival. And he looked at me with rather large eyes and said, "Why not?" And I said, "Well, because you are not going to the festival and you are Vrindvan. You are the festival as far as I am concerned." And Prabhupada had told me personally there, in Mayapur, several years earlier during the first Mayapur/Vrindavan festival that, "You should travel all year long and preach and then spend one month with me in Mayapur and Vrindvan", I reminded him of that.

So he appreciated the sentiment, to be sure, but then he said, "No, you are a preacher and you should go and preach to the devotees there." And he said, "Practically I never feel the absence of my spiritual master." And then he said, "Just like in Bhagavad-gita. Krsna spoke in Bhagavad-gita many thousands of years ago. He's not here but if you read the Bhagavad-gita then we feel his presence there." He was emphasizing the point that presence is not necessarily dependent on physical proximity.

One day Sridhara Maharj was sitting on his veranda. After the discussion, and devotees got up to leave, one fellow from another institution who was there visiting made an effort to touch the feet of Sridhara Maharaj. There was a bit of commotion, a kind of falling over people and other stuff like that. And Sridhara Maharaj was like, "What was going on?" He was about ninety-percent blind at the time. And then it became apparent to him what was happening. And he said, "Oh, so that is what you think it means to touch the lotus feet of the guru." And then he elaborated that it was not necessarily a physical thing but that proximity is determined on the basis of consciousness.

Prabhupada used to give an example of an insect like a fly that might happen to land on his lap and how it was in much greater physical proximity to himself than those of us who were sitting at a distance but that we were closer to him by consciousness, hopefully. And lifetimes closer...

The dham, it is said, has this covering, prodamaya. So people stand on the covering. They really don't enter the dham. Therefore you go to the dham and you say, 'Who are all of these people? They are supposed to be in love with Krsna.' Some of their character might be questionable. I remember once going to Radha Kunda parikrama with a group of devotees and one fellow from Radha Kund came up to us and said, "I am vrijabasi." It is said in the scriptures that the vrijabasis are worshipable and so forth. His idea of, 'I am a vrijabasi. I am born in the vraj. Give me money. Otherwise you can't go around Radha Kund, it is quoted in the scriptures.' It was very unbecoming and off-putting and so forth. He was very loud about. 

So I said, 'Let me cite another something from the scriptures for you. Trinad api sunichena, trinad api sahishnuna...', Mahprabhu's third verse of the Siksastakam about humility, tolerance, not expecting honor for oneself, and so forth. But he had no ear for it whatsoever, he just kept going on and on. And so finally I called to one of my Indian disciples, he wasn't a vrijabasi but I pretended he was. I said, "So and so, come here, vrijabasi.", and I gave him a donation and then we went on. 

So, there's an example of someone who is standing on the surface but not entering in. It's a plane of consciousness, Vrindavan, it's not a physical location. There is a facsimile of a physical location. The earthly Vrindavan. But if we study about that we see that it is not a physical location, not just limited to a geographical area, it's a consciousness. Rupa Goswami says it's one of five very powerful limbs of bhakti; sadhu-sanga, nam kirtan, hearing the Bhagavatam, then to worship the deity, to live in Vrindavan. So of them, one of them is to live in Vrindavan. About it, in his commentary he says that if you cannot live there in a geographical sense live there in the mind...He means a meditative mind. 

If you want to call the mental world the subjective world, filled with approximations of what the objective world is like all jumbled together and so forth, beyond that is the super-subjective plane, which is the world of God. I would liken it to the daydream of God. This world is kind of the night dream of God. This is where Vrindavan exists. To go there is more than purchasing a plane ticket. Therefore, it is said also about visiting the dham, what constitutes  visiting the dham? The Bhavagatam tell us...that going there and not taking advantage of sadhu-sanga is to not go there at all. It is like to have the mentality of a cow or an ass. So to go there is to have sadhu sanga, in a sense. Of course the two are differentiated as well, sadhu sanga and to live in a holy place, but the two are co-related in this way. So, what the sadhus are speaking about, the environment that they create by their consciousness, this is what we want to enter into. That is what Prabhupada meant when he said that, 'I never felt the absence of my guru. I am following his instructions.' 

So he was telling me, 'You go there, you are a preacher. You should preach Bhagavad-gita. And what to speak of always feeling my presence, you will always feel Krsna's presence. And so there is no question of not being with me if you are involved in this type of enterprise.' He said, 'Your name is Tripurari so you have to defeat all the demons.' Tripurari is a name for Lord Siva. The Bhagavatam is powered by Krsna to deal with the very difficult situation created by...three flying cities that were defeating the gods. And when there was no hope, Siva was called. And by the power of Krsna he became the enemy of the three cities and prevailed. 'So,' he said, 'Just like that. You should defeat all of the demons by preaching Bhagavad-gita. And preach to the devotees. The devotees are going there, you should go. I will be with you.'

So, this is the idea. And that, really in one sense, is how Sridhara Maharaj schooled us on Srila Prabhupada's disappearance from the world. We were left there homeless, so to speak, parent-less in a way. And, fortunately by Prabhupada's grace, he had opened the door to the association of Sridhara Maharaj and we went through the opening. But he schooled us this way with regard to the disappearance of Prabhupada. On how it creates an opportunity to connect with the guru on another level. There is a necessity now that has arisen in that circumstance and what we have learned and gathered, now it has come to be tested. And so it is all part of the instruction coming from Krsna who arranges the guru, brings the manifestation of the guru and takes him away."

An excerpt from Swami Tripurari's lecture titled: Q&A: To Always Feel the Presence of the Guru