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TEXT 10 vita-raga-bhaya-krodha
SYNONYMS  vita--freed
from; raga--attachment; bhaya--fear; krodhah--anger;
mat-maya--fully
in Me; mam--unto Me; upasritah--being fully situated; bahavah--many;
jnana--knowledge; tapasa--by penance; putah--being
purified; mat-bhavam--transcendental love for Me; agatah--attained.
TRANSLATION Being freed
from attachment, fear and anger, being fully absorbed in Me and taking
refuge in Me, many, many persons in the past became purified by knowledge
of Me--and thus they all attained transcendental love for Me.
PURPORT As described
above, it is very difficult for a person who is too materially affected
to understand the personal nature of the Supreme Absolute Truth. Generally,
people who are attached to the bodily conception of life are so absorbed
in materialism that it is almost impossible for them to understand that
there is a transcendental body which is imperishable, full of knowledge
and eternally blissful. In the materialistic concept, the body is perishable,
full of ignorance and completely miserable. Therefore, people in general
keep this same bodily idea in mind when they are informed of the personal
form of the Lord. For such materialistic men, the form of the gigantic
material manifestation is supreme. Consequently they consider the Supreme
to be impersonal. And because they are too materially absorbed, the conception
of retaining the personality after liberation from matter frightens them.
When they are informed that spiritual life is also individual and personal,
they become afraid of becoming persons again, and so they naturally prefer
a kind of merging into the impersonal void. Generally, they compare the
living entities to the bubbles of the ocean, which merge into the ocean.
That is the highest perfection of spiritual existence attainable without
individual personality. This is a kind of fearful stage of life, devoid
of perfect knowledge of spiritual existence. Furthermore there are many
persons who cannot understand spiritual existence at all. Being embarrassed
by so many theories and by contradictions of various types of philosophical
speculation, they become disgusted or angry and foolishly conclude that
there is no supreme cause and that everything is ultimately void. Such
people are in a diseased condition of life. Some people are too materially
attached and therefore do not give attention to spiritual life, some of
them want to merge into the supreme spiritual cause, and some of them disbelieve
in everything, being angry at all sorts of spiritual speculation out of
hopelessness. This last class of men take to the shelter of some kind of
intoxication, and their affective hallucinations are sometimes accepted
as spiritual vision. One has to get rid of all three stages of attachment
to the material world, negligence of spiritual life, fear of a spiritual
personal identity, and the conception of void that underlies the frustration
of life. To get free from these three stages of the material concept of
life, one has to take complete shelter of the Lord, guided by the bona
fide spiritual master, and follow the disciplines and regulative principles
of devotional life. The last stage of the devotional life is called bhava,
or transcendental love of Godhead.
According
to Bhakti-rasamrta-sindhu, the science of devotional service:
adau sraddha tatah sadhu-sango 'tha bhajana-kriya
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