By Yamaraja Dasa

During a lecture in his recent visit to New Shantipura, our dear Bhurijana Prabhu came across a statement which struck me with wonder. He said, "Wisdom is a high spiritual principle applied to a practical life". He also elaborated that as children often have childish romantic and idealistic ideas about their future life and things in the world ought to be, an adult who had already experienced how difficult life was, sees and deals with life in a completely different way. In this kaliyuga, everything is so difficult.

To certain degree, we all know how to be idealistic. We don't have problem with that, other wise we would not chose to become a devotee. Because we were exposed to so many ways that we understand love and devotional service to Krishna is the last word of idealism. We don't, I guess, have problem to be practical, neither, because material energy forces us to be so at every moment. Yet the mysticism is that we find an union, a balance, an integration of the two. All the great spiritual teachers and acaryas came to our life to teach us how to do so.

When I first met Gurudev (HH Tamal Krishna Goswami), I was overwhelmed and almost unable to take it that someone who is a spiritual teacher being so pushy in so many practical way and in so many details. Gurudeva completely changed my conception of spiritual life and KC. This is a manifestation of an inconceivable balance between idealism and practicalism, which is a symptom of a matured spiritual adult.

I remembered last time when i met Tirtharaj Prabhu he told me that Gurudeva once said, we should always be prepared for bad things to happen, because this is material world. This is spiritual practicalism, but this has nothing to do with pessimism or negativism in anyway, because at same time we are working under a most brilliant and idealistic goal that we will be united with the most wonderful krishna in an eternally blissful life. We just need to be clear that that reality will not be accomplished within the material energy.

Internally, we should always know, meditate and desire the most ideal, but at same time externally we should be able to see what is there in the practical world, and be happy to accept and start from whatever is there. We are to see with the eyes of sastra, and then act according to the knowledge of time, place and people of the practical situation, this is the real meaning of sastra-caksu. In this way the material world is neither attached nor rejected. It is in the right perspective. And this is yoga, the union of idealism and practicalism, spiritual and material. Applied in a negative way, we could be judgemental, narrow, short in tolerance and patience and even blinded to reality with this so called "sastra-caksu".

As we have the right to be perfect and ideal, we also reserve the right to be cautious when we see something happening in a too ideal and too perfect way, or someone want things to happen in that way externally. It is always questionable when everything seems to be so perfect and so right. Because the perfection we are after is ultimately an internal state. The history of our movement is, in a sense, a history of trying to balance between polarities of the idealism and practicalism of Krishna Consciousness, and Gurudeve is an unique model in this regard.

Intelligence is the power of discrimination, it is the ability to see what is black and what is white by separating. Wisdom, however, is the power of integration, it is an spiritual art to see black in white and white in black. We do gain intelligence with learning, studying and practice, but we will gain wisdom within, through an involved life, bytime, divine grace and association.