Lessons from the Road

Blessed Forgetfulness

By Satsvarūpa Dāsa Goswami

DEVOTEES SOMETIMES asked Śrīla Prabhupāda if when we go back to the spiritual world we will remember our former lives in the material world. Prabhupāda said we would forget them forever. In a purport to Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam (3.33.27), Prabhupāda writes:

A great Vaiṣṅava said that he who has no remembrance of his body is not bound to material existence.… When one forgets his bodily existence, his conditional material life is over. This forgetfulness is actually possible when we engage our senses in the transcendental service of the Lord.… Constant remembrance of the Supreme Lord is called samādhi, or trance.

This does not necessarily imply that a devotee forgets he has a head and feet, although in the most advanced stages that may happen. Forgetting the body means forgetting our selfish uses of the body. We were given a body because of our desire for sense gratification. Forgetting the body means forgetting that purpose and becoming completely absorbed in devotional service.

Forgetting the body creates a change in the subtle body. When our forgetfulness is constant, then at the time of death we will remember Kṛṣṅa alone and not have to take another material body, but will return to Kṛṣṅa.

Śrīla Prabhupāda illustrated this point one evening during a Kṛṣṅa book reading in his Los Angeles backyard garden. We were reading about Lord Brahmā stealing the boys and calves. Kṛṣṅa left the boys in Brahmā’s cave for an entire year. During that year, Kṛṣṅa expanded Himself into exact replicas of each of the boys and calves and allowed Himself to be loved by all their parents. At the end of the year, Brahmā returned the boys and calves, who all thought that Kṛṣṅa had been gone only for a few moments. They joked with Him, “Oh, You have come back so quickly. Were You anxious that we would eat without You? Don’t worry, we haven’t eaten yet.” Śrīla Prabhupāda commented, “Yes, this is how it will be when we go back to the spiritual world. All of our past births, all the miseries and so-called happiness, will seem like they never happened. We will simply join Kṛṣṅa's pastimes.”

It sounds simple enough, and attractive enough, but here we are in the practicing stage of Kṛṣṅa consciousness, not forgetting our bodies and not forgetting a lifetime full of material impressions. We also find that those past impressions create obstacles in our attempts to perform devotional service. They actually prevent us from constantly appreciating Kṛṣṅa's transcendental nature.

For example, our past association with mundane sex prevents us from understanding the spiritual nature of Rādhā and Kṛṣṅa. Prabhupāda drew the analogy of the cow caught in a barn fire. Even though she escaped, whenever she sees red she links it with the fire and panics. She has been traumatized by the fire. Similarly, after countless births and deaths in the material world, we have become traumatized by our associations here, and they have become obstacles to our full appreciation of Kṛṣṅa consciousness.

The psychologists’ definition of trauma is a painful emotional experience or shock that produces a lasting psychological effect. Often, it is something experienced in childhood. One may not even remember the incident, though it may still be causing irrational fears or unexplained patterns of behavior.

Freud said that if a patient could be brought to the point of remembering the traumatic incident he could be cured. When this theory was presented to Śrīla Prabhupāda, Prabhupāda agreed that trauma was possible to cure, but he added, “How can he prevent more trauma, not only in this life but in future lives? So what is the benefit of that cure?”

The first traumatic event is birth. Although a soul in the womb may pray to become Kṛṣṅa's devotee, the shock of birth overwhelms him with bodily identification. He becomes forgetful of Kṛṣṅa. Our work as devotees is to reverse this forgetfulness by engaging ourselves in devotional service.

We can learn to forget the myriad subtle material impressions we have accumulated. Kṛṣṅa says in the Bhagavad-gītā that He is the source of all knowledge and forgetfulness. It is by His permission that we forget our constitutional position as His servants, and it will be by His mercy that we can forget our bodies and be fully reinstated in remembrance of Him.

We can also help ourselves. The more we engage in Kṛṣṅa consciousness, the less likely we will be to continue gathering material impressions. Eventually, our Kṛṣṅa conscious memories will outweigh our material ones. We shouldn’t again take up material life and create new impressions to forget, and we shouldn’t do anything that will obstruct our spiritual vision. That is how we can help ourselves.

We may never quite forget that we have hands and feet, but when we begin to engage everything we have in Kṛṣṅa's service, there will be no more trauma. We will no longer be identifying with the material world.

When Śrīla Prabhupāda was in Vṛndāvana before coming to America, he wrote a poem called “Vṛndāvana-bhajana.” Here are some lines from that poem:

I am sitting alone in Vṛndāvana-dhāma. In this mood I am getting many realizations.

I have my wife, sons, daughters, grandsons, everything, But I have no money, so they are a fruitless glory. Kṛṣṅa has shown me the naked form of material nature; By His strength it has all become tasteless today …

This is misery, but it gives me a laugh. I sit alone and laugh. … All that is left of the family life is a list of names.

When the pure devotee remembers a previous life, he is not gripped like the cow—“Fire!” He laughs at his previous life. This is as good as forgetting it. He doesn’t identify with that life.

Of course, a devotee repents his past sinful acts, and that repentance is the beginning of his humility. But he is not traumatized by his previous life. His past no longer has power over him. The Bhāgavatam describes the experience of one pure devotee, Devahūti:

Having heard … from her son, Kapiladeva, … Devahūti began to meditate constantly upon the Viṣṅu form of the Supreme Lord. She did so with serious engagement in devotional service. … She became situated in knowledge due to realization of the Absolute Truth, her heart became purified, she became fully absorbed in meditation upon the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and all misgivings due to the modes of material nature disappeared. … Situated in eternal trance and freed from illusion impelled by the modes of material nature, she forgot her material body, just as one forgets his different bodies in a dream. (Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 3.33.24, 25, 27)

Satsvarūpa Dāsa Goswami travels extensively to speak and write about Kṛṣṅa consciousness. He is the author of more than two dozen books, including a six-volume biography of Śrīla Prabhupāda.