Wednesday, 03 March 2010 19:59
Sometimes serving God, the Supreme Lord is understood to be something like slavery, where one is forced to serve. The experience of being servant in this material world can condition us to such an understanding. But when one factually understands the supreme position of being a servant of Lord from authorative books like Srimad Bhagavatam, one cannot stop engaging in the loving service of Lord without expectation, which is our natural condition. Srila Prabhupada in one of his purports explains this difference.
"The Lord is not like the mundane lord. The mundane master or lord never enjoys equally with his subordinates, nor is a mundane lord immortal, nor can he award immortality to his subordinate. The Supreme Lord, who is the leader of all living entities, can award all the qualities of His personality unto His devotees, including immortality and spiritual bliss.
In the material world there is always anxiety or fearfulness in the hearts of all living entities, but the Lord, being Himself the supreme fearless, also awards the same quality of fearlessnessto His pure devotees. Mundane existence is itself a kind of fear because in all mundane bodies the effects of birth, death, old age and disease always keep aliving being compact in fear. In the mundane world, there is always the influence of time, which changes things from one stage to another, and the living entity, originally being account of changes due to the influence of time, which changes things from one stage to another, and the living entity, originally being avikara or unchangeable, suffers a great deal on account of changes due to the influence of time.
The changing effects of eternal time are conspicuously absent in the immortal kingdom of God, which should therefore be understood to have no influence of time and therefore no fear whatsoever. In the material world, so-called happiness is the result of one’s own work. One can become a rich man by dint of one’s own hard labor, and .there are always fear and doubts as to the duration of such acquired happiness. But in the kingdom of God, no one has to endeavor to attain a standard of happiness. Happiness is the nature of the spirit, as stated in the Vedanta-sutras: anandamayo ’bhyasat. Happiness in spiritual nature always increases in volume with a new phase of appreciation; there is no question of decreasing the bliss. Such unalloyed spiritual bliss is nowhere to be found within the orbit of the material universe, including the Janaloka planets, or, for that matter, the Maharloka or Satyaloka planets, because even Lord Brahma is subject to the laws of fruitive actions and the law of birth and death. "
