Devotee (2): You'll miss the opportunities.
Prabhupāda: Yes. Therefore it is helpful. If you want to do business, you must take the first opportunity, the greatest opportunity, do your business. That is intelligence. And if we think, "All right, I shall do slowly. In seven hundred lives I shall become perfect," that is another thing.
Bali-mardana: It is riskier to stay outside.
Prabhupāda: Oh, yes. Very risky. Otherwise why you are opening so many centers and making arrangement that "We shall provide you with shelter, with food? These are the facilities. You live here, do whatever is your capacity. Don't sleep, but work." This is our teaching. (japa) Satāṁ prasaṅgāt, this is also. And Rūpa Gosvāmī says, sato vṛtteḥ sādhu-saṅge sadbhir bhaktiḥ prasidhyati (Upadeśāmṛta 3): "If you live with the association of sādhu, devotee, then it will be quickly fruitful." And if you live with these ordinary men, then whatever you have got will be finished very soon. There is another verse. It is said there that it is preferred to live within the cage surrounded by fire than to live with the nondevotees. It is preferred.
Bali-mardana: Or with those who are too much attached to women also.
Prabhupāda: Yes. Nondevotee means too much attached to woman. That is the plain fact.
Yaśodānandana: Also one time in Bombay you told this verse from Caitanya-caritāmṛta, sādhu-saṅga (CC Madhya 22.83), sādhu-saṅga . . .
Prabhupāda: . . . sarva-śāstre kaya, lava-mātra sādhu-saṅge sarva-siddhi haya (CC Madhya 22.54). For me, personally, I had the opportunity to talk with my spiritual master not more than ten times in my whole life. Not more. It may be less than that. But I tried to follow his instruction, that's all, although I was a gṛhastha.
Bali-mardana: You are a much better student than us.
Prabhupāda: So this is the process. That is the . . . you sing every day, guru-mukha-padma-vākya, cittete koriyā aikya. That is the process. Wherever you live, if you follow strictly the instruction of guru, then you remain perfect. But if we create, concoct ideas against the instruction of guru, then we are gone, hell. Yasya prasādād bhagavat-prasādo yasyāprasādān na gatiḥ kuto 'pi (Gurv-astaka 8). There is no more shelter—finished. Yasya prasādāt. If guru thinks that "This person, I wanted to take him back to home, back to Godhead. Now he is going against me. He is not following," aprasādāt, he is displeased. Then everything is finished.