So liberation means the more you are enlightened the value of life, the more, then you become liberated. The more you become liberated, the more you are advanced in your spiritual knowledge, sata, sat, sat-saṅga. Therefore, these meetings which we hold every day, they are meant for advancing in spiritual life. Here, there is no program how to become very rich, how to possess more motorcars, how to have more bank balance, how to have nice dress. These are material things. Or ignorance: how to sleep thirty-four hours a day, although we have got twenty-four hours only.
So here we see big, big men, they sleep up to two o'clock. Early rising means two o'clock. That is also early, but not at day two o'clock. At night two o'clock if you rise, that is nice. But they are accustomed to get up two o'clock. Because they think, "The more we sleep, we enjoy life." Therefore, they are śūnyavādī. They want to become zero, sleeping always. Śūnyavādī. "Make everything zero." That is called śūnyavādī.
No, that is not life. Śūnyavādī is not life. Activity is life. Kīrtanīyaḥ sadā hariḥ (CC Adi 17.31). Caitanya Mahāprabhu says: "Don't become zero, but be engaged always in chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra." That is Kṛṣṇa . . . Caitanya Mahāprabhu's cult. We are not going to be zero. We want to be very active, but active not for sense gratification but for Kṛṣṇa's service. Now what is Kṛṣṇa's service? That we are teaching, how to worship Kṛṣṇa.
- śravaṇaṁ kīrtanaṁ viṣṇoḥ
- smaraṇaṁ pāda-sevanam
- arcanaṁ vandanaṁ dāsyaṁ
- sakhyam ātma-nivedanam
- (SB 7.5.23)
These are nine kinds of services. They are sat. The more we are engaged in these nine kinds of different occupation of devotional service, the more we are elevated. And the more we are engaged in activities of material sense gratification, we are degraded. Śrama eva hi kevalam (SB 1.2.8). You have got nice office, material point of view, nice business. So if you perform that business, office work, your duty, very nicely, but you have no Kṛṣṇa consciousness, śāstra says that śrama eva hi kevalam. It is simply wasting time and laboring hard. That's all. Therefore Kṛṣṇa says that this is the distinction between sat and asat. And we should not be very much interested with the asat. Then our life is spoiled. We should be interested with sat. That will make our life successful. Then we make progress for amṛtatva.
Unfortunately, people at the present moment, they do not know, neither they can imagine even that there is possibility of becoming immortal. This is very important point. There is not possibility, there is fact. And kṛṣṇa-kīrtana is so important. In the śāstra, many places, it is said. Kīrtanād eva kṛṣṇasya mukta-saṅgaḥ paraṁ vrajet (SB 12.3.51). That param is . . . means spiritual. There are two kinds of, parā- and aparā-prakṛti. Aparā-prakṛti, parā-prakṛti. Apareyam. Yam. This material world is aparā, inferior energy. Itas tu viddhi me prakṛtiṁ parām. Besides this, there is another prakṛti, another nature, which is parā. Parā means spiritual.