This is one of the practical aspects of bhakti that people sometimes get confused about. When they hear all the statements of humbleness, or they themselves feel humble, some devotees make the mistake of turning it into an insecurity complex. Like, “I'm really not good enough. I'm not a good devotee. I'm not a good person.” There's an adjustment that needs to be made to that.
The fact is, none of us are good people, none of us are good devotees. We've all done uncountable sins. We cannot imagine how bad we are. If somebody tells you, “Oh, you would have murdered someone in your past life!” We can't even imagine that, that we would have murdered another person. We've done unlimited murders in unlimited past lives. All the heinous crimes we've done, and we've done even worse than that. These are social crimes, physical crimes. We've also sinned against saints. We've said horrible things about God. We've wasted the chances God has given us as a human to follow the path of devotion and surrender ourselves to Him. So we are truly the most fallen that it's even possible to be.
This is a fact for all of us. But you just accept that, and you feel like, “Okay, Krishna is my parent! Radha is my mother! Krishna is my father!” We're all their ignorant children. So an ignorant child is going to make lots of mistakes and do a lot of wrong things, but the parent still feels an ‘apnapan’ - the parent still feels that this child is ‘mine’. So that's the combination that we need in devotion, “Yes, I'm a spoiled child, but I'm your spoiled child.”
So, “I'm not going anywhere. Even if you forget Me, I'm not forgetting you, although that's impossible.” Radha Krishna could never forget us. They could never leave us even for a second.
Nonetheless, this attitude makes you a strong devotee, “You may ignore me, but I'm never leaving You. You may never come to me, but I'm going to keep calling out to You. I am Yours. Where else do I have to go?”
You see the combination? We're accepting our lowly state, and at the same time, we're saying, “Yes, I'm the lowest of the low, but it doesn't matter because You are mine!”
So both of these feelings go together. It's a combination. It seems like a paradox or a contradiction, but they can both exist in the mind at the same time, and this is the real feeling of devotional humbleness, that we feel we are no better than any other person.
Truly, we feel that in our heart, but at the same time that just feels like a relief, “Oh, I don't have to be great. He accepts me like this.”
This is the state of devotional humbleness that Mahaprabhuji is teaching us.
