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Do you have strong friendships? By this I mean people close to your heart, who are with you through good and bad times, people with whom your life is tightly bound. Will these relationships endure at your deathbed and beyond? There is only one person who is tightly bound to us beyond the barrier of death. He has always been with us, even before this life. He is a friend who knows the contents of our heart… and yet we have somehow managed to forget Him. We have inconceivably lost our most important relationship… Of course, in the ultimate sense this relationship can never be lost; we only lose our consciousness of it. We are always a part of Krsna for we are souls and the soul is part of God. But we have to awaken from our forgetfulness to fully benefit from that one relationship.
In the Second World War, family members from countries like Poland and Romania were torn apart. Years after the war they again found each other. Imagine the moving scene when a son was reunited with his old parents. How must he have felt? In some cases, people were infant when they were separated from their families but nevertheless they felt a deep bond when they met as adults. Their natural relationships started to blossom as soon as they were active in those relationships – talking to each other, eating and working together as a family. Just as these inactive relationships were revived instantaneously, our relationship with Krsna can be reactivated the moment we turn to Him – for example when we go on pilgrimage to a holy place such as Vrndavana, the home of Radha and Krsna. Transcendental feelings of love awaken just by visiting Them ‘at home.’
In Vrndavana or Mayapur, the home of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, one can engage in chanting or other devotional practices and especially feel, ‘Krsna is here and I have a substantial relationship with Him.’ No one has to tell you about it. It comes naturally.
Srila Prabhupada writes in The Nectar of Devotion: ‘The places in the eighty-four square-mile district of Mathura are so beautifully situated on the banks of the Yamuna that anyone who goes there will never want to return to this material world.’1 1 Nectar of Devotion, p. 111.