On hearing sweet kirtans is the happiness we experience spiritual or material?

Podcast

Duration: 2 min

Transcribed by: Suresh Gupta

Question: On hearing sweet kirtans, is the happiness we experience spiritual or material?

Answer: We should focus not so much on where the feeling is coming from. Rather we can focus on where the feeling is taking us. Doing too much analysis may not help. For example, if there is a class and in the class, there is a joke. We hear the joke and laugh at it. We may think, “Am I laughing for Krishna’s pleasure or my own pleasure? Is this joke giving me material pleasure or spiritual pleasure?” We do not have to become so hyper-analytical. If we are experiencing emotions in the ambit of devotional activities, we can consider those emotions to be spiritual and taking us towards Krishna. If we make our bhakti practice dependent of the practice of those emotions, then we will be unsteady. However, while doing the practice of bhakti steadily, if sometime we experience emotions that is wonderful. We can see such experience as Krishna giving us some advance taste of what we will experience eventually.