When the false ego comes in, we can quickly become covered over by not following the process. Forgetting Krishna can happen really quickly—we know it in a day. And if you look at yourself in a twenty-four hour day, where your mind goes—it’s amazing; it can go all kinds of places. Can’t it? In twenty-four hours. What to speak of twenty-four hours, in five minutes it can go all kinds of places! So when we don’t follow the process of Krishna consciousness that Prabhupada gave us, then we become a little dull, and our ideas become very prominent, and our personal opinions become very prominent; and we become a little weak, and then we forget Krishna.
So Srila Prabhupada gave us this process, and he said, “It is glorious, please take it. Make it your life.” This life goes by so quickly. I know if you are teenagers, it seems like forever between one year and the next. But those who are in your mid-thirties now; you see how fast the years go by. They really do. I am almost seventy years old. And all I can say is that this life went so fast. It seems like just a few days ago, I was twenty-five. It just shoots by. But we want to commit. We want to get to the big “commit” word. How do we get to the big “commit” word? Try to associate with people who are more advanced than you are. Put time into the process of self-realization. Look at how you are doing. Look at where you can improve—where you can be better. What do you need to make yourselves stronger? And you know, if you do this, then just baby-step by baby-step you start to crawl, and then you walk, and then you run. It will happen, and you will feel the magic—the Krishna magic. It is the peace formula. It is the path of freedom. We are all looking for freedom, aren’t we? In the material world, they have a song that says, “Let freedom ring.” So we want that freedom, but actually we are bound up, almost in shackles—almost as if we are shackled down by material consciousness. There is no freedom better than the freedom of Krishna consciousness. And sometimes when a devotee so-called leaves, or they get weak, they are almost always looking for some kind of freedom separate from Krishna. But this is a very wonderful process. We have the most wonderful guides; we have support systems everywhere if just know where to look for them. And Krishna, our Gurus and the Vaishnavas are holding the rope out to us. We just need to grab onto it—and that means to commit.