At least lift your anchor

Speaker: Srila Prabhupada
Source: At Least Lift Your Anchor

Perhaps you all remember that a bridegroom party was to go to the bride’s home. In India the marriage party, bridegroom party, the bride, his father, his relatives, go with the bride, bridegroom, to the bride’s home, and the marriage ceremony takes place there in the presence of all kinds of relatives. That is the system. So the marriage was to take place in a different village some miles away, and in Bengal the land is full of rivers. The rivers are considered to be high roads. So it was settled that the bridegroom’s party will start in the evening before the marriage day and reach there in the morning and rest whole day, and in the evening the marriage will take place.

So they got up in a boat, and the boat was started and the, all the members of the bridegroom’s party, the, they fell asleep. It was on the river. The breeze was very pleasing. And next morning when they arose, they saw they were standing on the same place. Then they were surprised, “How is that?” The boatman was asked, “How is that, we are in the same place? We have not proceeded even a few yards. How is that?” The boatman said that “We were plying the whole night. We do not know how it happened.” Then one boatman found out that the anchor was not taken out. The anchor was fixed up, and the whole night they were plying meant the boat was round about the anchor only, moving, and it was… It did not go a step forward.

Similarly, if our anchor, that we want this material happiness, for which we worship God, we may go to the temple, go to the church, offer our respect… Arto artharthi. That is accepted as good. But one has to go far above that position. That means if one, being distressed, approaches Krsna, that “My Lord, I am in distress. Please help me,” the qualification is good in this sense, that he, somehow or other, he has approached God. But his motive is not pure. His motive is material enjoyment.