Reaching Life's Perfection
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elevated. Then when one attains friendship with Krṣṇa, another transcendental quality is added. There is the conception that God is great and that service must be rendered unto Him, but there is also an extra feeling: “Krṣṇa is my friend. Therefore I must treat Him in such a way that He will be happy.” With a friend we are not simply content with rendering service but in making him actually happy and satisfied. There is also equality in such a relationship, for Krṣṇa and the devotee relate on equal terms. Thus devotees in this position actually forget Krṣṇa's superiority. When Krṣṇa's boyfriends used to ride on Krṣṇa's shoulders playing games, they did not think that they were greater than Him. There is no question of sense gratification or self-glorification, for the relationship is based on pure love. The devotee's only desire is to give pleasure to Krṣṇa, and Krṣṇa also takes His friends on His shoulders to derive pleasure from them. Sometimes a person simply accepts the fact that his friend will slap his face—but there is no question of inferiority in such an action. When friendship and mutual pleasure are the basis of the relationship, there is no question of insult or inferiority.
The whole basis of Krṣṇa consciousness and a relationship with Krṣṇa is the pleasure potency of Krṣṇa Himself. Śrīmatī Rādhārāṇī, the damsels of Vraja, and Krṣṇa's cowherd boyfriends are all expansions of Krṣṇa's pleasure potency. We all have a tendency toward pleasure because the source from which we emanate is fully potent in pleasure. Impersonalists cannot think in these terms, for they deny the pleasure potency; therefore the impersonalist philosophy is incomplete and inferior. Those who are in Krṣṇa consciousness recognize the pleasure potency in Krṣṇa and in all His paraphernalia—His friends, servants, father, mother, and consort. All relationships with Krṣṇa which aim at satisfying Krṣṇa's senses are manifestations of Krṣṇa's pleasure potency.
As far as the individual soul is concerned, it is originally a part and parcel of this pleasure potency, of the reservoir of pleasure Himself. However, due to contact with material nature, the soul has forgotten its actual position and has become trapped in the evolutionary process of transmigration from one body to another. Thus one struggles hard for existence. Now we must extricate ourselves from the sufferings of the struggle, from the countless transmigrations that force us to suffer the miseries of birth, old age, disease, and death, and come to the point of our eternal life in Krṣṇa consciousness. That eternal life is possible. If one tries his best in this human form of life, in his next life he will get a spiritual body. The spiritual body is already within the gross material body, but it will develop only as soon as one becomes free from the