Reaching Life’s Perfection . 301

elevated. Then when one attains friendship with Krsna, another tran-
scendental 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 feel-
ing: ‘‘Krsna 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 render-
ing service but in making him actually happy and satisfied. There is also
equality in such a relationship, for Krsna and the devotee relate on equal
terms. Thus devotees in this position actually forget Krsna’s superiority.
When Krsna’s boyfriends used to ride on Krsna’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
Krsna, and Krsna 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 relation-
ship, there is no question of insult or inferiority.

The whole basis of Krsna consciousness and a relationship with Krsna
is the pleasure potency of Krsna Himself. Srimati Radharani, the damsels
of Vraja, and Krsna’s cowherd boyfriends are all expansions of Krsna’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 Krsna consciousness recognize the pleasure potency in Krsna
and in all His paraphernalia— His friends, servants, father, mother, and
consort. All relationships with Krsna which aim at satisfying Krsna’s
senses are manifestations of Krsna’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 ex-
istence. 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 Krsna 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
