How to Stop Collecting New Sin Daily

You have already dealt with the past. You went to the temple, or sat down alone and said the whole thing out loud, and for one clean hour the weight came off your chest. Then Tuesday came, and Wednesday, and by the end of the week the ledger had quietly filled again. Nothing dramatic happened. No crime was committed. Only the ordinary business of earning, spending, wanting, eating, competing, and yet the same heaviness is sitting in you again, and you cannot name a single event that put it there. This is the situation almost nobody addresses. Nearly every discussion of sin you will hear concerns absolution for what is finished. Very few concern the leak that is running while you read this sentence. You are not chiefly a man carrying an old debt. You are a man opening a new account every morning before breakfast.

How to Stop Collecting New Sin Daily

Understand this difference, because everything that follows depends on it. Kṛṣṇa does provide for the accumulated past, and He provides for it decisively; the boat of transcendental knowledge burns previous reactions to ashes, and that is a subject deserving its own treatment. But consider what such a promise is worth to a man who is still holing his own hull. You may bail water out of a boat all night with great sincerity and much sweat, and if the plank below the waterline is still open you will be bailing again tomorrow night, and the night after, until you are too tired to lift the bucket. The bailing was not wrong. It was simply incomplete. The plank is the thing. So where is the plank? Kṛṣṇa names it in Bhagavad-gītā 3.9 without decoration: work done as a sacrifice for Viṣṇu has to be performed, and otherwise work causes bondage in this material world. Read that a second time and notice how wide it is. He does not say that wicked work binds. He says work binds. Your office, your accounts, your ambition, the perfectly respectable labour you are proud of. Every act performed for your own enjoyment lays down a reaction, and you perform hundreds of such acts before lunch. Which is why He then gives the criterion that separates the bound man from the free one, and it is not the criterion you are expecting.

brahmaṇy ādhāya karmāṇi saṅgaṁ tyaktvā karoti yaḥ lipyate na sa pāpena padma-patram ivāmbhasā

— Bhagavad-gītā 5.10

Translation: One who performs his duty without attachment, surrendering the results unto the Supreme Lord, is unaffected by sinful action, as the lotus leaf is untouched by water.

Purport: Look closely at the image He selects. Padma-patram ivāmbhasā, as the lotus leaf is untouched by water. The leaf is not sitting on the bank. It is not in a cave, not on a mountaintop, not hiding from the pond at all. It is lying flat upon the water, surrounded on every side, and it comes up dry. That is the entire teaching held in one picture. What insulates you is not distance from activity but the surrender of the result. Saṅgaṁ tyaktvā, having abandoned attachment, dedicating the work to the Supreme. Kṛṣṇa is explicit in Bhagavad-gītā 6.1 that the true renouncer is not the man who lights no fire and performs no duty, and in Bhagavad-gītā 18.5 that sacrifice, charity and penance must never be given up, since they purify even the great souls. Do not resign your post. Change the address to which the fruit is sent.

The Leak That Nobody Plugs

Now I will take you into the one room you have never audited. You examine your speech. You examine your temper. You examine your dealings in money with some care. You have never once examined your kitchen, and your kitchen runs three times a day, every day, for the whole length of your life. Nothing else in a householder's routine has that frequency. Kṛṣṇa treats it as a matter of first importance and builds an entire cosmology around it in Bhagavad-gītā 3.14 and 3.15: all bodies subsist on food grains, grains are produced from rain, rain is produced by yajña, and yajña is born of prescribed duty, so that the all-pervading Transcendence is eternally situated in acts of sacrifice. Nothing on your plate originated with you. You did not make the rain. You did not make the seed, nor the sun that fed it, nor the tongue that tastes it. And in Bhagavad-gītā 3.12 He states plainly what a man is who enjoys such gifts and offers nothing in return: a thief. Not a sinner in some vague and philosophical sense. A thief, receiving goods he never paid for and never acknowledged. Kṛṣṇa then gives the consequence and the cure together in a single verse, and I will warn you before you read it that the language is not gentle.

The Lotus Leaf and the Water That Cannot Wet It

Begin, and begin small enough that you will still be doing it in a month. Take one meal, only one, and before you touch it place it before Kṛṣṇa, ask Him to accept it, and chant His names over it. Do not wait until the household is reformed or every ingredient beyond reproach. One offered meal a day is an enormous distance from none, and a year of it is three hundred and sixty-five. For the rest of your hours, Bhagavad-gītā 9.27 frames it as widely as language allows: whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you offer or give away, whatever austerity you perform, do that as an offering to Me. Before you open the file, say it. This is for You. Three seconds, and the day's fruit changes its destination. If even that is beyond you, He has anticipated you in Bhagavad-gītā 12.11: if you cannot work in consciousness of Him, work while giving up the results. He keeps lowering the bar rather than removing it. One thing more, without evasion. Where guilt has stopped being conscience and become a condition, persistent and disabling, breaking your sleep and appetite for weeks, go to a competent doctor exactly as you would for a fever, and stay under treatment. What I place before you is the soul's dimension, and it is no substitute for medicine. Kṛṣṇa Himself makes regulated eating and sleeping the ground of all practice in Bhagavad-gītā 6.17.

yajña-śiṣṭāśinaḥ santo mucyante sarva-kilbiṣaiḥ bhuñjate te tv aghaṁ pāpā ye pacanty ātma-kāraṇāt

— Bhagavad-gītā 3.13

Translation: The devotees of the Lord are released from all kinds of sins because they eat food which is offered first for sacrifice. Others, who prepare food for personal sense enjoyment, verily eat only sin.

Purport: Bhuñjate te tv aghaṁ pāpā ye pacanty ātma-kāraṇāt. Those who cook for their own sense enjoyment eat only sin, while the devotees who accept the remnants of sacrifice are released from all kinds of sins. Now hear me carefully, because this verse is regularly picked up and used as a club, and it was never given as one. Kṛṣṇa is describing a mechanism. He is not passing sentence on your soul. He is showing you the exact place where fresh reaction enters your life, quietly, three times daily, in food you had assumed was neutral. And having named the problem in the harshest available terms, He immediately makes the remedy almost absurdly easy. Bhagavad-gītā 9.26: a leaf, a flower, a fruit, water, offered to Him with love and devotion, and He accepts it. That is the price of entry He has fixed. He did not fix it high.

Eating: The Most Overlooked Source of Reaction

Now go deeper, because the mechanics are not the mystery. Why should a sentence spoken over a plate of rice alter anything? Reaction is not a substance stuck to the act like grease. It is a consequence of ownership. The instant you say this is mine, this is for my enjoyment, you have made yourself proprietor of the result, and a proprietor is liable. Kṛṣṇa says the man who has given up all sense of proprietorship is not affected by sinful reactions in Bhagavad-gītā 4.21, and that the steadily devoted soul who offers the result of all activities to Him attains unadulterated peace, while the one greedy for the fruit becomes entangled, in Bhagavad-gītā 5.12. Same field, same plough, same harvest, two different men, because one signed the deed over and the other did not. This is how Bhagavad-gītā 2.50 can promise that devotional service rids a man of both good and bad reactions in this very life, and can call yoga the art of all work. Not the art of avoiding work, but of doing it. Nārada told Vyāsadeva the same in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 1.5.32, that the best remedial measure for all troubles is to dedicate one's activities to the service of the Supreme Lord. In the next verse he asks the question that settles it: does not a thing, applied therapeutically, cure the disease caused by that very same thing? Work made the disease. Offered work is the medicine.

Take shelter today in the two places where your life is actually leaking. Before the work, offer the work. Before the food, offer the food. Kṛṣṇa's own summary in Bhagavad-gītā 3.30 is to surrender all your works unto Him, with no desire for profit, with no claim of proprietorship, free from lethargy, and then to fight. Not to withdraw. To fight. Do it clumsily. Do it while doubting whether it counts. The lotus leaf does not strain to stay dry; it is simply not attached to the water. And chant His holy names over both offerings, Hare Kṛṣṇa Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa Hare Hare, Hare Rāma Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma Hare Hare. He gives His word in Bhagavad-gītā 18.66 that He will deliver the one who surrenders to Him. He set no minimum on how well you must do it. He set a minimum of a leaf and some water.