Worlds Apart

Consciousness and unconsciousness

When I resigned from my networking job at that large internet company, I was in a bit of a dilemma about what reason to give them for leaving such a lucrative position.

I could not really tell my manager and my coworkers that I was going to take sannyas (at least, not without a lot of extra explaining) or, as Goswami Maharaj put it, that "I no longer choose to move and act under the deluding potency of maya," now could I?

I knew these guys; I had worked there for seven years. We were worlds apart in terms of consciousness. As stated the Bhagavad Gita [2:29]:

ya nisa sarva-bhutanam
tasyam jagarti samyami
yasyam jagrati bhutani
sa nisa pasyato muneh

"That spiritual plane of consciousness which can clearly be seen by self-realized persons is dark to all living beings bewildered by materialism. Conversely, this mortal world of sense enjoyment in which all materialistic persons are absorbed has no attraction the wise who are engaged in self-realization."

Not that I am self-realized or anything, but at least I could understand that my real self-interest lay in that direction, in the direction of the conscious world. My highest prospect was in trying to serve Guru and Vaishnava, in trying to enter into that service world, not in trying to please my manager and director by servicing the network so that we could make the figures for the next quarter...

I had to leave everything and run to this side.

So what did I tell them? Ultimately, I told them that I had to leave for family reasons. I just did not tell them that that family was the family of Krishna :-)