Krishna´s birth is just a manifesting of Himself.....

Krishna´s birth is just a manifesting of Himself. He was ever present and He is ever present. When we say that somebody is born, it means that there is also death, an end, but He who, is without beginning and without end, He can’t be born. He is just a manifestation of Himself – the Appearance that the Lord chose for Himself to manifest. You all know the story of Krishna, how He was born, so I will not tell the whole story again. He says in the Gita about His plan to manifest Himself: “Yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati bharata abhyutthanam adharmasya tadatmanam srjamy aham” which means that whenever there is a decline, whenever there will be anything terrible happening in the world, He will manifest Himself. Of course, the Lord always manifests Himself, but in the minds of the people, they want a big manifestation, a bang, but He is everywhere. So Mahavishnu, Narayana, took this form to help Mother Earth, because Mother Earth appealed to Narayana, saying to Him: Help me. I am suffering so much. The demon Kansa is terrorising and hurting me. (Actually, it’s not hurting directly Her, but the people.) The Lord answered to Her: Yes, I will manifest Myself. I will come. Then He chose the right time and manifested Himself into the womb of Devaki. He was born in a prison. The mother and father were locked there, because an Akashvani, a celestial announcement, had said to Kansa that the eighth child of Devaki would kill him. Of course, everybody is scared of death. Even Kansa, who was a great and knowledgeable devotee of Shiva, was scared of death, because death was unknown to him. This is because whenever we look at death, we look at our limited self. Kansa was so scared that he wanted to protect himself. He didn’t want to be killed. He didn’t want to face his own death. So it so happened that there were Devaki and Vasudeva. They were in love and they got married. And on their marriage day, Kansa, who was the brother of Devaki, was happily bringing his newly married sister and brother back to his place. He said: You are my favourite sister, you know, I have to bring you to my place. But, as they were going, they heard a voice from the sky that said: Kansa, you fool, what are you doing? Don’t you know that the eighth son of your sister will kill you? Again, here you see the number 8. People who do numerology know very well how important is the number eight: it’s the number without beginning or end. So now the Akashvani had said to him that the eighth child of his sister would kill him, and, of course, that enraged him. At that moment he wanted to kill his sister, because he thought “no sister, no death”. But Vasudeva stopped him and said: How can you kill a woman? All the people will say that you are just a coward. Of course Kansa, who was very proud of himself, didn’t want that, so he said: Okay, I will imprison them. Then Vasudeva answered to him: Yes, OK, imprison us and every time, when she gets a child, I myself will bring that child to you, then you can do whatever you want with that child. So Kansa imprisoned them. He imprisoned, also, his father, because the father was, also, against him. Then he invited all his demons friends to come and rejoice with him that he had become a king. Every year a new child was born and every time Vasudeva brought the child to Kansa who, without any mercy, would kill the child, but the seventh child of Devaki disappeared. When Devaki was pregnant with the seventh child, the child miraculously disappeared from her womb and appeared in Rohini’s womb. So, in the night Rohini was sleeping, and the next day she found herself pregnant. It’s scary, isn´t it? Matajis, what would happen if you would wake up tomorrow pregnant? So, the same way, Rohini was shocked, but she accepted it. She was old, but she got pregnant, so it should be considered as something miraculous. So she accepted the will of God. Then they told to the King that Devaki and Vasudeva had lost their child. And the King, Kansa, was so happy, saying “Look, the child was not even born yet, but he was so frightened of me that she lost it.” He didn´t know, of course, that the Shakti was transferred to Rohini. Then a few months passed and Devaki got pregnant again. Here you have to see that it’s not in the same way that you all are thinking, when I say that Devaki got pregnant. It was not in the way how normal people got pregnant. You see, after she lost her seventh child, Kansa tied Devaki to one part of the room and Vasudeva to the other side of the room and thought that, in that way, the eighth child would not be born and so could not kill him. Kansa was thinking, in the same way, that Devaki, his sister, would get pregnant in the normal way, not knowing that it was the Lord Himself that would manifest Himself. But even when Devaki and Vasudeva were tied to the different corners of their jail room, Devaki became again pregnant with the eighth child. And the night when the child was born, at the very moment the child was born, the prison room was filled with so much light. And when the child was born, Devaki and Vasudeva saw the true form of Sri Krishna, which is Mahavishnu, with Shanka, Chakra, and Gadha, standing in front of them. Then Mahavishnu said to Vasudeva: Take the child and bring him to the other side of the river, where there is Yashoda who is expecting and, when you get there, exchange the babies. There is another baby, a girl, there. You should take her and bring that baby here. And you should leave this baby, your child, there. The chains were unlocked and all the guards, who were guarding them, had fallen miraculously asleep. When Mahavishnu was in front of them, they could remember all of their past lives; they could remember everything. Why Mahavishnu and they were there and why the Lord would have to manifest Himself through them, now, was because, in one of their past incarnations, Devaki and Vasudeva had been a king and a queen, who had wanted so much to have God as their child. They had done penance for thousands of years, Mahavishnu was really pleased with them and had promised to them: Whenever I will incarnate myself next time, it will be through you. Because of the Maya Shakti, they had forgotten about everything, but now, in this moment when they were in front of Mahavishnu, they could remember everything and who they had been. So Vasudeva did according to what Mahavishnu said: he took the baby, put Him in a basket and carried Him from the prison. All the guards of the jail had miraculously fallen asleep and there was nobody stopping them. Vasudeva entered the water of the Yamuna carrying the baby and, as he was going deeper and deeper into the Yamuna River, Yamuna wanted so much just to touch the feet of the Lord. And the moment the feet of the baby Krishna touched the water of Yamuna, she became very calm. It was raining so much that Sheshnag, the serpent god, even came behind to cover baby Krishna. Vasudeva crossed over to the other side of the river with Him. Then he saw Yashoda and Nanda, her husband, sleeping and that they had just got the baby girl. Yashoda had just given birth to a baby girl, but she didn´t even know that – such is the manifestation of His Maya. So Vasudeva quickly exchanged the babies. He took the baby girl with him and left baby Krishna there, as Mahavishnu had asked him to do. Then he crossed over the river to the other side and everything became normal again. The next day, when they all woke up in the prison, the guards heard the cry of the baby and they rushed to the King and told him “Kansa, your sister has got again a baby.” Kansa rushed quickly down to the prison and opened the door and said “Give me the baby.” At that moment Devaki answered to him “No, my brother. It was said that my eighth son would kill you, but I didn’t get a son, I got a daughter.” Hearing this, Kansa calmed down. Then he started to think “Why did the voice say that it would be the eighth child? But this is a girl, how could a girl kill me?” Then his mind started to reason a bit and he said to himself “What if this is Vishnu Maya? What if it is Vishnu Himself in that form?” With that resolution in mind, he took the baby and said “Yes, I will kill this baby. He took her and he was going to throw her on the wall, the same way like he had done with the other babies, but at that moment, the baby flew up and changed Her form to the form of Durga, Maha Shakti. Then She laughed at Kansa saying “You fool you want to kill me? You can’t. The One who will kill you is born already. Count your days!” So Kansa was really, really scared at that moment. Then he rushed back to his sister and said to her “What have you done? Tell me.” But, of course, Devaki and Vasudeva could not remember anything, because Mahavishnu had covered them again in Maya, so that they wouldn´t remember anything what had happened during that night. Vasudeva had even forgotten that he had taken the baby Krishna to the other side of Yamuna and exchanged Him with Yashoda´s and Nanda´s daughter. And now they heard that when Kansa had wanted to kill that baby girl, she had flown up and taken the form of Maha Shakti and warned Kansa. Of course, Kansa was not that stupid: He knew that if Maha Devi had said that the Lord had already manifested Himself and that he has to count his days, he would have to try everything possible to find and kill the baby. From that day on Kansa started his great killing. He killed all the children who were born around that time. He sent demons all around to terrorize the people who were praying, so that they would stop praying. And his demons were very successful everywhere where he would send them. There was only one place, Gokul, that only when he sent a demon to Gokul, the demon would not come back. He got killed there. Then Kansa started to think “Why in all other places where I have sent the demons, they were very successful, but only in this one place the demon got killed and didn´t come back?” Like that he understood that the Lord had to be in that place – in Gokul. When Nanda and Yashoda woke up and saw the baby Krishna, it was a great surprise for them, because they were both very fair skinned, but when they looked at their child they saw that He was so dark. But they were so happy that they had a son. And this child was so special that whoever would look at Him would automatically fall in love with Him, because He was the personification of Love. So, of course, they wanted to make a big party for the occasion. They were so joyful and everybody came to Yashoda and praised her, saying “How blessed you are, Yashoda, that even in your age,” because she was well-advanced in age, “you could bear a child! This is surely the will of God. And, look at the child: He is just so charming, so loving that nobody can go away from that child”. So Kansa had sent many demons, one by one, to kill the baby. The first demon that he sent was Putana. I will say how blessed is Putana, because even if she was a demon, she took the appearance of a mother. So she took the appearance of a girl who would roam around singing. Wherever she would go, she would feed every baby that she found with her breast filled with poison. Of course all the children then died. So finally she arrived to the place where the baby Krishna was. She could enter the house because Yashoda didn’t stop anybody of coming to her house. So everybody could come in and go out as they wanted. So Putana, also, came in. She was looking for the right moment to feed the child and then she took the baby and went to one corner with Him and started the breastfeeding. But this child was different: all the other children had died, but this one kept drinking and drinking all the poison out of her. He was even taking all the life from her. Blessed was she, you know. We can say that Putana was very lucky to feed the Lord. This was because in one of her lives she had been a yogini. She had done so much tapas, so much penance. She had, also, done penance to become the mother of God, of Narayana, but because of her karma she could not. But He is so merciful that He said “It doesn’t matter. Your wish will be fulfilled, also.” So this time she took birth as a demon and, of course, when Krishna was there, He drank from her. But He drank everything, the whole surrender, the whole life itself. This is how He is, you know. And this is how Putana was: she was fully surrendered. Like that many other demons came, one after the other, trying to kill Krishna, but they were all very unsuccessful. At the age of sixteen, Krishna went to Mathura and, there, Kansa got killed and you know the rest of the story of Krishna. Seeing the beauty of the Lord, we ask ourselves how did all the people in His lifetime feel when they saw Him? What did they feel? What did the Gopis feel? How was it for the people of Vrindavan to be near Him? We have read several stories about that. We read how beautiful He was, how great He was, but yet we ask ourselves ”But why not now? Why, when we pray so much, nothing happens?” You, also, would like to feel and experience this Love. You, also, would like to be so much in love with Him, but yet you find it very difficult, don´t you? Why? If we look at ourselves and we look at the people in Vrindavan, there, whatever they would do throughout the day, Krishna was the main important thing in their lives. Their minds were so much into Him. Whatever they would do, wherever they were, it was just for Krishna. They would cook for their own family, but it was for Krishna. They would wash their clothes and, in their minds, it was for Krishna. Everything was for Him. They were so much surrendered, that every breath of them was Krishna. If every breath of them was the Lord Himself, of course, the Lord was present inside of them at all times.