Do you put a tulasi leaf on every offering?

Tulasi is only for Vishnu Tattva, for Krishna, Vishnu, and Ram. A leaf on top of Krishna's plate is almost a shortcut, since the Lord always accepts an offering crowned with tulasi. But you never offer fresh, unoffered tulasi to anyone else, not even to Srimati Radharani on her own plate. You may place a leaf that was already offered to Krishna onto Srila Prabhupada's dish, and that is fine.

How can we help someone stuck in ignorance?

It depends on the person, but one thing works on everyone: prasad. You cannot easily reason with a drunkard, who is lost in ignorance. Yet give them food first offered to the Lord, and a change of consciousness begins, guaranteed. It is said that giving prasad saves a person from the animal kingdom; they will at least take a human birth next. And the deeper rule: do not stand in judgment of who is in which mode. Point a finger and three fingers point back at you. Watch your own mode, lift yourself, and your example will quietly lift those around you, especially your family.

Why avoid onion and garlic if they are not meat?

They are not sinful, and they will not stop you, but they hold you back. By nature they stir up passionate, restless desires in the mind, and they are reckoned as tamasic, leaning toward ignorance, not only passion. (Pilots were once barred from garlic for hours before a flight because it dulled concentration.) We already carry enough passion. Better to avoid them, and if a packet turns out to have onion powder buried in it by accident, do not torture yourself; this is an imperfect world. Onion has medicinal uses, but you take medicine only when you need it, not at every meal.

How do you reach pure goodness, and stay rising?

Through three guides: the scriptures (shastra), the guru, and the devotees (sadhu). Read scripture, keep a spiritual teacher you can consult, and sit with devotees who speak constantly of the Lord. Company is contagious. Spend time with drunkards and it rubs off; spend it with devotees and you drift toward God. The hidden danger of goodness is comfort, growing so content in a sinless, easy life that you stop climbing. Keep the chart in front of you, see where you stand, and take the next step.

My mode changes through the day. So which one am I in?

Go by what dominates. If you meditate at dawn but spend it drafting a mental to-do list, you are in passion, not goodness, whatever the hour. If you sit in a busy office yet stay calm and work from duty, you are in goodness, whatever the hour.

Is it good to give a beggar food?

Very good, and even better if you stop seeing a beggar and see a chance to serve. Buy the food, but lift it from a good act into a spiritual one in a second: offer it to the Lord first ("please accept this, and bless the one I give it to"), and now you are handing out prasad. The mood to aim for is the gopis', and Prahlad Maharaj's. When Lord Nrsimhadeva offered Prahlad any boon, the boy kept refusing, until the Lord almost wept to give something. Ask the Lord for nothing, only to serve him, and you conquer his heart, and he gives not things but himself.

How does Sanatana Dharma say women should be treated, and does that ever change?

With full respect and full protection, and that never changes with time, unlike most of Smriti. The rules sit in the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Vedas alike, in both Shruti and Smriti. Scripture places a protector at every stage: the father in childhood, the husband in marriage, the sons in old age, because, sadly, men tend to exploit, and Arjuna himself named the ruin of unprotected women among his reasons not to fight. A woman's hardship may trace to karma, yet that is never an excuse to mistreat her. Where women and children are abused, that society is degraded, and you can judge any society by how it treats them. Even Draupadi was humiliated in a court full of kings, so in this dark age such decline is sadly expected, which is why the remedy must begin in our schools. Hold the deeper truth too: at the soul's level we are neither man nor woman but servants of God, so we should not drown in bodily divisions even while protecting one another. Srila Prabhupada once answered a devotee who felt slighted for being Black: if you feel hurt because you have a black body, he said, you have accepted the very mistake, that you are the body. You are the soul.

The Three Modes of Material Nature: Sattva, Rajas, Tamas, and Reading Your Own Mode

This whole material world is woven from three threads. Krishna calls them the gunas, the modes of nature: goodness, passion, and ignorance. They colour everything you see, hear, taste, touch, and smell, and they quietly steer how you act. Krishna gives them a whole chapter of the Gita, and a teacher of this course was once told that if you truly grasp that one chapter, this could be your last life here. This lesson explains the three modes, and then hands you a table to read which one is running you.

What are the three energies of the Lord?

Before the modes, the bigger map. Everything is one of three energies.

Internal energy: the Lord himself together with the spiritual world. It is eternal and always manifest.
External energy: the material world. Also eternal, but it appears and disappears. When Maha Vishnu breathes out, the universes pour forth and this energy is manifest. When he breathes in, they withdraw, and it still exists but is unseen.
Marginal energy: us, the jivas, the souls. We are called marginal because we are tiny, and can fall on either side. Linked to the internal energy we are properly placed. Right now we identify with the external energy, and that is why we are stuck here.

Think of an ocean, the land, and the beach between them. The ocean is the internal energy, the land is the external, and the beach, sometimes wet, sometimes dry, is us. Our true constitutional position is sat-chit-ananda: sat, eternal, chit, full of knowledge, ananda, full of joy. In that state we hold an eternal spiritual form shaped by how we love to serve the Lord. We have lost touch with it, which is the whole problem. Right now we are like a fish out of water, struggling on the sand. A fish is happy only back in the water, and we are happy only back in that spiritual state.

What are the three gunas?

Having fallen into contact with matter, the soul gets conditioned by its three modes and is forced to act through them, even though the pure soul has nothing to do with them.

Sattva-guna, the mode of goodness.
Rajo-guna, the mode of passion.
Tamo-guna, the mode of ignorance.

Krishna gives the whole of Gita chapter 14 to these modes, with more in chapters 17 and 18, where most of the self-analysis later in this lesson comes from. Chapter 14 moves through four questions: what the modes are, how they work, what a person caught in each mode is like, and how to rise above all three.

Here is a hard truth. We imagine we have free will, but while the three modes drive us, that freedom is mostly an illusion. Real free will appears only once we rise above all three. Until then we are pushed by goodness, passion, or ignorance, and stay trapped in the cycle of birth and death. And even goodness is not enough, strange as that sounds. We will see why.

What is the mode of goodness (sattva)?

Goodness is the purest of the three. It is illuminating, it frees a person from sinful reactions, and it gives knowledge. Someone in goodness does not want to sin. They do good, behave well, stay clean inside and out, and grow steady and happy.

So what is the catch? That very happiness becomes a cage. A person in goodness feels content and secure, sure they have achieved what they wanted, and so they grow attached to this world by their own comfort. Their behaviour is exemplary, always helping others, yet without a link to the Lord's internal energy they remain here, and worldly happiness always comes and goes. The classic examples are scientists, philosophers, and poets, proud of their knowledge, steady in mind, materially happy, yet bound to repeated birth and death. By varna, the brahmanas generally stand for goodness. The teachers' guru would say, "At least come to the platform of goodness," because from there the next step to liberation is short.

What is the mode of passion (rajas)?

Passion fills a person with endless desire and ties them to fruitive action. It binds with the ropes of longing and attachment, and shows itself most in the strong pull between man and woman. The mind runs without rest: I must have this, I must earn that, I must buy a bigger house. There is a hunger for enjoyment, for honour, for name and fame (charity given so others will praise the giver), for a happy family held with fierce attachment, for a grand home built as if it will last forever.

This is where most people live, and it is a trap with no exit, only endless circling. Goodness at least leaves a door open toward a liberating yoga. Passion shuts that door, because the person is too busy earning and enjoying to think of linking with God at all.

What is the mode of ignorance (tamas)?

Ignorance is total delusion, and it binds through madness, idleness, and sleep. It is the one place no one should want to be. People joke that ignorance is bliss, but here it is the opposite. Under its spell you cannot see a thing as it is. You take the irreligious for religious and the religious for irreligious, and everything turns upside down.

The signs: six hours of sleep refreshes a person, yet ten to twelve hours a day is a flag of ignorance, sleep eating half a life. A person sunk in this mode feels the whole world is against them, blames everyone else, takes responsibility for nothing, and leans on intoxication and sleep. There is no interest in spiritual life and often none in material progress either, only self-pity. Avoid it completely. Anyone reading this is already past it, since a person truly in ignorance would simply be asleep.

In short: goodness conditions you to happiness, passion to restless activity, ignorance to madness.

Where does each mode take you next?

The mode you live in shapes the body you take next.

Gentle cows grazing in a green pasture, the animal of the mode of goodness

Ignorance leads down, toward the animal kingdom.
Passion keeps you human, reborn to chase the same desires again.
Goodness lifts you to the heavens, perhaps as a demigod or a demigod's servant, for a long stay. But even heaven runs out. When the good karma is spent, you fall back to Earth and begin again.

There is a fourth level above all three, pure goodness (shuddha-sattva), the spiritual goodness of a soul linked directly with the Lord. That, not heaven, is the goal.

How do you read which mode you are in?

This is the practical heart of the lesson, and it is meant for honest self-analysis, never for judging anyone else. It is not an exact science, only an indication. Look down each column and ask, quietly, where do I mostly sit?

In the matter of...	Ignorance (tamas)	Passion (rajas)	Goodness (sattva)	Pure goodness
Food	Stale, putrid, unclean, leftovers; meat, fish, eggs, liquor	Bitter, sour, salty, pungent, rich, dry, hot; causes pain and disease; onion and garlic	Fresh, nourishing, sweet, juicy; gives strength and long life; milk, grains, fruit, vegetables	Prasad, first offered to the Lord, then honoured
Charity	Given at a wrong time or to an unworthy person (a gambler, a drunkard)	Given for publicity and praise, or grudgingly	Given as a duty, right time and place, to a worthy person, wanting nothing back	Given only to please the Lord
Worship	Ghosts, spirits, sport	Film stars, self-made "gods"	The devatas, a partial idea of God	The supreme Lord himself
Sacrifice (yagya)	Off the scriptures, no prasad, no bhajan, no offering to the priest	Done proudly for material gain, a business deal	Done as a duty per scripture, no reward expected	Per scripture, under a guru, to please the Lord
Austerity	Harms self or others (a month of starvation)	Done for honour, "look how devoted I am"	Done with faith, clean and non-violent, gentle speech, controlled thoughts	Done with faith to please the Lord (Ekadashi to remember him more)
Work	Cheating, lazy, morose, "I'll do it tomorrow"	Greedy for the promotion and bonus, attached to the fruit	Enthusiastic, steady, unmoved by success or failure	Serving Krishna and guru in every circumstance
Renunciation	Dropping your duty out of illusion (Arjuna fleeing to the forest)	Dropping your duty out of fear or because it is hard	Doing your duty because it must be done, unattached to results	Doing your duty in God-consciousness, all for his service
Knowledge	Concerned only with eating, sleeping, mating, defending	Seeing the body as the self, ignoring the soul	Seeing, through scripture, that you are spirit, distinct from the Lord	Seeing yourself as his eternal servant
Action	Reckless, violent, against scripture	Driven by ego and desire, great effort for the self	Done by duty, without attachment, love, or hate; it purifies	Done only to satisfy God or guru
Time of day liked	The night, awake till 2 or 3 am	The daytime	The early morning, to chant and meditate	Any hour, always serving
Understanding	Calling the irreligious religious; cannot tell up from down	Confused, cannot reliably tell right from wrong	Discriminating clearly by scripture; knows what binds and what frees	Always fixed on the Lord, confirmed by scripture and guru
Determination	Cannot move past daydreaming, fear, and regret	Fixed on enjoyment and gain	Unbreakable, steadied by yoga over mind and senses	Never deviates, untouched by temptation
Happiness	Misery at the start, middle, and end (the addict)	Nectar at first, poison in the end (the fifth gulab jamun)	Poison at first, nectar in the end (chanting, hard then sweet)	Ever-increasing ecstasy, beyond anything worldly
Colour drawn to	Blue (yet blue is also Krishna's colour)	Red	Yellow	White
Animal felt close to	The monkey	The lion, the tiger; dogs and cats too	The cow, who gives peace of mind; the dolphin	Garuda, Hanuman, the Surabhi cow

Read it gently. Liking the colour blue does not put you in ignorance, and the table is no weapon for sizing up others. It is a mirror. If you find yourself in ignorance, aim for passion. In passion, aim for goodness. In goodness, aim past it, for pure goodness.

Offering a banana to someone in need, first offered to the Lord so the simple gift becomes prasad

Key terms from this lesson

Term	Meaning
Guna	A "mode" or strand of material nature; literally also a rope
Sattva-guna	The mode of goodness: knowledge, cleanliness, calm
Rajo-guna	The mode of passion: desire, ambition, restless action
Tamo-guna	The mode of ignorance: delusion, laziness, sleep
Shuddha-sattva	Pure goodness; the spiritual platform beyond all three modes
Internal energy	The Lord and the spiritual world
External energy	The material world
Marginal energy	The jivas, the souls, who can fall to either side
Sat-chit-ananda	The soul's true nature: eternal, knowing, blissful
Prasad	Food first offered to the Lord, which lifts an act to the spiritual platform

What to carry forward

Three energies: internal (the Lord), external (matter), marginal (us).
Three gunas run the material world: goodness, passion, ignorance.
While the modes drive you, free will is mostly an illusion.
Even goodness binds, through its own comfortable happiness.
Ignorance leads to animal birth, passion to human, goodness to heaven, and only pure goodness home.
Use the table as a mirror for yourself, never a measuring stick for others.
Rise by shastra, guru, and sadhu, and ask the Lord for nothing but the chance to serve.

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