particular kindness towards his devotees, because He thus promotes the good of all beings.
The unfortunate, the needy, the intelligent, and the inquiring mind, when they have performed acts of piety, generally begin, if they have not already done so, to worship the Lord. The others, whose existence is a series of misdeeds, cannot, whatever their position, approach the Supreme Being, because the illusory energy misleads them. Now, when misfortune arises, the pious man has no choice but to take refuge with the Lord, because to keep constantly in his mind the thought of the Lord is to walk on the path of birth liberation and repeated deaths. For those who developed this attitude, the misfortunes disappear. Truly they are welcome, since they allow him to cultivate the memory of the Lord, that is to say, to escape material existence. Anyone who has taken refuge with the Lord rather than with great authorities in spiritual matters, can obtain liberation without more harm than if he jumped over the water contained in the imprint left on the ground by the hoof of a calf. This one is called to live in the kingdom of the Lord, and has no place in the material universe, where new dangers await us with each step. The material cosmos is a place of dangers, strewn with pitfalls. The mediocre intelligences strive, by a thousand means, to circumvent these obstacles, or to want to derive pleasure from material existence in spite of the misfortunes which it imposes, but remain ignorant of the fact that this universe is, by nature, source of constant suffering.
They also have no knowledge of the kingdom of the Lord, all of happiness and no trace of unhappiness. On the contrary, it goes from the duty of man to sure intelligence not to be troubled by the cruelties of fate, which are moreover inevitable in this world, but rather to take to heart, in spite of all the evils which cannot fail to reach him, to progress on the path of spiritual realization, aware that this is his mission as a human being. In fact, the spiritual soul is located beyond all material suffering, so that all the evils we face are only in name, and therefore without foundation. In a dream, for example, a man can be devoured by a tiger, and howl in fear, but in reality, there is no tiger, and therefore no reason to be afraid; all is chimerical. Likewise, the evils of existence are like dreams. If, however, we have the fortunate fortune to put an end to our “hallucinations” by entering into contact with the Lord through the service of devotion, this union will bring us only tangible gains; any action performed within the framework of the nine devotional practices. This service offered to the Lord consists of nine different practices:
1) listen to what concerns the Lord,
2) glorify him,