Express affection through recollection and attention

Suppose a husband who works out-of-station returns home for vacation. He tells his wife that, while he is away, he remembers her frequently. But then while she is speaking with him, he starts checking his phone messages. She will naturally ask, “If you don’t pay attention to me when I am with you, how can I believe that you remember me when I am not with you?” A similar dynamic applies to our relationship with Krishna – we need to express our devotion for him through both recollection and attention. Even while doing activities not directly connected with Krishna, we can strive to remember him as our Lord and goal. But such recollection requires strong devotion. Some people claim to remember Krishna constantly in their heart, but they don’t invest any time or effort in focusing on him directly. By their claims of constant recollection, they may well be flattering and fooling themselves. Avoiding such spiritual-seeming self-indulgence, we can express our devotion by offering Krishna full attention when he is manifest before us. He becomes manifest as, say, his holy name, his deities and his message when we do the corresponding direct devotional activities such as chanting, deity worship and scriptural study. If we are inattentive during these activities, recollecting him at other times will be nearly impossible. Pertinently, the Bhagavad-gita (08.07) states that we can succeed spiritually by remembering Krishna internally and working in the world externally, provided our mind and intelligence are offered to him. This Gita verse implies that the same two actions – attention and recollection – that express devotion also provide access to devotion. We can focus on him when he is manifest before us and remember him when he is not manifest. By this combination of attention and recollection, we can nourish our devotion for him, and increasingly relish it too.