Family Life as an Ashrama- Secrets of Success

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There is no difference between a good wife and good intelligence. One who possesses good intelligence can deliberate properly and save himself from many dangerous conditions [...]. If one gets a chaste wife, accepted through a religious marriage ritual, she can be of great help when one is threatened by the many dangerous situations of life. Actually such a wife can become the source of all good intelligence. With such a good wife, the family's engagement in the devotional service of the Lord actually makes a home a grihastha ashrama, or household dedicated to spiritual cultivation.

Most of Mahaprabhu's associates and our previous acharyas were householders who demonstrated by their own example the wonderful opportunities this ashrama offers in order to cultivate pure devotion to the Lord. In a lecture given in Vrindavan on 13th February 1974, Srila Prabhupada shares:

My birth was in a Vaishnava family, my father was a great Vaishnava, so from birth I was in Vaishnava culture only...

He dedicated the book Krishna, The Supreme Personality of God- head to his father, with the following words of gratitude:

To my father Gour Mohan De, a pure devotee of Krishna, who raised me as a Krishna conscious child from the beginning of my life. In my boyhood ages he instructed me how to play the mridanga. He gave me Radha-Krishna vigraha to worship, and he gave me Jagannatha-Ratha to duly observe the festival as my childhood play. He was kind to me, and I imbibed from him the ideas later on solidified by my spiritual master, the eternal father.

In The Journey of Self-Discovery, we witness the conversation Srila Prabhupada had (in October 1973) with Dr. Benford, an associate professor of physics at the University of California in Irvine, California. Once again, Srila Prabhupada recounts his good fortune of having taken birth in a Vaishnava family:

Dr. Benford: Is it true that the children of all such parents are somewhat spiritually superior to the children of other parents? Srila Prabhupada: Generally, yes. They get the opportunity of be- ing trained by the mother and father. Fortunately, my father was a great devotee, so I received this training from the very beginning. Somehow or other I had this spark of Krishna consciousness, and my father detected it. Then I accepted my spiritual master. In this way, I have come to this stage of sannyasa. I am very much indebted to my father, for he took care of me in such a way that I became perfectly Krishna conscious. My father used to receive many saintly persons at our home, and to every one of them he used to say, "Kindly bless my son so that he may become a servant of Radharani." That was his only ambition. He taught me how to play the mridanga drum, although sometimes my mother was not very satisfied. She would say, "Why are you teaching him to play mridanga?" But my father would say, "No, no, he must learn a little mridanga." My father was very affectionate to me. Therefore, if due to past pious activities one gets a good father and mother, that is a great chance for advancing in Krishna consciousness.