Statements such as these may cause wrong conclusions in the minds of men. They raise many ridiculous queries like the problems of the Lord answering calls of nature while shut up in the niche and they promote atheism among men. The archakas and the carping unbelievers are both ignorant of the real principles of temple-worship. That is the reason for their low conduct. You should be cultured enough to avoid the lower worldly path.

The temple should not be valued on secular principle at all; only the attitude of Devotion can ennoble and beautify feelings which otherwise drag you down to the lower worldly path.

Today, on account of new fangled views, temples have become objects of derision. This is a sad state of affairs. Therefore it is necessary to reveal publicly the real objective of temple worship and elevate them to the status which is their due. The temple must prosper once again. How stupid is it to be under the impression that the Lord sleeps as you do when a lullaby is sung or that He wakes up as you do when some one calls on Him aloud, or that He feasts when some food is placed before Him, as you want to do, or that He becomes weaker and weaker, as happens to you, when He is not given regular meals. Filling up the entire Universe down to the minutest part of the atom, unreachable by Time, effulgent beyond imagination, merciful above all expectation, the Lord has to be conceived as the Vital Energy that pervades and inheres everywhere, forever. How foolish to subject the Lord of that stature, to the carping criticisms of cynics and the false theories of the ignorant.

Can you bind the Lord to a timetable as you can do to a Bhaktha? Travails do not fall upon the Bhaktha during a fixed time, do they? Has the Bhaktha to wait till the Lord is awakened from the sleep? Oh, the foolishness of it all! The infant can cry for its mother's milk at any time; the Mother too will rise from sleep and feed it at her breast. She won't push it off, angry that it yells when she is sleeping. Well, the Lord who is the Universal Mother must be getting disturbed and awakened at least a million times, if He really slept.

It all depends on the progress of your mental faculties; they must reach the supreme level. The Lord is immanent everywhere; He is capable of everything; He is the Universal Witness; there is nothing He does not know. These truths must be taken as axiomatic and all rituals and sadhanas must be arranged and interpreted, in conformity with those Truths. No low demeaning feeling must be associated with the worship of the Lord, or with His Name and Form. Therefore the highest Bhakthi and the rites that can supplement it are very essential. To say that the Lord's sleep will be disturbed, that one should not interrupt Him while eating, and that at such times, the doors of the temple must remain closed is, to say the least, infantile. It does not indicate a broad or correct attitude. When the emotion of Bhakthi gets ripe and blossoms more fully, these low secular feelings melt away into nothingness.