Meaning of the Mantra

Once someone asked about the meaning of the holy names and Srila Prabhupada said its like a prayer to Krsna saying "Oh Lord please engage me in your devotional service". This is so powerful and if we think of the meaning of these words we may understand that means surrender, means we are thinking of the Lord and not in our own sense gratification, our own material desires and personal needs - we are thinking of how we could improve our service in order to satisfy the Lord, also we are accepting more and more service to His lotus feet.
We sometimes maybe offer to Krsna many prayers but we need to mean them, to really make them with our hearts and engage our senses on that too. Here is a prayer asking for service from the Sri Sanatkumar Samhita:


"O Sri Sri Radha-Krishna, you are like two great oceans of mercy. Please be merciful to me. I take shelter of you. I surrender to you. Please engage me, a sinner and offender, in your service."

Sri Sanatkumar Samhita 5

Chanting is a great service, when we chant we invite Krsna and Radha to our hearts and offer Them our service, our senses, our time, our voice and our love so They can take care of our whole life and engage us like They want to. This means we are surrended and we have complete faith the Lord will be there for us, to protect us any time in any situation we are in and we accept anything They give us. When we achieve this stage of complete faith we may understand our position as eternal servants and advance to pure chanting as our goal of life.

I pray so I can be blessed by the vaisnavas to be able to achieve this level and through strong faith I maybe serve the Lord much better than I do now.


In this material world the conditioned soul is very much distracted from his original all-knowing, all-blissful nature as Krishna's eternal servant because he is carried away by the so-called taste of material sense gratification. This artificial taste is encouraged and exploited by the materialistic propaganda mongers who make a handsome profit by misguiding the people in general promoting cigarettes, liquor, prostitution, meat eating, etc. The foolish sense enjoyer tries to become happy by squeezing as much pleasure as possible out of these things, but because there is no factual pleasure in sense gratification, the poor soul is ultimately left in a state of frustration and bewilderment. If, however, he will reconnect with his original transcendental nature diving deep into his eternal identity as the servant of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, he will taste a pleasure that is unlimitedly sublime and will go on increasing forever.
Chant:
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare