Today's Recommendations For You:

Customers who have read this blog might also read this.

Back to Blog-head?

It's been almost a year since my last post. Much has happened since then (details forthcoming). I have thought about updating, from time to time, but never quite got around to it.

But things are changing, I'm working from home now (mostly), and I'll be spending considerable chunks of time sitting in front of my laptop. In order to help me fight the temptation to waste my day on Metafilter, I think it would be a good idea to "dovetail" my internet addictions into something at least relatively Krishna conscious.

Credit must go to this guy, for creating a KC blog that has inspired me enough to give this another shot. Blogging as sadhana?

Btw, please forgive another short silence here. I am adjusting to a new apartment, but things will get going again soon.

The Mental Speculator Exchange

"As stated in the Brahma-samhita, the mental speculators, even by dint of learned scholarship, cannot even dream of the Absolute Truth by speculating over it for eternity. The Lord reserves the right of not being exposed to such mental speculators. And because they cannot enter into network stem of the lotus stem of the Lord, all material speculators differ in conclusions, and at the end they make a useless compromise by saying, "as many conclusions, as many ways," according to one's own inclination. (yatha-rucam). But the Lord is not like a shopkeeper trying to please all sorts of customers in the mental speculator exchange. The Lord is what He is, the Absolute Personality of Godhead, and He demands absolute surrender unto Him only...

...The Lord, being the Lord of intelligence in everyone (even in the nondevotee), favors His devotee with proper intelligence so that automatically the pure devotee is enlightened with the factual truth about the Lord and His different energies. The Lord is revealed not by one's speculative power or by one's verbal jugglery over the Absolute Truth. Rather, He reveals Himself to a devotee when He is fully satisfied by the devotee's service attitude. Sukadeva Gosvami is not a mental speculator or compromiser of the theory of "as many ways, as many conclusions." Rather, he prays to the Lord only, invoking His transcendental pleasure. That is the way of knowing the Lord."

SB 2.4.21 purport

The Over-Long Title of My Next Self-Help Book

It's not because I don't have the things I want.

It's because I want the things I don't have.

Who Says Spiritual Life Is One Of Inactivity?

"The whole Vedic adventure is to draw one's attention entirely unto the lotus feet of Lord Krishna without any diversion, as instructed in the Bhagavad-Gita (15.15)."

-SB 2.4.1 purport

Crying For Krishna

About a month later, I'm finally sitting down to write about my experience in Germany. What's that? Japa retreat? You're kidding, right? Oh, I haven't forgotten, but I'm not sure if I'll be sitting down for that one any time soon. Anyway...

One morning, eating breakfast in the Novotel in Aachen, I noticed a little boy one or two years old. He had just suffered a childhood trauma of some description. I'm unsure of the exact nature of the incident, and at the time I got the general impression that he wasn't quite sure either. By the time he had found his way to his mother's lap - all the while crying 'Mama! Mama!' in steady, insistent sob-tones - he seemed to have forgotten what the original source of his distress had been. Not that this dissuaded him in any way from rather vocally taking shelter of his mother's love.

I thought of how much his steady, repetitive 'Mama! Mama!' sounded like a mantra, and I was immediately reminded of how Srila Prabhupada has instructed us to chant Hare Krishna like a child crying for its mother. I also realized how there was something about this boy's crying that was faintly comforting to me, and I think, to him as well. Though he kept crying, and showed no sign of stopping, I felt that he didn't have a care in the world, but was in some way taking pleasure in both the crying, and in his mother's eager reciprocation - satiated by her desire to alleviate his distress.

The boy's apparent detachment may seem odd, but it seemed rather palpable to me at the time, and it reminded me of the nature of our own material strife. If we can follow this example, and take pleasure in crying out the Lord's Holy Name in the same way, the Lord will eagerly reciprocate. Any distress we may have had will then disappear without a trace. Nonetheless, we will continue chanting with the same urgency, feeling the bliss of mutual reciprocation with the Lord of our heart.

Our material distress is completely inconsequential, after all. Just as the pleasures of the body - and the world it inhabits - are illusory, so too are the distresses. The greatest thing the devotee has to fear in this material world is that he may at any time fall into illusion and forget Krishna. But if we are sitting at the Lord's lotus feet, crying out His Holy Names with relish, then what chance does maya have to enter our consciousness?

It's Kali-Yuga, Baby!

The last few days have been a little disheartening. If there was any doubt, Kali-Yuga is rapidly advancing: cheating and hypocrisy rule the hearts of men, and we are all casualties, Mother Bhumi included.

It seems that a few people still think that rocknroll can save the world. I read an article in Rolling Stone about the 24-hour worldwide Live-Aid style "benefit concert" that Gore is hoping will save us all from global warming. To be fair, Gore and co. say that they are making every effort to minimize the impact that organizing and executing such a colossal event will have on the environment, but I think it's fairly obvious that the cost will greatly outweigh the benefit.

On Sunday we had two very special guests at the East Hartford temple: B.B. Govinda Swami and Indradyumna Maharaja. The kirtans were deep and beautiful and full of spiritual potency, as were the words of these two venerable sadhus. I wish I could say that the entire evening was a festival of blissed out chanting, dancing, and feasting on the Holy Names, but there was some serious business involved as well. As I'm sure you are all aware by now our brothers and sisters in Kazakhstan have not been faring well of late. Less than a week ago another twelve devotee homes were unlawfully destroyed by local government officials. The rest of the community, including the farmhouses that are giving shelter to some 30 cows, and of course the temple and Deities, may be destroyed at any time. In spite of worldwide outcries from human rights advocates, ambassadors, and politicians including Great Britain's own Tony Blair, the Kazakh government appears to have no intention of changing their present course. B.B. Govinda Swami and others made impassioned pleas for support, and we obliged in whatever ways we could, but I have to say that the whole thing left me feeling pretty close to hopeless.

And a few more cheerful and uplifting stories have passed my way in the last day or so as well...

There's this one about an area of the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas that's filled with plastic waste of various descriptions - a sort of floating garbage heap. Then there's this one about some rather shocking behavior in Sri Vrindavana Dhama.

And last but not least, it turns out that the Dalai Lama is not quite the beacon of peace and compassion that everyone seems to think. Read this open letter on Kurma Dasa's blog, and don't miss the accompanying article linked at the bottom of the entry. Apparently, even "His Holiness" is a "meat-eating Buddhist". I would do my part to spread this information around, but I'm afraid that most people would take it as "permission" rather than the dissapointing evidence of hypocrisy that it is.

a-brahma-bhuvanal lokah
punar avartino 'rjuna
mam upetya tu kaunteya
punar janma na vidyate

From the highest planet in the material world down to the lowest, all are places of misery wherein repeated birth and death take place. But one who attains to My abode, O son of Kunti, never takes birth again. (BG 8.16)