Life Comes From Life

Occupy Yourself

2012-02-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

My latest essay at the World Faith Blog

Nearly a decade ago, I had the fortune of reading American Holocaust by David Stannard, which detailed the horrific conquest of Native American culture behind the “founding” of America. I found the very framework of my own cultural understanding thrown asunder. I realized that the “American Dream” had been largely birthed from a nightmare of unimaginable proportions.

I felt like I had been lied to, that the real fabric behind all the myths and legends of America was something else entirely that what I had absorbed as a open-minded youth in school. I now wanted to know what the truth really was, what truth really meant, and how to grasp a truth whose meaning would not be elusive or steeped in hypocrisy.

My own search for truth took me through many experiences and personal experiments into social justice and progressive philosophy into the realm of the spiritual, where I now live as a monk of the Hindu tradition in New York City. Yet I feel my journey is far from complete, as the bridge between the spiritual and activist spaces within my mind, heart, and soul feels unwalked to me. I want to know how I, as a monk, as a truth-seeker, with an open heart, can help to effect the kind of change we need in this world which is not ephemeral, which is linked to the eternal.

This disconnect came to the fore for me as I observed the march forward of the Occupy Wall Street movement over the past few months, its nucleus at Zuccotti Park just a short walk from my own monastery. I felt both a great inspiration for the courage and clamor of the huddled masses defying the fortress of inequality, yet I also felt a distance, a certain aloofness. I couldn’t connect, or find a deep personal motivation to become involved, to put my own body on the line.

As a monk, committed as much as I am to the inner spiritual journey, to the revolution of the heart, the realm of the politic feels incomplete without the consideration of the big picture. I am having a hard enough time occupying myself, knowing that unless I rend asunder my own greed, how can I make any impact taking on the forces of avarice that dominate our world? As great as the carnival spirit of OWS was and is, I desire a deeper connection, a clear bridge between our determination and our divinity.

A recent piece by Dylan Ratigan at the Huffington Post, titled “This Thanksgiving, Occupy Yourself”, helped to crystallize some of my own feelings and hopes with our grand new social justice movement. Dylan boldly challenges our own conception of the “villain” in the struggle that we face, asking us to look within the precepts of our own heart and being.

He writes:

I would point to the concept of the villain itself as the villain. For a villain, “the other”, lets us avoid dealing with the dark part that resides in each of us.

We all have dark thoughts — individually and as a nation. Fear, lust, anger, jealousy, deceit drive much of our decision-making. Yet, these are parts of ourselves we run away from. As a society, we have crafted a culture and set of institutional arrangements to deny this part of ourselves. This is why it has taken so long to even admit we have a problem of wealth inequality. It’s the denial of the dark part of ourselves.

But diabolical energy is part of human spirit, because we are dualistic beings. You cannot know honesty without knowing deceit, good cannot exist without evil, and life is not life without death. Our challenge is to reconcile all of these forces as they all exist in each of us. Any institutional arrangement that denies this, that relies on images of perfection bereft of the shadow, will inevitably be dominated by the very forces of that darkness. Namely fear of the shadow, ironically.

He quotes from Deepak Chopra’s The Shadow Effect:

We have been conditioned to fear the shadow side of life and the shadow side of ourselves. When we catch ourselves thinking a dark thought or acting out in a behavior that we feel is unacceptable, we run, just like a groundhog, back into our hole and hide, hoping, praying, it will disappear before we venture out again.

Why do we do this? Because we are afraid that no matter how hard we try, we will never be able to escape from this part of ourselves. And although ignoring or repressing our dark side is the norm, the sobering truth is that running from the shadow only intensiﬁes its power. Denying it only leads to more pain, suffering, regret, and resignation. the shadow will charge, and instead of us being able to have control over it, the shadow winds up having control over us, triggering the shadow effect.

This is a deep, deep spiritual meditation, a call to face the injustice we cause to our own heart, to our own self. It echoes the tradition of the Bhagavad-Gita, which tells us that the only real enemy we face is the vicissitudes of our own mind, and which call for us to find a
radical and progressive forgiveness towards those we hope can change for the better in their thought and action.

It is my fervent hope that by occupying the secret yet potentially sacred spaces in my own heart and mind, with the courage supplied to me by the great souls around me in my monastery and beyond, that I will be able to make a humble contribution to the OWS movement and to all the peoples struggling and striving to fulfill our common destiny as a human family.

If we want to give divine solace to the pain so many people are feeling, not being allowed their inviolable right to the pursuit of happiness, we must learn to face the pain within us, and learn to speak the language of forgiveness and transcendence.

Chris Fici is a writer/teacher/monk of the bhakti-yoga tradition. He has been practicing at the Bhaktivedanta Ashram in New York City since 2009. After receiving a degree in film/video studies at the University of Michigan, Chris began his exploration and study of the bhakti tradition. He currently teaches classes on the culture and art of vegetarian cooking, as well as the living philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, at New York University.

Faith House Manhattan Tour Bus: Experience Your Neighbor's Faith to Deepen Your Own

2011-12-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

From Samir Selmanovic and Bowie Snodgrass from Faith House Manhattan at the Huffington Post

Click through the slideshow to look at photos from the Faith House Manhattan Tour Bus:

We are coming to a realization that religious zealots cannot be fought with indifference. Extremists of all nationalities and religious persuasion feeding on prejudice, legislating exclusion, and resorting to violence cannot be prevailed upon by people with less passion. Telling them to "cool down" and to "be moderate" will not do it. We must allow fires greater than theirs to arise. Our passion for a whole and interdependent word must rise above their passion for a segregated and zero-sum world.

In Faith House Manhattan, a non-profit inter-religious "community of communities," we believe that the time of isolated faith is over. We believe that to know who I am, I must also know who you are. For three years now we have hosted more than 60 Living Room gatherings where people can experiences the practices of another religion (or path, including atheism). We invite all to join our "co-laboratory" of interdependence: "Experience your neighbor's faith, deepen your own."

Our call is to get radical. Very radical. We hold that in today's world, religious people have to remap their reality to include -- in tension and in gratitude -- 'the other.' While our ancestors may have fought for independence, ours is the great struggle for interdependence. 'The other' is not over there, but all around us. While we have been conceiving of the world in vertical terms (whose party is better, whose institution is larger, whose nation is stronger, whose god is bigger), the world is becoming increasingly horizontal, and wonderfully so. Can we learn to be a part of the whole?

This past year, Faith House started a new program with four religious communities in Manhattan, who were part of a "Tour Bus" with reciprocal visits to each of our main religious gatherings. We brought people together to trespass imaginary boundaries while preserving the real ones. From an experience of worship at a Hindu temple, to a Jewish Shabbat service, to a Sufi Zikr, to midweek "Space for Grace" at a major Protestant church -- either as "Interfaith 101″ or an opportunity for seasoned pilgrims to be hosts or guests in their own setting -- this seven-week adventure was a unique New York City experience.

One of the participants, Bhakti Center monk and teacher, Chris Fici, summarized the experience this way:

Experience Your Neighbor's Faith, Deepen Your Own. This is a personal revelation a lot of us have shared recently on the Faith House Bus Tour, as the different sounds, colors, tastes and waves of devotion we have experienced together in our different houses of faith have made a deep communal resonance in our souls.

Too often (at least from my own perspective) our own practice can become caught in the mechanical. Living as a monk, in an intense and insulated environment, I often see how my consciousness during our morning meditation is directed towards how tired I am, or how I might be upset with this monk or that monk. The beautiful essence of our prayers and singing and dancing together remains lost to me.

As I was soaking up the whirling sanctity at our wonderful Bus Tour event at the Dergah of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order, the pain of my own disconnection in my own practice became manifest, and that void was quickly filled by the wonderful and mystical people I saw around me, deeply absorbed in the love and vision of the Divine. I came to realize that what they were experiencing was something I had access to every day, if I chose to. I saw very clearly how we were all pearls on the same thread of God's mercy. I returned to my own community and practice with a sense of renewal that has stayed with me ever since.

The interfaith experience is very important for me, and I think for all of us as a common human family. The turbulence of our age calls for a communication between peoples of faith that transcends our superficial differences and allows us to drink from the immense well of wisdom God has given us, to give solace and take profound action to help cure our shared ills.

This turbulence also calls from us a tremendous maturity from our humility, from a recognition that we cannot possibly have the exclusive answers, that the pieces of the puzzle we need come from our brothers and sisters in faith. In Thomas Merton's journals of his final and fateful journey to India and Indonesia, where he breathed deeply of the eastern faiths that had always intrigued and inspired him, he related a realization in this regard that has deeply touched me.

He says that those who are mature in their faith are able to enter into the experience, philosophy, and practice of another faith and gain a practical wisdom which they can take back into their own renewed and strengthened spiritual life. This is the essence of my own personal adventure in interfaith. To be able to see of and hear of and speak about and taste of and move within the common thread of our faiths together is one of the most profound experiences I have ever had in my life. It links me to the maturity needed to answer the spiritual call of our time, and I imagine it may do so for you as well.

I am always eager to point out to others that New York City is a deeply spiritual place. I want to encourage others to develop the vision of the great rivers of faith which run through this town, which are not always visible beyond the surface tumult and loosely organized chaos.

When you come to New York City, you can enjoy a Broadway show, walk the Brooklyn Bridge, check out that special night club you found on Google, enjoy this gastronomical paradise with more than 4,000 restaurants, but don't miss the rich undercurrent of spirituality you can find at every corner. The many religious traditions can help you understand yourself, and perhaps rekindle a passion for your own faith, an encounter that will change you forever. You might even come back to your home and do something radical like taking time to understand the faith of the other, whose life is now inextricably intertwined with yours.Read articles and reflections about each stop on the Faith House tour here.

The Thread Underneath The Pearls: Final Reflection on Tour Bus

2011-12-29T17:30:00.002-05:00

by Chris Fici, Monk and Teacher at the Bhakti Center
From the Faith House Manhattan blog

One of my favorite verses in the Bhagavad-Gita is when Krishna tells his warrior friend Arjuna of how He is the connecting thread behind all reality.

O conqueror of wealth, there is no truth superior to Me. Everything rests upon Me, as pearls are strung on a thread.

I’ve noticed how this thread connects out to a recent update of the Faith House tag line, which now reads Experience Your Neighbor’s Faith, Deepen Your Own. This is a personal revelation a lot of us have shared recently on the Faith House Bus Tour, as the different sounds, colors, tastes, and waves of devotion we have experienced together in our different houses of faith have made a deep communal resonance in our souls.

Too often (at least from my own perspective) our own practice can become caught in the mechanical. Living as a monk, in an intense and insulated environment, I often see how my consciousness during our morning meditation is directed towards how tired I am, or how I might be upset with this monk or that monk. The beautiful essence of our prayers and singing and dancing together remains lost to me.

As I was soaking up the whirling sanctity at our wonderful Bus Tour event at the dergah of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order, the pain of my own disconnection in my own practice became manifest, and that void was quickly filled by the wonderful and mystical people I saw around me, deeply absorbed in the love and vision of the Divine. I came to realize that what they were experiencing was something I had access to every day, if I chose to. I saw very clearly how we were all pearls on the same thread of God’s mercy. I returned to my own community and practice with a sense of renewal that has stayed with me ever since.

The interfaith experience is very important for me, and I think for all of us as a common human family. The turbulence of our age calls for a communication between peoples of faith that transcends our superficial differences and allows us to drink from the immense well of wisdom God has given us, to give solace and take profound action to help cure our shared ills.

This turbulence also calls from us a tremendous maturity from our humility, from a recognition that we cannot possibly have the exclusive answers, that the pieces of the puzzle we need come from our brothers and sisters in faith. In Thomas Merton’s journals of his final and fateful journey to India and Indonesia, where he breathed deeply of the Eastern faiths that had always intrigued and inspired him, he related a realization in this regard that has deeply touched me.

He says that those who are mature in their faith are able to enter into the experience, philosophy, and practice of another faith and gain a practical wisdom which they can take back into their own renewed and strengthened spiritual life. This is the essence of my own personal adventure in interfaith. To be able to see of and hear of and speak about and taste of and move within the common thread of our faiths together is one of the most profound experiences I have ever had in my life. It links me to the maturity needed to answer the spiritual call of our time, and I imagine it may do so for you as well.

I am always eager to point out to others that New York City is a deeply spiritual place. I want to encourage others to develop the vision of the great rivers of faith which run through this town, which are not always visible beyond the surface tumult and loosely organized chaos. I think we most easily get this personal revelation through the communities we keep and build and hold together, through the families we cherish and keep in our faith and interfaith communities.

In the love we attempt to cultivate together, for each other and towards God, we see we are all the same wonderful pearls on the thread of His love and reality manifest in this world, drawing us towards Him in our unique but shared pathways.

So I am very happy and grateful to be allowed to be part of the Faith House community, and very grateful to be able to share my thoughts with you, and I hope now and into the future some of these thoughts, simply chances for me to pass on the wisdom I have received, may inspire you in many diverse way in your faith, and that they may help us all in the great and wonderful task of opening our heart and opening our mind.

A Deeper Understanding of Ahimsa

2011-12-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

My new article from Beliefnet

Twice a week, as part of our outreach of Hindu culture from our monastery in the East Village, myself and a few other monks teach classes on the art of vegetarian cuisine at Columbia University and New York University. We also try to share some of the essential tenets of the vegetarian/vegan life from some of the great traditional sources of the Vedas, such as the Bhagavad-Gita. We mix in with this knowledge a wide breath of moral, economic, and environmental reasons to support the vegetarian/vegan ideal

We do this with an eye to perhaps convince our friends to try to experience the values and benefits of a vegetarian diet, and for those already on the path, to show them the depth of their commitment and the potential for real change that comes by not eating our fair animal comrades.

My own journey into vegetarianism began with a lot of doubt and a little help from my friends. I was once of those students receiving delicious Indian vegetarian fare from Hindu monks at the University of Michigan, but having come from a different culinary background, the food they offered simply bewildered me. Over time, my monk friends won me over to their heartfelt offerings as they explained more of the culture behind it, and I also just came to realize the food was really, really good.

As I began to explore a commitment to vegetarianism, I had the good fortune of being surrounded by friends who were already engaged as vegetarians and vegans. I was also in a progressive college community where there were plenty of restaurants and groceries which catered to the vegetarian lifestyle. As I moved on into the lifestyle of a Hindu monk, I started to learn how to cook, which helped me to further appreciate the colorful, savoury, and rich depth of the vegetarian cuisine of India and of the rest of the world.

So it is with an immense sense of gratitude from my own end that I now am able to return the favor to all those who guided me towards the vegetarian ideal, by teaching its art and depth of knowledge to some of Manhattan's brightest. At the foundation of our presentation is a unique understanding of the value of ahimsa, or non-violence, as presented in the Gita. Going beyond the foundation of not causing any physical, mental, or psychological harm to any living creature, the deeper understanding of ahimsa lies in the understanding of the progressive, enlightened transmigration of the soul through the process of reincarnation.

The Vedas describe a progressive evolution of the soul through different microbial, plant, and animal forms to the human form of life, which is considered an ideal body for spiritual realization. The soul naturally progresses, by instinct and divine guidance, through increasingly complex forms of life before coming to the human stage. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, in his translation of the Gita, explains what happens when that progression is stopped by acts of violence:

"Real ahiḿsā means not checking anyone's progressive life. The animals are also making progress in their evolutionary life by transmigrating from one category of animal life to another. If a particular animal is killed, then his progress is checked. If an animal is staying in a particular body for so many days or so many years and is untimely killed, then he has to come back again in that form of life to complete the remaining days in order to be promoted to another species of life. So their progress should not be checked simply to satisfy one's palate. This is called ahiḿsā."

By living a vegetarian lifestyle, we not only refrain from harming our animal friends physically, but also spiritually. Naturally the question arises about plant life, and the potential harm that might be caused to them for the needs of our own body. Of course, we know that some fruits and vegetables fall right from the plant or tree, causing no harm in and of itself. For the other forms of plant life who do give their life for our sustenance, the Hindu tradition tells us that we should prepare and cook these gifts as an offering to God in love and devotion. If done in this mood, God blesses the offering, insuring that the fruits, grains, and vegetables used in the offering continue their spiritual progression.

With our cooking classes, our hope is that our friends there can understand that our offering of vegetarian food has benefits that go beyond the taste buds. We know that the way to a person's heart is through their stomach, and hopefully we can also help them understand that the way to knowledge and respect of the soul also comes through the food that they eat.

Chris Fici is a writer/teacher/monk in the bhakti-yoga tradition. He has been practicing at the Bhaktivedanta Ashram at the Bhakti Center in New York City since 2009. After receiving a degree in film studies at the University of Michigan, Chris began his exploration and study of the bhakti tradition. He currently teaches classes on the culture and art of vegetarian cooking, as well as the living philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, at New York University and Columbia University.

Why Suffering And Spirituality Go Hand-In-Hand

2011-12-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

The latest from my good friend and fellow monk Gadadhar Pandit Dasa at the Huffington Post

It's quite natural for those of faith to turn towards God during difficult times. Even if one has a regular spiritual practice, their practice can increase and improve during times of difficulty. After the events of September 11 for example, churches in New York City had some of their largest attendance in quite some time. Why is it that a lot of us have to come to a point of utter hopelessness and desperation before we call out to God? Why is it that even if one doesn't have faith, one may make a last ditch effort to call out to God as well?

When life is treating us good and all is going well, we often don't feel a need for God in our lives. Our material acquisitions -- money, property, friends and family -- become our crutch. As long as we have these things in place, we feel comfortable and don't have a strong need for a spiritual practice.

However, when these things start to fade, we feel a sense of fear and panic come over us.

As a society, we have become so dependent on material things for our happiness that our lives would become completely disrupted without them. When things are on shaky ground, we pray to God to protect what we have. We reach out to God and expect Him to keep things as they are or fix them and make everything all right. God becomes our plumber who's supposed to fix things when they go wrong. This need-based spirituality is all right, but it's a bit superficial.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna (God) lists four basic types of people that turn towards Him. Number one on the list is the "distressed." In case you're wondering, the other three are those that need money, the philosophically inquisitive, and the wise or those who don't want anything from God, except a loving relationship. In the Gita Krishna explains that He welcomes all four types that approach Him, but the one who approaches Him without material motivation is the most dear.

We can tend to use spirituality like medicine or a hospital. We utilize it only when things aren't going right or when we're suffering financially, emotionally or relationally. Our pain and suffering, however, can be a path to transcending this selfish conception of spirituality into something more. It can make us ask the questions we normally wouldn't ask, and can lead us to bigger and broader questions, such "what's really the purpose of life?" and "how can we avoid suffering?"

Unless one starts to ask these questions, one can never truly understand the purpose of life. Even if one does understand philosophically that there's a higher purpose to life, without some suffering, one may not feel the impetus to implement some spiritual practice into their life.

Suffering doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. It can help us grow and mature in ways we can't even imagine. It can give us realizations about life which otherwise would be difficult to acquire. I'm not suggesting we go out and look for suffering. Rest assured, it will find its way into our life.

There's a beautiful verse in the Gita, chapter 2 verse 14:

"...the nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course, are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons...and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed."

Difficulties teach us patience, tolerance, acceptance, and ultimately that we're not in complete control of our lives. We can do everything perfectly and things might still not go our way. Some of the greatest teachers within Hinduism demonstrated by their own example that our soul can experience the greatest spiritual growth during challenging times, and they also demonstrated that we can actually thank God for the difficulty.
While undergoing a difficulty one may not be able to fully understand how this is supposed to be beneficial. However, as Steve Jobs said in his commencement speech, you can only connect the dots looking back.

The Vedic texts explain that the soul is a part and parcel of the Supreme. It is qualitatively one but quantitatively different from God, like a spark of fire which has similar qualities to the larger fire, but is insignificant in size compared to the actual fire. Because the soul has this eternal connection to God, it has a natural tendency to reach out to God during difficult times. These opportunities provide the soul, which is stuck in a material body, to again reach out to God and rekindle that relationship.

The help will definitely come, but not always in the ways we expect it to. If the soul can remain faithful even if it appears that God isn't sending the help one is asking for, the soul's union with God is almost guaranteed even within this life.

Follow Gadadhara Pandit Dasa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nycpandit

The Strange Art of Relationships

2011-12-06T08:57:00.001-05:00

Five years ago I began my life as a monk at a Hindu/Vedic temple in the hills of West Virginia. It was the time of my life in which I burst out of the bubble of my previous life, as a middle-class, suburban young man/student from Michigan, into a whole new culture, into the world of responsibility, and the exhilarating and nerve-racking adventure of adult life, with a deeply spiritual twist. Soon after, I experienced the shock of my life.

I began to see that some people in our community, despite them all being deeply sincere spiritual seekers in their own way, were having an incredible time maintaining any semblance of a healthy relationship. In fact, their relationships, despite of, or perhaps because of so much personal history, didn't exist on any kind of healthy level, and that this reality was having a negative permeating effect on the community as a whole.

It was a certain smashing of my own naivete, and for the last five years I have been processing this revelation. I have found the strange art of relationships, both in my own life and in my continued observations of others, to be perhaps the most difficult aspect of any community to grasp, and to keep vibrant and whole. This difficulty is enhanced because without healthy relationships, no community can exist, let alone prosper and grow.

My heart calls me to process my initial sense of shock, and the resultant dislocation and disillusionment that comes from it, if I am going to understand my role as a loving servant of my monastic community here in New York, and of God. Talking today with my friend Charlie, the saintly and wise sage of Boston, we both were appreciating the necessity of this processing.

He said it begins with understanding that perfect and peaceful relationships, without any strife, are a utopian ideal best left aside. What really needs to be done is to appreciate the real growth that can be found in finding the proper perspective, based in a deep patience and selfless love in the midst of the inevitable quarrel and hypocrisy which comes to us in our dealings with each other.

The holy books of the Vedas describe our times indeed as the “age of quarrel and hypocrisy.” Yet the intensity of our time can compel us to truly understand our sacred duty towards each other in the art of the relationship. The Vedic scriptures also describe one who is a madhyama-adhikari, or one who has loving relationships with fellow spiritual seekers, compassion for those who are striving to seek and who need guidance, and who is able to avoid the negative effects of envious or proud people.

This level of consciousness is a transcendent level to raw selfishness, in which one can be in actual contact with one's conscience, the presence of the Divine within guiding us through the winds of our relations.

In his commentary to the classic Vedic text the Bhagavata Purana, renowned Vedic scholar and pioneer Swami Prabhupada expands upon this point:

"God has given advanced consciousness to the human being. Therefore he can feel the suffering and happiness of other living beings. The human being bereft of his conscience, however, is prone to cause suffering for other living beings."1

Recently I have been trying to drag my own conscience up from the dank and grungy space where I have left it. During the recent month of Kartik in our tradition, a time of extended and concentrated introspection and prayer (similar to the times of Lenten or Ramadan, for example), I attempted a meditation to focus on how much I criticize others, either verbally or mentally.

The first and most fundamental realization I gained from this meditation is that my critical facility runs on automatic overdrive. I realized that most of the time, I don't even notice the voice in my head, which also often finds its way into verbal expression, whining, moaning, cajoling, and chastising others for not living up to some standard that I myself don't even live up to.

This is a disease, a mentality which rots to the core any semblance of being able to meaningfully relate to others in a holistic and spiritual way. The experience of this meditation was, and continues to be, a cold shock to my system, yet I am grateful for it. It has heightened my awareness of my surroundings.

For example, in our monastery, we have a small yellow poster taped to the wall near the door. It is the “Four Principles of Community Building” by a renowned and beloved contemporary Vedic scholar and teacher Bhakti Tirtha Swami. I, probably like most others in this monastery, in our sometimes mad rush to do our duties and stay ahead of the clatter of our own minds and the streets of New York City where we live, never really notice this humble yet wonderful document.

Taking the time to consider it now, BT Swami's paeans to the hope we can share together strike a few essential chords to the processing of our conflicts.
Take a gander..

Treat each person with care as if the success or failure of your own spiritual life depends on this. Do not take into concern how they treat you. The manner in which you treat people is the same way you are treating your spiritual teachers and God.
Anytime there is a problem in a relationship, you should first see it as your own fault. Even if others are to blame, you will only add to the problem by considering them to be at fault.
You should treat every person with whom you come in contact with the same care as the person you love the most.
As we associate with others in our spiritual communities, we should do so in a mood that these are the people I am living with and they would probably also be the people that I leave this body with.

Wow, impossible, I say...

But that is perhaps just my naivete again, mixed with that rancid spice of cynicism. If we look at these principles with an objective lens, a hopeful lens, a courageous and open-hearted lens, we find essential spiritual technologies which can shatter the pride and envy which stand like barbed-wire tip walls between all of us and the healthy, dynamic relationships we desperately need.

These principles will allow us to firmly regain hold of our conscience, or our relationship of communication with the presence of God within us. We need to hear His voice within our heart, if we are to hear how our own voice communicates with others, and how we can also listen properly to what others want to communicate with us.

Otherwise, the dysfunction of our miscommunication robs us of the opportunity to find our voice in His voice. It leaves us mired in the complex state of fear which prevents us from knowing each other, trusting each other, and loving each other in the light of God.

No progress here comes without serious contemplation. Let us step back and really think about the conflicts in our life, and what we need to do to transcend them and allow them to help make our relationships grow. I hope to write an addendum to this piece soon, concentrating more on Bhakti Tirtha Swami's principles, and also some meditations on the need for some conflict, and the need to acknowledge gratitude, as markers towards understanding this strange art of the relationship.

I pray you may find some personal meditations of your own through this offering.

1 A.C Vedanta Swami Prabhupada, Srimad-Bhagavatam (Bhagavat Purana)-Fifth Canto, Chapter 26 (Summary), Bhaktivedanta Book Trust

The Space of Faith

2011-11-04T21:22:00.000-04:00

In the style of Mertonian homage, a simple meditation on thoughts, ideas, and realizations from our discussion of "Thoughts in Solitude" by Thomas Merton at our recent meeting of the Bhakti Center Book Club

We find a great, if unhealthy, solace in simply remaining in the role of the observer, yet the practical demands of this world, and the practical orders of the great teachers who carry us forward, demand that we transcend the restraints of the observer. They demand we come down from the clouds of our head-space into the ground of our heart-space.

In this ground of our heart, we come to understand the deeper truth of solitude, found in the acceptance, understanding, and communion with everyone else's solitude. We cannot accept how alone we are, how much pain we feel, how much joy we are capable of, and the presence of the Divine in our own heart until we can gradually see all these things in the heart of everyone else. The feeling of liberation we receive upon this revelation transcends all the fear and hesitation that ruins our ability to fully communicate with each other.

Having this revelation, we fully understand the meaning of solitude and silence in our own being, because the reality of who we are becomes incredibly clear, reflected with such illumination from the hearts of everyone else.

The pillars of greed, lust, envy, and all the other fantasies of the selfish heart has made our civilization barren practically to its core. Yet this is all a projection and reflection of the more imposing desert we face within our own heart, which is the source of all the anxiety we face in our individual and collective lives. This imposition from within has created the tangle of contradictions which we rage against, or which we die quietly but so painfully from.

The first instinct upon facing our contradictions is to run away as fast as we can, to dive into the spirits of our comforts. The experience of our actual consciousness is so painful, so nauseating, so disorienting, that most of us (myself especially) are still stuck in the energy of that initial instinct to flee, unable to go any further on the walk through the desert of the heart.

We are stuck once again on the observation deck, attempting to re-strategize for the next assault, but we are missing one great tool, one great weapon, which is found in the silence of our own heart. It is the space of our faith, where we understand that God is always carrying us and always protecting us, especially in the greatest tribulations and purification. In this space, feeling the warm embrace of our Beloved holding us close, we gain the proper perspective.

The great sage of solitude, Thomas Merton, explains this perspective:

"Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man. But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insolvable problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions, but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison"

Thoughts in Solitude

The closest space in our heart, closer still even than the spaces of our stored bitterness, is this silent space where God lives with us, and where we can communicate with Him in prayer, meditation, study, and also properly and divinely guided action. In this space, the heart becomes big and the mind becomes clear. Love and truth begin to come together, for love is what the heart wants and truth is what the mind wants. We move closer to no longer being a victim to the pendulum swings between our contradictions.

Humility is the essential cloth we must wear to enter into this space of faith. Beginning with the fundamental level of our language, we must learn to speak to each other in a tone which renounces the aggressive and competitive spirit ingrained into our conditioning, turning instead towards a tone which offers a substance and meaning based on our common values of divinity.

This is a task which requires a great deal of attention and sacrifice, for our natural humility in all of its expressions is buried under the layers of our disconnection from each other, from God, and from ourselves. One of the reasons for this is that humility itself brings its own paradoxes into our consciousness. For example, humility is something we know that we need, and we desperately desire its presence, but when we know we have it in our grasp, it is that very recognition which causes us to lose it.

Humility is not necessarily we are meant to enjoy, yet there is a certain and sure pleasure which comes in the genuinely humble moment. It is when we turn the simple glory of that moment into an inauthentic construct of pride that we lose control of what has been given to us. To be vigilant in our humility actually means to be vigilant against the pride within us.

Another paradox of the humble cloth is that it is best represented in the most obvious action, rather than a passive tolerance or non-violence. By the most obvious action I mean, in the spiritual context, the most selfless and most needed action to be done, considering the time, place, and circumstance. This action remains clothed in humility when it does not reinforce our "hero construct", or the self-obsession of our prideful mind.

This action, even if done with force, with tough love, with power and confidence, can only help and never harm, because it is centered on the true balance between the mind and the heart, between Love and Truth.

If we can absorb these concepts through our intelligence into our heart, and if we pray for courage and guidance from our teachers and friends, our spiritual life truly opens into the solitary spaces of our inner life, into our space of faith, with the silence of our embrace with God against the raging of our mind/body and of our society's endless noise brigades.

We finally receive what we have always wanted, an embrace that will always stay with us and not be like the empty gestures which has left our heart crusted with grief. We will be alone, but united. Silent, but dancing to the ecstatic rhythms of the Lord's steps, and our struggle will be renewed and strengthened.

ISKCON Loses 26 2nd Avenue

2011-11-03T13:32:00.003-04:00

From my good friend and fellow community member Yadunath Das

Did you just experience the same sinking feeling in your heart upon reading this headline that I did upon writing it?

A few months back, I wrote you all asking for monthly financial support to help keep Prabhupada’s 1st western temple up, running and under ISKCON care. My reasoning was that this temple is of global concern and surely the worldwide ISKCON community has a stake in whether or not its bills can be paid.

I may have been wrong.

Since posting my plea (titled “Seeking Matchless Gifts”), only one devotee has stepped forward to make a monthly donation (I thank you again, prabhu). I know when I read a worthy solicitation like this I often think that many others will come save the day, so the small donation that I would be able to give will probably be rendered moot. Please know that that is not the case. And as for the above headline, it is not true.

Yet.

It’s a distinct possibility, though. Once again, I reach out to you—Prabhupada’s disciples, grand-disciples and followers—to save this historic place for the legions of future followers who will marvel at being able to actually visit the exact spot where Prabhupada started his movement; the “small storefront” that they read about in the Prabhupada-Lilamrita; the place where it all began.

A lot of people are talking about HH Mukunda Maharaja’s new book, Miracle on 2nd Avenue. Well, another miracle is needed now, 45 years later—one that preserves a big part of ISKCON’s heritage, and you can be a part of it. Our total expenses are under $2,000 a month. Won’t you please consider becoming a regular monthly sponsor to save 26 2nd Avenue?

Please contact me at yadunath@bhakticenter.org or go to krishnanyc.com/giving.html to create a secure subscription via PayPal. All donations are tax deductible.

Yours in the service of ISKCON,
Yadunath das
Treasurer, 26 2nd Avenue

A Revolution In Consciousness?

2011-10-16T14:43:00.000-04:00

By Chris Fici for ISKCON News on 12 Oct 2011

Image: dipatch.com

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators carry a “false idol” to New York's Zuccotti Square

I was recently having lunch with a few of the ministers and pastors from our Interfaith community here in New York`s the East Village, and I was struck by how our conversation turned, like the force of a magnet, towards the practical matters of feeding and caring for the increasing number of homeless and destitute who were appearing in the Village.

I felt a certain disquietude as I listened. I didn't feel comfortable joining in their interest, and as I explored that discomfort, I returned to the disconnection still lingering in my heart between a bridge unmade.

My own compulsion to understand truth had previously lead from me the realm of social justice and activism to the realm of the spirit, and since that transition, I have been struggling to reconcile within my heart the bridge between these two worlds.

As I began exploring my feelings surrounding that lunch, another layer of truth hit me like a ton of bricks. The headlines I read turned towards a unique gathering in downtown Manhattan, which we all know now as the "Occupy Wall Street" protests.

In the past few weeks, I have been doing a dance in my mind and heart over how I feel towards this unlikely and unprecedented turn of events. I have gone from being quite eager to go down there and join them in their strange and colorful carnival, and I have also felt an equally strong desire to keep my distance.

Other monks in our ashram are feeling the same way, teetering between feelings of solidarity and skepticism, encouragement and discouragement. Yet it's something we can't ignore, not only because it's right down the street, but because it is speaking to a voice we know we all share.

Stop what you are doing for a moment and go to this website which is philosophically and practically linked to the protests on Wall Street:http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/

What do you feel when you read some of these people's accounts? I feel the pain of my own parents' financial troubles. I feel the pain of so many people from the wasted city of Detroit, where I grew up and honed my roots. I feel the pain of people just like me, just like you, who have found that precepts of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", as guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence, are a cruel joke laid upon them.

I look at many of the young people saddled with college and credit-card debt and I also feel gratitude for my current shelter as a monk, which has allowed me to keep a certain space from being plunged into that kind of angst, an angst which is visceral and existential all at once. I can literally say that "there but for the grace of God go I."

Most of all I feel that there are people who are done with being stuck with the survival of the fittest. Those camped out at Zuccotti Park near Wall Street are but the spearhead of what appears the emergence of a new zeitgeist, of a potential movement moving across lines of race (though not necessarily class), which is done with what Naomi Klein calls "The Shock Doctrine", or disaster capitalism.

The 99% are people who are sick of being manipulated and exploited by the 1% who, by all appearances on the surface and underneath, are rigging the system and benefiting beyond any sense of means and decency by a dependence on the inherent shocks and chaos programmed into the system itself.

In her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Klein writes of the 1% and one of their "spiritual" preceptors Milton Friedman:

"This desire for godlike powers of total creation is precisely why free-market idealogues are so drawn to crises and disasters. Non-apocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to their ambitions. For thirty-five years, what has animated Friedman's counterrevolution is an attraction to a kind of freedom and possibility available only in times of cataclysmic change-when people, with their stubborn habits and insistent demands, are blasted out of the way-moments when democracy seems a practical impossibility."

This is clearly a movement which is making the attempt to push back, to assert an essential need for decency, integrity, justice, and humanity. They are articulating a voice for so many of the voiceless. The desire of their heart is so sincere, and this is what is attracting so many of us to consider and even directly support their activism.

Yet, despite all these obvious truths, I still struggle to join my body, mind, and heart with their own. This is largely because I am a head-space person, and I am becoming more conscious of the "limits of my empathy", as articulated quite nicely in a recent NY Times op-ed by David Brooks, but the bridge between these considerations and actual action is also still unmade, and is the great conflict of my inner spiritual life at the moment.

There are practical considerations in any case. As monks, our distance from the world insures the space and freedom to cultivate the deeper spiritual reality which underlies and actualizes all potential solutions to the problems of this world. This distance allows a proper perspective and vision.

I can't help but relate to the similar struggle the great Catholic writer Thomas Merton also felt in trying to understand the bridge between his concerns for social justice and spiritual truth. He was careful to avoid the kind of zeal that warps sincerity, and which turns this sincerity into the violence of pride. From his 1962 essay The Seasons of Celebration he defines the zealot as an individual:

"who 'loses himself' in his cause in such a way that he can no longer 'find himself' at all. Yet paradoxically this 'loss' of himself is not the salutary self-forgetfulness commanded by Christ. It is rather an immersion in hos own wilfulness conceived as the will of an abstract, non-personal force; the force of a project or program. He is, in other words, alienated by the violence of his own enthusiasm: and by that very violence he tends to produce the same kind of alienation in others."

There is, of course, a fear in getting involved, of getting too drawn in when we are already in our ashram stretched to the max is so many ways. There is also a fear and hesitation based on simply not being familiar, on the ground, with the protestors, with who they are, what they are feeling, what they are experiencing. The only to this cure is a careful engagement on our part, to a sharing of our presence which also keeps us free from the winds of the chaotic and unformed aspects of this movement.

What the Occupy Wall Street movement needs, and what it is yearning for, is something more than a band-aid solution. They must solve the questions of leadership, policy, momentum, and a deeper integrity which will resonate with the mainstream. They must solve the question of how they are going to become truly transcendent.

Where do we come in to help them do this? Humbly of course, at first, not pretending to be the soothsayers who will guide them to victory, but as their servants trying to make them aware that they are on the cusp of a potential revolution in consciousness. We want them to understand truly what it means to come in like a needle, and out like a plow.

It is my own personal conviction that, as devotees and caretakers of Srila Prabhupada's mission, that we cannot live in a vacuum. We must offer, in some way, our presence, our association, our wisdom, our lifestyle, our love, friendship, and support. I ask for your blessings and your own prayers that we can perhaps all do this with courage and without naivety.

Bhakta Chris Fici is a monk in the Bhaktivedanta Ashram at The Bhakti Center, New York City

Lifestyle of a Monk in New York City (Part 2)

2011-10-06T17:23:00.000-04:00

Click here to head over to Tattva Magazine for Part 2 of my piece "Lifestyle of a Monk in New York City"

Radha, The Feminine Nature of God

2011-09-04T17:44:00.000-04:00

From my good friend and fellow monk Gadadhara Pandit Dasa at the Huffington Post

Millions will gather today, in India and around the world, to offer prayers, worship, and devotional songs glorifying the appearance of the Divine mother, Radha (Radharani). Radha descended from the spiritual realm shortly after Krishna, approximately 5,000 years ago. She took birth in the small village known as Barsana, which is about 28 miles from Mathura, the birth place of Krishna.

The word Radha comes from the Sanskrit verbal rootradh, which means to worship, and the word rani, which means queen. Radharani can be literally translated to mean "the queen of worship." In some texts, she is described as "the supreme goddess who is worshipable by everyone. She is the protector of all, and she is the mother of the entire universe."

The answer to the question that has been on everyone's mind for millennia is, YES and NO. The question is: Is God a Man? God is not just male, and according to some Vedic scriptures, God has both masculine and feminine expansions. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna provides a sneak preview into these feminine traits.

"Among women I am fame, fortune, fine speech, memory, intelligence, steadfastness and patience."

However, in some of the more esoteric texts such as the Puranas and the Chaitanya-Caritamrita, it explains that the complete manifestation of God includes his feminine counterpart, Radha. They are inconceivably one and different, as Krishna expanded himself into two for the purpose of exchanging love. There's a beautiful description in the Chaitanya-Caritamrita which gives us a window into the connection between Radha and Krishna.

"Radha is the full power, and Lord Kṛṣṇa is the possessor of full power. The two are not different, as evidenced by the revealed scriptures. They are indeed the same, just as musk and its scent are inseparable, or as fire and its heat are non-different. Thus Rādhā and Kṛiṣhṇa are one, yet they have taken two forms to enjoy the mellows of pastimes."

This concept is not an easy one to grasp. If God is full and complete, why does he need to expand himself to exchange love? The next question we can ask is why does God need to do anything? God has a personality which indicates that he has preferences. Perhaps this need to expand for the purpose of exchanging love speaks of the importance love plays in the lives of all individuals.

Our desire to love and be loved comes from God. For the most part, no one wants to be alone, at least not permanently. The thing everyone is chasing after is love. We all want to know that there are people out there that love us. Simultaneously, we hanker to be able to give our love to others.

There is another passage in the Caitanya-Caritamrita that describes Radha's qualities and love for Krishna.

"Radharani's body, mind, and words are steeped in love for Krishna ... The body of Radharani is a veritable transformation of love of Godhead. Even Krishna can't understand the strength of Radha's love which overwhelms Him. Her transcendental body is complete with unparalleled spiritual qualities. Even Lord Kṛiṣhṇa Himself cannot reach the limit of the transcendental qualities of Radharani."

These are some of Radha's prominent qualities:

1. Radha is adolescent and always freshly youthful.
2. Radharani is very sweet and most charming to look at.
3. Radha's face is smiling and ever blissful.
4. Radharani is the most exceptional singer and veena player.
5. Radha's words are charming and pleasing.
6. Radha is exceptionally humble.
7. Radha is the embodiment of mercy and compassion.
8. Radha possesses Mahabhava, the highest sentiment of love.
9. Radha always keeps Krishna under Her control. Krishna submissively obeys Radha's command

These topics of divine and spiritual love between Radha and Krishna will always remain a mystery as long as we remain on the material platform. Love on the spiritual platform is devoid of selfishness. The needs and interests on the other take precedence over one's own needs. The kind of love that comes closest to spiritual love is the love exhibited by a mother towards her child. It's full of sacrifice and is completely selfless; it is without expectation.

The feeling of love is derived from the service itself. The child is limited in its capacity to reciprocate the mother's love. Even if it increases its demands, the mother keeps on giving. Most of us can only imagine a relationship where the reciprocation of love and service is completely selfless and without expectation. It's the kind of love our hearts hanker for.

The path of bhakti or devotional service prepares one's heart and consciousness -- by eradicating selfishness and incorporating selflessness -- to understand and experience that divine love which exists between Radha and Krishna.

This is a wonderful day to meditate and reflect on the beautiful selfless qualities of Radharani and pray that we can to some degree follow in her footsteps.

Follow Gadadhara Pandit Dasa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nycpandit

The Bhagavad Gita And The Value of Vulnerability

2011-08-28T16:27:00.002-04:00

The latest article from my good friend, fellow monk, and Bhakti Center (Manhattan) president and CEO Ramnath Subramanian (Rasanath Dasa) on the Huffington Post

"Always state a strength as a weakness if you are asked about your weakness!" stated Shannon Iorio as she guided me through my mock interviews. "No one wants to hear about your weaknesses!" Shannon was my career mentor at Cornell University's business school, and she had just procured three investment banking job offers for me.

Incidentally, during my very first banking interview, my interviewer handed me a sheet of paper, which stated,

"Investment Banking is a business where thieves and pimps run freely on the corridors and the few good men die the death of a dog!"

In big, bold letters at the bottom it said, "THERE IS ALSO A NEGATIVE SIDE!" With a stern look, my interviewer asked me my first interview question, "Which one of the three are you?"

The message was written on the wall. I was walking into an environment where failure, weakness and honesty were treated as disease. The gravity of the challenge only became evident in the very first week of my new profession after I landed one of the offers Shannon had set up for me. The intensity of success-orientation, the sense of image consciousness, and the drive to be the best filled every nook and corner at work.

In that environment where every junior associate's performance is closely monitored and quickly labeled, I had my first major stumble. I was the only one in my class of 74 associates to fail my first major financial services examination -- the Series 7.

As I walked out of 100 Williams Street that evening, it was a sinking feeling. I waited until all my classmates had walked out -- not wanting to be with any of them. A deep sense of personal failure and the fear of being labeled as incompetent clouded my mind. I was extremely worried about losing the positive regard of my colleagues right at the start of new career.

I was thinking to myself, "I will just say I passed! No one will know anyways!" Determined to save my face at all cost and rationalizing it very well, I made the decision to "cook the books".

That evening, I spent time alone looking inside myself in a way that I never did before. There was an extreme uneasiness to sit and watch my feelings. For the first time, I encountered the fact that in my headlong rush to achieve, I had become a master at repression and a compulsive achievement machine.

I had so long invested in an image that I carefully preserved to convince others and myself about my capabilities. Behind an armor of achievements, I experienced the pain of my own vulnerability.

I realized that I lived in a culture that discouraged vulnerability. Vulnerability is usually associated with weakness -- something that I could be rejected or exploited for. In this culture, I have grossly and subtly ingested the notion that I should not have any weakness -- so much so that when I came in touch with my natural human limitations, it was painfully embarrassing. My idealized self-image was fractured. I realized that in the pursuit to keep the image alive I had invested in an image to gain positive acceptance from others.

As I entered the office the next morning, an excited bunch of associates and analysts were talking about the exam just next to my cubicle. One of the analysts, Matt Fiorello, asked, "How did it go, Ram?" I gathered all my courage and said that I failed. There was silence and I felt the pain run through every pore of my body.

Nobody knew what to say. A few consolations floated and the crowd dispersed. As I sat on my seat, I experienced a state of true grounding -- as if I had let go of a huge load. There was acceptance of my own vulnerability and a simple, lighthearted joy in that acceptance -- a relief that I did not have to live with an image.

Later that evening, Matt stopped by my desk. "I cannot believe you spoke the truth so easily", he said. "No excuses. I feel very inspired. Thank you for being so trustworthy". I was pleasantly surprised and grateful.

That evening, I experienced a deep sense of freedom. I realized how I had unconsciously become a prisoner of my own image. I realized that true personal development needs an honest and compassionate acknowledgment of our human limitations and a proper space to socialize them. We need to accept ourselves before others can accept us as we are. That acknowledgment can prove to be an invaluable guardian against the self-deception mechanisms of the ego.

Otherwise, we become desensitized to our authentic self and begin to package ourselves simply to attract favorable attention. "How do I come across?" becomes the name of the game. Even amongst "friends", it becomes difficult to take off the mask due to the fear of rejection.

The slick, smooth surface conceals the emotional neediness to be accepted as we are. In such a stifling environment, true personal development does not happen. We remain slaves of an image without grounding in who we truly are.

This very lesson is conveyed at the onset of the Bhagavad Gita, India's classic on yoga and spiritual wisdom, where prince Arjuna provides a remarkable example of vulnerability. Arjuna was a veteran of many battles and had never lost a single combat. His acts of prowess, courage and intelligence were world-famous. Yet, Arjuna faced a situation where he had to fight his own kinsmen.

His courage was tested and he broke down in front of his dear friend Krishna, expressing his distraught situation. In a matter of moments, Arjuna turned from a mighty warrior into a weakling, right in front of his opponents. In that exhibition of weakness, Arjuna exhibited great courage. It is that honest expression of weakness that set the stage for timeless wisdom to be spoken. Consequently, he received the strength and inspiration to confront his inner doubts and overcome them.

The same can happen in our lives if we take the courage to be vulnerable; when we learn to walk through the door of fear that has kept us prisoners to our idealized self-image. We can wake up to our authentic potential and experience the sense of freedom. It can also help us better understand and be compassionate to another's needs.

A Humble Request For MacBook Charity

2011-08-24T18:27:00.002-04:00

Hello dear readers!

I have a humble and charitable request. I am looking to upgrade from my trusty yet somewhat limited Samsung N110 netbook to a 11-inch Macbook Pro ($1199)

Being an aspiring brahmacari, of course, I ask for your help. The reasons for this upgrade are twofold: the college outreach (cooking classes, Gita courses) at New York University and Columbia University that I am a part of would be facilitated by this upgrade, especially in the matter of being able to show videos and do other multimedia presentations, which are difficult with my little netbook.

Secondly, I would also like to upgrade to a Macbook Pro so that the files for my writing and teaching seva would have a more stable and usable device for storage and usage.

There is also the whole aesthetic factor-to be honest! But that's secondary.

So I humble beg for any help donation-wise, and also if you are looking to unload a used Macbook (no more than 2 years old), I will also gladly take it off your hands as well.

Any donation will be eagerly remunerated by yours truly in terms of any kind of service you may request, to the best of my ability and facility.

Thank you very much! Any inquiries can be directed to me, Chris Fici, at nvclub108@gmail.com

The Birth of Krishna: When God Came To Earth

2011-08-22T15:21:00.002-04:00

It's Krishna's birthday! Here's a new article on the whole experience from my good friend and fellow monk Gadadhara Pandit Dasa at the Huffington Post

Krishna means "all-attractive" and avatar means "descent of the divine." Today is Krishna Janmastami, the birth or descent of Krishna, the god worshipped by millions of Hindus around the world. Krishna appeared on this earth, at midnight, approximately 5,000 years ago in Mathura, located in Northern India, 91 miles south of New Delhi.

Krishna is God as never seen before. He wore many hats: child, friend, servant, romantic lover, cowherd boy and killer of demons. For someone coming from a Western paradigm and even for some Hindus, Krishna can easily be passed off as a mythological figure created by a fiction writer for the purpose of entertainment.

However, hundreds of millions of people will perform severe fasts, engage in extended rituals and worship, recite extensively his activities and also the verses of the Bhagavad Gita for the purpose of remembering him and his activities on this day and throughout the year.

Krishna is the speaker of the Bhagavad Gita ("the song of God"), which is considered by many Hindus as the most prominent, referenced and commented-on scriptural text in all of India. The Gita serves as the guidebook for many Hindus and non-Hindus on how to live a life of devotion to God, while also cultivating a healthy detachment from the things of this world. In the past and even in the present, plaintiffs and defendants have sworn on the Gita in the courts of law in India.

Krishna's life has become the subject matter of textbooks in Hinduism classes in many universities and the subject of debate amongst philosophers and theologians. Those who are unfamiliar with his life and activities are befuddled by Krishna, while the devotees rejoice upon hearing and reading the wonderful stories of his life.

One of the most endearing qualities demonstrated by Krishna during his earthly manifestation was his willingness to relate to his devotees in multiple capacities. Even though he is the supreme deity according to the Gita and some of the Puranas, he always experiences great joy in the service of his devotees.

In the role of a child, he would carry the shoes of his father. Similar to Jesus washing the feet of his 12 disciples during the last supper, Krishna, with great joy, washed the feet of great saintly persons. The most prominent act of service demonstrated by Krishna was immediately after he spoke the Gita, when he drove Arjuna's chariot around like a humble chauffeur. The entire time, he obeyed, like a servant, every order of Arjuna.

These descriptions of Krishna's activities can be very difficult to comprehend, especially if one is used to the notion of God being the supreme father who is angry, jealous and eager to punish those who don't follow his law. There are descriptions that better fit Krishna: He's a poet, a singer, a dancer, he likes to serve, and all one has to do is look at a sunset, sunrise or any of the other wonders of nature and it becomes easy to understand the creative and artistic side of Krishna.

What I found especially intriguing about Krishna was the description given in an ancient Hindu text, the Brahma Samhita: "He has an eternal blissful spiritual body ... He is a person possessing the beauty of a blooming youth..." God is not an old man with a long white beard. I found this to be a very refreshing idea! If God is old, that means he falls under the influence of time and is subject to decay and possibly even death. Here he's described as an eternally youthful person beyond time and space.

It's not possible for us, with our limited and inaccurate sense perception and logic, to comprehend the nature, quality and personhood of Krishna. Hindu scriptures and sages explain that one needs to qualify oneself to understand God. Purifying one's senses, mind, consciousness and soul is the prerequisite for gaining access to this knowledge.

For example, before studying calculus, one needs to qualify one's self by studying arithmetic, algebra and geometry. Otherwise, more advanced subjects won't make any sense. Qualities of pride, envy, greed, anger and selfish desire must be purged as they cloud the ego.

Simultaneously, humility, nonviolence, forgiveness and tolerance need to be implemented into our character as they bring clarity into our lives. Without an endeavor to fulfill these prerequisites, God will only remain a theoretical concept.

Getting to know Krishna is a lot like getting to know anyone, as it requires time and commitment. Krishna explains in the Gita that he doesn't need anything nor does he want anything, but one who renders service to him becomes his friend. All-in-all, even though He's the supreme creator and the cause of all causes, he's looking to engage in a loving reciprocal relationship with those who are interested and he promises that it will be a two-way street where he's willing to do his part.

Follow Gadadhara Pandit Dasa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nycpandit

Transcending The Quarter-Life Crisis

2011-08-10T14:57:00.002-04:00

From my good friend and fellow monk Gadadhara Pandit Dasa at the Huffington Post

I had never even heard of the term "quarter-life crisis" until my fifth year as the Hindu Chaplain at Columbia University. During a conversation over lunch, a student told me about it, and then towards the end of the school year another student gave me a book called "Quarter Life Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties" by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner.

The term is similar to a mid-life crisis, but it refers to the plight of students in school or right out of college trying to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives. When I ask senior students if they know about their plans after they graduate, they give me a consistently similar response: "I have no idea."

It's not just one thing that leads to uncertainty and even panic which is labeled as the quarter-life crisis. It can be a combination of factors. All the facilities and conveniences a college campus provides will no longer be available: on-campus residential housing, eating facilities, medical & counseling facilities, security, and clubs and organizations for students to meet other students.

It can be even more intense if you can't find a job after graduating, or if you find something in your field and realize that you don't want to do this for the rest of your life, and you regret all that time and money spent on something you no longer want to pursue.

Moving back home with one's parents isn't the most attractive option, as it can feel a bit restrictive, and it can make graduates feel like they're regressing. Not everyone is affected by all of these concerns, but even one or two of these concerns can push students to act in extreme ways to resolve their situation. One such example, which I found quite shocking, was in a HuffPost article that describes college women engaging in sexual acts with wealthy older men in exchange for money to pay off their student loans.

The root of the problem is that right from our childhood we've been driven and pushed to achieve material success and social status. The equation we've been memorizing all our life is that material possessions, position, and success equals happiness, but there are so many people who get all of this and still feel empty inside.

We've been running full speed ahead, pedal to the medal, and we never stop to consider what's really going to make me happy. We've almost completely ignored our spiritual needs.

Material things can only give us so much. They can only provide temporary satisfaction for the senses, for the physical body and mind, but they do little for the heart and soul. It's quite amazing that we've hardly ever been seriously encouraged to pursue the needs of the soul, and we may even have been been discouraged to pursue our spiritual needs.

It's no wonder that so many people hit a brick wall at different stages of their life, whether it's in their 40s and 50s or even in their twenties, during the "quarter-life' crisis.

The fifth chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita explains:

One whose happiness is within, who is active and rejoices within, and whose aim is inward is actually the perfect mystic. He is liberated in the Supreme, and ultimately he attains the Supreme.

Just taking care of the needs of the body and ignoring the needs of the soul is like watering the leaves, fruits, and flowers of the tree and forgetting to water the actual root. It's just a matter of time before we come face to face with a quarter or mid-life crisis.

The sooner in life we're able to implement into our lives, on a consistent basis, spiritual practices of meditation and yoga, with the intention of understanding the true nature and needs of our soul, the better chance we have of preventing such a crisis from hitting us in the face. The crisis happens because we lose sight of who we really are, and we can't figure out what we're supposed to do.

The Bhagavad-Gita helped me get through a very difficult time in my own life; which I would call a quarter-life crisis. My family's multi-million dollar business had collapsed causing us to lose our house, cars, and savings. We were left with nothing. I was 21 years old and felt like my life had turned upside down. I had lost all sense of direction and had no idea what my next step would be. This is the first time in my life I started to explore spirituality and considered building a spiritual foundation.

The wisdom of the Gita taught me that material things are temporary, that they come and go like the winter and summer seasons and that I shouldn't be disturbed by their disappearance. I learned that becoming overly attached to material possessions and positions will only lead to frustration, as at some point, they will be taken away by the power of time.

The wisdom of the Gita encouraged me to focus on the more permanent things in life, such as understanding the eternal nature of the soul, and how the purpose of life is to re-establish our lost relationship with God. Once we're en-route to re-establishing that relationship, many other aspects of our life become clearer.

The problem is that we get so caught up with all of our material affairs and we wait for something to go wrong before we take action. The recommendation of the Gita is to make sure each day we incorporate some meditation and reflection into our lives. This may very well prevent the "quarter-life" crisis from happening, and at the very least, if it does happen, it can provide us with the coping mechanisms we will need to get through it.

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Hey I Am Finally Published!

2011-08-05T09:11:00.001-04:00

Click here to check out Part 1 of my essay "Lifestyle of a Monk in NYC" at the online magazine Tattva.

Parts 2 and 3 to follow soon!

Being A Monk In New York City

2011-07-27T16:16:00.002-04:00

From my good friend and fellow monk Gadadhara Pandit Dasa at the Huffington Post

Most people I encounter are quite fascinated by the idea of monks living in Manhattan. I suppose the fascination is quite natural. Most people engaged in monastic life are expected to live away from a busy city. A place that allows for focused meditation and reflection on spiritual life. Wouldn't a busy city like New York, which is seen by many as the height of materialism, seem quite counterproductive to the monastic life?

It all depends on one's purpose. If one is aspiring to focus only on one's own individual meditation and spiritual practice, then a busy city environment can definitely be counterproductive. However, if one is residing in a city for the purpose of helping people, then there's no better place.

Within the Bhakti tradition of Hinduism, the tradition that I have adopted, it is recommended that some monks live in the city because that's where people are most stressed and therefore need the most spiritual guidance. The city is a very intense place where everyone is constantly scrambling from one activity to another, always keeping themselves busy, often times leaving their spiritual pursuits by the wayside.

The Bhakti tradition teaches that making oneself available to assist others helps one develop greater levels of compassion, which is a very important tenet of Hinduism. This tenet applies to monks and laypersons.

The city can actually push one to greater levels of focus in one's meditation. There are so many distractions everywhere and to prevent oneself from getting sucked into the ubiquitous materialism, one really needs to take greater shelter of the meditation and other focusing practices.

For example, when you're driving at high speeds, you need to be more attentive, otherwise the chances of an accident are much greater. I like to compare the city to a high-speed highway which requires a greater level of focus.

Being a monk in New York City can definitely be challenging. I'm more comfortable in a city environment than some of our monks. I was born in Kanpur, which is an extremely busy, industrial city. Then, at the age of about five, we moved to New Delhi, which is also insanely busy. By age seven, I was living in Los Angeles.

When I first moved to New York, I found it to be an exciting place. Because of my conditioning, I like busy places. People, cars, trucks, and other city noises don't really bother me. I do like to get away once in a while, but for the most part, I'm fine with it.

The monastery, located in the Lower East Side, is right on First Avenue, and from the outside, it looks like just another New York brownstone, so one could walk right past it and not notice anything special. We're surrounded by bars, nightclubs, restaurants, tattoo shops, and a variety of eclectic establishments. It's probably one of the busiest areas in Manhattan on Friday and Saturday nights. The action actually starts on Thursday nights and goes until early Sunday morning till about 4:00 a.m.

I know the timings so well because I usually wake up at 4:00 a.m. and can hear the boisterous discussions taking place on the avenue after the bars have closed and flushed out their clients. Once, I even saw a couple of guys with their shirts off, in a total drunken stupor, having a fist fight right in the middle of the street. It's quite a scene out there with people yelling and bottles smashing against the sidewalk.

The natural question arises: What in the world are monks doing in a place like this?!

There's about 15 of us and we all wake up between 4:00 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. Our morning meditation starts at 5:00 a.m. To refresh ourselves from the night's sleep, everyone is required to shower, put on a clean set of robes and then enter the temple room for the meditation and worship. According to the teachings in Hinduism, the mind has the easiest time focusing during the early morning hours. The mind responds to all the stimuli around us -- people, traffic, noises, and activity in general. There's not a whole lot of activity going on at 4:30am. Stilling the mind is close to impossible, but the morning hours do help when you're trying to focus the mind.

Morning Meditation

• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Monks engaged in mantra meditation at 5:00AM.

Our morning services move through a variety of moods and flavors. We start with the more grave mantra meditation and after an hour, we move into a very devotional practice of song and devotional dance. We sing different songs glorifying the previous teachers and God. The use of traditional Indian instruments such as cartals (cymbals) and a double-sided Bengali drum allow the sessions to become quite rhythmic and ecstatic. The beautiful melodies enable one to pour their heart into the prayers being sung while all the monks move back and forth and side to side and eventually dance in a circle. It's an incredibly powerful, devotional, and spiritual way to start the morning. It's easily more energizing than a double espresso and the experience stays with you the entire day.

The monks rotate lecturing from Hindu scripture elucidating the philosophy and explaining how it can be applied into our daily lives. During the lecture part of the morning program, some of the other monks are taking notes on the class, while others are cutting up vegetables for the day's cooking and some are stringing garlands of fresh flowers to be offered on the altar.

Whenever anyone hears about the morning service, a common question arises "how often do you guys do this?" and I tell them "everyday -- seven days a week." The look on most people's face is priceless when they hear my answer. It's anything but boring. There's quite a bit going on and the three hours, from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m., flies by. Of course, if you haven't had a good night's rest, it can get kind of rough at times. After the morning program and before breakfast at 9:00 a.m., some monks will continue to do additional meditation, while others will do some yoga, and some may even take a quick nap.

The morning meditation and prayer service is our food for the soul. It gives us the much needed nourishment we need to handle the madness of the city and it gives us the spiritual strength we need for our various activities -- teaching, counseling, lecturing, cooking, cleaning, and going out to engage with the local population.

Being a monk in New York isn't easy by any means, however, if the principle of service to humanity is adhered to, it can be very satisfying and even blissful. Due to length constraints, I am only able to describe the first five hours of our day. In a future piece, I will go into further details of our monastic life, which will reveal more about the inner workings of the monastery and some of the challenges the monks face, individually and collectively.

Follow Gadadhara Pandit Dasa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nycpandit

Celebrating Another's Success: An Antidote To Envy

2011-07-14T21:45:00.003-04:00

The latest article from my good friend, fellow monk, and Bhakti Center (Manhattan) president and CEO Ramnath Subramanian (Rasanath Dasa) on the Huffington Post

"Always remember that envy gives the strength to excel!" These were my aunt's parting remarks during the summer of 1986, as I boarded a train back to my hometown just before the start of a new school year. Even as a third grader, those words left a lasting impact on my consciousness.

Year after year, the medals piled up and the accolades filled several folders -- one of the main driving forces behind it all was that one statement my aunt made. It gave me the strength to compete with the best and either equal or excel them. But along with it also came subtle, powerful and deeply imprinted "side-effects" that I only recently recognized were disempowering and distortive to my reality.

Envy is a universal experience. It pervades our culture -- from schools to corporations to family life -- but is rarely addressed openly or easily recognized. Rather, it masks itself under different, more palatable terms such as "competitive spirit" or "drive".

In plain terms, it is best defined as an emotion that occurs when a person lacks another person's perceived superior quality, achievement, or possession and desires to possess it, wishes that the other lacked it, or both.

Psychologists have suggested that envy can be classified into two types -- malicious and benign. They claim that benign envy can be used as a positive motivational force in achieving one's goals. However, there is a fine line between the two and often we quickly and unconsciously degenerate into the shadow side. In such situations, it can be easy to forgo everything -- even close relationships -- to acquire what we obsess over.

Dr. Richard Smith, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, states that much of the recent economic crisis may well have been fueled by runaway envy, as financiers competed to avoid the shame of being a "mere" millionaire.

The Bhagavata Purana, one of India's classics on yoga and spiritual wisdom, describes envy or dvesha as the older brother of hatred or krodha. It states that envy corrodes all virtues -- a poisonous venom that dries out all gratitude, love and compassion, so that others' misfortune and downfall can taste like honey.

In 2005, while I was a student at Cornell University's business school, my friend and classmate Vishal and I applied for a covetous position at a large investment bank. We were both excited about the prospect and exchanged ideas and information on our individual applications. Eventually, we both got selected to the final round of interviews.

Slowly, our mutual sharing and joy started to disappear. I started avoiding his phone calls. In class, we played subtle mind games. We would talk about the various deals in the financial markets simply to prove that each knew more than the other.

As the interview day approached, I started to lose sleep -- not because of the interview, but the possibility that Vishal would get the job and I wouldn't. Deep inside I feared that he was smarter than I was. Yet, I could not admit that to myself. To compensate I sat up all night practicing my interview questions to make sure I would ace them.

As fate would have it, Vishal got the offer and I did not. The pain of reality could not have been more bitter. As email congratulations flowed for Vishal, I could feel my heart pounding in rage and hatred. While having lunch at the atrium, I saw a relaxed Vishal happily chatting with friends. I interpreted that as him showing off and instinctively convinced myself that he was simply happy at my misery.

That evening as I sat with a few friends studying for a finance exam, I started to talk about how Vishal had deliberately not helped me with certain interview questions. Unconsciously, I began to assassinate his character. There were things about his past that he had shared with me in confidence that I started to make public. I felt "satisfied".

As I walked back home, I felt that I had lost something deep inside. I tried to distract myself by watching a movie, but the feeling only got heavier. As I explored it further, I realized what had happened. It was hard to accept at first, but denying it felt like a bigger burden.

I realized that envy is the most unfortunate aspect of human nature. Not only is the envious person rendered unhappy by his or her envy, but they also wish to inflict misfortune on others. Envy makes it hard to appreciate all of the good things we have receiving in the moment, because the one who envies is too busy worrying about how he or she is perceived. I resolved to put an end to this.

The next day, I approached Vishal and openly expressed my feelings to him. Tears filled my eyes as I sincerely apologized for my behavior. I told him that I truly felt that he was the better candidate to receive the offer. I felt the pain of the honest appreciation pass through every pore of my body.

To my surprise, Vishal was touched, which further humbled and embarrassed me. For the first time, I was able to appreciate his softhearted and forgiving nature. I felt grateful to have my friend back again.

The next day, I hosted a dinner at my house for Vishal and a few friends to celebrate his accomplishment. As I personally cooked and served everyone, I felt renewed, invigorated and cured of a chronic disease. I felt free.

That evening I understood the true purport of yet another statement from the Bhagavata Purana which states that envy is nothing but appreciation that is corrupted by a strong obsession to exclusively possess what we value. Envy results from a deep-seated desire to be the lord and master of all that we survey. It is the strongest weapon of the ego in its relentless pursuit for self-aggrandizement.

If we can strip away the desire to possess and control what we appreciate or value in others, we can experience the true beauty of the traits, recognizing that God and nature have given them to a particular individual for its best possible use.

Celebrating the success of another helps us recognize the qualifications of the individual who has been given certain gifts, and it helps us to be inspired by his or her qualities. Such celebration is the perfect antidote to the poison of envy.

The Humble Musings Of The Manhattan Monk 7/7/11

2011-07-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

The desert which I must cross is the desert of the vacant spaces of my mind, of my heart, void of all feelings, of the truth of your own heart.

In this desert are the scorpions whose sting I refuse to take, yet what else can I do if I must walk this path? Their is no mundane antidote to their poison. The only cure is the nectar stored within my own heart-space. I must access the storehouse of this nectar, by care and love and service, to keep in a pouch with me as I walk along these hot sands

**
The balance of respect...

On one side, my personality which needs the social touch, who longs for the heart-to-heart, freely giving in time and space, exposed and vulnerable and ready to heal.

On the other side, the silent one, learning the art of finding the treasure within, who needs relief from the extraneous noise and demands, needs a recharge of the batteries, who is free to meditate on the flowing waters in the woods everywhere.

If I disrespect one side, the other atrophies. This balance of respect insures mutual growth, reinforcing through each others' best qualities and gifts. Each side, when healthy and whole, knows exactly when to lend a hand to the other, to pick them out of their latent mirages.

**
I pray for the end to my creature comforts, but I understand their is a certain quality of madness that can come by pulling the plug too quickly. If I tear down my castle too quickly, without finding true comfort in the communal quarters of loving souls and our relationships, I will have no provisions for the walk into the desert.

Death: The Elephant In The Room

2011-07-06T21:42:00.002-04:00

From my good friend and fellow monk Gadadhara Pandit Dasa at the Huffington Post

Since I'm an only child, and since my parents and I migrated from India away from our immediate family in 1980, I haven't directly experienced the loss of someone close to me. I was very close to my grandmother, but by the time she passed away from the world, I had already been in America for over 12 years, and time had diminished any attachment I had for her.

My dad cried like I had never seen him cry before. His father had passed away when he was only seven years old, so he was quite close to her. His major regret was that he couldn't be with her when she passed.

These memories come upon me every once in a while, as I meditate on the rooftop of our monastery in the East Village. Looking across the street I witness a hearse pull up to the funeral home. The driver opens the back door and pulls out a coffin with a recently deceased individual and rolls it into the home.

It's a constant reminder that, all around me, restaurants, delis, and a variety of other businesses are opening or going out of business, but the one establishment that seems to remain constant and unaffected by the economy is that funeral home.

I also can't help but wonder how not too long ago, the person in that casket was a living, breathing individual with family and friends, and now they're gone. What must it be like for those they left behind? What was their final experience the few moments before their departure? It seems like such a mystery. A few moments before, they were here and now they've disappeared off the face of the earth.

There's little doubt that it's an unpleasant experience. The entire body and all its functions are coming to a halt. Everything we hold dear is on the verge of being stripped away from us. Losing simple things such as a cell phone or wallet can be quite stressful and frustrating, so what to speak of losing everything, all at once! Often times, death can show up at the door without giving any kind of an advance notice.

Is there anything we can do to prepare for that final moment of our lives? Or, are we to remain helpless victims? I heard one of my teachers explain that "Life is the preparation and death is the final examination." Obviously, we're not going to be able to ward off death. The death rate is and always will be one hundred percent.

However, just as we prepare for any exam in our life, whether it's a driving test or an academic test -- preparation for death is very much required. The more we prepare, the better equipped we'll be in dealing with the inescapable truth of the situation. Death is not a test we can cram for the night before.

We have a subconscious tendency to deny our mortality. Even though it's happening all around us, and everyday we're reminded of it in so many ways, we just never think that it'll actually happen to us. Driving by a cemetery might make us a little reflective, but somehow we're not able to connect that to our own life.

Death is like the elephant in the room. It can't be ignored, but we do a really good job of it. It's natural for us to be fearful of our own mortality.

This reminds me of a conversation that takes place in the famous Hindu epic Mahabharata between a wise king and a realized sage. The sage asks the king, "What's the most amazing thing you've seen in life?" The king replies that "The most amazing thing I've seen is that death is taking place everywhere, but no one ever thinks it's going to happen to them."

The Hindu scriptures explain that we come into this world with a certain number of breaths and the countdown begins the moment we exit the womb. Since we don't really know when it's going to happen, every moment should be lived in such a way that we're preparing our consciousness for the final moment.

This doesn't mean that we're constantly thinking of our demise and getting depressed by such thoughts. It means living life in such a way that we're constantly endeavoring to create a balance between our material and spiritual lives.

The wisdom found within the Hindu/Vedic tradition of India can provide us with a less fearful and brighter outlook on our own mortality, while teaching us to better prepare for our final moments. Their teachings can also help us better deal with the loss of a loved one.

As an example, I'd like to share a few passages from the Bhagavad Gita, which can provide us with a beautiful and broad perspective on life, death, and our ultimate existence:

As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.
The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon, nor burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by the wind.

These verses alleviate our very basic and most fundamental concern, the fear of ceasing to exist. The Gita explains that the only thing about us that deteriorates and dies is the body, which is compared to an old set of garments.

The real person, the soul, continues to live on without being affected by any of the elements of this world, including the factor of time, which is ultimately responsible for diminishing the life of all matter. Time, however, has no effect on the spiritual self (soul).

This isn't our first life and it's not going to be our last. The soul is eternal and it will continue to exist even after the demise of the body. Knowing this can provide some solace about our own existence and the existence of those we care for.

It also teaches us that in order to properly prepare for that final exam, we need to engage in spiritual acts, which will help us to realize the nature and reality of our soul, and simultaneously help distance us from the bodily concept of life.

Follow Gadadhara Pandit Dasa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nycpandit

The Intersection-Spiritual Action

2011-07-03T21:27:00.002-04:00

As mentioned before here and in the main themes of Merton's own writing and thought, our society lacks a careful, non-jealous, and non-envious love, a love linked to God that even includes the oppressor. The careful balance a spiritualist must strike between allowing proper and lawful justice for the oppressor, without losing sight of his inner spiritual core and the need to compassionately address the obstacles blocking that core, is of a magnitude of the highest maturity.

When we see someone we label as an “enemy”, we are actually seeing ourselves. We are actually the seeing worst part of our own nature personified, and we become so repulsed that we dehumanize that other person and prepare to destroy him/her without a trace, as if missiles and concentration camps are the only and most effective solution. In that other person who so viscerally represents our worst nature is an incredible opportunity to unveil and experience the deeper truth of God. Their personage, and their loathsome expressions, and our reactions to it, present to us a test of our own spiritual advancement, realization of that advancement, and capability to apply that realization,

The gift of God's truth and love is at stake in this exchange. Merton writes:

“If we really sought truth we would begin slowly and laboriously to divest ourselves one by one of all our coverings of fiction and delusion: or at least we would desire to do so, for mere willing cannot enable us to effect it.

On the contrary, the one who can best point out our error, and help us to see it, is the adversary whom we wish to destroy. This is perhaps why we wish to destroy him. So, too, we can help him to see his error, and that is why he wants to destroy us.

So while we are perfectly willing to tell our adversary he is wrong, we will never be able to do so effectively until we can ourselves appreciate where he is right. And we can never accept his judgment on our errors until he gives evidence that he really appreciates our own peculiar truth.

Love, love only, love of our deluded fellow man as he actually is, in his delusion and in his sin: this alone can open the door to truth. As long as we do not have this love, as long as this love is not active and effective in our lives (for words and good wishes will never suffice) we have no real access to the truth. At least not to moral truth.”^¹

As I read of the way the Native predecessors of this American land were coldly and quickly eliminated by the conquerors of European fortune and so-called piety, a grain of hate drew into my heart and began to flower and flourish. A clear demarcation line began to come into focus as I explored deeper into my unjust history. From Columbus to Cortez, from Stalin to Nixon, I could not but feel a hatred I had never experienced before in my life, a hatred largely born out of a incredulous incomprehension of these personalities and their deeds. How could someone be so hateful themselves, and not expect those who see through them clearly to return that hate in equal if not deeper fervor?

I sit in this chamber of my heart now, looking around at these past perceptions in a new light of Mertonian and Vedic wisdom. These men, my enemies, are showing me something of myself. They are teaching me a lesson about myself, and I must listen. My deepening sense of personal integrity is forcing me to re-examine all my relationships, most acutely the ones that challenge, in the light of a new obligation, an obligation to earn the deeper love of God, absorb it into my being, and be able to give to others without hesitation and discrimination.

A monk's life, even in New York City, is one where a taste of solitude can bear wonderful fruits. Here a different definition of solitude must be offered than what may originally come to mind, although this original definition is also a valid part of the larger, deeper definition. For solitude is something much more than hiding away and stepping back. It is essentially the effort to see ourselves totally, to make the painful effort to confront the hateful, lower aspects of our nature.

Solitude means to be with ourselves fully and without distraction, to learn who we actually are, to become complete in ourselves and in our spiritual relationships, with God and with our fellow seekers on the path. The fruits of this inner journey must be shared. If they are kept in the cellar of our heart, they will mold and rot, and have no benefit.

Merton writes:

“Solitude has its own special work: a deepening of awareness that the world needs. A struggle against alienation. True solitude is deeply aware of the world's needs. It does not hold the world at arm's length.”^²

Immersion in the solitary spirit allows us the necessary detachment and renunciation to process the needs and progression of our own spiritual being, but as the Gita describes, real renunciation fructifies in a spirit of action, of making work the gift of our realizations.

Consider this verse:

The steadily devoted soul attains unadulterated peace because he offers the result of all activities to Me; whereas a person who is not in union with the Divine, who is greedy for the fruits of his labor, becomes entangled.^³

One of the key lessons of the Gita is to saturate one's work in this necessary mood of detachment. What we become detached from is known as the ahankara, or false ego. This false sense of our reality and our own self is the house of our delusions and our unhealthy habits, the abode of all those tics, illusions, and failures to communicate which tend to derail all of our personal and collective hopes for justice and peace.

The elegant solution of the Gita, as spoken by Krishna, the personification of the Divine, to is to dovetail the intentions and the results of our actions towards His pleasure and His will. God is the source of love and of all justice and mercy, and by directing the energy of our work for love and justice towards this source, we call down upon us the element of divinity missing from our all-too-human struggle. We detach from our sense that we alone can reverse the tides of the diabolic in this world and attach to the need for the help and guidance of God, who believe it or not, cares and is invested just as much as we are, if not more, in uplifting the downtrodden.

Through this work, through this action, we learn the eternal and affirming art of bringing out the spirit of justice to correct the imbalances that offend our sense of decency and being.

Speaking from a Christian perspective easily seen in a universal light, Merton writes about the practical combination of spirit and social justice:

“Christian social action is first of all action that discovers religion in politics, religion in work, religion in social programs for better wages, Social Security, etc...In a word, if we really understood the meaning of Christianity in social life we would see it as part of the redemptive work of Christ, liberating man from misery, squalor, subhuman living conditions, economic or political slavery, ignorance, alienation.”^⁴

Elaborating further on the spiritual essence of social action, Merton writes:

“It is an attempt to elevate man, whether professedly Christian or not, to a level consonant with his dignity as a son of God...liberated from the powers that keep him in subjection, the old dark gods of war, lust, power, and greed.

In such a context, political action itself is a kind of spiritual action, an expression of spiritual responsibility.”^⁵

1Merton, 68-69

2Merton, 19

3Prabhupada,

4Merton, 82

5Merton, 82

Radhanath Swami Meets President Obama

2011-06-25T20:32:00.002-04:00

From RadhanathSwami.com

On June 13, 2011 Radhanath Swami was invited to meet with the President of the United States, Mr. Barack Obama at an event in Miami Florida. Radhanath Swami was grateful to accept the invitation on behalf of his beloved Guru, Srila Prabhupada and dedicated the meeting to his beloved Godbrother Bhakti Tirtha Swami. The President and the Swami had a beautiful, heartfelt talk for several minutes.

It is special that last year Radhanath Swami was invited to meet with the President of India, Ms. Pratibha Patil. We feel that the two meetings signal an auspicious spiritual connection between the United States of America and Mother India.

The Humble Musings Of The Manhattan Monk 6/23/11

2011-06-23T08:00:00.001-04:00

There is a tremendous pain within my heart at the presence of my blindness towards my real integrity. This integrity, full with substance, is not cheap; it is not to be abused. This pain reveals a great desire for freedom from this abuse, a yearning to grasp my real integrity. This pain is the key to the door of my heart. I must get over my fears and comforts and walk right through.

***
I get the real strong feeling that I am standing outside of the place I need to be. That place is full of the pain I need to embrace and transcend; my mother's pain, my esoteric pain at being torn asunder by the misuse of my free will, sending me plummeting away from Your love, embrace, and smile.

I hesitate constantly to enter into this space, taking baby steps, waiting for the push, praying that I don't drown when I enter that cold water.

Fear and pain are what I need to see most clearly, for when I hide by my rotten instinct, I lose access to their cathartic gifts. Just dive in, but keep the anchor set to the love of your friends and brothers, who will pull you up when you need to breathe.

***
Not a lofty beginning, so tentative
Apple juice, a little wine, hiding behind my mom
During a summer storm
Still the scared little boy despite all the books I've read
It's worse to be lost when you don't even know you're lost
Not too heavy, take the light of your brothers' hearts
Give what you can to heal them and take what they give you.

The momentum of their grace and your gratitude
Will get you on the path before you even know it.

The Bhagavad-Gita: You Are Not Your MInd

2011-06-20T09:01:00.002-04:00

From my good friend and fellow monk Gadadhara Pandit Dasa at the Huffington Post

Have you ever wondered about why your mind works the way it does, and how it comes up with all of its scattered, random and half-organized thoughts? Where are all of these thoughts coming from, and what's the reason they are there? Many of our thoughts originate from experiences we've had in the past, but the mind will also come up with dreamlike scenarios about events that have yet to take place in our lives.

We will find ourselves in a scenario for a future event, and we will be fully imagining the experience of what it would be like to live in that scenario. Some of these situations can be pleasant, while others are very nightmarish.

We've all had experiences where we can be eating, sleeping, walking down the street, studying, working, listening to music or even engaging in a conversation with someone else, and the mind will begin to drift away to somewhere else. We didn't consciously decide to let the mind wander, but it did. It just left us standing there talking to someone while it decided to go away for a while. This happens all the time!

This happens for prolonged durations during the dreaming state. Our dreams often seem so vivid and detailed, but they weren't our conscious creations. The mind conjures them up and gets very creative. This brings me to that statement Morpheus makes to Neo in "The Matrix":

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

No one willingly chooses to have a nightmare where one is chased by an animal, attacked by a murderer or falls off of a cliff. We can wake up in a sweat with our heart beating a million miles an hour. It becomes obvious that we weren't in control of our thoughts at that time, and that we are rarely ever in control of our thoughts at any time.

The Bhagavad Gita describes the tendency of the mind as follows: "For him who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his mind will remain the greatest enemy."

By referring to the mind as a friend or an enemy, the Gita treats the mind as if it were something different from us. Many times it can sure feel as if someone else, or even a whole group of people, is carrying on elaborate dialogues up there that have little to do with our present reality.

Many Hindu texts create a distinction between the physical body, the mind and intelligence. The mind is often compared to an impulsive child who isn't capable of making proper decisions, and the intelligence is likened to a parent that helps the mind choose the appropriate and healthy course of action.

A mind that isn't given proper attention and is allowed to run wild can cause havoc in our lives. The uncontrolled mind is the sole source of fear, stress and anger in our lives. We've all had the experience of recalling instances where others might have physically, financially or emotionally hurt us. Even though we tell ourselves that "it's over and that there's no need to continue to remember such instances," we find that the mind forcibly brings these thoughts back to the forefront of our consciousness.

The Gita explains that we can either become liberated with the help of our mind or completely degrade our consciousness. Believe it or not, the choice is ours. It may be possible to avoid unpleasant situations, uncomfortable places or unfriendly people, but the mind isn't something we can escape.

The mind lives within us and controls our thoughts, emotions and actions. We go to sleep with it every night and we wake up with it every morning. If we're going to spend that much time with someone, doesn't it make sense to develop a friendship with that individual? The question arises: How do you develop a friendship with someone that you can't see or touch or really even talk to?

First of all, we have to acknowledge that we have a mind and not that we are the mind. Second, we need to be able to admit that we have very little control over the mind's activities. Thirdly, we need to know that we're never going to have complete control over the mind.

Of course, we're not talking about controlling the mind in some forceful, unnatural way. What we want to accomplish is a harmonious relationship between the mind, intelligence and the soul, so that these different components of our being can be on the same page more often. This will lead to a happier and more peaceful existence. This, of course, requires training and practice. Nothing worth achieving ever comes easy.

During the mantra meditation session that I lead at Columbia, I encourage participants to incorporate a regulated practice of meditation into their daily lives. After all, we make time to clothe and feed the body, so why not take time to feed and nourish the mind? Even a short regiment of 10-15 minutes a day will gradually reduce the hurricane-like winds in the mind and grant the mind greater levels of focus and steadiness, which is something we can all use a bit more of.

Follow Gadadhara Pandit Dasa on Twitter: www.twitter.com/nycpandit

The Humble Musings Of The Manhattan Monk 6/19/11

2011-06-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

I have a confession.

I am a unrecognizable fallen soul

I am lost, bereft of the embrace and the company of my Beloved. My whole being is saturated with this forgetfulness, yet by the mercy of a few powerfully kind soul, I am a getting a glimmer of what I should know, of who I should be. Rays of truth pour into my heart-space challenging me to come home.

Part of my great work is learning to call out to You from the depths of my heart, in every Name I chant. My distant voice aches. I long to see You again, but I am so broken, so disconnected. Even writing these words has no juice.

I have to build the house of my heart again to live with You there.

***
"The Prison Of My Own Isolation"

I rot and dwell in the prison of my own isolation, but I find myself kicking at the iron bars, demanding my liberation. No longer do I want my heart to be locked up in this cold cell, where it cannot taste a warm embrace.

No longer do I want to sit alone in my castle. What good are the gifts I keep there, if you can't taste their splendor as well? Why am I so selfish? To solve that riddle means confronting the pain of the lie of my whole existence. I hate that pain. I hate its searing obviousness, and in my castle I keep all this at bay. I live in a fairy-tale that no one wants to read.

I am so high up in the tower of this castle that your suffering heart is inconceivable to me. Para-dukha-dukhi is a foreign language to me, as abstract as string theory. My compassion s distant and amorphous, entirely theoretical, without the force of action, touching nobody and no one. I cannot walk the walk. I can barely even talk the talk. Cut off, floating up near the clouds of my mind, in the turbulent airs without meaning and substance.

Rays of truth poke into my heart, challenging me to come home.

Where do I find this truth? In the simplest gesture of care. In giving up my time, my selfish pursuits, to open my voice in the gestures of honest-to-God communication, my eyes in the expressions of affection. I can find my heart in your heart. I earn the affection of your heart by giving what little of the simplicity of love that I have.

Get out of my head. Get into the ground of my being. Get into the heart.

You are knocking at the door of the prison of my isolation. For once, I am willing to answer, to bring you in and offer you a cup of tea. You want my pain, to know it and to help me transcend it. I pray simply for the courage to peel away these layers of pain around my heart-space, to free me. I need your help.

The Humble Musings Of The Manhattan Monk 6/16/11

2011-06-16T08:00:00.000-04:00

We are swimming with all our might, gasping for air
Even when the rescue boat arrives, we still must get in and join in the row
Even when our paddle strikes the water, we must remember to pick up the anchor
Lose the dead weight
Shed the old skin

Picking up speed, naturally the sun rises on the horizon of our heart
The relief of homeward bound
Bees and scents of kadamba games and peacocks
Relief from this dream that we have held onto for too long
The weight of this body, our expectations

Perhaps we are afraid to pick up speed, to life that anchor
But we have no choice, all hope lies dormant ready to shine.

***
We must beg for our grace. We must ring it and squeeze it out, like sugarcane juice, from the Holy Name. Bringing our pure intention to our chanting, we make this offering to the specific grace that we need, our actual spiritual desire. Let that offering hold our attention tight to the Holy Name, let it make us cling with all of our might to the Holy Name, to Your sweet sound resounding.

Let our chanting be infused with the complete faith that it will free and purify us fully of all that we are not. Let us have no doubt about its supreme, invincible power. Let us have no doubt about its sweet touch. Let us never give up, never turn our gaze from this golden grace.

The Intersection-The Spiritual Art Of Disturbance

2011-06-14T08:00:00.001-04:00

Merton writes of the essential foundation of self-realization:

“Since I am a man, my destiny depends on my human behavior: that is to say upon my decisions. I must first of all appreciate this fact, and weigh the risks and difficulties it entails. I must therefore know myself, and know both the good and the evil that are in me.

“It will not do to know only one and not the other...I must then be able to love the life God has given me, living it fully and fruitfully, and making good use even of the evil that is in it. Why should I love an ideal good in such a way that my life becomes more deeply embedded in misery and evil?

If I can understand something of myself and something of others, I can begin to share with them the work of building the foundations for spiritual unity. But first we must work together at dissipating the more absurd fictions which make unity impossible.”^¹

For many, God is identified as part of the problem, as an agent of the oppressor. For these people, the evolution of human society means to move past the idea of a God who watches over all, over whom we must serve out of obligation and out of love. Social justice remains solely an earthly concern, devoid of the supernatural presence. It depends solely on human endeavor, human wit, human emotion, and human ability, but to the committed spiritual activist this hope on mere humanity itself is a pipe-dream.

Humanity without a sense and connection to God's presence is not a fully capable or realized humanity. Its revolutions, even if they temporarily succeed, will then only dissolve back into the systems, structures, and injustices that the revolutionaries originally fought against.

I may still find myself rooting on green-shirted protesters in Iran of black-shirted anarchists smashing Burger King windows at the latest meeting of the World Bank, but a deeper calling comes through my conditioning. Standing as someone who is trying to reconcile my spirituality with my yearning for justice I feel as an outsider yet again looking in. Can I convince others of God's place in this discussion? Can I help to show them He is the real friend and the one who empowers the oppressed, rather than the lord and overseer of the oppressor?

A great courage and resolve is needed to remain firm to God's message in the realm of social justice, to not be convinced and swept up in actions devoid of any supernatural motivation. One has to remain in a sense above the fray, while not becoming aloof. Merton comments:

“People are constantly trying to use you to help them create the particular illusions by which they live. This is particularly true of the collective illusions which sometimes are accepted as ideologies. You must renounce and sacrifice the approval that is only a bribe enlisting your support of a collective illusion.

You must not allow yourself to be represented as someone in whom a few of the favorite daydreams of the public have come true. You must be willing, if necessary, to become a disturbing and therefore an undesired person, one who is not wanted because he upsets the general dream. But be careful that you do not do this in the service of some other dream that is only a little less general and therefore seems to you to be more real because it is more exclusive!”^²

The spiritual activist committed to social justice must use his most developed and sincere intelligence to tread a careful path: first, to understand and imbibe the presence of God's desire for his/her life and to act constantly upon that desire, then, to apply that desire in the fields of justice without letting it become diluted into mere politics, and finally to learn the art of disturbance as mentioned above.

This art of disturbance requires a tender balance, between being forceful enough to shed the light and message of God through in the realm of justice with enough strength to convince others, even the doubtful, of the need for God's presence, and at the same time being tender enough, astute enough, not to completely alienate the intended audience and also any potential new recruits to the cause.

This mixture is so potent, and it allows the committed spiritual activist to bridge gaps in a way that make history. We can look to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr as one of the most clear examples of someone who came as close as possible to perfecting this art of disturbance, but we shouldn't feel that his lofty example can't be emulated in our own way, in our own lives, and in our own particular set of circumstances.

Even if we try to ignore the potency of God and His love, we will have to acknowledge His absence, even unconsciously, in our failure to reflect it in our duties of justice and compassion. We cannot complete our own humanity, and any attempt to restore the humanity of others, without the touch of the kingdom of God, and this kingdom is so wonderful, life-affirming, and redemptive that it lays bare the faults and emptiness of the “kingdom” we call our attempted civilization. It is our duty and our struggle to make this contrast unavoidable to look at.

1Merton, 95

2Merton, 97

Distinguishing Between Shallow And Deep Religion

2011-06-13T19:46:00.002-04:00

The latest article from my good friend, fellow monk, and Bhakti Center (Manhattan) president and CEO Ramnath Subramanian (Rasanath Dasa) on the Huffington Post

In March 2007, I attended a talk by Dr. Steve Weinberg, the 1979 Nobel Laureate in physics for his work on electromagnetic and weak forces, on the topic "On Religion and Science" at Cornell University. Dr. Weinberg did not mince any words when he vehemently spoke about the hypocrisy and shallowness of religion, citing several evident episodes of scandals and violence in recent religious history.

At the end of his talk, he categorically stated that because of the problems that religion has created, one of the primary aspirations of science should be to cease the existence of religion. He made a strong appeal to the audience to take this seriously.

As a practitioner of Bhakti yoga, an ancient devotional school in the Hindu tradition, I was stung by Dr. Weinberg's strong comments. It felt like an assault on a paradigm that defined my outlook and the people whom I deeply loved and respected. At the same time, my rational faculties knew that Dr. Weinberg's citations were completely based on facts and thoroughly justified. Was I simply being a sentimental religionist turning a blind eye to the problems that religion has created? Or was there a deeper root to my adherence that Dr. Weinberg may not have had a chance to experience?

The key to resolving this conflict lay in one verse from the Bhagavata Purana, one of the primary texts in the Hindu tradition. The verse classifies religious faith or dharma into two categories: peripheral (kaithava) and essential (sanatana).

Gordon W. Allport, a Harvard psychologist, developed a similar scheme and categorized religious practice into extrinsic and intrinsic. The peripheral or extrinsic practice of religion refers to those expressions of faith that are motivated by self-directed desires: personal comfort, riches, power and status. The essential or intrinsic practice of religion is governed by the deep inquiry to uncover our true essence that results in profound personal transformation.

Growing up, my first experience of Hindu religion was extrinsic. I was exposed to Hindu rituals that enabled an individual's economic development and sensory pleasure, respectively known asartha and kama in Sanskrit. My parents taught me to pray twice everyday. The prayers usually were a means to please the gods to give me the best grades, good health and success in all endeavors.

I clearly recollect visiting temples of the elephant god, Ganesha, on the eve of exams, to put in "special requests" because he is an expert at taking away impediments on the path of success. On occasions, when the stakes were high, I paid good money to the head priest for special services. I got more than the expected results every time, expect for one big test where I failed miserably. That failure exposed the conditional nature of my faith.

In course of time, I turned away from the Hindu faith, much to the concern of my parents. I was old enough not to be swayed by them or other religious individuals. Episodes of communal violence fueled by Hindu fundamentalism in the early '90s further strengthened my stance.

It was six years later that a conversation with a good friend unexpectedly reopened the "religious" chapter. Manish was regarded as one of India's young scientific geniuses, but possessed a humble demeanor. In a casual conversation on a Monday evening, he convinced me to accompany him to a talk on the Bhagavad Gita. It was during that talk that I heard for the first time a clear explanation of the primary purpose of religion: deep inquiry and knowledge about our identity and the true purpose of our existence.

The talk systematically and logically pieced together the need for such inquiry and provided a deep philosophical look into the nature of consciousness and our quest for immortality. Sprinkled throughout the presentation were various scientific citations from the Hindu scriptures -- verses explaining a method of plastic surgery from the Rig Veda, the heliocentric model of the solar system from the Bhagavata Purana, and a description of time dilation and relativistic mechanics from the Upanishads.

The speaker was pleasant and humble, yet authoritative and confident. There was no trace of criticism, sentimentalism or fanaticism in his talk. I met with him personally after the presentation and I spent two hours critically questioning his paradigm.

He introduced himself as Radheshyam and his answers were deep and succinct. Although I did not fully accept his paradigm then, I deeply respected his approach and logical explanations. It was refreshing to see such a religious man. I was curious to know more.

In the next four years, I frequently visited Radheshyam's Bhakti Yoga monastery in downtown Mumbai and spent considerable time studying Hindu scriptures with him and his fellow monks. I was a personal witness to the rigor and scrutiny they applied to their scriptural study. The scriptures dealt exclusively with understanding consciousness, its source and its purpose.

Most of the monks had advanced graduate degrees from prestigious universities. Their simplicity and spirit of brotherhood were evident in their lifestyle. Their possessions -- four sets of clothes, some books and some rosary beads -- were neatly stacked away in 3x3 closets. They slept on straw mats on the ground. They lived by one principle adopted from a beautiful verse in the Hindu texts: "Be humbler than a blade of grass, more tolerant than a tree. Be ready to offer all respects to others and expect nothing in return."

In a conversation when I thanked the director of the monastery for his time to answer my questions, he looked at me with sincere gratitude and said, "I am so grateful that you have accepted me as your servant." The glimmer in his eyes clearly reflected the sense that he would not exchange his lifestyle even for $100 million.

The lives of these monks demonstrated to me a sincere search for truth and reality. Their practice completely contrasted any experience of religion that I previously had. To me, it seemed to be a compelling alternative to science in the pursuit of truth. Their axiomatic basis may be different, but their methods, rigor, logic and dedication were comparable to any true scientist. They strove to live an ego-free life, which gave them clarity and objectivity in their quest. Above all, they were truly beautiful human beings.

Dr. Weinberg's citations were correct and his frustrations justified. But his conclusion that science should destroy religion completely was probably based on his very limited exposure to the intrinsic practice of religion. They probably sprung from his experiences of narrow-minded and ritualistic religious practices that lack philosophical rigor, progression of logic and a transformative lifestyle.

Instead of rejecting religion completely, it would be wise to discriminate between substance and shadow -- and encourage the substance. The pockets where intrinsic religion is practiced may be few, but they hold deep significance especially at a time when religious fundamentalism needs to be addressed with strong action. They may also offer the unique opportunity for science and religion to have meaningful dialogues and finally understand each other.

Bhakti Yoga: In Search Of A Lost Love

2011-06-12T16:32:00.000-04:00

From Radhanath Swami at the Huffington Post

Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills. They shared the kind of lessons that elevate the spirit.

One particularly illuminating lesson from the forest comes in the form of the Himalayan musk deer. The musk deer is referenced in Sanskrit poetry and philosophy owing to its peculiar behavior. Prized by the perfume industry for its exceptional aroma, musk is one of the world's most expensive natural products, fetching more than three times its weight in gold. The aroma of musk is so alluring that when the stag's sensitive nose catches wind of it he roams the forest day and night in pursuit of its source. He exhausts himself in a fruitless quest, never realizing the bitter irony: the sweet fragrance he was chasing resided nowhere but within himself. Musk, you see, is produced by a gland in the stag's very own navel: it was searching without for what was all along lying within.

The sages of India found in the musk deer an apt description of the human condition. We are all pleasure-seeking creatures wandering a forest of some sort -- replete with pleasures and perils alike. Moreover, we are prone to the same type of folly as the deer: we seek our happiness externally. Misconceiving our true needs, we wrongly equate our fulfillment and self-worth with possessions, positions, mental and sensual thrills. We are often drawn into superficial relationships which hold the promise of lasting satisfaction, yet leave us feeling empty.

The true treasure lies within. It is the underlying theme of the songs we sing, the shows we watch and the books we read. It is woven into the Psalms of the Bible, the ballads of the Beatles and practically every Bollywood film ever made. What is that treasure? Love. Love is the nature of the Divine. Beneath the covering of the false ego it lies hidden. The purpose of human life is to uncover that divine love. The fulfillment that we're all seeking is found in the sharing of this love.

The power of love is most profound. It has various levels. In its crudest sense, the word love refers to acts of physical intimacy, and its influence over society is obvious. But on a deeper, more emotional level, not simply of the body but of the heart, there is no greater power than love. For the sake of money and prestige, one may be willing to work long hours, weekends, even holidays. A mother's love, on the other hand, is selfless and unconditional. There's nothing she won't do for the well-being of her child, and she asks for nothing in return.

When love is pure it has the power to conquer. Lover and beloved conquer each other by their affection. The source, the essence, the fullest manifestation of love's conquering power is the love of the soul for the supreme soul, or God. The sages who authored India's sacred texts found that the most astonishing of all of God's wonders was His willingness and eagerness to not only be touched by our love, but to be conquered by it. The cultivation of that dormant love is called the path of bhakti (devotion). This love is within all of us. It is the greatest of all powers because it is the only power that can grant realization of the highest truths and the only power that can reveal the deepest inner fulfillment in our lives. On the strength of this love we can overcome envy, pride, lust, anger and greed. There is no other means of conquering these diseases within us.

One who loves God sees everything in relation to God. Therefore their love flows spontaneously toward everyone, at all times, everywhere. They even love those who wish them harm. If you love God, you can't hate anything or anyone. If the love one offers is met with hate, it doesn't die, rather it manifests in the form of compassion. That is universal love. It is not just a sentiment. It cannot be manifested merely by a shift in mental disposition. It can only come from inner cleaning, an inner awakening. Then that love becomes the reality of life.

This inner cleansing is the goal of all spiritual practice. Every prayer offered, mantra chante, or ritual performed should be for the purpose of removing the impurities which impede the full blossoming of unconditional love and compassion. This is the only way to peace, both individually and collectively. When our intrinsic love is awakened and our divine qualities shine through, we will not only find the pleasure we've been seeking but also become powerful agents of change in the world.

We are all searching, roaming the forest like the musk deer, seeking the pleasures without. When we recognize what we are really looking for and begin searching for the lost love within, at that point, the real journey of human life begins.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

2011-06-03T22:02:00.002-04:00

A renowned contemporary meditation from Nicholas Carr at The Atlantic

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

Also see: Living With a Computer (July 1982) "The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler , Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts , its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Spiritual Activism Doc Gives Recipe For Real Change

2011-05-31T12:43:00.000-04:00

By Madhava Smullen for ISKCON News on 21 May 2011

Radha Vallabha Das

With his shaved head and saffron robes, Radha-Vallabha Dasa—a brahmachari monk at New York’s Bhaktivedanta Ashram—isn’t your typical activist. But his new documentary film Today We Have The Power may just have the most powerful, and deceptively simple solution to the problems of capitalism and globalization that have bothered so many protesters for decades.

His story starts back when the one-time Christopher Timm was in his last year of college at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and was developing an avid interest in studying the dark underbelly of capitalism.

“A capitalist economy is based on us being able to cheaply buy the latest new gadgets every couple of years, as many new clothes as we want every season, and plenty of other stuff we don’t need,” he says. “We’re sold the idea that there’s an equal exchange going on—but in order for that system to be sustainable, one group of people are going to be getting the shorter end of the stick.”

That means a dark truth : workers, often children, in China or Bangladesh laboring in a sweatshop under extremely unhealthy conditions to create tennis shoes or cheap clothes for us. Conditions that, despite sometimes providing a slightly better life for the destitute, would still never be condoned by any sane person if they were happening in our own backyard.

And our consumerist culture doesn’t just create systems for the oppression of people. It also destroys the environment.

“Take, for example, facial tissues and toilet paper—two commodities that we use extravagantly in America, and that are actually unnecessary,” Radha-Vallabha says. “People had been using handkerchiefs and cleaning themselves with water for centuries. But now, so that we can very conviently wipe our butts and blow our noses, we’re ravaging forests. Companies go out and clear-cut a forest in South America, where there are none of the environmental protection laws that we have now in the US. Each box of Kleenex or pack of Charmin has a huge, destructive backstory that we never hear about or think about. It’s horrendous. There’s blood on our hands for the lifestyle that we live.”

Some people who made such discoveries might become political activists. Others, like most of us, might be horrified at first, but gradually forget amidst the familiar conveniences of modern life. Christopher Timm did neither. He took the spiritual path, intent on finding the root of the problem.

“I realized that this whole system of exploiting people and resources in other parts of the world was set up to benefit me—the typical white American guy,” he says. “And I was totally miserable. I was living this shallow, middle-class life in Madison, Wisconsin, just hanging out and getting drunk and talking about stuff like the latest episode of the Simpsons. I was a happy little consumer, a cog in the wheel—I was the cause of the problem. And I thought, ‘Man, how do I get out of this?’”

Christopher got out by becoming a Hare Krishna devotee in 1995. He followed a new spiritual path of simplicity, celibacy, devotion to God and cleansing his heart of the selfish desires that stoked the fires of globalization and the capitalist economy. He received the name Radha-Vallabha Dasa from his guru, Radhanath Swami.

And then, in 2001, he co-wrote and co-produced his first documentary film, “The Simple Temple,” about the Radha-Gopinath Mandir in Chowpatty founded by Radhanath Swami. It focused on a different life, a life of selflessness and devotion to God—the answer to the problem.

But what about introducing spiritual activism in a broader way, to those new to the idea? For his next documentary, Radha-Vallabha immediately looked to the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests—widely known as “the Battle in Seattle” that had happened just two years before, in 1999, as a way to explain the problems of globalization and then direct viewers to a spiritual answer.

Since then, life took him in many directions, and the film was a long time coming—it’s expected sometime next year. But today, while there are some changes to the way corporations negotiate trade agreements, the core issues are still as relevant as ever.

“The WTO protests in Seattle were a watershed event where people came to realize on a large scale that there was this whole other side to globalization they had never heard about before,” Radha-Vallabha says.

The World Trade Organization, he explains, holds meetings every couple of years wherein countries come together to negotiate trade agreements—agreements that result in globalization. One of those at stake at the 1999 meetings, for example, was the Global Free Logging agreement, which would have given American corporations access to South American forests.

“Forty thousand people, across a wide spectrum of society, gathered in Seattle to protest this and other environmental, human and animal rights violations that happen as a result of WTO agreements,” says Radha-Vallabha.

Today We Have The Power, Radha-Vallabha’s film, examines these economic and social issues that brought people to Seattle, and tells the story of how their protests turned from a peaceful street theater, singing and dancing-filled “carnival against capitalism” into a violent nightmare of police brutality.

“The story that most people remember is that a peaceful protest was disrupted by a small band of masked anarchists intent on violence and property damage, forcing the police to intervene,” Radha-Vallabha says. “What we know for sure is that for one week in 1999 the sight of Seattle police brutally attacking ordinary American citizens that had come to protest the WTO transfixed the world.”

Today We Have The Power takes a close look at the events of that week, featuring ground-breaking interviews with major players such as the anarchist philosopher behind the property damage, and the Seattle Chief of Police at the time, Norm Stamper.

In fact, according to Stamper, who today regrets his actions, the small band of anarchists were not the impetus for the police violence—rather it was simply a decision to clear the streets of a far larger amount of protestors than had been anticipated.

But it’s the spiritual thread running through all of this that most interests Radha-Vallabha.

“I talked to many people who agreed that everything that happened in Seattle boils down to spiritual issues,” he says. “Mr. Stamper, whom I didn’t even expect to get an interview with, told me, ‘You’re the first person to mention this angle in relation to the Seattle protests,’ and agreed that a lack of spirituality was at the heart of the problem. He said that even being a police chief is fundamentally a spiritual role—a responsibility to protect and care for citizens, to respect and honor life. And he had neglected that responsibility.”

As well as being the cause of the police violence, it was agreed that a lack of spirituality is the cause of the greed and exploitation inherent in the capitalist system and globalization that people were protesting in Seattle.

Activist and author David Korten hits the nail on the head in an interview in Today We Have The Power when he says, “If we want to solve this problem, we have to recognize that capitalism is built on a system of inspiring unlimited material desires and material needs. It instills the idea that happiness means acquiring more and more material things.”

“What we need is a spiritual awakening, where people realize that the way to true happiness is not through material things, but through searching within, and connecting with God,” Radha-Vallabha says. “And as my guru Radhanath Swami says in the film, if we want to change the world, we have to start by changing our own hearts.”

Radha-Vallabha doesn’t address the specific method he discovered for changing his own heart in the film, preferring to leave it up to the individual seeker. He does, however, introduce the idea of a spiritual solution.

“There’s a whole class of Americans out there who are aware of these issues, and are struggling to find answers,” he says. “And I believe this film can help them get closer to some.”

Radha-Vallabha is fundraising for Today We Have The Power himself—a difficult task—but provided he does get the funding he needs, he expects the film to be completed in August. He’ll then submit it to both smaller film festivals interested in human rights, environmental and spiritual issues, and larger events such as Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival, and New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival. If it does well at these, it’s likely to get theatrical distribution at independent theaters around the US, some form of television distribution, and will of course also be available on the Internet.

Radha-Vallabha will begin a cutting edge program on religion and ecology at Yale Divinity school this fall, and hopes to continue connecting with the activist community through writing and teaching, thus offering them his unique view.

“A big issue in activism is that a lot of people feel completely overwhelmed,” he says. “It seems impossible for us to change this gargantuan system backed by multinational corporations that are economies within themselves. But my film shows how through the power of personal spiritual transformation, we can change our world, the world within us, today. And by changing our world, we have the power to change the world.”

To find out more about Today We Have The Power, or to contribute urgently needed finances towards the final stages of its production, please click here:http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1047769031/today-we...

The Humble Musings Of The Manhattan Monk 5/29/11

2011-05-31T08:00:00.000-04:00

We seek the personal blessings of Krsna, in His beauty, His smile, His kindness, and His love. There is no abstraction and no doubt in His personal touch. The embrace of His blessings is the care and core of all of our actual desires, beyond the flickering embers and sparks of the small and fragile joys we stumble upon in this temporary world.

That exchange, which the deep core of our heart longs for
Heart-to-heart, nothing cheap, nothing maudlin
The original dance, falling back into our original rhythm
There is nothing to fear and nothing to doubt

So why must we close our hearts is haste to His embrace?
Why are we so cold? Why are we a wallflower of time immemorial?

We make ourselves open to His personal blessings through our dedication, determination, and joy in the simple, humble, yet dynamic service to the Vaisnavas. We become one who feeds the body-mind-soul continuum of our many-layered, many-colored friends.

We ride the crest of the wave of their mercy upon us, trying to burst through the levees of doubt and falsity. We must be real. We must be practical. We must be eager to to risk facing our fears and illusions to serve with meaning. We must step out the door to be those humble sparks, dancing and dancing, that will ignite all the other dormant sparks.

We turn our gaze towards His gaze
And He has been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting
To give us His affection of His beauty, His smile, His movement
The kindness of His rhythm, the love of His melody
The wash of peace and clarity in His personal touch, His personal dance.

The Intersection-The Unity Within

2011-05-29T20:55:00.002-04:00

Our relativistic spheres of morality can prevent us from understanding the dichotomies that lie within the ground of our being. Our good intentions can go astray when they are mixed with the unclean and immature viewpoint in which we base them in. The ranting preacher in the Union Square subway in New York City or the Hezbollah suicide bomber in Tel Aviv may think they are on the right side of history, the right side of divine reality, but one with a thorough understanding set in the depths of the bonafide spiritual sciences will see the clear deficiencies in each approach.

Our good intentions to create a more just reality certainly are not likely to fall into these extremities, but our impact may end up being just as void. How do we know we are getting the message across in the proper way? How do we even know we have the right message? We get one idea from the results of our application, in seeing what hits people hearts and minds. Even then, we may not let go of our misconceived ideas.

Our intentions lay bare on the altar of our being, and we worship them without the slightest understanding of what they actually represent, and how we represent them. We need an inner guidance, best represented in a spiritual authority or personality interacting with us, to examine exactly what we mean and what we mean by it. Any genuine, time-tested, experience-tested spiritual discipline will give us this acute opportunity for examination.

The only question that remains is our desire to do so and our courage to make the commitment. Are we able to examine our intentions for what they are and what they create in a constant, discerning, and piercing manner. Merton writes:

“One must face the fact that 'good intentions' are only as good as long as they are faithfully re-examined in the light of new knowledge, and in the light of their fruits.

More and more we see how in reality the 'good,' 'kind,' 'humane,' and 'loving' intention bears fruit in real evil, cruelty, inhumanity, and hate. The experience of each day makes this more and more clear.

The ethic of subjective 'good intentions' has been judged and found wanting. We must refocus on the objective results of our decisions!”^¹

This means we must learn the art of mature and exacting responsibility. This was the key motivation for my own choice to live as a monk in the bhakti-yoga tradition of the Vedas. My initial experiences with devotees of this tradition showed me a deeper potential to life itself, and to the potential power of my own ability to help exact and create a solution to the suffering I saw all around me. The discovery of the depth of this experience continues on a daily basis for me, and it begins with an increasing sense of my own developing and maturing responsibility to care for myself so that I may learn to really care for others.

This care must be entirely motivated to bring myself and others closer to the love of God. Otherwise, if it remains simply in the material realms of the political, moral, economical, and altruistic it will create only a temporary relief, much like blowing air on a burn only removes the pain for a short while. The pain is our disconnection from God, which has thrown our application of reality into a whirlpool.

Responsibility is inherently a moral consideration, and moral considerations are inherently concerns originating from the loving will of God in our lives. The realm of social justice must take a step forward to meet once again the objective moral realm of God to fulfill its real purposes and desires.

Merton writes:

“There is an objective moral good, a good which corresponds to the real value of being, which brings out and confirms the inner significance of our life when we obey its norms. Such an act integrates us into the whole living movement and development of the cosmos, it brings us into harmony with all the rest of the world, it situates us into our place, it helps us fulfill our task and to participate fruitfully in the whole world's work and its history. In a word, it is an act of obedience to God.”^²

Where our striving for justice fails is in the lack of inner integration of our being to the will and the love of God. We become reliant on our dull, imperfect senses, on our illusory, textbook concepts of history, on our own muddled subjectivity to solve problems quite beyond us. We cannot look to the speculations of our society's so-called pundits and scholars to show us the brighter path. We have to look towards the source of morality, the source of goodness, the source of justice Himself, God Himself.

We hold tight to God's will and love, and we can become steady to fight today for what we truly believe in. Merton writes:

“In times like ours, it is more than ever necessary for the individual to train himself, or be trained, according to objective norms of good, and learn to distinguish these from the purely pragmatic norms current in his society...We cannot trust our society to tell us the difference.

Everything is confused, and the men of our time blindly follow now God and now Satan, blown this way and that by every changing wind of urgency and opportunity, judging only by what seem to them to be the immediate consequences.

We must recover our inner faith not only in God but in the good, in reality, and in the power of the good to take care of itself and us as well, if only we attend to it, observe, listen, choose, and obey.”^³

If we are looking for a lynchpin to unify ourselves in the face of an immense, weaponized, and demonic evil that is strangling our humanity, we cannot ignore our unity in God, and we cannot ignore the protection and empowerment that He is constantly giving us. This is a tremendous challenge to find this unity, for even amidst the sincere seekers of justice and truth, too often sectarian concerns of religious, political, and social concerns drive a deep wedge that is very difficult to remove from the consciousness.

How can love of God bring it all together? For one thing, love of God belongs to no group in particular but to each and everyone of us. The core of our being, the core of our soul, revels and thrives in the love of God. Everyone has this ability, and there are many applications to bring it out to our conscious, waking awareness.

Only if we dive deeply into our particular application, transcending all sense of distance and separation from our real self, from the real selves of others, and from God do we find this unity. Not only that, but we also find the ability to help others understand this ultimate unity in the love of God. The love of God has the power to overcome all evils, to correct all injustices. To find the love of God in ourselves and to give it to others, freeing us totally on the spiritual and material platforms, is the greatest act of social justice.

1Merton, 113-114

2Merton, 119

3Merton, 119

Today We Have The Power: We Need Your Help!

2011-05-24T13:51:00.002-04:00

Our dear friend and fellow monk Radha-Vallabha Dasa (Christopher Timm) is inches away from finishing his excellent documentary film "Today We Have The Power", a look at the bridge between social activism and spirituality via the issues and events of the famous/infamous 1999 WTO Seattle demonstrations.

How he traverses those last few inches depends on your generosity and mercy.

Using the website Kickstarter, he is trying to raise $11,500 to fund his post-production work. As of right now, he has raised $3779 through the help 0f 43 generous backers.

He has until June 1st to reach his goal, and the unique nature of Kickstarter is that if you don't raise your full funding, you don't get any of it. It's an all-or-nothing system designed to really "kickstart" the fundraising.

As some of you know, Radha-Vallabha is a supremely dedicated soul and this film is his heart's work. We sincerely pray you can help him to reach his goal. Any donation is kindly appreciated and reciprocated.

The Kickstarter page where you can donate
http://todaywehavethepower.com/ (The film's website)
"Today We Have The Power" on Facebook

Here's more about the film below:
Today We Have The Power is a feature documentary that delves beneath the mayhem and madness of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, examines the economic and social issues that brought people to Seattle, and then dives into the spiritual crisis at the root of the problems. The goal of this film is to facilitate conversation about the connection between activism and spirituality that many people have come to see as essential for our societies progressive evolution.

For one week in 1999 the sight of Seattle police brutally attacking ordinary American citizens that came to protest the World Trade Organization transfixed the world. The story most people remember is that a peaceful protest was disrupted by a small band of masked anarchists intent on violence, forcing the police to intervene.

Ten years later, people still don't know why unprecedented numbers of people from all walks of life came to protest the WTO. Ten years later most people still don’t know what the WTO actually is. The blasts of tear gas, rubber bullets and shattered windows may have obscured the reasons for the protests, but the reasons for the clash have not gone away: denigration of human life, species extinction, environmental destruction and social decay remain the heavy tolls we pay for the way we have gone about globalization.

Now in 2011, the Seattle protesters seem like prophets, as the effects of globalization continue to take their toll on our world. But still missing in the public discussion is the strong belief held by many that at the real problem—and the solution to it—is not an economic or political issue, but a spiritual one.

Today We Have the Power challenges us to consider the deep spiritual issues at the core of these events. The film achieves this by drawing out the spiritual angle from the people engaged on all sides of the Seattle WTO protest event, who reiterate and expand upon the eternal spiritual truth best expressed by Mahatma Gandhi: You must become the change you wish to see in the world.

The film features interviews with David Korten, Norm Stamper (former Chief of Police in Seattle), Mike Moore (former Director-General of the WTO), Vandana Siva, Jagadish Bhagavati, John Zerzan, Tom Goldtooth, Sister Catherine Pinkerton, Radhanath Swami and many more.

Vaisnavas Participate In East Village "Local Faith Communities" Group

2011-05-23T21:37:00.000-04:00

By Madhava Smullen for ISKCON News on 21 May 2011

Yajna Purusa Dasa and the East Village interfaith community

Yajna Purusa Dasa of the Bhakti Center in New York City will join other faith leaders for a public Panel Discussion at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue on May 25th, organized by the group “Local Faith Communities of the East Village.”

The Brahmachari monk, who started Manhattan’s Bhaktivedanta Ashram in 1998, and then the Bhakti Center around six years ago, will be joined by twelve other faith leaders from the East Village.

These include Rabbi Greg Wall of the Sixth Street Community Synagogue, Father Arthur Wendel of the Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, Imam Abu Sufian of Madina Masjid Mosque, Lama Pema Dorjee of the Nechung Foundation, and Sam Ruiz of Iglesia Alianza Cristiana y Misionera, among others.

The event will begin at 7pm, with each faith leader sharing the story of his or her personal spiritual journey, and explaining how they came to their understanding of what spirituality means to them. The histories of some of the local faith institutions, as well as information about what they’ve been doing for the neighborhood, will also be told.

Finally, the discussion will be opened up to the audience—consisting of the general public as well as members of each faith’s congregation—who will ask questions and also get a chance to share realizations from their own spiritual paths.

“This kind of discussion is important because it encourages people of different faiths to become more broad-minded by seeing the similarities between their own stories, and the stories of others who were attracted to serve God,” says Yajna Purusa Dasa. “It will help people to see, ‘They’re worshipping the same God as I am, just in a different way.’”

The upcoming panel discussion is just one of many public and private faith meetings organized by the Local Faith Communities group since its inception in Spring 2009.

Interestingly, the group was the inspiration of a man who is not affiliated with any particular religious group, but is, as Yajna Purusa says, “a very spiritual person.”

Now 58, Anthony Donovan has lived in the East Village since 1990, and conducts historical tours there. He had been attending programs at 26 2nd Ave, where Srila Prabhupada started ISKCON in 1966, as well as at many other churches, synagogues and mosques in the East Village. Wanting to connect all these neighbors, he approached their leaders with his idea, and many—including ISKCON of course—enthusiastically accepted.

“We stand against the prejudice, divisions, hatred and wars in our many names,” says Donovan on the group’s website. “We share the same missions to serve people in our community, especially in times of need and crisis, and also to help celebrate our unique heritage. We rejoice in our traditions, without losing sight of our undeniable common ground, and our common goals to do good and to serve others.”

As well as Yajna Purusa, eleven other East Village religious leaders joined the group—including rabbis, imams, Catholic and Russian Orthodox priests, Episcopal and Protestant ministers, a Spanish Evangelical pastor, and a Tibetan lama. They meet monthly, rotating sites and sharing their spiritual spaces each time. At these private meetings, they discuss issues facing their congregations and how they can work together to solve them.

For instance on one occasion, just as Ramadan 2009 was beginning, a huge billboard sprang up directly across from the entrance to the Madina Masjid Mosque on 11th Street, advertising a new TV show with an image of five larger-than-life naked teenagers, just barely covering their private parts. When the Mosque brought this up at a Local Faith Communities meeting, and asked if there was any way to help, the concerned group contacted the TV station in question as well as their ad agency in California. Understanding the impact on the community, the company apologized and took immediate action, changing the billboard the very next day.

Several months later, the same Mosque suddenly lost access to their building for Friday prayers, attended by over 350 people. The group sent out an urgent request, and soon the local St. George’s Ukranian Catholic Church stepped forward, warmly opening their doors to the Mosque’s congregation and showing great hospitality and community spirit. Welcoming the members of a religion often portrayed as their “enemies” to pray, they asked nothing in return—except “Could you say one little prayer for us too?”

This caring interfaith group also helps each other with lighter issues—for instance, when cooks at the Bhakti Center’s new Bhakti Café wanted to make their food not only vegetarian but also kosher, Rabbi Greg Wall of the Sixth Street Community Synagogue stepped forward to assist.

While this May’s panel discussion is the first of its kind, the group has also had several prior public events.

“In December for the past two years, we’ve held an evening of interfaith recitation and music called Spiritual Sounds,” Yajna Purusa says. “Each faith organization from the neighborhood makes their own musical presentation, and we hold it at a different church, temple, synagogue or mosque each time.”
The group also held a series of Open Houses every Thursday evening in summer 2009, welcoming the public to enter any of its member institutions, get information, or simply contemplate quietly in the special spaces.

“Numerous people spoke of ‘never being in a synagogue,’ or a church, or a mosque, etc,” says Anthony Donovan on his site. “Those of the public who wandered in expressed how they loved both the idea, and the reality of this openness and sharing.”

On May 5th 2010, a special version of this Open Houses evening was held wherein leaders walked with each other as well as members of the public to each institution—visiting a mosque, a synagogue, a Tibetan temple, a Vaishnava temple and several churches, all in one evening.

The next Open Houses is scheduled for September 6th of this year, while the next Panel Discussion is also expected to be held sometime in September.

“At the next one, each member will share their faith’s approach to Death and Dying,” says Yajna Purusa. “As we do with our private meetings, we’ll rotate the venues every time, so the next one could be at the Bhakti Center.”

In the future, Yajna Purusa also hopes to hold a regular program wherein he introduces leaders of different faiths to the Bhakti Center’s congregation.
“Interfaith events like this will certainly create awareness that we exist, and may inspire more people to find out what we’re about,” he says. “But they’re also a good way for our congregation to interact with people of other faiths, hear their stories, and in so doing decrease the sectarianism and fanaticism that naturally comes along with any faith. Getting to know people of other faiths, meeting them in person and hearing their stories, is very powerful.”

Local Faith Communities from Anthony Donovan on Vimeo.

For more information, please visit www.LocalFaithCommunities.org.

Radhanath Swami and Dr. Cornel West Bond In A Conversation On Faith

2011-05-19T09:35:00.001-04:00

By Madhava Smullen for ISKCON News on 7 May 2011

Radhanatha Swami and Dr. Cornel West

On one seat sits Dr. Cornel West, a distinguished African-American gentleman in an elegant black suit and tie, sporting a dramatic Afro and a black goatee shot through with gray. One of the most well-loved and respected professors at Princeton University, he’s a Baptist and is outspoken about his faith, especially his love of Jesus as the force that defines him and guides him in everything he does.

A scholar and somewhat of a celebrity academic, Dr. West is very active in the public sphere—he weighs in on politics, is a champion of social injustice causes, and is a prominent figure in the field of African American studies. His 1993 bestselling book, Race Matters, changed the way Americans look at race. During the last election a popular magazine called him “Obama’s conscience.” He even made an appearance in the Matrix sequels as a councilor of Zion. He’s a deep thinker and highly learned, yet in many ways very “Of the world.”

In the other seat sits Radhanath Swami, looking rather otherworldly with his shaved head and shining orange robes. Years ago, he was Richard Slavin, a Jewish kid from suburban Illinois, until in 1970 at the age of nineteen he left his normal life and hitch-hiked to India, where he soon found himself meditating in the Himalayas. After many years searching as a wandering monk, he found his guru in ISKCON founder Srila Prabhupada. And today he remains a Swami, serving the Lord in the renounced order of life, and leading the spiritual community of Radha Gopinath Ashram in Chowpatty, Mumbai.

Yet like Dr. West, he has also made his contribution to the world, launching acclaimed social action programs such as missionary hospitals and eye camps, eco-friendly farms and schools, and the Midday Meal program, which feeds more than 260,000 plates of nutritious vegetarian food to underprivileged children daily.

Two men who have much in common, yet have taken very different spiritual journeys.

East meets, quite literally, West.

Just two men having a conversation.

On stage at Princeton University, with about, well, 800 people eavesdropping.

This was East Meets West: Hindu and Christian Perspectives on God, Love, and Spiritual Activism, an event held in Richardson Auditorium at Princeton University on April 19th.

The story of this remarkable meeting between faiths and cultures goes back several years, when Radha Vallabha Dasa of ISKCON New York, who is currently working on a documentary on spiritual activism, envisioned a public conversation between Cornel West and the late ISKCON guru Bhakti Tirtha Swami. It made sense: Radha Vallabha admired both, they were both from the same generation, they were both from African American backgrounds and had similar experiences growing up, and they were both influential spiritual leaders.

In 2005, however, Bhakti Tirtha Swami passed away. Some time later, Radha Vallabha casually mentioned his idea to his friend Venkata Bhatta Dasa (Vineet Chander), who was just interviewing for the position of Coordinator for Hindu Life at Princeton.

“Of course, it’s no longer possible to arrange a meeting with Dr. West and Bhakti Tirtha Swami,” Radha Vallabha said. “But wouldn’t it be neat, and just as interesting in a different way, to have him meet with Radhanath Swami?”

The idea very much appealed to Venkata Bhatta, and as he got the job, and settled into his new position at Princeton, he let it germinate. If this was to happen, he wanted it to happen organically, and finally in fall 2010, the time semed right.

“The biggest challenge was just getting the time to sit down with Dr. West and and pitch the idea to him,” says Venkata. “He’s so incredibly busy that just to get a sit-down meeting with him requires months of scheduling in advance. But when we were finally able to match up schedules and I sat down with him, I was pleasantly surprised by how personable he was.”

Venkata gifted Dr. West with a signed copy of Radhanath Swami’s memoir The Journey Home, and began to share with him Radhanath Swami’s story, as well as that of Bhakti Tirtha Swami, to whom the prospective event would be a tribute.

Within a few minutes, Dr. West became very enthusiastic about the idea. A date was set, Princeton students and staff began a major promotional campaign on campus, as well as at yoga studios and bookstores in the area. They also used Facebook and other social networking sites to reach a broader audience beyond the campus.

“Although the idea came from the Princeton Hindu Life program—part of the Office of Religious Life—everyone from the Anthropology department, to the Center for African American Studies, to both Hindu and Christian student organizations helped to organize the event,” Venkata says. “It was amazing—this was the first time that Hindu and Evangelical Christian students were invested in and helping to organize an event together.”

Everyone’s combined efforts paid off, and by the day before the conversation, nearly all the seats in the auditorium had been booked—it would be a full house.
On the day itself, a private dinner was held for Dr. West, Radhanath Swami, several chaplains and religious leaders on campus, and a handful of student leaders from various organizations. As they ate the delicious full-course meal catered by Govinda’s restaurant in Philadelphia, the two guests of honor immediately hit it off, chatting like two old friends, joking, and referencing memories from their childhoods.

After the meal, there was some downtime, and the two spontaneously decided to spend some more time at Dr. West’s office getting to know each other a little more before their onstage conversation.

“From all reports, their rapport grew even deeper during this time,” says Venkata. “At one point, Dr. West expressed appreciation for his mother, mentioning that she continues to be the biggest influence in his life. Touched by this, Radhanath Swami said that he would really love to meet her someday. At which point Dr. West responded, ‘Let’s call her up.’ So they did! And so you have this funny scene where Radhanath Swami and Cornel West are spontaneously phoning up
Dr. West’s eighty-year old mother, and just chatting away to her. That should give you an idea of how this grew beyond a mere formal event into the start of a beautiful relationship.”

At 7:30pm, a diverse crowd gathered in Richardson Auditorium, consisting of faculty members, students of many different backgrounds, members of the the Princeton Community, Christians, members of the greater Indian community in New Jersey, and ISKCON devotees from New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.

Host Venkata Bhatta Dasa welcomed everyone, before turning proceedings over to his colleague Paul Raushenbush, who was officially moderating the event. Formerly a Dean at Princeton’s Office of Religious Life, and now moving on to become senior religion editor of the Huffington Post, Paul introduced the two speakers, and set the tone for the evening.

Radhanath Swami spoke first for roughly twenty minutes, sharing his perspectives on the relationship between devotion to God and activism, as well as his own experiences of how the two things intersected. Dr. West then did the same. Next, guided by Paul, they discussed each other’s faiths and journeys in a two-hour talk. Everyone was riveted to hear about how each of the speakers had their own very personal relationship with God, and how they used that relationship to serve, and try to bring positive change to, the world around them.

“The audience was struck by the many similarities in their perspectives,” Venkata says. “Both Dr. West and Radhanath Swami spoke about the idea that love has a private face and a public face. The private face can be expressed as devotion, full of intimacy and tenderness. And the public face, Maharaja said, is manifested as compassion, while Dr. West commented that it can manifest as justice. So a theme that emerged strongly in the discussion was that as people who are aspiring to be servants of God, we have a responsibility to express that love and live out that faith in the world around us.”

There was also much appreciation for the differences in each other’s faiths. When Radhanath Swami spoke of extending love beyond national boundaries, beyond racial boundaries, and even beyond the boundaries of species—perhaps delicately hinting at the benefits of a more compassionate diet—Dr. West very much appreciated the point and picked up on the hint.

Then, with great humility and sincerity, he shared that although his own tradition doesn’t speak much about the importance of a compassionate diet, it was an element of other traditions that he was inspired by and hoped to develop more in himself.

“The overall tone of the conversation was one of two people really connecting in an honest way, and going far beyond the formal academic exercise that many of
these lectures can become,” says Venkata. “They were just very genuinely sharing what it is about their faith that allows them to be agents of change and service in the world, and inspiring one another with that sharing.”

The talk concluded with prearranged members of the audience handing in questions on index cards which both speakers answered. These ranged from ‘How do you explain the problem of evil?’ to ‘How can one balance living a God conscious life with school and work responsibilities?”

The conversation ended at around 9:30pm and was followed by a reception for all, which, like the private dinner, was catered by ISKCON devotees. There, audience members had an opportunity to meet Radhanath Swami and Dr. Cornel West, as well as to purchase their books at the University bookstore, which had been specially contracted to sell them.

“Looking back at the dialogue, what came across was that these are two people who can recognize commonalities, but can also be very honest about the differences in their faiths, and even appreciate the differences,” Venkata says. “I think that the dialogue left us all feeling like Radhanath Swami was a better practitioner of Krishna Bhakti as a result of the conversation, and that Dr. West was a more inspired Christian, or, as he says, a ‘lover of Jesus.’”

Venkata concludes: “For all of us, it was a profound lesson that when real interfaith exchange happens, it’s not about glossing over the differences or trying to convert one another. It’s about using those differences, and one’s appreciation for those differences, to go deeper in one’s own faith, and one’s own love for God.”

The Dharma Dilemma: The Challenge Of Competing Duties

2011-05-17T21:38:00.002-04:00

The latest article from my good friend, fellow monk, and Bhakti Center (Manhattan) president and CEO Ramnath Subramanian (Rasanath Dasa) on the Huffington Post

I grew up in a traditional Indian household where lessons on integrity and duty were the norm. The word that encompassed those qualities was dharma. When I first encountered the word through the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita and understood its meaning, it seemed to be the quality that I most sought out in a hero. In my childhood war games I usually played the role of a captured prisoner who would be "tortured" but would not give away "the secret" to the "bad guys" even in the face of "death". At other times, I made up stories in my mind where I would play the role of a friend who would sacrifice his life for his dear companion. It was child's play, but in my mind it was what I wanted to become. As I grew up though, I began to realize that living with dharma meant more than just a romantic notion. Its meaning is in embracing a life of struggle.

Dharma is a topic that has been celebrated through books and talks by philosophers and academics, both from Indian origin and outside. It's meaning surfaces as one delves into the depth of the concept. In its simplest sense, dharma in Sanskrit means that which upholds. It is a concept of central importance in Hindu philosophy referring to a person's duties or obligations based on occupational and situational context tightly intertwined with relationships.

The idea of dharma as duty is found in India's ancient religious texts. It states that there is a divinely instituted natural order governing justice, harmony and happiness. This requires human beings to discern and live in an appropriate manner that fosters order and cordial living. As simple and as socially attractive as the concept may sound, living a life of dharma poses some complex questions for us as individuals living in a world that is in many ways disconnected from these fundamental concepts.

What exactly is my dharma? Is it my daily occupation or my sense of obligation to my family, society and humanity? To answer this question, one has to investigate into the deeper implication of dharma itself. A deeper understanding of dharma is "that which is inherent or essential to." For example, we can state that the dharma of sugar is sweetness. The "sweetening" is the duty of sugar. The sense of duty that is derived from dharma is the acting out of that essential property.

In ancient Hindu or Vedic culture, one's dharma was determined by one's psychophysical make up -- proclivities that stood out in and were inherent to an individual. That aptitude was determined at a young age and nurtured to serve the individual and society at large. This primarily became one's occupation. Other obligations were embedded based on different stages in one's life -- duty towards self, towards family (parents, spouse, kids, etc.) and towards different segments of society at large that also included animals. All of these duties were considered equally important on an absolute level.

The complexity of dharma becomes evident even in current times when our different obligations take mutually contradictory directions. I work as the president of a non-profit organization and recently I found myself in a situation where I was confronted with the decision to let go of a few employees. They are my personal friends, have great integrity and have made significant contributions in the past but for personal and situational reasons were not able to sustain their performance. The decision was a despairing one to make. As the president of the organization it is my primary responsibility to the stakeholders to ensure organizational efficiency. Bad decisions would not only be detrimental for the purpose of the organization, but would also cost me my job. At the same time, my decision would be humiliating and ungrateful to friends whom I truly value and are facing an hour of great need. What about "The friend in need is a friend indeed"?

It is in this type of emotionally ambiguous situation in which the Bhagavad Gita begins. Arjuna, the Pandava prince, facing a life-or-death battle against his unrighteous cousins. In the opposing army he also finds senior and revered members of his own family who raised him and his brothers when they had become fatherless at a very young age. His heart was only filled with gratitude for the stability, care and teachings that they had bestowed upon him. But according to his dharma, Arjuna has to fight in order to establish justice and that means he has to kill the very individuals whom he worships with all of his heart. The result is despair -- a situation where Arjuna feels like "damned if I do and damned if I don't." This sets the scene for a classic conversation on the concept of dharma.

As in any complex or paradoxical situation, there are at least two distinct alternatives -- the path of least resistance with enough justification that our "rational" intelligence and ego can provide, or the hard struggle to find deeper answers, clarity and grounding. It is easy for the head to justify one decision over another when the gut has already made the decision, but that may simply be our refusal to go through the pain of honest introspection. As the renowned Trappist monk Thomas Merton states in his book Thoughts in Solitude, "Laziness and cowardice are the most dangerous of all when marked as discretion." Many Nazis did, in fact, justify their acts against the Jews at the Nuremberg trials on the grounds that they were not acting on selfish grounds: they were doing their duty to their country.

Arjuna, at first, also justifies his gut decision to escape the battle with convincing arguments, but eventually musters up the courage to become vulnerable to the struggle and go deeper in his inquiry. And the deeper meaning of dharma manifests. Krishna, Arjuna's friend and confidante, unravels the profound meaning of dharma as going beyond the psychophysical nature of our existence and its corresponding duties and obligations. Instead Krishna encourages Arjuna to discover his true spiritual identity, for that alone can harmonize the conflicting and temporary responsibilities of this world. Referring back to the meaning of dharma as "that which is inherent or essential to", Krishna tells Arjuna that our essential identity is pure consciousness that is born from the spiritual soul, totally distinct from our psychophysical material nature that we so strongly identify with. Arjuna's ethical crisis transforms into a spiritual renaissance, where he realizes that his true dharma is that which aligns deeply with his spiritual and not his material identity.

Living with dharma can present paradoxical and despairing circumstances where our sense of goodness is severely tested. It has been humbling for me to realize that even with best possible intentions I cannot produce solutions that can satisfy everyone involved in a situation. The struggles have helped me to be less judgmental about other people's actions and understand that pure ethical living and idealism, although very admirable, also has its limitations. I realize that the primary aim for living the life of dharma is not only to ensure a society with high ethical conscience but also to go beyond the ethical into the realm of the spiritual. That is why the ancient Vedic texts encourage us to live by dharmic principles and furthermore struggle through despairing contradictions to seek deeper answers on responsibility, integrity and duty. This is where despair becomes a surpassing excellence and the movement from the ethical to the spiritual begins -- as the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard put it. This is where striving to live by dharma becomes our spiritual emancipation. It has awakened a deeper spiritual understanding into the real purpose of my existence, which I will highlight in my next article.

Bhakti Vasudeva Swami: Uniting Religion And Social Justic Advocacy

2011-05-16T15:33:00.002-04:00

From Qalam: The Columbia University Undergraduate Journal of South Asian Studies

Event Organized by the Sanctum, Columbia’s Undergraduate Journal of Religion

“When our eyes become anointed with the salve of love, or when our eyes become anointed with transcendental love, we will be able to have a universal vision not based on color, gender, race, age, etc., but based on the fact that everyone is a spark from the Creator. Therefore in a sense, faith has a very vital role to play in originating social justice…”

His Holiness Bhakti Vasudeva Swami graced Columbia University with his presence on the evening of Sunday, April 17, 2011 in order to discuss the points of intersection between religion and the pursuit of social justice in the modern world. In response to the question of whether or not religion has any bearing on the movement for social justice in the world’s societies, and if this bearing is positive or negative, His Holiness presents a threefold thesis: he describes the divergence of modern-day religion from its truest spiritual roots; expresses the necessity of human beings’ reconnecting with the spiritual roots of their religions; and identifies how social justice in modern societies will blossom forth from this newly awakened, worldwide God-consciousness. The most critical message His Holiness sought to convey through this presentation is the means by which human beings might gain access to the spiritual truths inherent within both their Selves and their Faiths; and how this newfound spiritual connection might enable humanity as a whole to externalize the promised fruits of its religions in the world today, with the achievement of social justice.

His Holiness envisions religion in the modern world as having two basic forms. Modern-day religion represents a type of social culture, severed from a sense of duty to higher ideals or culpability for the perpetration of unjust, unethical, or immoral actions. Adherents to such social cultures gather to attend “religious” events, but leave such gatherings spiritually and morally untransformed; religion in this sense is only understood from a mundane perspective. By contrast, His Holiness highlights transcendental religion as a form of religiosity or spirituality that produces a genuine practitioner of moral and ethical ideals. This genuine practitioner of transcendental religion is characterized by five “symptoms,” which His Holiness translates from Sanskrit, Vedic verse as: (1) having control over the urge to speak harsh words or insincere nonsense; (2) having control over the mind, which is attained through the discipline of cultivating a particular type of sadana or spiritual practice; (3) having control over the tongue, by not saying improper things at improper times; (4) having control over the abdomen, by having orderly, controlled eating habits; (5) having control over one’s genitals, by engaging in no harmful or immoral sexual behaviors. An individual who has gained such mastery over his or her sensory apparatuses represents a genuine practitioner of transcendental religion.

However, gaining control over these five aspects of the body and mind is in no way the culminating point of the genuine practice of religion. Exercising control over the Self is a means by which one refrains from engaging in immoral or unethical social practices, but does not wholly prepare one for participation in the movement for social justice and human rights. His Holiness asserts that the purification of one’s consciousness is the only means by which one will be able to successfully engage in the struggle to end social injustice. A purified consciousness engenders one with purity of purpose; from a purified consciousness, one begins to see one’s transcendental Self, or soul, at the core of one’s physical, and even intellectual, being. One then sees that this soul-source is connected to that of all other living beings, whether they are human or non-human; from this recognition of the interconnectedness of all life arises a sense of love that is imbued with a consciousness of human commonality and equality. Once rooted in this consciousness, the most genuine shoots of social justice – harmony, tolerance, equality – are able to blossom forth in human societies.

Indeed, according to Vedic revelations, the presence of God in the universe is threefold. God is realizable in three phases: (1) God as spirit permeating the whole of the cosmic creation; (2) God as residing in every person’s heart as the super-soul or the Holy Ghost; or, the body as the temple of God; and (3) God as realizable by calling on His names. It is through the practice of the latter that the truth and reality of the former is manifested within the human consciousness.

With this, His Holiness identifies social injustice in modern societies “as being rooted in an ‘identity crisis.’ That is ignorance, ignorance of our true identity.” This true identity is the recognition of the Self at the core of one’s being as interconnected with all other Selves; and this assemblage of interconnected Selves as being inextricably connected with the Creative Force, or God, of the universe. His Holiness solidifies this conceptualization with a discussion of research reporting a strong correlation between the “purification of consciousness” by a community of individuals, and the subsequent or simultaneous emergence of social justice within that particular community. He cites South Africa at the height of apartheid; despite the intensity of hatred, discrimination, and division in that society at the time, Black, White, and Indian members of the South African Hare Krishna community met together in an atmosphere of unity, concord, and love. “Such is the power,” he proclaims, ”of deep devotion to spirituality, of genuine religiosity.”

Finally, His Holiness presents the tool by which human beings might purify their consciousnesses, in order to achieve the extraordinary vision of social justice, human rights, and world peace in modern societies. He presents the idea that, for every age, human beings are given a tool by which to connect with the deepest spiritual meaning of their religion, and thus with their truest Selves, God, and all of humanity. His Holiness identifies the tool for this age as, “sonic therapeutic intervention, or audition and recapitulation of the names of God.” While this might mean chanting Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, or dhikr as practiced by Muslims, the remembrance of the names of God is an injunction that many religious traditions have enjoined upon its adherents. His Holiness explains, “Basically, we understand that God has multifarious names – such as Jehovah, Allah, or Krishna – and dedicate time everyday to Him through repetitions of these names.”

According to His Holiness, calling upon the name of God is like having a direct cell-phone line to this Higher Power. “Just as human beings appreciate when a friend calls, unexpectedly or even regularly, out of genuine love and concern, so too does God appreciate having His name called upon by human beings; this is because human beings are parts and parcels of that supreme ocean of appreciation.” His Holiness encourages people who have an inclination for religiosity to take time out from their daily schedules to connect with a higher force in this way, as it sustains spiritual awareness. Such a practice is food for the Spirit, which nourishes and invigorates human beings in a manner similar to how food nourishes the physical body. He suggests that two hours be used for this practice, especially in the morning between 4:30 and 6:30am. “Any effort you make in terms of your spiritual endeavors at that time,” he confirms, “will give you very great spiritual benefits.” By engaging this practice, His Holiness indicates that “you’ll be protected from all of the known or unknown temptations. Even your physical environment can be purified by calling on God’s names.”

Truly, the practice of calling upon the names of God is a spiritual tool by which not only one’s own consciousness may be purified, but even by which one’s immediate physical setting – and the world as a whole - can experience purification and spiritual recalibration. Affirming the connection between the remembrance of God, the purification of one’s consciousness, and the achievement of social justice, His Holiness concludes, “If we don’t take care to give some quality time to God, we may have good intentions about social justice, but our intentions may be thwarted, because if we don’t have that purified consciousness, it is very difficult to strive for social justice. …The practice of religion leads to liberation; genuine practitioners of religion are those who uphold the norms of social justice. If your higher self is realized [through the genuine practice of religion], you will see the spiritual essence in everyone; thus, you will be able to genuinely campaign for social justice.”

********

His Holiness Bhakti Vasudeva Swami (Vasudev Das) is a religious leader of the Gaudiya Vaishnava Hindu faith, a doctoral researcher of leadership and organizational change, and a scholar of the social sciences. Born in Nigeria, he commenced his religious and communal activities in 1984 with the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). His Holiness frequently travels around the world to educate diverse audiences on the values of love, peace, unity in diversity, self-realization, positive change, and community development.

(Biographical points: Courtesy of Columbia University’s Undergraduate Journal of Religion, The Sanctum)

-JMG

The Humble Musings Of The Manhattan Monk 5/15/11

2011-05-15T08:00:00.000-04:00

We need to come to the realization that our struggles are impossible roads to cross without the grace of the Lord. This realization must not sink our spirit. How do we center our whole life and being around this grace? By learning how to pray for it constantly, in many sincere permutations of feeling, according to our circumstance and need.

We also come to this center by the habits of our reactions. Patience, firm faith, and hope born of experience, with a determination that never goes wayward, instills in us a gravitational pull towards this grace. Our reactions to our struggles never take us away from this grace.

We must feel the clear relief of giving ourselves to this grace. We earn this right slowly, only through clearly seeing the many-layered mistakes of having turned away from this grace. We feel the painful sear of this error, and this instills within us the transcendental instinct to turn deeply into constant prayer for this grace.

***
The sweetest and greatest shelter we receive in this world is Krsna's reciprocation to our pure intention to love, serve, and know Him and His devotees. What comparison of relief can we find in trying to build a roof over our head that is destined to leak and fall? A materialistic peace cheaply earned and cheaply used is the poorest excuse for the satisfaction we will actually find in the courage and resolve to give our love based on this pure intention.

Our pure intention is the jewel in the dust of our heart that captivates Krsna's attention and affection towards us. This pure intention is what my Gurudeva sees in me, in his affectionate gestures and glances, in his implicit trust in my young devotion and his service to guide it

We must tenderly shine our best light on our pure intention. Its most natural reality should come to saturate our every thought, will, desire, and deed. It is the best of us, and the great privilege of our devotional life is to understand and make tangible the reality of this intention, this desire to serve with our most clear and loving heart, and to help to unveil it in the hearts of the lost souls who surround us.

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