The Strange Art of Relationships

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..

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. You should treat every person with whom you come in contact with the same care as the person you love the most.
4. 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

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

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?

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

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

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