Compassionate Reflections #3

Inspired by my reading of "Vaisnava Compassion" by HH Satsvarupa Maharaja

We all carry our own stone, or as the Beatles sing, "boy, you're gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time."

It's a heavy load of false ego, dirty addictions, life-draining habits, misconceptions, laziness, and a whole other shebang of indolence, insolence, and illusion.

We can very easily get caught up in our personal successes and failures to cleanse this dust away. Our own problems leak into our lives, into our temporary states of happiness and material well-being, and we become sullen, morose, and incapable of even a smile or a warm gesture. It's a symptom of our original malady, thinking that we are the Center Of It All, and we often mistake a temporary discomfort as the universe caving in on us.

It helps me when I am able to take a deep breath, realize the reality of my own sufferings, realize the strength provided to me by Krsna to overcome them, and above all, to realize that everyone else is also carrying this weight.

To give real compassion to others, we have to identify the crucial fact that no one is alone in the struggle against the threefold miseries of the material world, and the wisdom we gain in this struggle must be shared with each other.

In writing on tolerance in his article "Tolerance and Nonviolence", Maharaja writes:

"Tolerance towards others is only really possible when we tolerate our own suffering as a reaction to our own past misdeeds. That is, when we don't curse anyone for causing it"

He then quotes from Prabhupada's purport to SB 6.17.17)

"A devotee is naturally so humble and meek that he accepts any condition of life as a blessing from the Lord...A devotee always accepts punishment from anyone as the mercy of the Lord. If one lives in this conception of life, he sees whatever reverses occur due to his past misdeeds, and he therefore never accuses anyone."

"On the contrary, he becomes increasingly attached to the Supreme Personality of Godhead because of his being purified by his suffering. Suffering, therefore, is also a process of purification."

This is our lofty aspiration in our personal expression of our suffering state. To be grateful for our suffering!...I can barely comprehend, let alone practice it. It's essential to our devotion to properly understand our own suffering so that we can transcend it and then allow others to transcend it as well.

Compassionate Reflections #2

Inspired by my reading of "Vaisnava Compassion" by HH Satsvarupa Maharaja

In his book, Maharaja stresses the importance of nourishing each devotee's individual capacity to best serve the devotees. Individuality is often shattered in the face of fanaticism and institutional immaturity, and its often misunderstood to be something that we should get rid of, like a weed.

It is our own individual experience, spiritually and materially, and the immense struggles we face in each arena that allows us to relate deeply to the individual experience of everyone else. From the piece "Misplaced, Mundane Compassion", Maharaja writes:

"When we preach, we immediately show compassion according to the spiritual master's direction and learn to sacrifice our own comforts for the well-being of others. Preaching is important; otherwise, our sense of spiritual compassion would remain theoretical. Still, there is a distance to move from the theoretical to the realized, and to get there we need to cultivate humility and self-awareness-to see how much we too have been suffering and in how many similar ways, how much we have been given by our spiritual master and how very vulnerable we are-before we can truly hear or understand what others are going through."

It is rather important, at this stage in my life, as a college graduate and supposed "adult" to figure out what the hell I should "do." For most people, that means a long and stressful job search and career path. Not for me! Well, at least not yet, but the idea is the same. How can I best use my individual abilities and talents, and how can I best use them in Krsna's service?

It is this "finding of our self" that can have such potency in our preaching, as opposed to a rigid, institutionalized formula. Maharaja writes:

"A compassionate preacher has to help others find the strength within to acknowledge their physical and emotional needs, to recognize their propensities, and to want to use those things in Krsna's service. Sooner or later, each of us will have to face the face that we have certain tendencies. If we want to really become devotees, we will need to learn how to engage them for Krsna's pleasure."

All I can offer is a heck of a lot of gratitude for the chance to live my life in the association of devotees, so that perhaps I may develop a deep level of compassion for everyone in my life and beyond.

Compassionate Reflections #1

Inspired by my reading of "Vaisnava Compassion" by HH Satsvarupa Maharaja

"Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace! Where there is hatred let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon."-St.Francis of Assisi

It's not easy to show compassion. It requires maturity, sincerity, integrity, austerity, sensitivity, and above all a deep realization of personal humility. The showing of compassion is inherent to the spiritualized individual. It is a natural heart-felt connection of feeling and action that comes when one acknowledges that Krsna is the center of all reality, and not one's self and selfish interests.

As a young aspiring devotee, I must surround myself with those individuals who are not abstracted from the idea of compassion. Compassion can be theorized about endlessly, but it doesn't belong to the mind, to the intellect. It belongs to the heart and the hands that make real the mercy that flows from beyond the fragile shell of this material realm.

Real compassion is seeing every living entity equally, whether they are brahmana or dog or dog-eater or terrorist or politician or plastic movie star or street bum. The maturity of our world-view allows us to discriminate to time, place, and circumstance with each unique individual we come across in our preaching, and we should never let anyone walk upon us or place us into a violent situation.

With this foresight, we see also that the great pure devotees like Prabhupada indeed saw every living entity as spirit soul worthy of receiving the Holy Name. I know I have a hell of a long way to go just to even be compassionate to myself, let alone everyone else.

Imagine, in your own life, how much stronger and softer and smarter you would have to be to treat every living entity with the same selfless love saved for your nearest and dearest.

Being compassionate is as simple as sharing what you hold dearest, whether its a warm blanket or a set of Bhagavatams, but to absorb our lives, to soak our very being in the kind of bottomless compassion given by the acaryas is one of the greatest challenges we face as individuals and as a society of devotees.

We have to remember that the externals of our sadhana do not immediately make us compassionate persons. We have to fight and struggle against our false ego, going deep within ourselves to face the dust and demons, in order to really open our heart as a channel for real selfless, devotional works.

The Reward of Faith

Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thous mayest understand."- St. Augustine

Faith is something that must be put to the test, that must become an active part of our lives, applied to all the various facets of the undertakings of our bodies, minds, hearts, and souls.

Our faith must become realized and alive in such a way that it doesn't become an abstract, reaching "belief" that can be easily shot down by the likes of such modern-day "pundits" as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

Why did Srila Prabhupada constantly describe the process of Krsna Consciousness as the "science of God" and "the science of self-realization"? Anyone with a fourth-grade education can tell you with some gusto that science and faith are mutually exclusive, so if we are practicing a scientific process of self-realization, then what is the role of faith?

Quite simply, we can understand, or try to understand, that so much of the spiritual realm beyond this material shell is incomprehensible to our mild minds and shattered senses. But we must have the faith in the descriptions of the realized acaryas that this is actually what the spiritual world is like, that this is what Krsna looks like and this is what He does.

At the same time, our process of bhakti-yoga is active and verifiable in its results in a way that can be observed by the scientific method.

By chanting the maha-mantra reguarly, by following the four regulative principles, by preaching widely and consistently, by reading Prabhupada's books, etc, we get the results that are advertised. Our lives and our existences become absorbed in the flows of auspiciousness, as mentioned in the opening verses of the 16th Chapter of the Gita. We actually become brahmanas!

This is a great point for preaching. The faith we hold, essential for any aspiring spiritualist, needs a process, a daily practice, to become mature and realized. The sankirtana process and the society of devotees with Prabhupada and Lord Caitanya as the guiding lights provide, when practiced humbly and properly, the best and most scientifically verifiable method of self-realization available today.

Prabhupada writes in his purport to S.B 3.15.33: If the members of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, putting faith in Kṛṣṇa as the center, live in harmony according to the order and principles of Bhagavad-gītā, then they are living in Vaikuṇṭha, not in this material world.

It's a powerful statement, something which we have to yet to fulfill on a large scale within ISKCON. The important part is living in harmony with the order and principles of the Gita. This deepens our faith with Krsna at the center, and makes it a vibrant, ecstatic reality.

So many people want something more tangible than just the misguided and misdirected faith they are offered. Let us offer them not only the most mysterious and sublime of faiths, but also the way to see it face-to-face.

Where Are All The Half-Evolved Dinosaurs?

I don't profess to have a very proper understanding of the mechanics of the Darwinist theory of evolution, so I'm always a little wary to blindly refute it based on the little knowledge I have, and so I keep an inquisitive mindset into what exactly is valid and invalid about this theory that so many people take as absolute fact.

Here's an article that asks a simple question: Where are the fossil records of all the not-fully formed predecessors to the fully formed species that we have dug up and that we see living today?