Srimad-Bhagavatam Meditation: 3:9:10

It is once again time for a guided meditation on the ripened fruit of the tree of Vedic knowledge, the Srimad-Bhagavatam

I humbly ask you to read first the translation and Bhaktivedanta purport to today's verse, the 10th verse from Ninth Chapter of the Third Canto of the Srimad-Bhagavatam.

ahny āpṛtārta-karaṇā niśi niḥśayānā

nānā-manoratha-dhiyā kṣaṇa-bhagna-nidrāḥ

daivāhatārtha-racanā ṛṣayo 'pi deva

yuṣmat-prasańga-vimukhā iha saḿsaranti

Such nondevotees engage their senses in very troublesome and extensive work, and they suffer insomnia at night because their intelligence constantly breaks their sleep with various mental speculations. They are frustrated in all their various plans by supernatural power. Even great sages, if they are against Your transcendental topics, must rotate in this material world.

I just wanted to appreciate and offer some meditations on a recent class done by our esteemed guest HG Damodar Gopal Prabhu of Montreal and Chowpatty on this verse. I hope I may add something to his already wonderful and profound observations.

I must admit I'm always tickled with these kinds of verses, in which the minute fallacies of our contemporary civlization of vice and conceit are placed in the proper light of the parampara.

After all, what is more revolutionary that "you are not your body, you're spirit soul!" Every activist group of progressive minds is actually aiming at this ideal, this liberation, this freedom against the clearly perceived injustices of our material existence.

The complete vision that Prabhupada has given us actually makes him the supreme activist, the one who can give us what we really lack and want: our selves, in real, eternal freedom, and what's more, he can give us our loving relationship with Krsna once again, if we sincerely desire it.

Our contemporary post-modern hodge-podge of gadgets, guns, and gonzo living is a veritable monster, on the loose, devouring our forests, hedge funds, idealistic politicans, and so many senses of decency and piety. It is a monster of lust, a capitalistic, industrialized, over-technological creature of comfort.

We are its victims as well as its confidants, its bridegroom and its divorcee. Prabhupada could clearly see this from the core of his vision, and his strong and crystal-clear writings on the precarious situation we have put ourselves in as a collective people stand with and above all such revolutionary expressions.

In the purport to this verse, Prabhupada writes:

"As described in the previous verse, people who have no taste for the devotional service of the Lord are occupied in material engagements. Most of them engage during the daytime in hard physical labor; their senses are engaged very extensively in troublesome duties in the gigantic plants of heavy industrial enterprise.

"Factory" is another name for hell. At night, hellishly engaged persons take advantage of wine and women to satisfy their tired senses, but they are not even able to have sound sleep because their various mental speculative plans constantly interrupt their sleep. Because they suffer from insomnia sometimes they feel sleepy in the morning for lack of sufficient rest. By the arrangement of supernatural power, even the great scientists and thinkers of the world suffer frustration of their various plans and thus rot in the material world birth after birth."

We think this is normal. We rotate our entire lives around the expectations of some such temporary pleasure to be derived from this vicious cycle. And Prabhupada clearly states that even the so-called "great minds" are not immune. Indeed they are often the ones, consciously or unconsciously, creating the social and economic spheres for the monster to stomp around on us.

It boils down to hankering and lamenting. This is the essence of the material nature. We are trying to enjoy seperately from Krsna, and we are in a world filled with so many different varieties of sensual delights.

We desire, we obsess, we think, we feel, and we act. In Calcutta on 1-27-73, speaking on verse 7:1 from the Gita, Prabhupada spoke the plain truth about this:

"Because in the karmi stage we have got two diseases: hankering and lamenting. Whatever you have got, if it is lost, then I lament. "Oh, I got this and that and it is now lost." And whatever we do not possess, we hanker after. So for possessing, we hanker, we work so hard. And when it is lost, we again lament and cry. This is karmi stage. So brahma-bhutah stage... Jnäna stage means he has no more lamenting or hankering. Prasannätmä. "Oh, I am, aham brahmasmi. What I have got to do with this body? My business is to cultivate transcendental knowledge, brahma-jnäna. So in that stage, brahma-bhütah prasannätmä na socati na känksati samah sarvesu bhütesu [Bg. 18.54]. That is the test. He has no lamenting. He has no hankering. And he's equal to everyone. Panditah sama-darsinah."

Again, what is more revolutionary than this? This is the summit of all progressive human aspiration, and beyond.

Another point that Damodar Gopal Prabhu made was that our contemporary system of education is the feeder into this ideology of impersonal and demonic exploitation. As I can relate from my own experience, your normal everyday, idealistic young college student is fed into a spiral of credit and debt, consumption and need...a veritable slaughterhouse.

Prabhupada writes from "The Art of Dying" from The Science of Self-Realization:

"The modern setup of human civilization is a risky one because it offers no education about relevant inquiries into the essential principles of life. Like animals, people do not know that they are going to be slaughtered by the laws of nature. They are satisfied with a bunch of green grass, or a so-called jolly life, like the waiting goat in a slaughterhouse. Considering such a condition of human life, we are just trying to make a humble attempt to save the human being by the message of Back to Godhead. This method is not fictitious. If there is at all to be an era of reality, this message of Back to Godhead is the beginning of that era."

It is our spiritual foundation, the house that Prabhupada built, that is our gift to all progressive-minded living entities. To dovetail our aspirations for a more just, humane, and equitable world into the vision that Prabhupada has given insures that our efforts will rise above the modes of nature.

Without a God-centered core, the modes of nature, the monster, will gradually and with great steadiness eat away at all of our energies and sincerity.

Prabhupada's vision is a mix of the urban and the rural. The lynchpins are book distribution (and all the dynamic city preaching and shelter that comes along with it) and self-sufficient, spiritually centered farm communities. This could save the world...at least temporarily, in a Golden Age kinda way.

It could save many souls, giving them back exactly what they are looking for in their protests, occupations, petitions, hunger strikes, martyrdoms, etc.

Satsvarupa Maharaja states this excellently here in an excerpt from his book Living With The Scriptures:

When the devotees regularly produce excellent books and magazine articles, and as they continue to distribute Prabhupäda’s books more and more, and when they establish successful farm communities, and when they solve their own problems of education, marriage, and community cooperation, and when they demonstrate the perfect Vaisnava etiquette of ladies and gentlemen–not just with a handful of members, but with thousands–then eventually the dull brains of the suffering population of Kali-yuga will come to realize Prabhupäda’s message, and we can be satisfied by fulfilling his request.

If there is truth in the homely proverb “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” then it should not be very long before the practical ability of devotees to solve their problems and the problems of other people in the world begins to manifest more clearly to everyone, and the world’s citizens begin a mass movement of beating their path to the Krsna consciousness movement and back to Godhead.

My heart always remains connected to the progressive vibe, to the movement of the people. I pray very humbly, knowing I have little ability on my own, to Guru and Gauranga, for the guidance and ability to serve these striving humans and spirit souls by allowing them to understand the sublime message of Krsna Consciousness.

The Soul of Merton 4-26-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

In Contemplation In A World of Action, Merton once again examines the sticky issue of openness verses cloister, of engagement versus withdrawal from the secular world. He writes:

"Openness to the world means involvement in the affairs of people outside the cloister, identification with them in their desires, problems, struggles, dangers; it means vital concern about a world of total war, genocide, race riots, social injustice, misery, poverty, violence, lust, every kind of disorder. All this is wicked and ungodly. Far from divine, it is diabolical. How can one think of such things and maintain the inner peace, the purity of recollection, the serenity of spirit in which one will hear the sweet ineffable call to the divine?"

The deep wisdom that Merton holds in his heart, expressed through his writings, is a clarion call to all spiritual seekers and doers to connect, to plug in, to the world-at-large, to avoid the selfish trap of "blissing out" and becoming disconnected, whether out of fear or plain ignorance, from the real suffering of the peoples of our times, places, and circumstances.

The real revolution, the real heart of Merton's mood expressed through his writings is the urgency and the courage he shares and implores us to have in deepening our contemplation in dynamic engagement. He writes:

"Is the cloistered life merely to escape from the troubles and conflicts of the world to a condition of security and peace in which we find rest and taste the consolations of intimacy with God? Or does it mean sharing the anguish and hope of a world in crisis in which millions struggle for the barest essentials of human existence? Should not the contemplative life be seen in terms of event and encounter rather than simply as a viewing and tasting of essential love? Is love an object or is it a happening? Is God present to us in idea or act?"

From the very core of Prabhupada's mood, we know that to reach out to others, to sacrifice our own nonessential comforts, indeed to sacrifice a traditional life of cloister (this is most relevant for young monks like ourselves in the Bhaktivedanta Ashram in the middle of Manhattan), is the essential way to actually go deep into ourselves, to see that Krsna is there.

We must learn, refine, and perfect the art of communication, of the loving exchange. Merton writes in this regard:

"We have to be open in the sense that we are ready and available in all possible situations, including those of human encounter and exchange. Christian love, including contemplative love, starts from the basic realization that those who are unable to relate to others in a valid human encounter are also handicapped in their relations to the encounter with God."

Our challenge is finding the fine line in our own personal and collective disciplines as spiritual communities, a discipline that will not only prevent us from falling into the mundane, but will sharpen us into becoming dynamic, bold, and deeply caring in our outreach.

We have to consider both sides of the coin: our need for detachment to insure our own spiritual growth, and the the need for engagement to apply and give the lessons of our growth in a mood of compassion and of creating real change in the world. The mature devotee is able to find and perfect this balance, to be strong in and to give by the example of his own character. Merton writes:

"The contemplative life will therefore need to be understood...in terms of living experience and witness...What is important now is not so much to preserve order and regularity in observance but to produce real contemplatives, disciples who have found and have known him whom the Father has sent into the world and who are able to bear witness to his reality by their characters, by their lives and by the transformation of their consciousness."

He also says:

"Hence openness is necessary for contemplatives. It is by no means a mere concession, something permitted to modern people who would otherwise become too tense through too much concentration and withdrawal. In one word; openness is now seen to be not only opposed to cloistered contempation but even as necessary for its deepening and renewal."

Our maturity shines through our eagerness to engage with, and the urgency we feel to connect with progressive communities of thought and action who are fighting to shape a better planet, to take the right fork in the road.

We have so much to offer to our thoughtful and wise brothers and sisters, and they also have so much to offer us, which we should never forget. Merton writes:

"We are literally at the crossroads of our destiny. Most people either ignore the spiritual dimensions of the crisis or else they are incapable of apprehending the real issues in any whatever. The contemplative, by selective information and well-chosen exposure to sound commentary, should be able to identify intelligently and compassionately with modern man in crisis. Simple aloofness, withdrawal, and refusal of concern would make the contemplative a scandal to his brother in the world."

He adds:

"Much discipline and humility are necessary for one who tries in all honesty to share with others an undistorted view of the truth. The task of conveying to others clearly and sincerely what one knows of the problems of Christian life, without saying more than one knows and without resorting merely to catch phrases borrowed from books, is a great help for one's own life in Christ."

So, in the unique occupation of a monk in Manhattan, the mood must be one of relish in our opportunities, of careful consideration of our chances and the risks involved, and of deep faith in the potency of the parampara to carry to us what we lack and to enhance what we have. Merton clearly states:

"We are living through the greatest crisis in the history of man, and this crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action and has lost (or perhaps never had) the sense of contemplation. Far from being irrelevant, prayer, meditation, and contemplation are of the utmost importance in America today."

The Blue Swallows

The Blue Swallows

		Across the millstream below the bridge Seven blue swallows divide the air In shapes invisible and evanescent, Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s Or memory’s power to keep them there. “History is where tensions were,” “Form is the diagram of forces.” Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge, While gazing down upon those birds— How strange, to be above the birds!— Thus helplessly the mind in its brain Weaves up relation’s spindrift web, Seeing the swallows’ tails as nibs Dipped in invisible ink, writing… Poor mind, what would you have them write? Some cabalistic history Whose authorship you might ascribe To God? to Nature? Ah, poor ghost, You’ve capitalized your Self enough. That villainous William of Occam Cut out the feet from under that dream Some seven centuries ago. It’s taken that long for the mind To waken, yawn and stretch, to see With opened eyes emptied of speech The real world where the spelling mind Imposes with its grammar book Unreal relations on the blue Swallows. Perhaps when you will have Fully awakened, I shall show you A new thing: even the water Flowing away beneath those birds Will fail to reflect their flying forms, And the eyes that see become as stones Whence never tears shall fall again. O swallows, swallows, poems are not The point. Finding again the world, That is the point, where loveliness Adorns intelligible things Because the mind’s eye lit the sun. Howard Nemerov

The Soul of Merton 4-18-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

I'm upfront about it...discipline. I've rarely had it in my life (outside of high school football, and it did do me wonders then), and in my sadhana, in the here and now, when I need it most, I often fail to grasp it, to utilize it for the real purpose of my life, for the cultivation of real happiness.

You could put it simply like this: I don't understand what real discipline is and how to use it. It's so much more than the following of obligations. It is the processes, the forms which we put to our practice that allows us to hook up to our internal link to the Lord.

It's the deepest need of our heart, and our application and understanding of discipline must lead us to think, feel, and act in such a way to as fulfill this need.

Discipline is an essential aspect of the monastic life, and proper application of discipline allows those of us in the monastic order to fall deeply into the realization of our summons and livelihood, as Merton describes in Contemplation In A World Of Action:

"The monk is a man who, in one way or other, pushed to the very frontiers of human experience and strives to go beyond, to find out what transcends the ordinary level of existence...And he feels if he does not respond to this summons, he cannot be happy because he cannot be fully honest with himself. To evade this would be to reject a certain kind of truth, a certain inner reality, and ultimately to forfeit his self-respect as a human being"

In any extended effort beyond the mundane, from athletic to aesthetic to ascetic, we require a exterior discipline to give focus to our internal discipline. And we must not forget the internal aspect of it, lest we become hard-hearted, out of touch, etc. Our discipline must be dynamic, warmly received, and open to change and adaptation to our time, places, and circumstances.

In terms of the monastic application (which is a rather universal application when we get down to the bare bones of it), Merton writes:

"That is what monastic discipline is all about. It implies the cultivation of certain inner conditions of awareness, of openness, of readiness for the new and unexpected. Specifically, it implies an openness to, a readiness for, what is not normally to be found in an existence where our attention is dissipated and exhausted in other things."

Material life in the Kali-Yuga is spontaneous enough, and as we deepen our restoration of our relationship with Krsna and His devotees, the spontaneous factor also increases. In order to make sure that we are in the proper state to receive both of these degrees of spontaneity, we must find the guidance of those who have developed a strong external and internal discipline, so that they may give us the proper shelter for us to do the same.

A sincere discipline allows us to become real before Krsna, without quarrel and hypocrisy in our words, thoughts, and hearts. Merton states this plainly when he writes:

"True discipline is interior and personal. It is something more than just learning a certain kind of conduct and possessing coherent religious justifications for that conduct. It is one thing to say that when I make a profound bow I intend to express love and adoration for God, but another to really grow and develop in that love and adoration."

This kind of sincere discipline is so rare in contemporary spiritual practices, and without it, you get hodge-podge and treading the surface of the water, without going deep, without facing up to who you are and who you aren't, and what do you get? A spiritual life that can hardly be called spiritual, with one foot in the surf, constantly knocked over by the waves of maya that also crash, because we don't know how to swim.

Discipline, in essence, frees up from the bodily and mental platforms, allowing us and giving us the real, tangible, ecstatic freedom that all these poor, sincere dispossessed souls inhale tear gas and take rubber bullets to the gut in order to find and live by.

Without the determined, enthusiastic, and patient development of such discipline, under proper guidance, we will never find what we are seeking.

Merton concludes:

"Finally, discipline means solitude of some sort, not in the sense of selfish withdrawal but in the sense of an emptiness that no longer cherishes the comfort of various social idols and is not slavishly dependent on the approval of others.

In such solitude one learns not to seek love but to give it. One's great need is now no longer to be loved, understood, accepted, pardoned, but to understand, to love, to pardon and to accept others just as they are, in order to help them transcend themselves in love.

Anyone who undertakes to be a monk knows, by the very fact of his vocation, that he is summoned by God to a difficult, lifelong work in which there will always be anguish and great risk. If he evades this work under any pretext whatsoever, he must know that he cannot have any peace with himself or with God because he is trying to silence the deepest imperative of his own heart."

The Soul of Merton 4-11-09

Inspired by my readings of "Contemplative Prayer" and "Contemplation In A World Of Action" by Thomas Merton

We often talk here in the Bhaktivedanta Ashram of going outside our "comfort zone" in order to prove ourselves worthy of the inspiration and blessings that we need to become sincere sadhakas and spiritual warriors.

In a recent class, our wise and fearless guide HG Yajna Purusa Prabhu gave an essential purport to this personal challenge: Our souls are designed to relate, to go deep into relationships, becoming vulnerable, honest, pure, sincere, and determined.

Because we have never been trained how to do this (I can only speak deeply of my own feelings of uncertainty in this department), to make this effort and to clear the muddled path to allow ourselves to reach our natural state of relation and syncopation on the level of Divine Love is a existential task that confounds even the best of us.

In our sadhana, we are given the essential key to opening up the path inward to achieve this state of grace: a constant prayer and meditation that connects us to Krsna in the most direct and palatable way. In Contemplative Prayer, Merton writes:

"Prayer...means yearning for the simple presence of God, for a personal understanding of his word, for knowledge of his will and for capacity to hear and obey him. It is thus something much more than uttering petitions for good things external to our deepest concerns."

To become at all serious in our spiritual drive, we must strive to deepen our conceptions of what real prayer is. We cannot treat our prayers as abstract expressions of our material will. We cannot treat our prayers as daily rituals to be finished on or off schedule.

Observe any devotee, any serious spiritualist, whose prayer is the focus, the calm eye of the storm in the midst of the raging hurricane that is the Kali-Yuga, and you will see someone connected, wireless and flowing to the eternal.

Our prayer, our meditation on the Holy Names, if we can do like this and make it the central foundation holding up all our externals, and allowing it to lift us off the bodily and mental platforms, will allow us to break through to our true identity, beyond our "comfort zone". Merton writes:

"My true identity lied hidden in God's call to my freedom and my response to him. This means I must use our freedom in order to love, with full responsibility and authenticity, not merely receiving a form imposed on me by external forces, or forming my own life according to an approved social pattern, but directing my love to the personal reality of my brother, and embracing God's will in its naked, often impenetrable mystery."

This gift of the depth and breath of our prayer, letting our tongue reach out and even try to taste the Holy Names, feeling it mixed in with the scents of kadamba flowers and fresh cow dung, is a grace that has taken us millions of lifetimes to take hold of.

If we wrap our prayer in the attitude of gratitude, with the soft spice of humility, we will never lose hold of this most precious meal for our soul. Merton writes:

"We must approach our meditation realizing that grace, mercy, and faith are not permanent inalienable possessions which we gain by our efforts and retain as though by right, provided that we behave ourselves. They are constantly renewed gifts...it is never something which we can claim as though by right and use in a completely autonomous and self-determining manner according to our own good pleasure, without regard for God's will...the gift of prayer is inseparable from another grace: that of humility, which makes us realize that the very depths of our being and life are meaningful and real only in so far as they are oriented towards God as their source and their end."

Merton, in developing the realizations of the essential importance of humility, implores the serious seeker to place himself vulnerable and pleading before God, in order to become absorbed in the most sincere and potent meditation. He writes:

"Our meditation should begin with the realization of our nothingness and helplessness in the presence of God. This need not be a mournful or discouraging experience. On the contrary, it can be deeply tranquil and joyful since it brings us in direct contact with the source and joy of all life. But one reason why our meditation never gets started is perhaps that we never make this real, serious return to the center of our own nothingness before God. Hence we never enter into the deepest reality of our relationship with Him."
It is actually as asset of our greatest strength that we can place ourselves before Krsna like this, which gives us, by His mercy, all the creativity and vitality we need to stay committed and caring.

Of course, raised up in our culture of emotional instability, we must try to transcend using this feeling of helplessness to remain hopelessly on the mental platform, over analyzing every little fault of our imperfect character, and overly depending on others to define our experience for us.

Merton demands us to dig into our own hearts, beyond the comforts of our mental speculations and machinations. To do this, we must soak up courage from our prayer and meditation with unfettered determination and desperation. He writes:

"Finding our heart and recovering this awareness of our inmost identity implies the recognition that our external, everyday self is to a great extent a mask and a fabrication. It is not our true self. And indeed our true self is not easy to find."

But find it we must, and we must arrange our lives in such a way, in whatever sacrifices of the nonessential that we must make, to put our prayer, the Holy Names, at the first and foremost center of our consciousness.