Bhakta Brian in Toronto

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After my first visit to the Toronto Krishna temple, my life was about to change in a major way. I had entered the medieval world of Krishna Consciousness, and like a moth into the fire, I had been consumed by this first experience. I immediately returned the next day. My friend, on the other hand, never returned. His curiosity had been satisfied and I never saw him again. His mission in my life had been fulfilled; he had delivered me to Krishna, but I could not get enough of the temple. I returned as often I could. The devotees urged me to drop every thing in my life and “move in.” In fact, I came very close to doing this, but somehow it never happened. I never “moved in.”

I would show up at the temple every Friday evening and Sunday afternoon without fail. I did this consistently for five years. Soon I even began to attend the 4:30 AM morning prayer program (mangala arati) a few days of the week! For the first year I never told my parents or any of my friends what I was doing. I would sneak downtown to the temple where I would chant, hear and read philosophy, take prasad and work in the temple. Mostly I would clean cooking pots or wash floors. Soon I would even change into a dhoti and put on tilaka (Hindu clothes and the clay religious markings).

In those days it was unusual for someone to be so involved and yet not move into the temple. It became standard procedure for the devotees to corner me in a room after the Sunday feast and lecture me about the evils of the material world. I was told that my parents were evil and that my school was a “slaughter house” for the soul, and how I should become a monk and leave the material world. The pressure was overwhelming. I suffered great psychological pain over this. I loved my parents and I wanted to continue my education into university. In those days most of the devotees were men in theirtwenties. A large percentage of them were ex-drug addicts and American draft dodgers avoiding the Vietnam war. I was never comfortable with these people. Had it not been for this one fact I indeed may have moved into the temple. I simply did not like the street element of many of the devotees. There was one devotee, however, that I did like. He was the temple president, Jagadish. Had it not been for Jagadish I could not have withstood the pressure that was put on me to move into the temple. Most certainly I would have left. Jagadish was college educated and could see that I needed to be handled in a different manner, so he created space for me in the temple society by telling the devotees to desist from pressuring me to become a full time member.

In those days the issue of religious cults was just beginning to surface in the public awareness. Soon the cult issue was to become a major topic in North American. A myriad of religious teachers both western and eastern would come to dominate the popular culture.

 The Vietnam war played a major role in what happened in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Anna, I am sure you have heard of the hippie movement with its free love, drugs, and rock and roll. The natural tendency to protest and challenge authority that is a part of normal adolescence was amplified a hundred fold by the Vietnam war. The youth of America rallied around this issue. In Canada there was no military draft and the country was not directly involved in the Vietnam war. Canadian youth were not coming home in body bags, but still we felt the questioning and the unrest that was churning in the land to the south. The pressure of the war put a huge number of rebelling youth onto the streets of North America. The atmosphere was ripe to collectively question the values of the society and challenge traditional ways. The rock music of this era reflected the turmoil of the times. Many youth explored religious mysticism, both Western and Eastern, in an attempt to find meaning in life. The Hare Krishna Movement was one such attempt. There were also many unorthodox Christian groups. I remember seeing “Jesus Freaks” and “Jew for Jesus” on the streets of Toronto. There was a general questioning of traditional values by the youth of the country.

I did not know this at the time, but the Hare Krishna Movement was really not a walk into something new. On the contrary, it was a venture into ultra-conservative values. It was religious fundamentalism, old time religion packaged in a new way. It is likely that my involvement in this movement was a retreat from the liberalism of the hippy movement to the security of traditional values. But not without a huge cost!

Living in Small Town America

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My Canadian background is essentially a modified British background and the British, of course, are a polite and “proper” people. And it is true, at least compared to Americans! The moment you board a British Airways flight you experience a politeness in the flight crew that seems out of place, yet we often hear the expression, “the dirty old Englishman behind the door.” The truth is the English, and by extension we Canadians, try our best to make a good show of things. We keep our dirty laundry out of sight and present a public image that is upright and pristine, yet our reality is quite different. We have as many skeletons in our closets as anyone.

Americans amaze me! When I initially arrived in this country I was appalled by how little they hid their skeletons. In fact, they seemed to revel in displaying their dirty laundry in public, and I was easily convinced that these were a barbaric people. Have we not seen many Americans actually bragging about their divorce? Where I came from if someone was divorced it was considered shameful, and one was expected to have enough decency to hide the fact. Here, I find Americans even bragging about multiple divorces! In recent years, I have changed my position and I now think there may be something perversely healthy in telling all, or at least in not hiding the fact.

My first wife was a beautiful Jewish woman from Miami Beach, and to make a long story short I fell deeply in love with her and thoroughly intended to spend my life with her–till death do us part and all the rest of it. This was the Canadian in me. Life, it seems, enjoys making mockery of fairy tales and after eleven years she abandoned both me and our five children for a better life. My heart was crushed beyond comprehension and my life entered a chasm that took years to crawl out of. Before she left, however, she actively campaigned for a replacement wife for me! At the time we lived in New Vrindavan, a rural village of Hare Krishna devotees situated in the hills of West Virginia. New Vrindavan was a spiritual community of a thousand people, and like any village, everybody knew everything about everyone, what the inside of their homes looked like, what food they ate, and almost, what color underwear they wore. This was small town America and this was my first true residence in this country, and at the time I was as Canadian as they come. Life within a this small town America, however, was saturated with Puritanism, at least on the outside. There were strict codes of behavior for almost everything and strong undertones of asceticism. It was within this context that my wife actively solicited a replacement wife, and to “sweeten” the deal she was only too happy to tell all of my intimate details. She was, after all, American. Your ears would burn if I described all of what she told the world.

There is something about my life that wherever I live I become a public figure; so as you see today, in those days, I was also a public person within the confines of that community. I was the headmaster of the school and I had 350 children and 75 teachers under my charge. You can just imagine my horror to find my wife publicly soliciting a new wife and loudly spreading the “glories” of my private life in public! I went through complete humiliation. Not only was I losing my wife, a woman whom I loved dearly; not only was my family collapsing, our children were losing their mother; I was being publicly humiliated. This was one of my darkest periods.

But every cloud has a silver lining, as they say, and I learned something astounding from this experience. After all had been said, after the dust of intrigue and public humiliation had settled, after there were no longer any “secrets” to conceal, and after I had been thoroughly aired, this public spectacle reached a point where it became a dead issue. I became bullet proof! Nothing more could be said to hurt me and yet life still went on. In time the shame even faded and I became somewhat healed, at least in my public persona, and what I learned from this ordeal is that there is strength and freedom in having no privacy. I am therefore, no longer concerned with what people know or say about me. I have been through the fire of public scrutiny and I have survived. This however, is not a path I recommend for everyone. No one in their right mind should follow my course, but for me it became an unavoidable fact of my life and I have learned to turn it to my advantage. Perhaps in these days of digital communications it is in one sense unavoidable anyone, but for sure it is for a public person. At any rate, as you read these passages and perhaps gasp at my lack of desire to hide my personal life, you now know the history behind my decision to write these pages.

Yet there are deeper motives behind my apparent lack of concern with privacy.

I have a mentor, Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinode, whose writings have profoundly affected my personal life for many years now. Years ago, as I did my doctoral research, I travelled to Bhaktivinode’s ancestral home in West Bengal India and to my utter delight discovered a handwritten manuscript of his autobiography in Bengali. Bhaktivinode had written a long private letter to one of his sons describing the details of his life. I photographed and translated this manuscript and later found a single published edition of it at the India Office Library in London. This autobiography showed the human and personal side of a great religious thinker, how he managed his career, raised a family and grappled with the issues of modernity while living a religious life.

Consequently, this autobiography became a great source of inspiration to me as I grappled with my own issues of modernity and old world Hinduism, with secularism and spirituality. Had this honest and bold document not been available, I would certainly have had a more difficult time achieving this much needed integration in my life. Bhaktivinode’s autobiography not only included his private thoughts and activities, it also described the topical issues of his day including interactions with his colleagues many of whom became famous in their own right, men like Bankim Chandra, Keshab Candra Sen, Debendranath Tagore, and others. It also described how gas street lighting first came to Calcutta, how the telegraph and the railroads arrived and how they changed life in Calcutta. It gives a first hand account of the 1857 rebellion and describes the huge controversy over sati (widow burning) that raged throughout Bengal during the late nineteenth century.

And here I was, a hundred and fifty years later, a person from another time and place, looking back into time and seeing life through the eyes of this great soul and gaining insight and help in my own life. In this way I learned the value of leaving a written history. I also learned that what seems trivial and mundane now may one day assume larger historical significance and help readers that I cannot even imagine. For this reason I am leaving behind a record of my struggles and my solutions, as well as my descriptions and comments on the topical events of my time. I hope my writings will stand as a guide for those who would follow a path similar to mine.

And there is still one more reason that I am creating these installments. They are a personal therapy and an attempt to hone and sharpen my thinking. When I take the time to go through my thoughts and collect the photos of past days and feel the joy and pain of my personal struggles, it gives me an opportunity to revisit and re-assimilate my emotions and my thoughts. I find this hugely therapeutic. It raises ghosts from the past and allows me to process them from a new vantage point and put them to rest, once and for all. When I record my views on the big questions of life, God, religion, and science, as well as on the smaller topical issues of these days, marriage, abortion, capital punishment, and politics my thinking becomes clarified. I create an informed opinion for myself that I can draw upon whenever I am asked for my views on these subjects. It also allows me to clear my mind, for my opinions have been worked through and written down. Writing matures the mind, and by publishing on the web I can also receive the comments of others, which allows me to change and republish my views in an instant if new points of views demand that I alter my opinions.

And finally, what I have learned most of all, is that writing is my greatest joy and therefore I write to feel this joy.

The Community Begins: New Varshana

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After sitting and listening to Kanina and Gaudiya, allowing myself to be updated with the recent affairs of ISKCON, the thought ran through my mind that Krishna was giving me an opportunity to do some service and I should seize the opportunity. The idea of establishing a farm community, of buying land and developing a New Vrindavan type community, was exciting. The myth of Walden ran deep in my veins. I had no idea how to do this, but my immediate reaction was, “Oh boy, a challenge, a project!” There is a side of me that always wants to rise to a challenge, and the more challenging, the better. I felt intrigued and excited by the idea of establishing a rural community of devotees in eastern Ontario.

Kanina could fire pottery in a most beautiful way and he had become famous in the local area as a potter. As far as devotees went he was somewhat established in the material world and had some practical understanding of things. Without Kanina I would not have untaken this community project, and so we joined forces. He became my right hand man. He and his wife, Dhamayanti, rented a house in the local town of Warkworth and used their garage for his pottery business. Gaudiya along with his wife, Lilashuka, moved in with Kama Nagari and I. We had an extra room so we allowed them to move in with us and work for Marvin and Tucker. Lilashuka took over the book keeping and Gaudiya became my driver and my “goto” man. Our house also became the first community temple. This was a big mistake. Having devotees living in our home and making our house public property put tremendous strain on our family, especially with Kama Nagari being pregnant. We set up an altar in the living room and started a morning spiritual program at 5AM, complete with Mangal arati, Bhagavatam class, japa and even a Sunday program. Looking back on this now and knowing my private nature makes me wonder why I permitted such a state of affairs to occur. I was still in graduate school and, while running Marvin and Tucker might be justified in the name of making a living, taking on the additional responsibility of a community, and then to top it off making my house into a public temple, was insane. What was I thinking? Perhaps both Kama Nagari and I felt guilty that we were not doing enough spiritually. ISKCON was a “hot” organization that demanded action and commitment from its members and in the last few years we had slipped away and were just making a living, coming to terms with the material world. We were spiritually hungry, and now that an opportunity was presenting itself to do something directly spiritual, we felt obliged to take it. In fact we seized the opportunity. We called our new community, New Varshana, after Radha’s birth site in India.

Our Walden

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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”*

In this country there is a famous American author, Henry David Thoreau, who lived about 150 years ago. Thoreau is known as one of the founders of American transcendentalism and a pioneer of the ecology movement. He was a vegetarian, a practitioner of non-violence and a follower of passive resistance. He read and often quoted the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads in his writings.

Henry David Thoreau

Perhaps his most famous book is Walden, a collection of diaries he kept while he lived away from society at Walden Pond, a small lake in the State of Massachusetts. Thoreau saw himself as a seeker of truth and his time spent in isolation at Walden Pond was a time of personal meditation and soul searching. One of his most notable ideas expressed in Walden was the notion of simplicity. He writes, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail…Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.” Thoreau was one of the greatest influences on my early life and my generation.

For Kama Nagari and I, the cottage was our Walden Pond. After the incredibly urbanized world of Los Angeles we were ready to follow the path of simplicity outside of the city. We were ideologues and so our residence on the banks of the Trent River, a small log house 7 meters square that my father and I had built out of old canal logs, cedar fence rails and rough-cut lumber, was a perfect setting for our experiment in “truth.” Simple living and high thinking was the motto of our life. Of course, this was the also the motto of ISKCON.
                                        The Cottage

In our cabin there was no indoor plumbing, which meant no hot or cold running water, no central heating, just a simple wood stove, no indoor toilet, only an outhouse and no electricity, just kerosene lamps. We were to spend our life living without the amenities of life, just sewing ski hats and studying at school. We had no debt, no credit cards, our needs were minimal and we wanted to keep it that way. It was a perfect opportunity to live the simple rural life. So this is how Kama Nagari and I lived for the next two years, about the same length of time that Thoreau spent at his Walden.

Anna, the simple life is not so simple. I think in these two years I spent more time chopping wood, shoveling snow, pumping and hauling water, weeding gardens, swatting flies, driving into town for supplies, sewing ski hats, driving them into Toronto and more worrying about money than I have ever done in my life. In spite of our incessant work all we did was barely maintain, there was hardly anytime left for our actual purpose, studying at the university. So much for the simple life. When I hear of utopian ideas that involve back to nature, simple living and high thinking, I laugh. It is an illusion. I have done it and there is nothing simple about it. It takes a lot of effort and even money to live simply. I recall one of Gandhi’s financial backers commenting that it cost a fortune to keep Gandhi living in a loin cloth. I agree and this is what I learned at my Walden.

* Henry David Thoreau

Little Events

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In the course of a person’s life there are watershed events that change the course of a life. I have written about some of those events, my involvement with Krishna Consciousness, my decision to study Sanskrit, my marriage to Kama Nagari, and my immigration to the United States. Any one of these events are beyond the norm of what most people do, but in focusing on the major events of life we often overlook the minor ones, those tiny events that at the time seem unimportant but upon later reflection take on great significance. Here is one of those minor events.

I remember this day only too well. I was 13 and in grade 7 at Clairlea Public School. It was January and this was in the days when Toronto winters were still cold, really cold. The afternoon break had just ended and I was returning to class walking up a small icy hill. I had my hands in my pockets because of the cold. Suddenly I slipped and fell flat on my face. I knocked my two front teeth out of my head. Actually, at the time it looked like just a small chip on the end of one tooth had broken, but later dental x-rays revealed major fractures on both teeth below the gum line. My front teeth had to be removed. Anna, I cannot tell you the expense this caused my parents and what expenses it has caused me in later years, but the damage was much worse than mere financial stress. Age thirteen was the beginning of my teenage years, perhaps the most important developmental time for a child, and I had to spend much of that time without front teeth suffering from the “vampire look.” This led to major self esteem issues that has taken me years to recover from. I have told you that I am socially awkward and that even smiling is difficult for me. Can you now understand why? During my formative years I had no teeth and the last thing I wanted to do was smile! To make matters even worse my 7th grade teacher used to chide me and call me “smiley” because I never smiled. She did this out of affection, however, at the time it was anything but affectionate to me. Of all my teachers in school she is the only one whose name I still vividly remember. Her “affections” are indelibly etched into my psyche. And to make matters worse I had these big beautiful red lips that my friends used to say were girl’s lips and so for the boy who was socially awkward to begin these little things brought me over the edge and created damage within my personality.

 

Did such events create the introverted withdrawn young boy? Did they drive me towards the priesthood? It is commonly known that priests and shamans are social misfits. There is something about the priesthood in almost every culture that allows or even expects its priests to be socially odd. I think it is an exaggeration to think that this was the cause of my religious nature, but I think an argument could be made that these issues were contributory.

Today it is fair to say that I have used my awkwardness to my advantage and I no longer concern myself with my red female lips or any other deformities. In fact I make a good income being a priest and I spend a major portion of my life standing up in front of people teaching, public speaking or performing religious ceremonies. I am even a moderately famous person and I think there is still a lot more celebrity to come whether I like it or not, but still, I do not frequent social events except when I am required to do so and I am content to be alone when I can, In fact, solitude is a great luxury for me. I do, however, feel that my social timidity is not a positive thing and it is an issue that I am still trying to overcome.

Anna, I write about this issue partly to bring to the attention of my readers how they must be careful when dealing with children. I am sure my Mrs. Potter was not intentionally being cruel to me, but like it or not, her attention to my problem was an act of cruelty. The chiding of friends can never be avoided, but adults must understand that what, to them, may just be a minor issue or no issue at all, to a child can be a life shaping event.

Following the Sun

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I’ve been driving my car, its shiny and new
Not knowing where I’m going, only to seek the limits of my heart.
I lay in bed, smiling and shining, I’ve found a new land.
There is honey and melons, nuts and beer,
There’s a party going on here, and the sun is just arising.

How are you? I’d like to know you.
Can we arrange a meeting? I know a place not far
I saw it in my car.
Oh, such a beauty!
I have searched my whole life.
Can I take you home and feed you nuts and beer?
The sun is high noon. Come touch my life.

I have studied and studied, read and read.
There was 26. I have 46 more, and now even I have 33.
Puskin was a fool, and beauty was his game
But the world came to his door and thanked him.
Who am I? Just a tiny fool?
Pushkin had his, I have mine.
The sun mounts its chariot and is heading home.

I’ve fallen into darkness and lost my way.
Help! Someone throw me a rope.
I want to see the sun again.
“Yes, but the sun has set for the day.
You’re driving at midnight now, waiting for the sun.
Why don’t you pull over and rest my son?
There’s always another day, the sun will shine again.”

Oh, Mother

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There is a place I know as Notre Dame,
Sweet blessings comfort me there.
And in my mind I still seek her calm,
Many changes touched me there.

Blue red windows all around,
Yellow sunlight filtering through.
Tall ceilings calling me home
Removing darkness from my soul.

Oh mother, can you see me crying?
Hold me helpless in your arms.
In my heart I fear I am dying,
Oh mother, sing to me somehow.

On the Wings of Love

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You say you want to progress?
Then there comes a time
When you must transgress
The rules of man and self.

You fear to awaken one day?
To find that you have never loved
That you’ve never seen the way
Of roses, perfumes and joy?

So you choose the path of love
Spreading arms out wide
Reaching up, high above
The drudgery, the way of man.

But why, still in a box all this time?
Like the tiny chick, peck peck,
Still you’ve not found the sublime?
Are you sure you really want to fly
To roses, perfumes and joy?

Image taken from: http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/home/how-to-care-for-roses.htm

Caterpillars to Butterflies

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Come take my hand, let’s take a walk,
You’re thinking of making a change.
I think I see a light, so I hope we can talk.
You know, you and I, we’ve done this before,
We’re talking of caterpillars to butterflies.

We’re born dark, we live in the earth,
Our world is small, yet we think its wide
We look up high, and dream of a birth,
Yet we fail to see, so we stay in the ground.
We’re still talking of caterpillars to butterflies.

We tie ourselves up, as tight as we can.
This is the way, I no longer have to think,
You please take care of me, I’ll just stand.
So you wait and wait and sweat and sweat.
We’re not talking of caterpillars to butterflies.

You’re cracking apart, not liking what he did,
But you let him do it, you gave him control.
He promised to be good, he’ll give you a kid.
Take roses and wine, let’s go in the ground.
We’re now talking of caterpillars staying caterpillars.

Now Sita was a curl and Ram had a crow.
And when they lived in the forest,
Ram kept caterpillars, but he’d never let them grow.
They stayed dark and lived in the box,
Until one day, Sita threw Ram from the nest.

Image taken from: http://www.iamashcash.com/2011/03/just-give-up-daily-word-march-16-2011/caterpillar-to-butterfly-2/ 

Tripping on Stones

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The sun shines bright,
But still there is night.
Light shows the way
But night grows the soul.
Come take my hand
I want you to stay
We’re only tripping on stones.

I had a good day,
a dream come true.
I wanted to share,
but you were not there.
I waited and wondered,
but you were away.

I have a great love,
but it rides on a shark.
It took a great bite
And now there is blood.
We talked and talked
And now I feel down.

You and I are taking a walk
The path is wide; the path is straight.
But then a turn comes
And the way seems dark.
We’re tripping on stones,
Lost in the night.

The sun shines bright,
But still there is night.
Light shows the way
But night grows the soul.
Come take my hand
I want you to stay
We’re only tripping on stones.