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Increasingly I hear people calling themselves spiritual, and not religious. There is a famous radio talk-show host in this part of world who is notorious for having explicit sexual and other outrageous and profane content on his show. His personality is magnetic and so he has a large and upbeat audience. When recently interviewed by an equally famous television host and asked if he believed in God, I was surprised to hear that he did indeed believe in God. His view of God was as some kind of ultimate power and not as an supreme person, but judging by the content of his show, I did not expect any kind of affirmative answer. He did, however, qualify himself by stating that he was not religious. Instead he defined himself as “deeply spiritual.” The issue of religiosity and spirituality is one that has also drawn my attention in recent years and so this interview sparked my thinking. A lot can be said on this topic and I am not going to suggest that my thoughts embrace the whole matter in anyway, but I do want to offer the following perspective. The assertion made by our talk-show host that he was spiritual and not religions is actually a common view. There are many who speak of spirituality as something that is opposed to religion. They see spirituality as outside of religion and so reject, outright, traditional religions, which they see as obstacles to spiritual growth. There is, however, another kind of spirituality. This is spirituality within religion, which involves a believer with a faith that is more personal, pluralistic and open to new ideas than the doctrinal faiths of many traditional religions. As far as my comments are concerned in this article they are addressed primarily to spirituality within religion, but I think, in the end, they also have something to say to those who want to see spirituality as something outside of religion. When I consider the matter of religion and spirituality I am reminded of the work of the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), who spoke of myth and symbols as operating on two levels, one, the local (volkergedanken) , and the other, the universal (elementargedanken). There is hardly a civilization on this planet that has not had its sacred stories to explain its origins and its place within the universe. These are the myths of a culture, which Joseph Campbell saw as the collective dream of a civilization. As an individual has dreams to express his inner hopes and struggles, so a civilization has its collective dreams in the form of its stories and myths. These myths contain reoccurring motives, or to use the terminology of Jung, archetypes that are common to all civilizations. These reoccurring themes address Bastian’s universal symbols and stories that are repeated in local traditions the world over. In his work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell outlines many of these reoccurring themes. One of the most important is the Great Goddess, the Mother of the universe. Pre-christian Europe had its Goddess in the form of Gaya. Hinduism has Durgadevi along with all Her forms. Similarly, the Greeks, the Romans and the Norse peoples had their Mother Deity, and even today, Christianity has this powerful image in the form of the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. This reoccurring image of Mother is Bastian’s universal that manifests locally in the form of a particular ethnic goddess. Another theme that appears over and over is that of the hero, who goes on a journey, faces trials and tribulations and then finally returns home renewed and self realized. In Hinduism the most famous hero is Rama, whose story is told in the epic tale, Ramayana. Rama, as the incarnation of Vishnu, who marries the beautiful princess, Sita, is exiled to the forest, who ultimately battles the ten headed demon, Ravana, and then returns home to Ayodhya, is the local image of the hero. But Rama as the universal hero, who goes on a quest and is tested by great dangers and ultimately overcomes these challenges and finally returns to his kingdom triumphant is the universal hero. In this way, we can read the Ramayana as a local story, or we can read the Ramayana as a universal event telling the story of the archetypal hero. Similarly, Indian’s other great Epic, the Mahabharata, is filled with an unending supply of heros and other archetypal forms that also can be read on either the local or the universal level. The life of Jesus as told in the Bible can also be read in this way. I have a teacher, Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda (1838-1914), who also taught about these two modes, yet writing during the 19th century he spoke in different terms. He described two kinds of seekers, the bharavahi and the saragrahi. The bharavahi wants to focus on religion and so regards religion in more absolute terms, the right way to pray, the right way to dress, the right way to think, the right way to eat, the right way to perform rituals, the right things to believe, and so forth. This is the person who primarily sees the local. The saragrahi, on the other hand, is the seeker who is less interested in the local and more interested in the universal. In fact the world “sara” can be translated as “universal” and so the saragrahi is one “who grasps the universal.” This is the person who sees that the Durgadevi of Hinduism is the Virgin Mary of Christianity, that the Rama of the Ramayana is the hero with a thousand faces. The saragrahi may be likened to the spiritual person.The ability to read a myth or a sacred text in either a local or a universal way is key to understanding the relationship between religion and spirituality. Religion tends to focus on the local, while spirituality wants to focus on the universal and archetypal. In recent years, my path has turned towards the spiritual. I grew up thinking of God as the Father, who had a beard and sat on a large throne in the sky. This was a local and ethnic Christian perspective appropriate for a child, and then, coming to Krishna Consciousness, I learned that God actually had a blue color, that He wore yellow clothes, had four arms and was called Vishnu. Again, this was the local perspective of Hindu Vaishnavism. But now, having studied religion academically and seen the diversity of religious thinking, having travelled and seen the variety of religious practice in the world, having spent years as a priest and seen the huge ethnic diversity even within a single congregation, and having taught hundreds of students, Hindu and non Hindu alike, I necessarily come to think of God in abstract terms, as the Complete, as the Unthinkable, as the Infallible, as Beauty and Truth. There is even a side of me that says to call God Vishnu, Shiva, Durga, Ganesha or even Jesus is to diminish and trivialize what is profound and mystical. And yet there is that side who still wants to call out for the local God. I want to tip my hat to a person and not to an abstraction. So I find that I think in both modes now, the local and the universal, but with one important difference. As a child and young man I placed a lot of weight on the local. In fact, there were times when I took the local as absolute and even shunned the universal and archetypal as blasphemous! But now I accept the need for both, and yet I also know the limitations of both. A human being is a person, which is to say a human being is local, and so we respond to the local, the God in the sky, the God that is blue. And yet within us, we also hold the universal and the archetypal. We therefore need both. In my world as a priest I have learned that religion and spirituality are related in many important ways. Religion is the outside; spirituality is the inside. Religion is the part and spirituality is the whole. Religion gives discipline; spirituality gives vision. In all cases, both aspects are needed and, indeed, complement each other. And yet a balance must be maintained between the two. One side cannot dominate the other. If we think of life as an ocean to be crossed, religion is the boat and spirituality is the compass. Both are necessary, but if one begins to think that the boat itself is the goal and so refuses to leave the boat, then no progress can be made. And yet if one rejects the local as parochial and restricting, it is like trying to cross an ocean with only a compass. It cannot be done. Our talk-show host whom I mentioned at the beginning is good for admitting a spiritual view of life and yet, I fear, he is limiting himself by rejecting the local, for one needs both a boat and a compass. The true saragrahi is a person who may, for a time, turn away from the local in order to grasp the universal, but eventually sees the need for the local and so turns back to embrace both aspects. Ultimately, this is a discussion not only about religion and spirituality, but also about about life itself and our need to integrate and balance the part and the whole. It is within the religious world that I have learned these truths, but in fact they apply to other areas as well. The radio talk-show host is Howard Stern and the television host is Larry King. |
“To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”*
Working with people is messy business. Sit in an airport and watch the endless streams of people move through the systems. It is amazing how much life goes through an airport: Old people in wheel chairs, babies in strollers, big people, small people, people traveling alone, people traveling in groups, males, females, and everything in between, short people, tall people, an endless array of baggage, all with different shapes and colors, an ocean of electrical gadgets dangling off ears and around necks or held in hands. There is nothing standard or regular about life. It squirms and wiggles in every possible direction, and yet all of this has to be processed and packed into the mechanical workings of a modern jet. Amazing!
Running a community is like running an airport. I cannot begin to tell you the number of people problems I had to deal with as head of the Norham project. The need for financial stability was the greatest problem. Not only did I have to look after my own family, it seemed that I had to look after just about everyone else’s family as well. New couples wanting to come to Norham had to have a way to make money and take care of themselves. So Kanina and I did our best to provide jobs, but there were limits. I did not want to replace local farm ladies in favor of devotees. That Marvin and Tucker provided local employment was a public relations asset for our community. If we stopped looking after the local community we would lose whatever dwindling respect we had within the outside community. I knew that ultimately, without the support of the greater community, we could not survive.
It also seemed that devotees had more than their share of personal problems compared to non devotees. I intervened in endless marriage disputes. Families with financial problems almost always have marriage problems. Many times I was called out in the middle of the night to listen to husbands and wives fighting. There was so much physical, psychological and sexual abuse. A typical husband demand went something like this: A distraught husband calls me on the phone at 7 AM in the morning. “Prabhu, (a typical devotee form of address) you have to come and get my wife. We fought all night and my wife packed her bags and walking down the road with my kids. You gotta come and get her off the road and bring her home. She is crazy.” Or a wife shows up on my doorstep at midnight: “My husband has been drinking and he is threatening to beat me and the kids. Do something”! Or even better, two wives call me up fearing that their husbands, who are fighting with each other over a goat that went into the others garden, would seriously harm each other. I arrive at the scene just as the police pull up and so have to explain to the police why these two members should not be arrested and taken away.
Then there were the crazies. Somehow religion attracts the strangest, most eccentric and outright mad people. I learned so much about human nature and I saw so much of the under belly of humanity. One night I had to rush over to one member’s farm after his wife called me in a hysterical state: “He’s been smoking pot and drinking and now he is in the barn preparing to hang himself.” I arrive just as he is putting the rope around his neck and threatening to jump off the upper beam of the barn. I then spent the next 5 hours hearing the life story of this poor man and how his parents abused him. In the end he came down off the bean in tears as we hugged each other. I have talked more than my share of suicides down from the ledge! A devotee hanging himself in his barn was all we needed to help our public relations! Anna, have you ever have an old uncle with a big gray beard full of pieces of stale tobacco and old food? Have you ever put your fingers into this uncle’s beard? If so, you know what being a community leader is all about. I had to put my fingers into the thick dirty beard of so many devotee’s lives. People’s personal affairs are a tangled mess. There are demons and skeletons everywhere.
Having to intervene in all these personal affairs just about sucked the life out of me. My life looked pretty good compared to most, but in truth I had my own demon to wrestle with. A monster was about to descend on me.
*Samuel Beckett, Irish dramatist, novelist
Once our small community was on its feet, meaning that we had established a spiritual program, Bhaktipad began to ask all of his Canadian disciples to move to our community. Within a year we had 20 families. Some began to work for Marvin and Tucker and others worked for themselves. Some sold used cars and others sold anything they could get their hands on at swap meets. Twenty families may not sound like a lot, but it amounted to about 70 people, including children. That was a huge number of people to have gained within the first year. This, of course, brought the attention of the Toronto and Montreal temples. Years before, these temples had tried to establish their own rural communities. In fact, each had land just sitting vacant. Neither could get any devotees to move onto their properties and dedicate themselves to such a project; then suddenly, almost over night, here was our community sitting on their doorstep with 20 families, totally outside of their control.
The Norham community was about half way between Toronto and Montreal and so accessible to both of these major temples, and now that devotees wanted to come and live in Norham there was a concern that this could cause a manpower shortage in the city temples. The real problem was, however, we were a New Vrindavan satellite, or at least that was the perception of the city temples. This was their worst nightmare. They disliked Bhaktipad with a vengence, and not without some justification, and for years had tried to get rid of him, and now here he was reappearing at their doorstep. Unfortunately, there was little they could do because our community was all private development and I was a Prabhupad disciple with full spiritual rights to do this project. Besides, I had not even planned to develop this community. I had just been living quietly when all this started happening.
Prabhupada
Other than the fact that I agreed to become involved once the project presented itself, I really could not be justifiably blamed. Eventually I was called into Toronto and asked to explain my plans for the Norham community. Was I going to operate as a legitimate ISKCON community in Canada? In those days New Vrindavan was still an official ISKCON community and Bhaktipad himself was an official leader, and as far as I was concerned, I still had no major problems with ISKCON; so naturally I said yes. The fact of the matter was I am ultimately incapable of fully submitting to any authority, whether ISKCON or Bhaktipad, or even Prabhupada, and so it might have been better to just admit this from the start. It would at least have been truthful. However, at that time I was not mature enough to even admit it to myself let alone others. I am a fierce rebel. But with my agreement to cooperate the Toronto and Montreal temples agreed to support the Norham community as their official rural community. In reality they had little choice because the winds of development were blowing in the direction of Norham whether they liked it or not. Our community would soon grow to almost 75 families, over over 300 devotees! Devotees were arriving from both coasts and from all points in between. It was amazing! When the winds of fortune blow in your direction there is little that can be done to stop them.
But whether our community was an official ISKCON community or not, I still had to balance all the forces. The Bhaktipad disciples wanted nothing to do with the mainstream Canadian temples. Yet, the devotees in these city temples hungered for a rural location. The desire for Walden cuts deeply into the North American heart. So I became the link between these two communities. It was a horrible position to be in. I had success and hell all at once. Even an extremely talented and famous painter, Vishnu Das, came. I commissioned him do some paintings for our temple and for me personally. I still have these paintings in my home today. In fact, many talented people came. We established beautiful murties of Radha Vrindavan Nath. Ladies were coming and dressing them and making garlands on a daily basis. Even Indians from Toronto and Montreal started to come to visit our spiritual community on the weekends as a spiritual retreat. We had a Vyasasan, a spiritual throne, to Prabhupad and even one for Bhaktipad. As the spiritual leader of this community I even shaved my head. I regret that I have no pictures of this period. Eventually the top leader for Krishna Consciousness in India even came to talk to me. He wanted me to give up the New Vrindavan connection, in spite of the fact that New Vrindavan was a legitimate ISKCON community and more that half our members were disciples of Bhaktipada. The politics were extreme. The Canadian temples wanted to control us, but I refused to belong to anyone. Even the Bhaktipad disciples became angry with me. They wanted me to favor their position, but I would not. I stayed independant. The whole thing was slowly brewing up for a huge explosion. Oh God, what I went through! As I write this I feel both good memories and a horrible nightmare.
To make matters worse, the press came and news of our community appeared in the media: newspapers, radio and even on television. I could not control who they talked to and they made it their business to talk to everyone. I desperately wanted to keep our Norham concept out of the public view. “Hare Krishna Cult Establishing a stronghold in Eastern Ontario.” “Krishna Cult, Buying a Town” “Hare Krishna Take Over Norham.” This is how the headlines appeared. My parents, who lived at the cottage nearby, were mortified to read about their son, the cult leader! What a scene! On the one hand, I was liked because I was bringing jobs into the local community by hiring local people. And yet, I was being painted as a dangerous cult leader. Once the press became involved things started to heat up, especially when the public got hold of the idea that we were buying their town, Norham! The press had a field day. The obscure hamlet of Norham along with me were suddenly seen on television in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver and across the whole country. My poor parents!
In those early days, when our community of devotees was just starting and the Norham idea was beginning to develop, my life experiences were still limited; so I could not fully understand or appreciate the significance of what I was doing. Today I can write about this part of my life with clarity and ease, but at the time it was anything but clear. It would be years before I could see the implications of what I was doing. At the time the Norham solution was just a practical way of solving our zoning code problems. The concept of free market spiritualism compared to spiritual communism was not clear. In fact, I thought my ideas were spiritually wrong. I believed that spiritual communism was the ideal, and if our community at Norham could have purchased one farm and allowed its members to live in a spiritual collective, I would most surely would have gone in that direction. It would take me years to see the failings of this approach. Only after living under the spiritual communism of New Vrindavan, would I come to understand the long term implications and dangers of spiritual communism. In those days our ISKCON training taught us that everything belonged to Krishna and therefore it was maya to own personal property. Individuals should own as little as possible. Life should be kept simple. This, of course, meant that the temple or the community or even the guru would own all things on behalf of God. This is what I mean by spiritual communism. What I was eventually to learn, however, is that when we say that Krishna, or the community owns everything, the practical effect is that nobody owns anything and therefore nobody takes personal responsibility for anything, and in the case of land and vehicles they quickly become misused and abused. Life is cheap under spiritual communisum. It sounds good on paper, but in real life it fails miserably. My experiments in community building that had just started in Norham were lessons in political and economic philosophy. On a tiny scale I was learning the principles of nation building, and today, I find that my political philosophy has been radically shaped by what I was doing in these early years in Norham and in New Vrindavan. I was also going to learn, in a very dramatic way, the relationship between religious power, political power and totalitarianism, but that is a story for the future.
So Kanina and I set about to purchase the Norham church. It was a dilapidated mess and we would need to pour a lot of money and effort into it to make it useful. Our plan was to use it as a factory for our businesses for a few years and then to donate it to the community as a temple. Gaudiya was to do the renovations. As I recall we purchased the church for $12,000, each of us putting $6,000 into the deal. Whoever the sellers were, they were delighted to wash their hands of such a mess, and we were equally delighted to own such a mess! Step one was complete; we owned the village church which meant we controlled the high ground. The next step was to make the church functional for our businesses and create an economic base for our community. Marvin and Tucker would take the upper floor for sewing operations and Kanina would take the lower floor for his pottery business. If devotees were going to rent and buy homes in Norham we needed to provide jobs. As our businesses prospered our employment potential would expand and more devotees could come. Our community needed an economic base and these two businesses were to be the foundation. At the time the community’s temple was not in Norham proper, but in a small farm house a few kilometers away from Norham. A temple produces a lot of noise from musical instruments, singing and chanting, so until we had the church to use for worship we decided to keep our temple in the farmhouse away from the public. I did not want to draw unneeded attention to what we were doing. I hoped to stay away from public view as long as I could. So far as the world needed to know the old Norham church had been purchased for business. Nothing religious was taking place.
Marvin and Tucker soon moved out of my basement and came to the Norham church. Kanina also moved his pottery kilns to the church. I had Gaudiya build an elevator to move our supplies and finished products between floors. I moved a few of my workers to the factory, but I still kept most of them working in their homes. I used the ones in the factory for special purpose sewing. I could control and manage their work more efficiently there. In total Kama Nagari and I had 37 people working for us. Gaudiya became our “run around man” and I trained him to time the sewing machines, drive into Toronto with finished goods and pick up supplies and a host of other things. His wife, Lilashuka, became our book keeper handling the accounts receivable and payable. Kama Nagari managed the office while I managed the production. Kanina also hired some people to work for him, but in general his business was primarily him working alone, while our business was labor intensive. There was nothing artistic about making slippers, It was strictly production-line work. Each morning all the members of the community, including the new families would meet at the temple for morning prayers; we would eat breakfast together as a group and then go to work. At noon we would meet again at the temple for a community lunch and then go back to work for the afternoon. In this way life went on.
Soon another devotee arrived, a Scottish Prabhupada disciple named Gaur Nitai along with his wife and family. He brought a team of Brown Swiss plowing bulls! Within days he bought a house with 20 acres just across the ravine from where I lived and became our immediate neighbor. Kama Nagari and I were delighted to have devotees living close by. We had lived alone for years, isolated from devotees, and now devotees were arriving almost on a weekly basis. In one month alone four new families arrived, all disciples of Kirtanananda. One from Vancouver, Mahesh who bought and sold used cars for a living; another from Peteborough, Gaur Gopal, who bought and sold anything he could get his hands on, and a third, an astrologer named Chaitanya. It was from this astrologer that I had my first experiences with HIndu astrology. Then there was another devotee, a Prabhupada disciple from Vancouver, who had been living in the middle east and was looking for a place in Canada to settle. He stopped to visit for a few weeks, but I remember after just a few days he came banging on me door in the middle of the night begging me to drive him to the airport at 2 AM! I learned that he was hiding from a German girl who was desperately trying to marry him. He had received word that she was coming in the morning and so he needed to escape immediately. He had been in Germany when he first met her, then when he went to China she followed him, then to somewhere in Africa she followed him, then to Lebanon and now here in here in Canada where I lived she was still following him! She was chasing him around the world! I do not know why I did it, but I drove him to the Toronto airport at that ungodly hour. It was a 5 hour round trip for me. I do not know how she did it, but in the end she married him and they returned to live at our community. This was just the beginning of the headaches I would receive from all of these devotees. I was quickly going to learn that the lives of most devotees was one tangled mess after another, and as leader of this growing community, it was going to be my job to solve all of their problems: marriage problems, financial problems, health, legal and psychological problems. There was no end to the headaches coming my way! At the time, however, I was delighted to have these devotees arrive. Eventually all four of these families rented homes in Norham, a village nearby. This gave me an idea, a revolutionary idea!
Norham was a picturesque hamlet in the heart of eastern Ontario. At the center was a church and general store. Along the southern limit of the village there was a stream and sawmill. Surrounding the church a store were 65 homes, half of which were unoccupied. The church had not been used for worship in a generation and the general store was just barely surviving. A part from the few residents and their relatives, no one ever came to Norham. It was one of many farm villages that had been destroyed with the advent of the automobile. Once the car had taken hold thousands of hamlets like Norham, which had served as a shopping center in the horse and buggy days, had faded into obscurity. With a car people could travel to larger centers for shopping and entertainment and so Norham had become reduced to a mere relic from an earlier age. But it was perfect for what I had in mind. Throughout North America in the 1960s and 1970s the “back to the land” movement had become popular. This was part of the hippie movement and disenfranchised youth were leaving the cities in large numbers and searching for their version of Walden. Communes sprung up outside of every city in North America including a few Hare Krishna farm communities. New Vrindavan was one of these communes.
The great problem with most of these collective living experiments, including the Hare Krishna communities, were local zoning codes. The commune was based on the idea that a group of families with a common ideology could get together, pool their resources, and buy a farm that could then be used by the members to practice their particular ideology. The commune was one large family and in order to make it work members need to live in close proximity to each other. The problem was that in most localities zoning codes prohibited more than one family living on a single parcel of land. This meant that a farm of 100 acres, which was common in most parts of the country, could only house one family. A hundred acres was actually enough space for hundreds of families, but zoning codes restricted it to one. A proposed commune could, in theory, petition local government to allow more families to live on this one parcel or even to subdivide this parcel into many parcels, but this was next to impossible because most rural communities were highly conservative and wanted to preserve their farms. They were especially suspicious of hippie like groups and even religious groups trying to do this. Religious cults were especially shunned! At the time our community had seven married couples and one brahmachari. In total there were 27 people including children, but I knew that in the future a lot more people would come if the conditions where right. So one night the idea came to me: Buy a town! A town by its very nature was already sub divided with homes in close proximity and most towns already had the correct zoning for religious, commercial and residential zoning. So Norham was perfect. There was a church and a general store and houses all around. This would solve all of our zoning requirements, and best of all, real estate prices were already depressed because the town was only half occupied. So Norham was ripe for the taking. I also liked the idea of individual development instead of communal development. In most religious models the collective would purchase the land and then provide the land back to its members, but I felt in the long run it was better to let the members themself rent or purchase their own properties. The commune model was socialism on a small scale whereas what I was proposing was a free market religious community. It was a spectacular idea!
In those first months it was just Kanina, Gaudiya, myself along with our families. The three of us formed the core group. Kama Nagari, Lilashuka and myself were Prabhupada disciples, all the others, including Kanina, were Bhaktipada disciples. We had seniority. I had known Lilashuka for years in the Toronto temple, so we had a special repore. She had known me as Bhakta Brian and used to see me coming to the temple every Sunday. She worked at the university and sometimes we would walk together to the university. She was going to work and I was going for classes. So we had some history and a friendly relationship. Kanina was also a long time devotee, but he had never taken initiation during the Prabhupada years. His original family, when I met him was from the same area where we were going to build our community. As I recall he had a most beautiful wife and a young son and daughter. His wife was a quiet girl, but she had no interest in Krishna Consciousness. She feared it. Consequently, most of the devotees in the temple encouraged him to leave her because she would not become a devotee. This was a terrible thing to see and eventually he did leave her and his family. I was extremely upset to hear of this and I have never forgotten or forgiven the devotees for encouraging such a thing. Karina’s second wife was a devotee, but a very unstable person who would run off and get into all sorts of trouble usually with drugs. Kanina was much better off with his first wife. This second wife put Kanina through hell. So even though Kanina was a Bhaktipad disciple he had an early history like me and we had known each other in the Toronto temple for years. Gaudiya, Lilashuka’s husband, was a passionate and hot blooded young devottee. A very stern and rigid guy, but also a dedicated hard worker. He was the kind of person who needed a master, and once dedicated, he would do anything for that person. He was also a potentially dangerous person because he could turn on you with the same veracity as he would work for you. He became my arms and legs.
For the first few months it was just the three of us, so we gradually setup our spiritual program and developed some routines. We would share the cooking and eat a communal noontime meal. My house was the temple and the place for cooking and eating. Even I used to cook for everyone! Together the three of us made trips to New Vrindavan for Bhaktipada’s advice and we even arranged for deities, Radha Vrindavan Natharaj, dancing Radha Krishna. They were very sweet murtis. On one occassion Bhaktipada even visited and blessed our community. To me Bhaktipada was a Godbrother, an equal, but to the others he was a god, but I adopted their mood and got into their excitement. I even personally washed his feet! I groan when I think of this now. It was the only time I ever washed anyone’s feet and it will be the only time I wash anyone’s feet, but at the time it was an important event and I enjoyed it. His visit was also one that enraged the rest of the
Canadian devotee community. He was a hated and feared guru crossing enemy lines at my invitation, so I also became despised. Our community was operating from the perspective of inspiration and faith and they were working from the perspective corporate protocols and political boundaries. A war was about to begin.
After Bhaktipada’s visit our first brahmachari arrived. What is a brahmachari?
Literally the word means “one who walks in the ways of God; it means an unmarried young man, a dedicated worker, a money maker! Do you remember that I told you about “The Pick”? Originally, devotees would go into the streets and chant the names of Krishna, later, that also included selling religious books, but afterPrabhupada’s passing it quickly degenerated into selling “whatever,” flowers, bumper stickers, records, anything for money. This brahmachari was sent to by Bhaktipada to be our first collector. My God, I had criticized the pick and now here I was taking full advantage of it. We needed a separate building for a temple. We simply could not continue to use my house and so we rented a farm house as our first temple and now we needed money to pay the rent. It became the job of Jnanidas, our brahmachari, to collect these funds. And collect he did! We now had a very positive cash flow. Yes, I now understood why every ISKCON temple president promoted the pick. But picking met that we were now competing with the other Canadian temples for a limited events market. By events I mean rock concerts, football games, race car competitions and so on. Our brahmachari would often be seen at these same events as the Toronto and Montreal devottees. They viewed us as a New Vrindavan satellite crossing turf boundaries, and unfortunately New Vrindavan had a reputation for being extremely aggressive. They would move into a town, break the law, clean the place out, and then let the local temple take the “rap.” Our pick was not like that, but still I do not blame these Canadian temples for becoming alarmed.
Image Source: http://outsideinlife.com
Top Image Source: http://www.netwalk.com
Other Image Sources: http://mothshutup.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/attack-of-hare-krishna-goons/
I’m taking a journey, searching your room.
There I find high heels arranged in a row.
The pink are for romance,
The blue are to tease.
Green is for envy,
And red is for me.
Then there are perfumes:
Some strong and some sweet.
Who gets the sweet, and who gets the strong?
Today you wear sweet,
Tonight you wear strong.
Now I see dresses, all silky and soft,
They kiss at my face and call in my ear.
The blue one entices; the red one excites,
Red is my pick!
Down it comes tumbling, touching the floor,
A long stretch there, some small circles here.
This is my home; now close the door.
Image taken from: http://www.portwallpaper.com/image/26061-cat-head.html
“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”*
Years ago I used to be concerned about the dating of the Vedas and other related literatures, such as the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and in particular, the Bhagavat Purana, which describes the life of Krishna. The dating of these literatures was a spiritual life or death issue for me. The historical existence of Rama and Krishna or even Veda Vyasa was crucial to my faith. My concerns were perhaps similar to how a Christian may need to know the historical reality of Jesus. At university I learned one thing and at the temple I learn something quite different. My faith in Krishna Consciousness hung in the balance over this issue. I even went so far as to write a letter to my guru stating my concerns and outlining the arguments of modern historians and asking him to help me to resolve the issue. In his reply he simply asked me to have faith in tradition and not to accept the arguments of modern historians. As you can imagine the matter remained unresolved and I struggled with the burden of faith for many years. A decade later, when I began my Ph.D. I re-addressed the issue I eventually resolved the matter by understanding of the nature of belief and faith and learning how to separate the two. Now, whether the Bhagavata Purana is 5000 years old or 1000 years old has no bearing on my faith. My point is, one way or another, through study, contemplation and perseverance the issued was resolved and I was able to make spiritual progress.
Similarly, I used to be preoccupied with the existence of God. I spent much time going through the arguments that tried to prove the existence of God, but I soon learned that an attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God was not likely to be fruitful. I took a different approach and looked to the real world that I saw around me. I tried to see God in the beauty of the world. The Upanishadic teaching: “The flash of the lightning that causes one to blink and say, “Ah!” – that ‘Ah’ is Divinity,” was the key to my new vision of reality. The existence of ‘sky gods’ became less and less relevant. The sunset and the other beauties of the world became manifestations of the beauty of God. Whether Vishnu wore a yellow dhoti and resided in Vaikuntha or whether Krishna, or even Jesus for that matter, existed as historical personalities was of no spiritual concern. Divinity was bursting out all around me and I was satisfied. Again, through study, contemplation and perseverance, I was able to advance.
I come now to the matter of self realization. It used to be that when I looked into a mirror the self I saw was just the little self. I was told that deep within, there was a capital S self, the soul, and it was this Self that had to be focused upon. The guy looking in the mirror was temporary and unimportant. Any attachment to him was like the attraction of the sunset, an illusion. But like my search for sky gods, in all my years I have never found a Self. So in time I changed my approach and started to reexamine the real world around me. Eventually I came to the understanding that when I looked into the mirror, the life and warmth and even self-consciousness that I saw in the guy looking into the mirror was most satisfying. The guy peering into the mirror is all the self I needed. I felt integrated between what was here in this world and what may be on the inside. The God on the outside was an indication of the God on the inside. The self on the outside was an indication of the Self on the inside. And after so many years of life, with all its happiness and struggles, I can honestly say that I have a good understanding of the potentials and limitations of this guy looking into the mirror. I am self realized! More progress has been made.
People suffer from the incorrect understanding that spiritual life is something remote and mysterious. Mysterious it may be, but remote it is not. People hide spirituality in capital letters and make it unobtainable. They talk of Absolutes and capitalize God, Soul, Self, Guru, Truth and even Church, Temple or Mandir. They place their popes and gurus on great high seats. They say that we live in some dark age, a Kali yuga, and they wait for some illusive golden age or second coming. They say mankind is full of sin and therefore unqualified to have divine realization. We can only read about self realization in the ancient books. Only the sages of thousands of years ago could have it! In this way people put spiritual life on a pedestal and make it unobtainable. But I reject these notions. After 35 years of striving, I have nothing to show because I am chasing some illusive bigger than life Self or God? This is not for me. I choose to acknowledge what I have achieved. I will not dismiss what I know of life and of myself. I joyfully look forward to another 35 years of continued evolution and striving, knowing that I have only scratched the surface; and I thank the heavens that there is no end, no final beatitude and no Absolute that I need to find.
*Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French essayist.
*Image Source: http://youarespecialgirl.blogspot.com/
I remember sitting in the living room of my parents home when I was 19. They had just discovered my involvement with Krishna Consciousness and they were naturally concerned and wanted to know what I was doing. I told them that I was pursuing the two must important things in life, namely, self realization and love of God. I proceeded to load them up with all the books on Krishna Consciousness that I could carry and I gave them a lecture about Krishna being the Supreme Personality of Godhead. I can hardly imagine what I sounded like. I was a “God intoxicated” young ISKCON devotee and I wanted to set them straight. As I write this I both cringe and laugh to myself wondering how I actually said these things. Self realization and love of God? Such lofty topics for a youth of just nineteen; my mother always said that I was too serious too young in life. She was right.
But let me examine what I told my parents. Almost 35 years have lapsed. Am I self realized and have I achieved love of God?
I have heard this term ‘self realization’ bantered about for years. Every guru I have ever met talked about it and certainly all of my God brothers and sisters employed the expression seemingly in every conversation I heard for decades. In the past self realization was to know the big ‘S’ self, the spiritual essence, the soul within. It also implied the realization ‘I am not this body’ ‘I am spirit.’ I also learned that ‘the me’ I saw in the mirror every morning was an illusion. This was the little ‘s’ self and it had to be discarded in favor for the big ‘S’ self. The motto was to live simply, think high, and if I did this and chanted Hare Krishna I would become self realized. I would know the Self and I would know that I am not this body. Well, I have been to my Walden and even to other people’s Waldens many times and, lord knows, I have chanted Hare Krishna faithfully for years, but the only thing that ever happened was that I spent a lot of time splitting wood and carrying water. I never woke up any morning thinking, “Ah, I know the Self!” No burst of cosmic light ever graced my bedside. But then I thought, “self realization is not so cheap. I need to chant Hare Krishna more, split more wood and stay away from tea.” In other words, I needed to work harder at it and be more strict with myself in spiritual practice. But no light ever came in 35 years. Perhaps the process was supposed to be a gradual “unfolding” of spiritual realization. So you would think that after all these years I would at least have one half or even one quarter knowledge of the Self. But not even a speck of a capital S ‘self’ has ever appeared. So it seems that only the sages of old, the ones that we read about in the books, ever know the Self. After all, this is Kali Yuga, the time of darkness; there can be no light in these days and, for sure, chanting could never work for me because I was a sinner.
I have a friend who has chanted Hare Krishna much more than I ever did. In fact, chanting is almost all he does, and I do not know anyone more simple in lifestyle. I have long since abandoned the simple life, but he still follows it with a passion. I consider him saintly! This friend recently called me; he was depressed over the course of his spiritual progress and he too told me that he has yet to see the Self, nor has he been graced by comic light, nor has he gained any realization of the Self. This was depressing. I don’t know anyone more saintly than my friend and if he had failed to know the Self, what hope was there for me?
Then one day, as I sat in bed, I thought. “I am fifty and I am not self realized? I have learned nothing about myself in all these years? My life is a waste?” Surely after 35 years of striving some result should be there. So what exactly is self realization and what are the markers of spiritual progress? Perhaps it is necessary to re-evaluate the premises by which I judge spiritual realization.
Monday, December 25, 2006 8:01:14 PM
Today all of the available family arrived for Christmas at our newly completed home in Rim Rock. To see the family sitting together for Christmas meal was a source of great satisfaction to both Sukulina and myself. We have worked extremely hard preparing this property and putting our home together. Everything is done and we were able to sit outside in the new patio for noon time meal. All were impressed and happy. It was the best Christmas yet.