namahatta.org - Congregational Development Ministry

by Kripamoya das

Wouldn't it be nice if all the religions could get along? Peacemakers like to suggest an impersonal way to do it. Sometimes they even try to use the Gita to support their ideas

"Well, we can understand that all you spiritual and religious people still need something to believe in. But please listen to us—there is a difference between the God of Religion and the Ultimate Reality. The first is the figure you believe in, pray to, and have a kind of emotional faith in. The second is a slightly more abstract notion of a state of universal, cosmic light from where all the incarnations and saints, angels and prophets come from and into which they merge after their time with us is finished."

As I write, California burns. Multiple wildfires continue to afflict the land.

California! For so long the migratory terminus of American dreams, her own Hollywood gave those dreams back to the world crafted in dazzling pageants of lights and shadows that seemed more real than reality itself. Yet California herself now suffers under multiply woes, most of them, like the Los Angeles fires, self-inflicted.

by Ravindra Svarupa das

Spanning the cusp between the 15th and 16th centuries, Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu taught and exemplified complete absorption in divine love through the chanting of the names of God. Mahaprabhu propagated a spiritual discipline that carries the guided practitioner through clearly demarcated stages, beginning with a tentative interest (adau sraddha) and culminating in an extraordinary exultation of ecstatic spiritual emotions (prema). Mahaprabhu succinctly conveyed this whole adventure in a sequence of eight instructive verses (Siksastaka).

The first of these verses is, in essence, a promise by the author: when the chanting of the name of Krishna is fully accomplished, all anomalies and impediments being weeded out (vijayate sri-krsna-samkirtanam), the chanter will have experienced seven benedictions or blessings. The aspirant should therefore have faith (sraddha) in this promise—a guarantee, really...

In Sanskrit the word haṁsa is the name for both a bird and an advanced yogī. The bird has such estimable qualities that its very name became applied to the spiritual practitioner.

In English, Prabhupāda followed a well-established convention and rendered haṁsa as “swan.” The advanced yogī or devotee is accordingly “swan-like.”

For example, Prabhupāda once remarked, in reference to his disciples: “So Kṛṣṇa consciousness means swan-like, they should be like swans. Their behavior should be like swans. They should live in clean place, at refreshing place.”

In this second usage, haṁsa has probably become most generally encountered when prefixed by the superlative parama, meaning “highest,” best,” and so on.  Strictly speaking, paramahaṁsa denotes the highest of the four ranks of sannyāsa (see ŚBh 5.1.27, purport), but it is used in more general sense to describe the best of the sages or devotees.

Here is an excerpt from a lecture by Śrīla Prabhupāda on Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam 2.1.1. It was delivered in New York, on April 10, 1969. (Some comments follow the excerpt.)

As soon as I am desiring something, immediately my body is formed. Immediately a particular type of body begins to form, and as soon as I am mature to change, my next body I get according to my desire. Therefore we should always desire Kṛṣṇa. Then from this life, the Kṛṣṇa-approaching body or the spiritual body will be formed. The more you become sincere servant of Kṛṣṇa, the more your body becomes Kṛṣṇaized, electrified. Therefore advanced Kṛṣṇa conscious person is considered to have a spiritual body. The same example, as I have given several times: just like iron rod. You put into the fire, it becomes warmer, warmer. The more it is connected with fire, it becomes warm, warm, warm. And at last it becomes red hot, so that at that time, if that iron is touched to any other thing, it burns. It does not act as iron; it acts as fire. Similarly, by this Kṛṣṇa consciousness, continuous chanting, you will make your body spiritualized. At that time, wherever you go, wherever you touch, he’ll be spiritualized. Similarly, the iron: Without being spiritualized, without being red hot, if you touch, it will not act.

SDGonline online diary by Satsvarupa dasa Goswami

What the punctuation in the title indicates:

Quotation marks: Draping the word God in quotation marks indicates that we are first concerned with the signifier, not the signified. (Compare these two sentences: I am interested in God. I am interested in “God.”)

Question mark: The mark of interrogation backstopping “God” points us next to questions concerning the concept or idea of God. What does it mean? Aren’t there many different meanings? Isn’t the meaning often vague or ambiguous?

by Ravindra Svarupa das

In Bhagavad-gita (5.22) Krishna says this about enjoyment of the senses:

ye hi samsparsha-ja bhoga   duhkha-yonaya eva te

"The pleasures that arise from contact between the senses and their objects are in truth the sources of all suffering."

The Sanskrit word bhoga (with the long 'a' of the plural) means 'pleasures' or 'enjoyments.' What kinds? The pleasures born (ja) from samsparsha, 'the bringing into contact'—implicitly, the contact of the senses with their appropriate objects.

This is what we mean by "sense gratification": enjoying the pleasures that arise when the eyes, or nose, or tongue, the hands, skin, or genitals comes together with their particular objects.

The following article was first published in Back to Godhead magazine in 1991.

Sometime in the 1730’s, a young Scottish philosopher tried, and failed, to find himself. David Hume reflected upon this experience in his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). The passage is much quoted and anthologized. I encountered it frequently as an undergraduate philosophy major, for my teachers regarded it as a watershed in Western philosophy. They revered David Hume—progenitor of the hard-nosed, no-nonsense style of empiricism they professed—and they amused their classes by reproducing in a Scottish burr a famous remark by the great philosopher’s mother: “Oor Davie’s a fine, good-natured crater, but uncommon wake-minded.”

The following is an excerpt from Ravindra Svarupa dasa’s 1995 Vyasa Puja homage to Shrila Prabhupada.