Why This Devotee of God Doesn’t Think To Be Atheist Is To Be A Demon
→ Life Comes From Life

There are two kinds of people in this world. Devotees and demons.

I think this is absolutely true.

But let’s parse this out a bit.

First of all, what is the source of my seemingly eccentric and dogmatic statement?

In the sixteenth chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna speaks of two kinds of natures that exist in this world and in our being: the divine and the demoniac. After listing a number of qualities that are of the divine nature, such as charity, aversion to faultfinding, purification of one’s existence, cultivation of spiritual knowledge, and freedom from envy and from the passion for honor, Krishna lists six qualities-pride, arrogance, conceit, anger, harshness and ignorance-which mark the demoniac nature. In the remainder of the chapter, Krishna unpacks further how the demoniac nature unfurls in our reality.

In the ninth verse of the chapter, Krishna says:

Following such conclusions, the demoniac, who are lost to themselves and who have no intelligence, engage in unbeneﬁcial, horrible works meant to destroy the world.

In his commentary on this verse, renowned Vedic scholar/teacher A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada writes:

The demoniac are engaged in activities that will lead the world to destruction. The Lord states here that they are less intelligent. The materialists, who have no concept of God, think that they are advancing. But according to Bhagavad-gītā, they are unintelligent and devoid of all sense. They try to enjoy this material world to the utmost limit and therefore always engage in inventing something for sense gratiﬁcation. Such materialistic inventions are considered to be advancement of human civilization, but the result is that people grow more and more violent and more and more cruel, cruel to animals and cruel to other human beings. They have no idea how to behave toward one another.

As a follower of the Gita, there is a straightforward-ness in Swami Prabhupada’s presentation which I find refreshing, important, and essential. It cuts to the rotted root of injustice, oppression, and hatred which exists in our world. It points to a deeper conception of why this injustice exists, in that without a conception of a divine reality, or a divine ethic, we all-too-fallible humans will all-too-often inevitably fall prey to the demoniac nature which surrounds us, and within us.

At the risk of appearing as a heretic (even more so than I appear to be already) to some more orthodox/literalist followers of the Gita, I want to critically examine what Krishna and Swami Prabhupada are saying in tandem in this chapter of the Gita. A surface interpretation of the dichotomy of the divine and demoniac here may provide a certain sense of clarity, but often what seems absolutely clear can lead to absolute expressions of theology and morality which can alienate and marginalize. This seeming clarity can also be at odds with people’s actual and visceral experience in the world, so I want to make a humble attempt to go a little bit deeper.

In thinking of my own experience doing Interfaith work in New York City, I have always made a sincere effort to be as open-minded and open-hearted as I can, with the appropriate respect and understanding of the natural boundaries that exist between different faith traditions. This mood has allowed me to develop wonderful relationships with Russian Orthodox priests, Reform Jewish rabbis, Wiccan priests, and just about everything else in-between. Being able to build, and walk across, bridges between faiths is one of the most important aspects of my spiritual journey. Real Interfaith work is a vehicle for creating the kind of deep and active compassion that is the most needed quality in this world at the present moment.

Yet as I went deeper into this work, I began to wonder what are the mechanics, as it were, of extending this joyful sense of communion towards those who identify as atheist/agnostic. More distinctly, I challenged myself to be as open-minded and open-hearted, with the same understanding of boundaries, with those I may encounter in my work and service who may not believe in God or a divine reality beyond the material reality we all inhabit together. This was a particular challenge for me, as I mentioned above, because to many within my tradition the terms atheist and demon go hand-in-hand. As usual, my innate sense of curiosity, or to put it more plainly, my independent streak, my desire to understand the truth beyond what may be “obvious” or “comfortable”, compelled me to question the basic assumption at hand: Does being atheistic mean one is inherently demoniac as described by Krishna in the Gita?

My opportunities to interact with serious and intelligent atheist thinkers were few and far between, so I was grateful to be invited to the 2012 World Faith Gala at the NYU Center for Spiritual Life this past December, with Chris Stedman as the featured speaker for the evening. Stedman is a unique figure in the world of Interfaith, as many of you already know. He is one of the founders of our esteemed community of thinkers here at State of Formation along with the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue. He is the Assistant Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University and a prolific writer, including blogging gigs at the Huffington Post and the On Faith blog at the Washington Post. Last year, Stedman published his first book Faitheist: How An Atheist Found Common Ground With The Religious, detailing his journey from being a “born-again” Christian through the acceptance of his alternative sexuality and eventual turn towards identifying as an atheist, along with his concurrent work and experience organizing for justice with communities of faith, even as he became someone for whom faith as most religious know it no longer necessarily applied.

As I listened to Chris that evening, and had the chance to meet him, the thoughts I had been having about my desire to understand the humanity and reality of the atheistic perspective became more intense. First of all, the work that Chris is doing is indeed of an enlightened nature. He is someone who understand the values of wisdom, empathy, and compassion. These are indeed spiritual values, but to understand them as spiritual values in the context of the work and convictions of someone like Chris Stedman means that one has to take a much broader, inclusive, open, and truer understanding of what it means to be spiritual. Hearing Chris speak, meeting him, and reading his words, it struck me that one cannot automatically assume that someone who is an atheist is inherently demoniac. Chris Stedman, who he is and what he does, is proof enough to me that what Krishna is saying in the Gita has to be understood with discretion, intelligence, and compassion. It has to be understood beyond the surface.

As our human civilization faces a massive existential crisis in understanding that our consumerist way of life is no longer, and never was, a sustainable way for us to interact with the web of ecology that surrounds us, what is needed most is the kind of dynamic communication that builds a sense of community across not only the boundaries of different faith traditions, but across all unnecessary boundaries between people who sincerely want to create justice on this planet today, tomorrow, and going forward. There is a tremendous courage that is needed to cross through these boundaries, and the realm of Interfaith is a place where this cutting edge exists. In Faitheist, Stedman writes:

I believe that change will come from within-that by participating in Interfaith work, the nonreligious will broaden the meaning of such efforts and that the language used to describe them will change accordingly…I cannot begin to recount all of the times Interfaith work has opened up a space for robust conversations on problematic religious practices and beliefs. In fact, it has been a hallmark of my experience working in the Interfaith environment. Furthermore, it has allowed me to engage religious people about atheist identity and eradicate significant misconceptions about what atheism is and what it isn’t

I regularly hear from atheists who are leading the charge for Interfaith cooperation on their campuses and in their communities, and their experiences echo mine. They too have found that Interfaith is expanding to incorporate them and that, when done well, Interfaith engagement doesn’t require that people check their convictions at the door; it invites people to try and understand and humanize the other.

This understanding, and this shared grasp of what it means to be human in this world, at this time, is immeasurable more powerful and effective in organizing, working for, and living by the principles of divinity than by any surface labeling of who is divine and who is demoniac.

Let us look again to what Swami Prabhupada said above, to truly understand what is demoniac. The demoniac nature is that which exploits the material nature simply for the selfish exploitation of the senses, an exploitation that invariable leads to violence and cruelty. It does not take a great leap to understand, through the examples of our shared history and also our contemporary experience, that those who may claim to have an obvious “concept of God” can easily become wrapped up in the demoniac qualities. This is not a black-and-white equation. There are “devotees of God” who act demonically. There are “demons” who act divinely. If we stay on the surface of this dichotomy, without diving deeply, without the kind of courageous thought and activism that someone like Chris Stedman is offering, we will add nothing to the equation but the kind of irrational hatred that scars our very existence.

As I said before, the Gita is straightforward, and everything I have said above is not to discount that there are people who are obviously divine and obviously demoniac, and that those categories can fall alongside certain accepted parameters of faith/lack of faith. But instead of condemning every atheistic/agnostic person to be inherently demoniac, I challenge anyone who is challenged by this to think a little deeper, to broaden their experience working with and knowing the non-religious, to try to understand that the religious and the non-religious have a lot to learn from each other, and to read Faitheist. The true arts of compassion and communication require much more than intellectual and theological complacency. They require a courage based in a divine sense of love that belongs to all beings regardless of what they identify as.

Why This Devotee of God Doesn’t Think To Be Atheist Is To Be A Demon
→ Life Comes From Life

There are two kinds of people in this world. Devotees and demons.

I think this is absolutely true.

But let’s parse this out a bit.

First of all, what is the source of my seemingly eccentric and dogmatic statement?

In the ninth verse of the chapter, Krishna says:

Following such conclusions, the demoniac, who are lost to themselves and who have no intelligence, engage in unbeneﬁcial, horrible works meant to destroy the world.

In his commentary on this verse, renowned Vedic scholar/teacher A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada writes:

When Saying "It’s Just Kali-Yuga" Is Not Enough
→ Life Comes From Life

Dr. James Cone is one of the formative personalities in the living history of liberation theology, the spiritual/religious framework of knowledge and practice based around the ideal that God, and those who are devotees of God, should be primarily concerned with the social/political/spiritual freedom of the oppressed, of those who are marginalized due to their race, sex, class, nationality, or gender. Through such courageous and groundbreaking works such as A Black Theology of Liberation, The God of the Oppressedand The Cross and The Lynching Tree, Cone has resounded a daring truth which says that God is intimately and particularly concerned and active in securing the freedom of black people in America from the shackles of bondage which have kept them and held them over much of the last five hundred years. While Cone did not invent the idea of Black Theology, he is considered one of its “founding fathers,” as it were, and is a historically important and vital figure in the field of contemporary Christian theology

Dr. Cone’s work has inspired many other liberation theologians across the spectrum of race, sex, and gender to apply this ideal of God’s care and love for the oppressed to their own particular situations of oppression/marginalization. He has been teaching at Union Theological Seminary, the oldest independent progressive Christian seminary in America, for much of the last four decades. Union, where I am currently working towards a master’s degree in religion and ecological ethics, is where I had the good fortune of participating in Cone’s Systematic Theology course this past Fall.

From the very first class, Cone was encouraging us to find our own personal theological voice, but he was also clear that there was an objective difference between good theology and bad theology. I came to understand that good theology, a working theology, must include understanding and realization of the transcendent reality of God, who speaks to us and acts within us beyond the boundaries of the material world, helping us to transcend our own limitations. Good theology must balance this understanding of the transcendent element with a clear acknowledgment and commitment to confronting, within the material world, the structures and expressions of injustice, discrimination, and oppression which deny people their material and spiritual freedom and dignity.

Bad theology is removed from this balance. A theology which doesn’t work gives a framework which compels a community to think itself above the problems of the world. Bad theology commits the “sin of silence” towards the injustice of the world, either by outright ignoring the pain and suffering of oppression, or by misinterpreting how to deal with this oppression with antiquated and insensitive forms of praxis. Theology will also not work when it is too concerned with justice work at the expense of the transcendent element. Our link to the transcendent reality of God allows us, as expressed in the thought of one of Union’s most influential teachers and philosophers Reinhold Niebuhr, to understand the original freedom of our own spiritual nature in relationship with God, while also making clear to us the finite nature of our material existence and our limitations within that nature to express that original freedom. Any theology, or any kind of justice work, which does not keep the transcendent relation of God at its center, will not be able to comprehend or transcend its own limitations and the multifarious flaws of human nature.

Dr. Cone was also very clear that all theology, and that our own theological voice, comes out of the element of contradiction. A major part of this element of contradiction comes from the the understanding that if we have the conviction, courage, and intelligence to wrestle with and examine how our faith tradition is expressing itself in relation to the world, we will be able to confront ideas and frameworks in that expression which do not work, which are not relevant. From the confrontation of that contradiction we will be able to shape new ideas and frameworks which insure that our faith, our theology, speaks of the reality and love of God in a way that is meaningful, powerful, compassionate, and effective to the actual time, place, and circumstance which surrounds it. The element of contradiction, when processed in a healthy, intelligent, sincere, and surrendered fashion, helps to insure the proper theological balance between faith and knowledge of God’s transcendent reality with a commitment towards the active work and service that can bring the just love of God into reality to break the bonds of injustice and oppression in our world.

I am beginning to understand, as my own theological voice begins to form, as a devotee who serves within ISKCON and identifies, more or less, as a member of ISKCON, who identifies as a servant of Prabhupada’s mission, that I am also dealing with a serious contradiction. This contradiction begins as I understand that while I accept the fundamental and essential tenets of sastraas given to us by Prabhupada, I have many problems with how this essential spiritual understanding is expressed culturally and socially by our society of devotees. Let us recall the words of Yogesvara Dasa, a long-standing and well-esteemed disciple of Srila Prabhupada, who in our previous piece expressed his feelings that the Hare Krishna movement is largely invisible and irrelevant to society today:

“The most candid comment I can give about public perception of Hare Krishna in North

America is that I don’t think there is one anymore. The worst possible thing has happened,

namely indifference. There was a time going back 20 years perhaps when there was a public perception of the Hare Krishna movement in the sense that people felt accosted in airports or read reports of abuses or saw devotees chanting in public. Devotees were a more visible part of the landscape of American culture previously.

Maybe then one could say there was a public perception because Hare Krishna was in the news, it was on television, it was in the papers for good or for bad…I believe that Vaishnavism as it has been historically will not be the same in the future for the simple reason that the world it lives in is not the same. There is a compulsion within Vaishnava faith to move into the larger society and to become relevant, and the Vaishnava community has yet to demonstrate its relevance. For 99.99 percent of the world we don’t matter. Krishna Consciousness is irrelevant to most of the world.”

I feel, and I am not alone in this feeling, that there is something wrong in how ISKCON, as the standard-bearer of Prabhupada’s mission, relates to the world at large. Srila Prabhupada has given us the gift of a profound spiritual revolutionary movement which is to meant to strike at the very status quo of the oppression of material nature, yet our tendency is to speak in a overtly transcendent manner to the problems and complexities of the world, as if we are speaking down to people who are trying to spiritually work through these problems and complexities. It is difficult for us to speak to, to speak with, to speak along-side these sincere-minded and sincere-hearted people working for peace, justice, love, and meaning. As I wrote in my previous piece, this contradiction crystallizes for me when we communicate to people that “they are not their body” in such a way as to completely ignore or devalue their particular bodily or human existence in the world. Telling someone “they are not the body” when they are looking for spiritual shelter to help them work through and transcend their bodily situation of oppression is a particularly insensitive and irrelevant form of communication. This is compounded by the fact that when we consider the history and concurrent living experience of ISKCON in terms of how we relate to vulnerable and marginalized people, such as our women, our children, or devotees in our community in racial and sexual bodily constructs which are considered to be the “minority” or the “alternative” to the norm, we have a long and painful reckoning to deal with.

Let us consider two statements that Srila Prabhupada makes to us in one purport from the Madhya-lilaof Sri Caitanya-Caritamrta:

“ ‘As far as religious principles are concerned, there is a consideration of the person, the country, the time and the circumstance. In devotional service, however, there are no such considerations. Devotional service is transcendental to all such considerations. Madhya 25.121

The transcendental service of the Lord (sādhana-bhakti) is above these principles. The world is anxious for religious unity, and that common platform can be achieved in transcendental devotional service. This is the verdict of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu. When one becomes a Vaiṣṇava, he becomes transcendental to all these limited considerations. Madhya 25.121

Prabhupada is quite clearly expressing here that devotees should never define the essential values of Krishna consciousness, of bhakti-yoga, by the limitations of material consideration. The color of someone’s skin or the nature of one’s sexuality ultimately has nothing to do with anyone’s eligibility to become a devotee. Therefore no one claiming to be a devotee should ever discriminate or prevent someone from approaching devotional service because of material or bodily considerations.

As Prabhupada mentions in the first passage, devotional service is transcendental to all such considerations, but the cultural principles which surround, express, and communicate the eternal, absolute values at the core of Krishna consciousness have to take time, place, and circumstance into account. Prabhupada did this himself actively in the grand spiritual/sociological “experiment” of bringing the tradition of bhakti-yogafrom its original cultural context in India to the cultural context of the West. We know many of the alterations he made, such as allowing men and women to live together in the temple environment or initiating very young men into the sannyasaasrama, and we know the kind of push-back he received from his more conservatively oriented God-brothers. We know that every consideration he made around altering certain religious/cultural symbols was done with the exact and sincere motivation to maintain and enhance the free potential for everyone to properly encounter the eternal, absolute, and transcendental principles of Krishna consciousness.

To follow his calling for us, we need to understand that as devotees we are not to limit or define ourselves by material considerations in how we grow and maintain our communities and our society as a whole. Does this mean that we shouldn’t be conscious of the material diversity of psychophysical situations we encounter in growing and maintaining our communities? Absolutely not. Prabhupada was also a tremendous genius at giving the reality of Krishna consciousness to each person as he consciously and compassionately understood the location of their being in this world, in the actual ground that they stood on. To have the capacity in our preaching, in our outreach, in our advocacy of the values and principles of Krishna consciousness, to learn and practice the art of revealing devotional service in the unique and palatable way that each person may desire it, is completely essential for us if we are to properly follow Prabhupada’s calling for us.

Consider two more passages from this purport:

As far as different faiths are concerned, religions may be of different types, but on the spiritual platform, everyone has an equal right to execute devotional service. Madhya 25.121

The conclusion is that devotional service is open for everyone, regardless of caste, creed, time and country. This Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement is functioning according to this principle. Madhya 25.121

How can we say our movement is functioning according to these absolute values when we clearly understand the legacy and ongoing reality within our movement of discrimination against certain types of body, nationality, caste, and/or sexuality? There is a contradiction which exists, which we must confront, between these eternal values of openness and equality at the heart ofbhakti, and the way we either share or don’t share these values with people because of the discriminatory lenses we carry with us. This contradiction is one of the core reasons, if not the core reason, why we struggle to be as relevant are we are called to be in the world around us. There are of course individual devotees and communities of devotees who are exploring this contradiction and creating outreach which truly speaks

openly and equally to the heart and mind of the contemporary human being in the 21^stCentury.

One powerful example is the Gita Sutras (gitanyc.com)program associated with the Bhakti Center community here in New York City, which is attracting a diverse and dynamic spectrum of spiritual seekers whose intelligent minds and compassionate hearts are being enlivened by a presentation of the essential principles of the Bhagavad-Gitaas given by Prabhupada. It is a presentation which meets them powerfully and profoundly in their psychophysical locations and which doesn’t discriminate against those locations.

ISKCON as a whole, as a global body representing Prabhupada’s body, must now courageously and specifically ask whether its cultural presentation is something that is directly relevant to the world we live in. Do the elements of the presentation of Krishna consciousness in our communities and in our society as a whole contribute to the discrimination that exists in this world, or does it help to liberate people from that discrimination? What do we need to do to translate the eternal relevance of bhaktiso that it is practically relevant to the way people feel, think, live, and suffer? What do we need to do to translate this relevance so that it is not a scandal to the intellect and experience of the people we want to reach, touch, and affect?

As individuals and as communities we have the tendency to participate in “spiritual bypassing”, or to become addicted to “spiritual heroin”, in which we consciously/unconsciously ignore the difficulties in our own hearts, in our own communities, and in the world around us. To offer a balm to this affliction, I ask this question: do you, do we, do I, really understand how terrible and how painful the effects of the Kali-Yuga are to people suffering those effects? In the same way we can say to ourselves or tell someone else that “you are not the body” without fully understanding the full spiritual import of that statement, when we pass off the tumult of our time by saying its just the “Kali-Yuga”, we are ignoring our sacred responsibility to understand, confront, and redeem the pain of our age. We have to ask ourselves: do we want to be confronted by the realities of our age, perversities of divine nature which most certainly manifest in our own heart, or do we want to be an insular, provincial, “Hindu” religious society which has little practical relevance or effect upon society?

I know it is my experience, and the experience of a good number of devotees in our communities, that once one sees and encounters the vastness of the injustice and suffering which permeates our age, there is no longer anyway to bypass it or ignore it. It changes one’s entire identity and calling as a devotee. It strengthens that identity and calling. It deepens that identity and calling. Some of the most formative influences on the shape of my own spiritual journey has been books like American Holocaustby David Stannard, which detailed the mass extermination of indigenous Native American peoples and cultures upon the “discovery” of the “New World” by European settlers/conquerors. Equally as powerful isThe New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which explores and reveals how the contemporary criminal-justice system has created a underclass of people, largely Black and Latino men, whose standing as citizens in American society has been traumatically torn asunder. I would encourage any devotees to read these books to gain a better and broader idea of the kinds of demoniac forces we encounter in this age and on this planet.

Let me also share some food for thought from my recent participation in the opening workshop of the 2013 Immersion Experience of the Poverty Initiative, a clear and committed social justice organization working out of Union Theological Seminary. The workshop was titled Conditions and Consciousness: The Current Economic Crisis, and in the opening session we were presented with a number of facts that were meant to challenge and motivate us to grasp and understand a number of elements of exactly why and how so many people face suffering and exploitation because of certain economic factors that exist in our societal infrastructure.

I hope that by listing below some of these fact/provocations/questions that like-minded and similarly concerned devotees reading this may be deepened and challenged in their own motivation and conception of what it means to serve in this Kali-Yuga. We must understand the nature of what the term economic means. It is a measuring and a conceptual understanding of who gets what and why. It is an examination of the principle of the quota from the Isopanisadand how that principle is/is not honored in our current time.

We must understand and confront in our ourselves and in our society the gap between the factual reality of certain economic conditions and our consciousness of these conditions.

To whit:

-As recently as 2010, a home was being foreclosed on every 15 seconds.

–According to the Census Bureau in 2011, one of every two Americans is poor/low income.

-The number of “Tent Cities”continues to rise since the 2008 financial crisis, exacerbated no doubt by the increase in environmentally related disasters. As devotees, how do we practically help the people living in these communities?

-Of course we tend to notice how machines/robots continue to replace human service/interactions in such places as the assembly line and the checkout line. What do we as devotees have to say to people whose livelihood has been replaced/is threatened by this effect of economic globalization?

-I am reminded of the time HH Devamrta Swami, in one of his visits to the Bhakti Center in NYC, showed all the brahmacaris the award-winning documentary Inside Job, which detailed the 2008 financial meltdown. He never explicitly explained why he was showing us this film, but the implication was clear: just down the road from the Bhakti Center, on Wall Street, are the kind of overt demoniac forces that Krishna spoke of thein the Bhagavad-gita, and that as devotees, we should be very aware of this and very clear about what they are trying to do.

-How much are we, as devotees, aware of how debt functions to keep this unjust economic system working? How do our own experiences of debt, as individuals and communities, define our viewpoint of how our society actually works? Do we understand that the current crises of debt inequality exist not because the system isn’t working, but because that is how the system actually works?

-Through the combination of our own personal misuse and the ways the industrial food production systems work, half the food that is produced is eventually wasted/thrown out.This adds up to $165 million of food wasted per year, while 800 million hungry go around the world.

-Did you know that, despite the backlash that came after the 2008 economic crash, CEOs earns at least 185 times more on averagethat the workers under them at their corporations?

The main point of this workshop was to help us to begin to understand the structural and ideologicalroots of why our current economic situation is the way it is, from the most high corporate boardrooms on down to the people barely scraping by in slums left behind. As devotees, it is also our challenge to understand the roots of the way the Kali-Yuga is being expressed in the world around us. Understanding these roots will allow us to have a more accurate diagnosis of the problem, and it will compelus to offer the right prescription to help cure our ills as much as we possibly can.

What, according to Srila Prabhupada, is this right prescription?

Because of the increment in demoniac population, people have lost brahminical culture. Nor is there a kṣatriya government. Instead, the government is a democracy in which any śūdra can be voted into taking up the governmental reigns and capture the power to rule. Because of the poisonous effects of Kali-yuga, the śāstra(Bhāg. 12.2.13) says, dasyu-prāyeṣu rājasu: the government will adopt the policies of dasyus, or plunderers. Thus there will be no instructions from the brāhmaṇas, and even if there are brahminical instructions, there will be no kṣatriya rulers who can follow them. 7.2.11

Therefore, through the popularizing of hari-kīrtana, or the saṅkīrtana movement, the brahminical culture and kṣatriya government will automatically come back, and people will be extremely happy. 7.2.11

Having an effective consciousness and awareness of the suffering in this world will give us determination and courage to effect the change, to do what Prabhupada is calling us to do, to overcome this suffering. As devotees, we have a responsibility to always be asking ourselves if we are truly and comprehensively aware as we can be of the suffering in the world. We must always be critiquing and improving our understanding of our own responsibility and our own calling to free the world, as best as we can, from this suffering.

A few quotes to end, from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of course, and also from Jon Sobrino, an influential Jesuit activist and liberation theologian

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr

“Our theology has to be rooted in reality”

Jon Sobrino, S.J

The relevance of Prabhupada’s mission as we move into the 21^stCentury depends so very much on standing firmly on the ground of suffering in this world, in this Kali-Yuga, and in giving effectively and compassionately the unique loving and spiritual balms and solutions that we have to give.

When Saying "It’s Just Kali-Yuga" Is Not Enough
→ Life Comes From Life

“The most candid comment I can give about public perception of Hare Krishna in North

America is that I don’t think there is one anymore. The worst possible thing has happened,

Let us consider two statements that Srila Prabhupada makes to us in one purport from the Madhya-lilaof Sri Caitanya-Caritamrta:

Consider two more passages from this purport:

As far as different faiths are concerned, religions may be of different types, but on the spiritual platform, everyone has an equal right to execute devotional service. Madhya 25.121

openly and equally to the heart and mind of the contemporary human being in the 21^stCentury.

We must understand and confront in our ourselves and in our society the gap between the factual reality of certain economic conditions and our consciousness of these conditions.

To whit:

-As recently as 2010, a home was being foreclosed on every 15 seconds.

–According to the Census Bureau in 2011, one of every two Americans is poor/low income.

-Did you know that, despite the backlash that came after the 2008 economic crash, CEOs earns at least 185 times more on averagethat the workers under them at their corporations?

What, according to Srila Prabhupada, is this right prescription?

A few quotes to end, from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. of course, and also from Jon Sobrino, an influential Jesuit activist and liberation theologian

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr

“Our theology has to be rooted in reality”

Jon Sobrino, S.J

When Saying "You Are Not Your Body" Is Not Enough
→ Life Comes From Life

This is the first in a series of essays I am writing based on my thoughts and experience as a devotee of Krishna, associated with ISKCON, in the 21^stCentury. These thoughts are mine and mine alone, resonant surely with other devotee’s thoughts, but not representative of any community, temple president, or any other personality or spiritual master

I have submitted this piece to such websites as ISKCON News and Dandavats and so far it have not been published. While I hardly think the thoughts I have here are “radical” in any way, I have noticed a certain hesitancy to discuss some of the issues herein, like the place of LGBTQ people within our society of devotees, or to associate these issues in any kind of official capacity with the institution of ISKCON. This I find frustrating, because there are many devotees like myself who want to understand how our society can relate in a more honest and relevant way with our fellow brothers and sisters on this planet.

I hope that these words add to a fruitful and healthy dialogue as to the present and future shape of our devotional society. I intend no offense with these words, and if I cause offense by these words, I sincerely and humbly beg your forgiveness.

One of the most powerful spiritual experiences I have ever had in my life was when I had the chance to visit Srila Prabhupada’s room at the Radha-Damodara Mandir in Vrndavana. It was, as you can imagine or may have experienced yourself, overwhelming to be so distinctly in the presence of Srila Prabhupada. His vibrations still filled the room so clearly, so mystically, if I may use that term with all sincerity, so long after his presence last filled that room physically. I immediately could sense my own place, who I was, who I wasn’t, and what I was being asked to do, now that I had come this far, and committed as much as I could to becoming a servant of Prabhupada’s mission.

All I could really do (all I can really do anyway) was pray, and beg. I begged to be given the chance to be a part, to be a servant, of carrying Prabhupada’s mission forward into the 21^stCentury. Contemplating this responsibility felt like a two-ton weight on my shoulders. Everything I had considered serious in a materialistic sense up to that point in my lfe had the buoyancy of a riven cloud compared to the weight of this calling for Prabhupada. It was a frightening feeling in one sense, because I had never considered anything so serious, but it was also a liberation, a clarity that burned away the angst I had felt as a confused American kid in my twenties trying to find sense and belonging in the isolating substance of the material world which surrounded me.

With as much love and humility as I could muster, I simply asked Prabhupada for the chance to serve his heart. I asked for the chance to share the gift he had given me, that he had given all of us. Rarely before or since have I been able to find such a prayerful state. I felt embraced by Prabhupada for my efforts, trusted even to do what he needed me to do, despite the primary fault of my existence in this world. I’ve always wanted to be a revolutionary, and here the chance was being given to me in a way I never could have imagined. Every step I would now take, even if it was sideways, even if it was backwards, was to be shaped by this calling. To have any hope, I would just have to hang on to Prabhupada’s lotus feet and never let go.

I was recently approached by a new friend over Facebook, a gay man who wanted to share his story and his anguish in approaching the bhaktitradition, and in particular ISKCON temples. He was clearly and deeply attracted in his heart to Krishna, and he wanted to walk forward in that resonance of his heart. Yet he had encountered prejudice because of his sexual persuasion when he had gone to his local temple. He was deeply affected by this, and he asked if there was anything I could tell him to help with his spiritual anxiety. I told him about the Bhakti Center community in New York City, where I had lived for over three years and how it was generally more welcoming than most Hare Krishna temples, but other than this, I had no easy answer for this obstacle of prejudice that he was encountering.

It broke my own heart to hear this. I simply wondered, on the level of common sense, how those claiming to represent the tradition of bhakti, those who claimed to represent the exquisitely magnanimous heart of Prabhupada, who have the obligation, as best as they can, to represent the pure and perfect love of Krishna, could look at someone from the vision of their body, and turn them away from the gift they themselves had been given.

This exchange shook me to my core, and left me with some serious and probing questions. What were these devotees missing or misunderstanding in the way they had related to my friend? How does this reflect what we may be missing or misunderstanding in our communication as devotees to the world at large today? What could I be missing or misunderstanding in my own conception and perception of Krishna consciousness? If we are telling ourselves, and if we are telling others, that “you are not the body”, how can we can judge anyone by their body? “You are not the body” is a saying every devotee has as an essential tool in their arsenal of spiritual communication, but I often wonder, as many devotees do, if we really understand what this means? Do we really understand that this saying, as essentially true as it is, can have an alienating effect upon others if we do not also know how to respond, comprehend, and comfort the bodily prejudice so many people experience in this world?

I am now a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, which is one of the oldest and most prestigious independent and progressive Christian seminaries in America. It is a place where I have the great fortune of having my spirituality shaped through many different sophisticated, outrageous, and radical lenses. It is a place where I am able to see and experience the beauty, pain, and struggle of how so many others outside of the “traditional ISKCON” universe understand the nature of God and reality. It is a place where I can develop my identity as a progressive devotee. What does this mean to be a progressive devotee? For me, it is a conscious choice to live one’s devotional calling by examining how the purport of Prabhupada’s mission, and the culture and tradition of bhakti which comes from that mission, can communicate in the most relevant concert and concern with the contemporary time, place, and circumstances of the 21^stCentury. To be a progressive devotee is not to abandon the fundamental principles that Prabhupada has given us, but it is to consider, as Prabhupada himself did, how to make these principles realistic and relevant for the people of this age.

To be a progressive devotee is a precarious position. It brings upon the serious concern and even condemnation of those devotees who are deeply suspicious of anything labeled as such, who feel that to label oneself progressive is to commit the offense of abandoning Prabhupada’s core teachings. It creates the opportunity to respond in a very offensive manner to the sincere concerns of these devotees. I know I myself must be careful to use this label, for the reality is that all sincere devotees of Krishna are truly the most progressive people on this planet. We have been given a revolutionary process which questions the very status quo of material existence itself. To label one set of devotees as progressive and another as conservative is a dangerous political game, yet for the nature of these essays, I want to highlight certain distinctions, perspectives, and proclivities that devotees share and don’t share, as a way of highlighting serious issues and arguments which are shaping, and will shape, the future of Prabhupada’s mission in the 21^stCentury.

There is nothing I can do in preventing devotees who are concerned with my position from expressing their concern. This is their sacred and natural right to do so, and I welcome any conversation that does not come from or lead to offensive attitudes and expressions. My response to their concern and their criticism must stand on the solid ground of the wisdom that Prabhupada has given us. I write this essay in that spirit, standing on the bedrock of the gift of Prabhupada’s wisdom as much as I can, and in that spirit, I hope to contribute to a fruitful and much needed dialogue in ISKCON. In that spirit, I hope that my own misconceptions can be corrected, that our mutual unhealthy assumptions can be confronted and transcended, and that the practice and art of our spiritual communication can be brought to a more profound and relevant level.

***

The heart of my concern as a progressive devotee is a question of the engagement, and the relevance of that engagement, of our movement to society at large. There are two levels of relevance to be considered here: the ultimate relevance of bhakti and of Krishna consciousness to the existential situation of being in the material world, a relevance that is beyond reproach and even the vagaries of human reason itself. Then there is the theological and sociological relevance of Prabhupada’s movement to the concerns of our contemporary society, concerns which include social justice, civil rights, poverty, ecological collapse, amongst so many other connected issues. Here is where I, and many other devotees, feel that our movement suffers in its communication and in its relevance. I was particularly struck by something that Yogesvara Dasa (Joshua Greene), an esteemed and long-standing disciple of Srila Prabhupada, said in an interview with an academic publication on “Being a Krishna Devotee”

“The most candid comment I can give about public perception of Hare Krishna in North

America is that I don’t think there is one anymore. The worst possible thing has happened,

namely indifference. There was a time going back 20 years perhaps when there was a public

perception of the Hare Krishna movement in the sense that people felt accosted in airports or

read reports of abuses or saw devotees chanting in public. Devotees were a more visible part

of the landscape of American culture previously.

To be relevant, and to find relevance, is to always be considering how the prophetic voice of our movement is responding to the concerns of our fellow living entities on this planet. It is to be open to having a historicistapproach to how we express our faith in the world. We are not raw historicists, in that we believe in an Absolute Truth that is beyond the relativism of history, yet our prophetic voice is best expressed with an intelligent application of our principles to the time, places, and circumstances which we are intimately connected to.

To find our relevance means to understand that we should not frame our communication to others in such a way that we ignore who they are and where they are coming from. We also have to prove our worth and pull our weight. We may not be of this world, but we are in this world. This we cannot ignore. We have to learn to give the gift that Prabhupada has given us in such a way that it makes sense in people’s lives and to the concerns in their life. We may tell someone that they are not the body, and yet by doing so, we may completely ignore how we can relate our transcendental message to their particular situation of bodily marginalization, pain, and oppression. We may completely ignore the questions they have for us, as to how the heart of bhakti, of Krishna’s love, speaks to the body they live in and the ground they stand on.

In our relation as devotees to the material world, to our own bodies, and the bodies of others, we must learn to be transcendent, and we must learn to acknowledge. To be transcendent is to truly understand that we are eternal spirit souls, lovers and friends of Krishna, whose true home is the spiritual world, and that our ultimate destiny is the liberation of pure devotional service. This is the goal and perfection of our existence, and all that we do should direct us and all others towards this goal. This is the gift that Prabhupada has given us.

One of the most powerful and eternally relevant verses Krishna speaks in the Bhagavad-Gita is this:

The humble sages, by virtue of true knowledge, see with equal vision a learned and gentle brāhmaṇa, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a dog-eater [outcaste]. (5.18)

This verse calls all devotees, all living entities, to a spiritual vision and lifestyle which has no room for bodily discrimination. For me, this verse gives us the foundation of equality and justice which underlies all movements for the same within the material realm. The vision of the sage is the essential and pristine vision which must be at the core of all movements for equality and justice in the material world, from the fight for civil rights for those who are marginalized because of their race, gender, or sexuality, all the way to the consideration of the right to life, decency, and sustainable health for the wide diversity of plant and animal life that this planet holds. As Srila Prabhupada writes in his purport to this verse:

A Kṛṣṇa conscious person does not make any distinction between species or castes. The brāhmaṇa and the outcaste may be different from the social point of view, or a dog, a cow and an elephant may be different from the point of view of species, but these differences of body are meaningless from the viewpoint of a learned transcendentalist. This is due to their relationship to the Supreme, for the Supreme Lord, by His plenary portion as Paramātmā, is present in everyone’s heart. Such an understanding of the Supreme is real knowledge.

The vision of the sage sees reality as it actually is, but this doesn’t mean that the sage ignores the reality that is right in front of him/her. When Prabhupada says that the “differences of body are meaningless”, he is not saying that those who claim to be a sage should treat everyone the same regardless of their bodily situation. The real sage does not discriminate according to the body. He/she gives the same grace of spiritual knowledge to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, the shape of their caste, or whatever their sexual preference is. The humble sage is able to use his/her intelligence to shape their message in such a way so that the mercy of Guru and Gauranga speaks specifically and intimately to each person’s bodily/mental/existential situation.

The humble sage is able that to understand that to merely say “you are not the body” and not acknowledge the person’s specific psycho-physical makeup is not enough. This acknowledgement is the supremely compassionate and intelligent awareness of the bodily, social, political, and sexual contexts that people come from, allowing the principles of bhaktito speak to them in such a way that it doesn’t add to the injustice and oppression that they may face because of their body. To be able to acknowledge in this way is to give the gift Krishna consciousness so that it confronts this oppression and injustice and gives the ways, means, and inspiration to transcend it.

Frankly, in the general history of ISKCON, I feel that we not effectively learned how to transcend and how to acknowledge. I kneel and beg to be corrected, but I don’t just base this statement on my own speculation, but on the experience and sincere feelings of many other devotees that I have encountered. Because we struggle so much to transcend and acknowledge our own bodies and our own standing in this world, we are left with a number of psychological and psychosocial hang-ups which have crippled much of our outreach. It has tended to harden our hearts, and with our hearts encased in the stone of our guilt, envy, and shame, how can we truly acknowledge and answer to those who approach us wanting to transcend their own pain and walk towards the loving embrace of Krishna?

As we try to mature in treating the subject of our transcendence with more compassion, patience, and common sense than has been the history of our movement, as we try not to “storm the gates of heaven”, as we understand that to purify our hearts is something that is the journey of a lifetime, or lifetimes, that must be done hand-in-hand and heart-to-heart with each other, we must learn to acknowledge our own bodies, our own material natures, and how these aspects of our existential situation can lead us further on to transcendence.

To be able to acknowledge means to not see our bodily and material situations as obstacles which should be smashed, but as aspects of our being which must be seen in the light of compassion and the wisdom of sastra, andalso in the light of our common sense and natural experience of our lives in this world. We have to reach people at the point of how they live their own lives, in the reality of their social location, and not through any oppressive assumptions of meaning that we may have of what their lives and bodies represent. In the same way we have to meet our own experience as devotees in terms of who we actually are, and not through the frameworks of assumption others may place upon us.

In the next essay I hope to further develop these points, to acknowledge my own discomfort with identifying with ISKCON, and to ask a serious question of devotees: do we really understand how bad the Kali-Yuga is in the manifestations which presently surround us and which oppress so many of us.

When Saying "You Are Not Your Body" Is Not Enough
→ Life Comes From Life

***

“The most candid comment I can give about public perception of Hare Krishna in North

America is that I don’t think there is one anymore. The worst possible thing has happened,

namely indifference. There was a time going back 20 years perhaps when there was a public

perception of the Hare Krishna movement in the sense that people felt accosted in airports or

read reports of abuses or saw devotees chanting in public. Devotees were a more visible part

of the landscape of American culture previously.

One of the most powerful and eternally relevant verses Krishna speaks in the Bhagavad-Gita is this:

The humble sages, by virtue of true knowledge, see with equal vision a learned and gentle brāhmaṇa, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a dog-eater [outcaste]. (5.18)

Loving Ourselves, Part 1
→ Life Comes From Life

One of the most wonderful aspects of our society of devotees in ISKCON is the tremendous level of diversity we all share. Within this diversity of race, nationality, and gender, there is a multiplicity of opinions as to how we should create and make enduring our culture of devotional service together. It is always my hope that within this diversity there is also the requisite respect towards the differences that do exist between us, but that is certainly not always the case, therefore I tread forward with what I am going to say carefully. I deeply pray that the sentiments and ideas I express here going forward does not offend the reader. If I do, I beg your forgiveness and understanding.

The foundation of what I want to say is that we need a deep cultural change within ISKCON. The substance of this change means moving from impersonalism towards personalism. This is not a philosophical issue, but rather an issue of relationship, of community. The history of our relationships, of our communities in ISKCON, have been marred by a deep-rooted impersonalism which has harmed many devotees’ lives, and which has prevented ISKCON from being what it could truly be, from what Prabhupada wanted it to be. Many devotees of my generation, and many devotees of generations older and younger than mine, have also expressed this realization.

There is so much we have to do to insure that ISKCON thrives and grows as we move into the 21^stCentury, but I do not think there is anything more important that in improving the health of our culture of relationships and communities within ISKCON. Without addressing the stones of this essential foundation of our society, all of our aspirations will trend towards an inadequate and disappointing outcome.

I want to frame this essay around a lecture a good friend of mine recently gave. He titled the lecture “Presenting Our Best Offering to Krishna” and he based his lecture around a very wonderful and thought-provoking essay by HH Sacinandana Swami. The name of this essay is “From My Heart: Beloved of God” and can be found online via the Saranagati Newsletter.^¹

We must first understand that the purpose of our lives as devotees is to learn how to give the best offering of ourselves to Krishna. The very substance of this offering should be of love and affection towards Krishna, with intentionality and meaning in everything that we do.

The profundity of our offering can be so much greater if the love that is its substance is also directed towards our own self. HH Sacinandana Swami has us consider a line from “Prayer of a Lover of God” by Bhaktivinoda Thakur, in which the Thakur says “Let me also love myself who am inclined towards Krishna so that I may attain devotion to Him.”^² What does this mean? To my own heart, this is a very common sense statement. If we are parts and parcels of Krishna, who is the ultimate object of our love, then we are also worthy of love. This love must be directed towards our personal reality as spirit soul and servant of the Lord, and not towards our temporary identities as body and mind.

We are called to love all of Krishna’s parts and parcels, and that includes our own selves. We are not excluded. Spiritual life, in this sense, comes full circle. We are trying to transcend our narcissistic tendencies, and we have the tendency to do this in a very impersonal and unhealthy way, at the expense of our self, and at the expense of our relationships and communities. We complete the circle when we learn to include ourself in the package of love.

The very meaning of the deepest surrender is rooted in a pure and selfless love towards Krishna and His devotees. In the history of ISKCON, the meaning of surrender, and its practical applications, has often been something different. Often it is translated as “work until you drop.” Who is asking for this kind of surrender? Is it Krishna? Yes, sometimes Krishna is asking from us a surrender which tests and pushes back our boundaries, but is Krishna taking pleasure from the pain that results?

When we have the maturity to understand the bigger picture of our spiritual journey, we understand why Krishna is putting us into such a situation. We experience His love for us as the reason why, and the difficulties that we experience take on a different and deeper meaning.

If this kind of intense surrender is instead based on our own self-imposed expectations, or on the unrealistic expectations of others, then the tendency we have seen is that we will burn out. This is based as well on the tendency that we place on ourselves, and which is placed on ourselves by others, to act as if we were a pure devotee, but we cannot be a pure devotee until we are a pure devotee. Acting in this kind of charade is a big source of the pain we experience in our life as a devotee.

Often this concept of surrender means to forget our humanity. The joke I’ve heard is that first you become a pure devotee, and then you become a human being. To transcend our identification as a material human being doesn’t mean to become inhumane in our devotional lives. The human nature we carry with us features many tools, such as the ability to be selfless and compassionate, which can only enhance our devotional lives if we choose to engage with them.

In his article, HH Sacinandana Swami quotes from an article by HH Bir Krishna Goswami, entitled “Love Yourself.” HH Bir Krishna Goswami writes:

I am writing about this subject matter because many devotees have contacted or talked to me about this mental state. When I hear devotees talking like this it causes tears to come to my eyes because I know that all the devotees are very, very dear to Krishna.

Even though ontologically we may be small-we are important to Krishna. We are not small in Krishna’s eyes.

Take the story of Gopa Kumar in the Brhad Bhagavatamrta for example. Krishna was feeling so much love for Gopa Kumar and so much hankering for his association in the spiritual world, that Krishna personally became Gopa Kumar’s spiritual master.

You may say that Gopa Kumar is a special devotee, and that is true. But, it is a fact that Krishna personally is the Caitya Guru of all of us residing in our hearts and personally takes the trouble to direct us to our spiritual master.

Even before we take to Krishna consciousness, Krishna is residing in the heart waiting for us to realize that our real happiness is in relating to Him rather than this external energy.

So, Krishna considers us significant, important, etc.

When Gopa Kumar finally goes back to Krishnaloka, Krishna faints in ecstasy upon receiving him. Even Krishna’s associates can not understand what is going on.

Krishna feels the same way about us.

There is an interesting statement in the Isopanisad (Mantra 6):

“He who sees systematically everything in relation to the Supreme Lord, who sees all living entities as His parts and parcels, and who sees the Supreme Lord within everything never hates anything or any being.”

So we are parts and parcels of Krishna. Therefore we should not hate ourselves. On the other hand since we are supposed to love Krishna we should love all his parts and parcels and that includes ourselves too!

What does that mean, to love oneself?

It means to picture or visualize or imagine how you want to be. Forget about all the negativity; whether the negativity comes from yourself or from others.

If you think negatively that is what you are meditating on and those thoughts will impede your spiritual life.

Here are some things you can think about:

1. Radha and Krishna love me and want me to be with Them in the spiritual world!

2. Taking care of my spiritual needs will not impede my spiritual progress

3. Taking care of my material needs will not impede my spiritual progress

4. I am an eternal soul, full of bliss and knowledge!

5. I have an eternal relationship with Radha and Krishna and will realize this relationship.

And don’t remain in a situation where others are denigrating you. You owe it to yourself and to Krishna to reject situations that are unfavorable for Krishna consciousness and accept favorable situations. Have positive spiritual self-esteem!

It is not mayato take what we need in our Krishna conscious lives. It is not maya to find the proper situation in our Krishna conscious lives to make the best offering of ourselves. It is not mayato have a positive sense of self-esteem to ourselves in our Krishna conscious lives. Again, I feel very strongly that this is common sense, but sometimes it can be quite difficult to discern, either from our own perspective or within the expectations of our community, what we really need to be healthy and happy as a devotee.

We may fear that by taking what we need, we may take too much, and cross that fine line into selfishness based on sense gratification. What is essential for us, and which strikes at the heart of the need for healthy community, is having guides who we can trust, who are very attentive, introspective, and progressive, and who can help us to strike the balance between need and sacrifice in our lives.

Ultimately we have to, as the saying goes, “fly our own planes.” This is not to say that we become bereft or aloof of relationships to authorities in our lives, but that we must also develop a sufficient sense of self-discernment. We have to know, in the fiber of our being, in the shape of our consciousness on a everyday level, when a mood of indulgence may be taking us away from our sadhanaand service. This may be a mood of indulgence in our bad habits and illusions. It may also be a mood of indulgence in trying to fulfill the unrealistic and impersonal demands of the devotees in our community.

We have to learn to give ourselves the time of day. If we are just jumping all over the place, trying to be selfless, we may become resentful, because we have deprived ourselves of our needs. If we don’t fulfill our real needs, then we set up ourselves to fall back into these patterns of indulgence again and again.

If we can just see the good we have in ourselves, and addressing our relevant needs both material and spiritual will help us do that, then we will be more willing, and be more able, to make sacrifices and to enter into that mysterious realm of surrender. As HH Sacinandana Swami often quotes, from the mind of famed French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “If you want to build a boat, don’t just drum up people together to collect wood and assign tasks. Teach people to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

1http://saranagati.net/index.php?S=3&Article=270

2commentary on Bhajanamrtam, quoted in Bhaktivinoda Vani Vaibhava, volumes 2 and 3, p. 408.

Loving Ourselves, Part 1
→ Life Comes From Life

In his article, HH Sacinandana Swami quotes from an article by HH Bir Krishna Goswami, entitled “Love Yourself.” HH Bir Krishna Goswami writes:

Even though ontologically we may be small-we are important to Krishna. We are not small in Krishna’s eyes.

Even before we take to Krishna consciousness, Krishna is residing in the heart waiting for us to realize that our real happiness is in relating to Him rather than this external energy.

So, Krishna considers us significant, important, etc.

When Gopa Kumar finally goes back to Krishnaloka, Krishna faints in ecstasy upon receiving him. Even Krishna’s associates can not understand what is going on.

Krishna feels the same way about us.

There is an interesting statement in the Isopanisad (Mantra 6):

What does that mean, to love oneself?

It means to picture or visualize or imagine how you want to be. Forget about all the negativity; whether the negativity comes from yourself or from others.

If you think negatively that is what you are meditating on and those thoughts will impede your spiritual life.

Here are some things you can think about:

1. Radha and Krishna love me and want me to be with Them in the spiritual world!

2. Taking care of my spiritual needs will not impede my spiritual progress

3. Taking care of my material needs will not impede my spiritual progress

4. I am an eternal soul, full of bliss and knowledge!

5. I have an eternal relationship with Radha and Krishna and will realize this relationship.

1http://saranagati.net/index.php?S=3&Article=270

2commentary on Bhajanamrtam, quoted in Bhaktivinoda Vani Vaibhava, volumes 2 and 3, p. 408.

Guides, Gurus and Grounding In Our Spiritual Journey
→ Life Comes From Life

My latest from The Huffington Post Religion Today is Guru Purnima, and this spiritual festival takes on a very special resonance for me this year. Just a few weeks ago, I was formally initiated into the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition at a ceremony…

Guides, Gurus and Grounding In Our Spiritual Journey
→ Life Comes From Life

The Barking Dog of The False Ego
→ Life Comes From Life

My latest essay at The Huffington Post Religion Our ego is one of the most intimidating and inscrutable realities we face in our lives. Countless philosophers, spiritualists, seekers and armchair prognosticators have tried to define its paramet…

The Barking Dog of The False Ego
→ Life Comes From Life

Homosexuality And Scripture
→ Life Comes From Life

Q & A with Swami B. V. Tripurari

“Times change and with new information new opinions form, and if they are spiritually reasonable, the task for devotees is to support them with scriptural logic—sastra-yukti—or the logic that supports the essential conclusions of revelation.”

Q. Is being gay a sin?

A. I don’t think that any reasonable person would consider “being gay” sinful in as much as the distinction between sexual orientation and sexual behavior is understood. Sometimes people refer to biblical passages that they say condemn homosexuality but even Christian theologians have offered plausible interpretations to the contrary. For example, regarding the often-quoted verse (Romans 1:26-27) where the apostle Paul denounced homosexual behavior as unnatural, one distinguished Christian theologian comments, “No doubt Paul was unaware of the distinction between sexual orientation, over which one has apparently very little choice, and sexual behavior, over which one does. He seemed to assume that those whom he condemned were heterosexuals who were acting contrary to nature, “leaving,” “giving up,” or “exchanging” their regular sexual orientation for that which was foreign to them.

Paul knew nothing of the modern psychosexual understanding of homosexuals as persons whose orientation is fixed early in life, or perhaps even genetically in some cases. For such persons, having heterosexual relations would be acting contrary to nature, “leaving,” “giving up,” or “exchanging” their natural sexual orientation for one that was unnatural to them.” (Rev. Dr. Walter Wink, Professor of Biblical Interpretation, Auburn Theological Seminary)

Hindu texts, on the other hand, are relatively silent on the issue, and when they do discuss homosexuality, it is in relation to heterosexual brahmanas, or priests, indulging in homosexual liaisons. The Hindu dharma sastra describes such behavior as a minor sin; however, it is hardly possible to make a determination as to the religious status of homosexuality in today’s world on the basis of a few isolated statements from the dharma sastra. Nor will mere reference to Srimad Bhagavatam’s statements concerning spiritually correct “celibate householder sexuality” or the Bhagavad-gita’s identification of divinity with dharmic sexuality, serve conclusively in condemning homosexuality.

Indeed, wholesale condemnation of homosexuality on the basis of Hindu scripture is quite difficult, and given the amount of information on the subject that we have today, which was not available even fifty years ago, such condemnation would not in my opinion be spiritually correct or compassionate.

Therefore, my conviction is that monogamous homosexual relationships are as viable a position from which to cultivate spiritual life as are monogamous heterosexual relationships, and I believe that despite what my guru said decades ago, he would hold the same opinion were he with us today. Since he was with us, a wealth of insight into the nature of homosexuality has come to light, so much that any devotee would do well to carefully consider it when forming his or her opinion on the subject.

Times change and with new information new opinions form, and if they are spiritually reasonable, the task for devotees is to support them with scriptural logic—sastra-yukti—or the logic that supports the essential conclusions of revelation.

Q. What really bothers me about today’s homosexuals is how they wave their gay flag and require everybody to approve of their sexuality. Why should the world appreciate their parade of wrongly directed lust?

A. You might think differently if you were born gay and had to undergo the kind of discrimination that homosexuals have been experiencing for centuries, what to speak of the psychological trauma of “coming out” in our largely homophobic society. The fact is that homosexuality would still be a criminal offence in the United States if it were not for the courage of gay activists. Their flag waving is a cry to be allowed to be what they are without being attacked, jailed, or discriminated against, which was the norm here in America for so long. What’s more, in some countries people are still being executed for homosexuality. Sexuality is a huge part of a person’s life. To be forced to live in a society where one is routinely mistreated because of his or her natural occurring sexuality is something I would not would wish on anyone.

Q. I am a Hindu and I believe that homosexuals should seek reformation because scripture (the Bible) states that God is not pleased with homosexual relations. The Kama sutra states that the goal of kama, or lust, is procreation. Heterosexual relations serve this purpose but homosexual relations serve only personal sense gratification. Dharma means to accept one’s duty in relation to society and God, so how could homosexuality, which has nothing to do with procreation, be considered in any way dharmic?

A. In the Hindu canon there is no condemnation of homosexuality that I am aware of. You profess to be Hindu but are unable to cite any of our scriptures to support your position, not one. Kama sutra is not scripture but it does address homosexuality without condemning it as you have done.

Ultimately everyone agrees that the sexual urge should be harnessed, and different acaryas have tried to help their students do so in different ways. In the mission of Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakura, sexual activity was supposed to be restricted to married life, but our Srila Prabhupada tried to establish a stricter standard, one that permitted sex only for the purpose of procreation. However, the vast majority of his disciples could not follow this standard. Thus in some individual cases he sanctioned sex outside of procreation for married couples. The point is that establishing a standard that students can follow and that helps them to progressively harness this desire constitutes sex that is dharmic and is thus arguably blessed—kamo ‘smi. Realistically, whether one is gay or straight this would be limiting sexual activity to within a committed long-term relationship, doing so for the purpose of making advancement in spiritual life.

Furthermore, we are not concerned with trying to please God by following the complex rules of dharma because Krsna is not concerned with this. He says, sarva-dharman parityajya: “Forgo all concerns of dharma and take exclusive refuge in me. I will protect you from all reactions. Do not fear.” Spontaneous love brought about by devotion (bhakti) is the way to please Krsna, and homosexuality being a naturally occurring minority phenomenon is no more an obstacle to bhakti than is heterosexuality. Therefore, I encourage everyone regardless of their sexual orientation to become devotees of Krsna and follow in the footsteps of the residents of Vrindavana. This is the highest dharma—prema dharma.

Regarding your proposal that homosexuals seek reformation. As far back as 1948 sex researcher Alfred Kinsey attempted to document patients who had been converted from homosexuality to heterosexuality during therapy and could not find one whose sexual orientation had been changed. Later, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association officially ceased classifying homosexuality as a disease, and today’s psychiatrists and psychologists almost never attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation. All this means that your notion of converting homosexuals into heterosexuals will certainly be a failure.

Finally, just try to imagine growing up and finding that when your young friends began to develop an attraction to the opposite sex you found yourself developing a sexual attraction to the same sex and had learned that you were a queer who could be justifiably beaten up and that there would be no shoulder to cry on at home. Employers (if you could get hired) would fire you if they detected your sexual attraction, which is not something that one can easily hide or that heterosexuals hide (indeed they are encouraged to celebrate it!). Then imagine that you had to pursue your sexuality in the back alley or at an illegal bar and thus ended up being the shady person that society accused you of being and gave you little opportunity of avoiding. The world is still just understanding that they did this to millions of children. Think about it.

Q. Swami, from your writing on the issue of homosexuality it appears that you want to encourage gay people to become devotees. I think that sounds broadminded but I think that the way you are doing it flies in the face of the words of your guru Srila Prabhupada, who was a great and wise man. I like to quote Prabhupada’s words on the topic verbatim, and I don’t think doing so is narrow-minded. What can possibly be wrong with just repeating what he said? And what he said does not jive with your approach.

A. The difference between you and Srila Prabhupada is very great. You may repeat what he said (kind of) but you have no ability to change when new information is presented; information that is much more readily available to you than it was to him. What new information? That one born with a homosexual orientation has no choice in the matter, a fact that has come to light only in recent decades. Srila Prabhupada’s views on this subject were informed by the prevailing misinformation of his time. He similarly wrote that women were less intelligent because their brain size was almost half that of men which is another piece of misinformation that he attributed to Dr. Urquhart, a professor at the institution he attended in Calcutta. However, unlike you, Srila Prabhupada was able to significantly change his position when new information was presented to him. Being incorrect at times is normal, but what’s egregiously incorrect is when a person simply ignores new information and holds fast to outdated ideas despite of it.

Abraham Lincoln was also a great and wise man. He brought about the abolition of slavery in America but he also felt that black people should not be allowed to hold public office. Although once nationally accepted, this idea has in our time been internationally rejected. Still, history does not condemn Lincoln for his latter position but rather lauds him for the former—freeing the slaves. By our standards Srila Prabhupada was an even greater person; not because he held some dated views on various social issues but because he was an empowered pure devotee who was able to free sincere souls from the bondage of material existence. This is what he should and ultimately will be remembered and appreciated for, not for the few dated statements he made about homosexuality.

Q. You say that you know of no passages in the Hindu scriptures that condemn homosexuality, but in his purport to Srimad Bhagavatam verse 3.20.26 Srila Prabhupada writes: “It appears here that the homosexual appetite of males for each other is created in this episode of the creation of the demons by Brahma. In other words, the homosexual appetite of a man for another man is demoniac and is not for any sane male in the ordinary course of life.” How do you explain this?

A. The verse says that when Lord Brahma created the demons they approached him for sex but were ultimately lured away by the twilight, which appeared to them as a beautiful young woman. The text goes on to elaborate on the alluring qualities of youthful women and how attraction to them clouds the mind of the unintelligent. In that section of the Bhagavatam, only one verse mentions the demons’ sexual attraction to a male, while the ten following verses elaborate on their sexual attraction to a female. Overall, the demons being discussed were obviously more sexually attracted to a woman than they were to a man (Brahma) which indicates that they were not “gay” as we understand the term today.

It is also worth mentioning that Prabhupada never backed up his stance on homosexuality with any references from scripture. Even in the purport cited, he does not say that the verse he is commenting on says that homosexuality is demoniac. Instead, using the word “appears,” which indicates a degree of uncertainty, he merely offers his own opinion. Elsewhere when discussing the subject he also only cites reasoning that demonstrates that his opinion was based on misinformation. For example, in one place he says that homosexuality is not even found in the animal world; a notion that we now know is incorrect. In this case Srila Prabhupada made an inaccurate statement in support of his position, one that he must have learned from someone else. If we are to take his words as absolute in all respects, as some devotees claim that we must, then we are forced to deny the proven fact that homosexuality is found in the animal species. If not, we must face the fact that the example given by Srila Prabhupada was mistaken.

If the example used in support of one’s reasoning is proven wrong, then one’s position on the issue itself is brought into question, especially if that position is not clearly supported by scripture. So to disagree with Srila Prabhupada’s opinion on homosexuality is not to pick and choose whimsically, but to do so in the very way that he taught us to do, which is to consider the issue according to sastra. In one discussion of the subject Srila Prabhupada even said, “One should take as it is enjoined in the sastras.” This is what I have done, and as I have already stated, Hindu texts are relatively silent on the issue, so it is very difficult to condemn homosexuality on the basis of sastra.

In conclusion, you have made it clear that you feel homosexual relationships established with a view to progress in spiritual life are not to be accepted in the same way that similar heterosexual relationships are. Your arguments on the subject are basically Bible-based religious fundamentalism, as you could not present any verses from Hindu scripture in support of them. As for Srila Prabhupada, if it were possible I would welcome a discussion with him on this topic and I feel confidant that in light of present times and information available he would be willing to alter his position in agreement with mine. After all, in regards to his gay disciple Upendra he did exactly that: he sanctioned a committed homosexual relationship with a view to help his disciple progress in spiritual life.

Homosexuality And Scripture
→ Life Comes From Life

Q & A with Swami B. V. Tripurari

Q. Is being gay a sin?

A Case For Celibacy, Sobriety & Sanity.
→ Life Comes From Life

Read the full version of my new article at Elephant Journal

I choose not to have sex unless my intention would be to produce a child with my wife. In all other circumstances, I strive for a complete and healthy celibacy. I choose not to take any intoxicants, not alcohol or marijuana, or even tobacco or caffeine. I choose not to gamble, to speculate whatever finances or assets I may have. I choose not to eat any meat, fish, or eggs. I’ve been a committed vegetarian for over seven years now, and I’ve even flirted with veganism on occasion as well.

You may think I’m crazy, fanatical and hopelessly out-of-touch with the natural pleasures of the body and mind that seem to be our birthrights. As a practitioner of the bhakti-yoga tradition, my community, my teachers, and my calling ask of me a commitment beyond the normal, expected and comfortable.

It certainly isn’t easy to follow these regulative principles, but by doing so, I can understand what it means to be a human being and spiritual being and all that combination entails in today’s over-driven and over-stimulated world.

A Case For Celibacy, Sobriety & Sanity.
→ Life Comes From Life

Read the full version of my new article at Elephant Journal

A Hindu Response to Gay Rights
→ Life Comes From Life

From the Religion section at The Huffington Post

I was personally very impressed and moved by President Obama’s decision to come out openly and vocally in support of same-sex marriage. For all the guff we throw at him, and not withstanding the obvious political calculations that came along with the decision, his move was a courageous and truly historic gesture befitting the expectations that came along with his ascendancy to the presidency.
The cultural waters in terms of gay rights continue to move and shift in profound and irreversible ways.

I see this as well in the religious communities that I am part of. Recently, my friend Bowie Snodgrass, who is one of the executive directors of the excellent Interfaith community Faith House here in Manhattan, presented a sampling of the liturgy, song, and scripture she and others in the Episcopal Church have been developing for a same-gender blessings marriage ceremony. (For more information, click here to visit the Episcopal Church’s “Same-Gender Blessings Project”)

Still, within my own tradition (the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition of Hinduism), and within its contemporary cultural expressions, I feel a certain hesitancy to be so supportive of gay rights. Within my own heart and conviction, there is no conflict. But I wonder how I will be perceived by my immediate and extended religious community. Nevertheless, I use this platform on The Huffington Post to bring this conflict into a brighter light, because I think it is part of the larger question of establishing and defining the relevancy of my tradition in the world today.

It is an unfortunate aspect of my experience within the Vaisnava tradition that I have experienced prejudice towards the gay community. Some of this prejudice has been overt, some of it simply a matter of cultural conditioning and unfamiliarity, but in either case, it has always made me quite uncomfortable. I had many gay and lesbian friends when I was an undergrad at the University of Michigan. I imagine I will have many gay and lesbian friends when I began grad school at Union Theological Seminary in the fall. I am naturally comfortable with people of this sexual persuasion, because of the simple fact that, beyond sexual preference, I see no difference between them and me.
Therefore when I encounter prejudice against gay people and gay culture, even if it is not with the intent of malice, it feels abhorrent in the fiber of my being and spirituality.

I feel comforted knowing there are many people of faith who feel the same way I do, and who are trying to come to grips and understand why the prejudice of homophobia can never be supported in any kind of genuine spiritual way. As always, I look to support from the timeless scriptures of the Vedas, the fount of universal wisdom. For example, in the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna states:

The humble sages, by virtue of true knowledge, see with equal vision a learned and gentle brāhmaṇa, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a dog-eater (outcaste).

From this passage we understand a very elevated spiritual principle that calls out to our everyday experience. The fact of the matter is that prejudice of any kind has no spiritual foundation. We are called as spiritual people to apply the principles of equality, and to understand how these principles of equality can be applied in the secular world in a common-sense way, so that people do not unnecessarily suffer because of who they are, and so they can be encouraged to understand their real spiritual nature, beyond any conceptions of the physical body.
One may make an argument that gay marriage is not supported by scripture or tradition, but is homophobia ever supported by scripture or tradition? Forgive my ignorance per se if this kind of prejudicial support exists, but even within the scriptural evidence of Hindu antiquity there is plenty to support a nuanced and inclusive culture towards people of same-sex persuasion. To explore such an example, I suggest taking some time to read an excerpt from the book “Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex-Understanding Homosexuality, Transgender Identity and Intersex Conditions Through Hinduism” by Amara Das Wilhelm, which is available at the website of GALVA (The Gay And Lesbian Vaisnava Association).

In his book, Wilhelm explores the reality of the “third sex” (tritiya-prakriti) and its various permutations as we know them today in the LGBTQ community. He reveals how individuals of the “third sex” naturally fit into traditional Hindu/Vedic culture, and how they were not excluded from traditional social customs like marriage and religious customs as well. It was an enlightening read for me, and I imagine it might be for you as well.

In future editions of this blog, I want to continue to explore the issue of prejudice against the LGBTQ community within my own tradition, and how these issues relate to and expand outwards within the spiritual quilt of our humanity. I do no want to shy away from this conflict as I see it, even if it brings upon me misunderstandings and doubts from others.

Follow Chris Fici on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@ChrisFici

A Hindu Response to Gay Rights
→ Life Comes From Life

From the Religion section at The Huffington Post

The humble sages, by virtue of true knowledge, see with equal vision a learned and gentle brāhmaṇa, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a dog-eater (outcaste).

Follow Chris Fici on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@ChrisFici

IChant: The Ultimate App
→ Life Comes From Life

From Elephant Journal

Genius is a multifaceted jewel. It has many rough edges, and it doesn’t care for any mundane norms or compromises.

The package that genius is wrapped in doesn’t necessarily belie what is within but it is the duty of time to reveal that this genius— in whatever forms it takes—speaks to our body, mind and soul in many profound and challenging ways.

I think Steve Jobs was a genius. Of course the nature of Jobs’s character and his integrity as a person are quite complicated. History will see him as the “poster boy” for the troubled, difficult persona of the genius. History will also reveal that, as he expressed it to his biographer Walter Isaacson, his feeling that he follows in a line of innovators that includes Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein, was not mere hyperbole. His influence on our cultural expressions, on our connectivity and communication, and in the ways we define ourselves as biological beings in an increasingly technological world is already immense and will only grow more so.

Being a spiritual seeker, my obligation is to see the glass more than half-full when I examine the nature of such a complex and powerful personality. The Bhagavad Gita tells us that the truly wise person sees everyone on a spiritual level, beyond the body-mind construct which is the general source of all our foibles and follies. While being very clear and honest about the dark side of Steve Jobs, still I can’t help but appreciate the honest sincerity of his ambition, his own spiritual leanings and his desire to create a legacy of ideas and products that speaks to the best of human creativity at the intersection of technology and aesthetics.

What particularly strikes me about him was his attitude towards design. An early slogan of Apple was that “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” This mirrors a saying from my own Hindu tradition, echoed by such great teachers as Mahatma Gandhi and bhakti-yoga pioneer A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, of “simple living and high thinking.” The idea is that only when we simplify, when we clear away the dust that only complicates the obvious truth, will we be able to discover the presence of enlightenment within ourselves and all around us.

In Walter Isaacson’s excellent Jobs biography, Jonny Ive—Jobs’s confidante and core designer during Apple’s incredible renaissance of the last decade— shares his take on this philosophy of simplicity:

Why do we assume simple is good?….Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple you have to go really deep.

We now reap the benefits of this philosophy in so many interesting ways in our lives. Our personal computers, tablets, phones and our whole conscious existence are full of these little apps that connect us and push us and inform us in ways that deftly ride along the balance of aesthetic and technology that so inspired Jobs’s overall vision.

What exactly is an app? To put it roughly, it is a little program which shapes our daily life in a particular way. We can just see it for what it apparently is, a bit of cutting-edge technology. But I want to go a little bit further, into the depth of complexity, to shine a different light of definition on this whole idea of the app.

Disclaimer: Reading the bio of Jobs and also being the recent purchaser of a wonderful, sturdy, fast and sleek Macbook Pro, I have the inklings of having become an Apple cultist. Some of the feelings are not entirely dissimilar to my spiritual practice, for both give one the sense of a particular worldview. That is why, as I was walking through New York City recently, meditating on my prayer beads, I was struck by the idea that the mantra I was chanting was also like an app and how it was the best app I had in my life.

Krishna and Radha

My spiritual practice revolves around the chanting of the maha-mantra, which is part of the Bhakti (devotional) path of Hinduism. The mantra features three names of the Divine, of God, as known in the Bhakti tradition: Krishna (the masculine aspect of the Divine), Hare (the feminine aspect of the Divine), and Rama (the pleasure reservoir of the Divine). The whole mantra goes like this:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare

Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare

The maha-mantra is, in one sense, a tool in the toolbox of apps that is part of my daily existence as a spirit in the material world. But in the ultimate sense it is so much more. By chanting this mantra, we are taken through the depth of complexity of our own being, allowing us to see and transcend all the illusions that we carry in our consciousness. We come to the simple core of our being, as eternal souls in a loving relationship with God.

While my Weather Channel app can give me a grasp of my environment, and my IBooks Author app can help let loose a real dose of my productive creativity, my maha-mantra app helps me to understand who I really am, at the deepest level of my being. This is an app whose substance is entirely spiritual and which helps me to understand that the substance of my being is also entirely spiritual. It is the ultimate app to me because it contains the essence of all divinity.

By chanting the names of God—because these names are non-different from the substance of God—one’s being comes directly in touch with God. By being in contact with the vibration of God the dust of the heart, or all of the chains which keep us stuck in the vagaries of our ego, is removed. It is a very simple practice of meditation on sound vibration, yet what can be more sophisticated and wonderful than the presence of God?

It is the ultimate app because it is available to everyone, for free, at all times and is not at all contingent on one’s skin color, sexuality, political preference, or whether one is even spiritually qualified to practice it. One doesn’t have to be a Hindu to chant the maha-mantra. It enhances any kind of spiritual search because it is a universal app. It connects one to the source, the powerhouse of reality, and is inclusive of everyone.

It is the ultimate app because it’s fully open-source. It can be transmitted to anyone at any time. Whatever the technology of your being, of your personality, the maha-mantra fits into the system of your life.

It is the ultimate app because, being of eternal spiritual substance, it never breaks down, and it never needs an upgrade. It’s always in style, and it’s always available.

There have been calls for a “spiritual Steve Jobs” to appear, to innovate some of the rusted structures of spirituality. I can certainly agree with this sentiment in many ways, but it is essential to remember that real change begins within our own heart. The maha-mantra is a tool, a spiritualized lifestyle app, which allows us to come to the core of the real innovation and creativity of our true being.

In the Bhakti tradition it is said that everyone has the responsibility to become a teacher, a guide, a selfless sharer of the essence they are finding. Understanding the real tools, the real apps, of our spiritual life and seeing their immense value in our daily life can help us to become givers of the Divine, of God’s reality. It can bring us to the simplicity of our being, and allow us to give the ultimate sophistication.

IChant: The Ultimate App
→ Life Comes From Life

From Elephant Journal

Genius is a multifaceted jewel. It has many rough edges, and it doesn’t care for any mundane norms or compromises.

Why do we assume simple is good?….Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple you have to go really deep.

Krishna and Radha

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare

Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare

It is the ultimate app because, being of eternal spiritual substance, it never breaks down, and it never needs an upgrade. It’s always in style, and it’s always available.

Occupy Wall Street: Don’t Dehumanize The ‘Evil Banker’
→ Life Comes From Life

From the “Occupy Wall Street” section at The Huffington Post As a spiritual person, I have felt aloof from the Occupy Wall Street movement. I have thought about this aloofness a great deal, spoken and dialogued about it, and written about it, but I …

Occupy Wall Street: Don’t Dehumanize The ‘Evil Banker’
→ Life Comes From Life

Why Being a Hindu Has Made Me a Better Catholic
→ Life Comes From Life

My debut piece at the Huffington Post

I recently took a pilgrimage to Corpus Christi Church on 121st Street off of Broadway, here in New York City. This is where Thomas Merton, the great Catholic monk/mystic/author, was baptized, formally beginning a spiritual journey which has captivated and inspired millions of truth-seekers over the past few generations, myself included.

It was a special enough moment to be there, but a certain deeper resonance came as I stepped back out into the street, as I suddenly saw my past, present and future all before me. My past, raised in the Catholic tradition by my family in Detroit, as represented by Corpus Christi Church and Merton, faced me in my present situation, as an aspiring Hindu minister in New York City. I turned to my left to see the potentiality of my future, as represented by Union Theological Seminary, where I am currently applying, and where I hope to find an experience to harmonize my spiritual aspirations with my concern to be a servant to create justice in the world.

I was reminded that we owe a tremendous debt to that which has shaped us, to those who have helped to form us. We can forget this so easily, when the cult of our own individuality oversteps its boundaries. I was once again reminded that what I appreciate most of all in my own spiritual journey is gaining a greater and more loving acceptance of where I have come from, from the sacred roots of my family.

The Catholic faith of my youth planted within me the seeds to seek the truth. Now the tables have turned, as my experience of the incredible vistas of Hindu theology and practice has turned a shining light back to where I was before. In fact, I see that where I was before is very much the same as I am now. My Hindu faith has made me a better Christian.

Even as a child, the stories and wisdom I received in church and in catechism spoke to me of a profound yet simple reality: God is a person who knows and loves me dearly and deeply, and that I am also a person who can return that love in a very personal and unique way.

As I began to study the great Bhagavad-Gita, I found out that my seemingly childish impression of a personal and loving God was not actually so. It was steeped in the deepest truth. The theology of the Gita is immense and all-inclusive. The reality of the Divine is explained in three ways: God is His all-pervasive, transpersonal essence, the guide or conscience within our heart, and also a distinct individual. It is His unique personal feature which the Gita describes as being the preeminent of these three aspects.

The Gita climaxes with this passage, in which Krishna, the original Personality of God as described in Hinduism, tells his friend Arjuna that:

Always think of Me, become My devotee, worship Me and offer your homage unto Me. Thus you will come to Me without fail. I promise you this because you are My very dear friend.

I remember hearing, as a child, that God was always with me, seeing what I was doing, understanding my heart. There was never a moment where I felt threatened by this. Instead, I simply felt like I had a dear friend who would always be with me, and who would always help me, and whom I felt I could love in return. As I entered into the Bhakti faith I began to experience this simple reality in all its depth.
The path of Bhakti which I follow is a system of connection, or yoga, with God, based on the idea of loving, devotional service. Real devotional service is the giving of one’s body, mind, and words to the service of God. In the Bhakti-rasamrta-sindhu, a classical 16th century devotional treatise, we read that:

“When first-class devotional service develops, one must be devoid of all material desires, knowledge obtained by monistic philosophy, and fruitive action. The devotee must constantly serve Kṛṣṇa favorably, as Kṛṣṇa desires.”

The Hindu diaspora is filled with examples of such fidelity, including A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, who braved the rigors of old age to bring the Bhakti tradition to the West at the age of 70 in 1965. In my exploration of my Christian roots, I come across the same mood in St. Francis of Assisi, who understood very deeply that to truly serve means to be an instrument of God. St. Francis wrote that:

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive

It is in St. Francis’s particular example that I understand that Bhakti is not exclusive to any one path or faith. Bhakti means devotion, love, surrender to the will of God. My own understanding of it as a practicing Hindu helps me to see its reality as the foundation of my Christian heritage as well.
As I pray and meditate and call God’s names, it takes me into the memory of the examples before me, of my great-aunt chanting the rosary with daily and deep devotion in the living room of my childhood home, and of my grandfather taking to the Detroit airwaves in his youth to say the rosary as well.

These connections, sacred and sustaining to me, is where I really feel I have become a better Christian through my Hindu practice. It has allowed me to honor a desire in my family to carry forward a torch of devotion to God that transcends any cultural boundaries or differences.

Without the grace and knowledge I have received in my practice and life as a Hindu minister, I would not be able to approach my heritage as a Christian in such a meaningful way. This reality leaves me with a grateful heart, and a desire to go deeper into this harmony, to honor where I have come from, where I am now, and where I am meant to go.

Why Being a Hindu Has Made Me a Better Catholic
→ Life Comes From Life

My debut piece at the Huffington Post

The Gita climaxes with this passage, in which Krishna, the original Personality of God as described in Hinduism, tells his friend Arjuna that:

Always think of Me, become My devotee, worship Me and offer your homage unto Me. Thus you will come to Me without fail. I promise you this because you are My very dear friend.

“When first-class devotional service develops, one must be devoid of all material desires, knowledge obtained by monistic philosophy, and fruitive action. The devotee must constantly serve Kṛṣṇa favorably, as Kṛṣṇa desires.”

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved, as to love. For it is in giving that we receive

The Heart of Mantra Meditation
→ Life Comes From Life

Prayer Beads

One of my favorite passages in the Bhagavad-gītā is where Krishna, the personification of the Divine, tells his stricken warrior friend Arjuna that:

For him who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his mind will remain the greatest enemy. (Chapter 6, Verse 6)

Of all the pearls of wisdom we try to teach our students at our Gita Circle student club at New York University, this is one passage that really seems to stick out in a very visceral, practical way. The Gita is a book of everyday reasoning, a treatise of spiritual technology designed to help us take a step back from the world in order to engage with it further, as the great sages from the Himalayas to Walden Pond did for many ages before we tread upon this world.

Nowhere is this reasoning more intensely felt when we stop our everyday scheming and dreaming to ask some pertinent questions: What is my mind? How does it work? How does it exist? Why does it seem unable to focus when I need it to? Who is the “I” that is observing the mind? Our mind is more powerful, and with a much deeper memory than any visionary device from the labs at Apple or Google. It is considered the “sixth sense”, intimately linked to how the rest of our senses interact and respond, for better or for worse, to the physical reality that surrounds us.

As our students at NYU also experience, when we meditate together, we are instantly confronted with the fact that the mind prefers to be in an adversarial position. Even to just focus simply our breath for a few moments at a time in a tremendous endeavor.

Arjuna, in the Gita, agrees when he says:

The mind is restless, turbulent, obstinate and very strong, O Krsna, and to subdue it, I think, is more difficult than controlling the wind.

Krishna, while trying to present the true reality of our bodily and mental nature as clearly as possible in the Gita, is also trying to show us that we can transcend this nature into the actuality of our being as spirit, so he responds to Arjuna’s plea by saying:

O mighty-armed son of Kuntī, it is undoubtedly very difficult to curb the restless mind, but it is possible by suitable practice and by detachment.

The wisdom texts of the Bhakti tradition have a specific and compassionate design to help us access this suitable practice and detachment, in the form of a specific style of meditation using mantra. Many of us are familiar with this word, but not as much as with its actual meaning. Contemporary Bhakti scholar Stephen Knapp explains:

Man means the mind, tra means deliverance. Therefore, a spiritual mantra is the pure sound vibration for delivering the mind from material to spiritual consciousness. This is the goal of any spiritual path.

The Bhakti tradition of the Gita recommends the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra (Hare Krishna/Hare Krishna/Krishna Krishna/Hare Hare/Hare Rama/Hare Rama/Rama Rama/Hare Hare), which is known as the maha-mantra (“great chant for deliverance”). This mantra consists of three names of the Divine: Hare (the feminine aspect of the Divine), Krishna (the all-attractive aspect of the Divine), and Rama (the pleasure reservoir of the Divine).

Just by resounding the vibrations of these names within one’s body, mind, and heart, one comes into contact with the Divine, with God, who is not different from His/Her holy names. Chanting mantras engages so many of our faculties, from our hands delicately handling our prayer beads to our voices soaring in the musical chanting of these mantras, also known as kirtan.

This is something I do every day (quite early in the day, befitting my monk lifestyle) in a consistent timeframe and manner, which gives me fuel to swim the upstream tide of spiritual life in the material world. Paul McCartney said that meditation to him was akin to brushing one’s teeth, in that he couldn’t imagine going without it. I certainly agree with that but I know as well the intention behind meditation must go deeper.

The chanting of mantras allows us, as we learn to focus, control, and harness the power of our mind for spiritual good, to gain access to these deeper benefits of meditation. By chanting the Hare Krishna mantra, for example, we gain access to the heart of the reality of our being, as spirit soul seeking to return to our eternal loving relationship with God.

Truly, meditation is meant to bring us to this reality, and while we can certainly enjoy and prosper from the stress relief and mental growth we get from our practice, we should always be striving for the divine love that is within us, which allows us to fully connect to God and to all life around us.

Chris Fici is a writer/teacher/monk in the bhakti-yoga tradition. He has been practicing at the Bhaktivedanta Ashram at the Bhakti Center in New York City since 2009. After receiving a degree in film studies at the University of Michigan, Chris began his exploration and study of the bhakti tradition. He currently teaches classes on the culture and art of vegetarian cooking, as well as the living philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, at New York University and Columbia University.

The Heart of Mantra Meditation
→ Life Comes From Life

Prayer Beads

One of my favorite passages in the Bhagavad-gītā is where Krishna, the personification of the Divine, tells his stricken warrior friend Arjuna that:

For him who has conquered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his mind will remain the greatest enemy. (Chapter 6, Verse 6)

Arjuna, in the Gita, agrees when he says:

The mind is restless, turbulent, obstinate and very strong, O Krsna, and to subdue it, I think, is more difficult than controlling the wind.

O mighty-armed son of Kuntī, it is undoubtedly very difficult to curb the restless mind, but it is possible by suitable practice and by detachment.

The Regulative Principles of Freedom
→ Life Comes From Life

The Vedic spiritual tradition, as magnificently manifested in the Bhagavat Purana, the volume of stories, fables, and lessons from the life of Krishna, the Divine Personality of God, and His followers and friends, tells us of the exceptional position of human life. In the apparatus of our human form, our body-mind-intelligence-soul framework, we have the opportunity to realize the deepest meaning and reality of our own individual self, and the meaning and reality of our relationship with God.

According to the Vedas, other life forms, the animals and plants we share this world with, do not have this same opportunity. I have noticed that to exclude the birds and bees from a life of enlightenment is a matter of fierce debate, but the science of self-realization does not run merely on the engine of instinct. The eminent Vedic sage and scholar Swami Prabhupada writes in his translation of the Bhagavat Purana that:

Animals in bodies lower than that of the human being are conscious only as far as their bodily distress and happiness are concerned; they cannot think of more than their bodily necessities of life-eating, sleeping, mating and defending. But in the human form of life, by the grace of God, the consciousness is so developed that a man can evaluate his exceptional position and thus realize the self and the Supreme Lord.1

This is where we come to an even stickier point. To run beyond our feral instincts means to understand the power of our mind and senses, and to be able to actually harness the power of our mind and senses. It is a matter of control, of discipline.

Swami Prabhupada also writes in the Bhagavat Purana:

By controlling the senses, or by the process of yoga regulation, one can understand the position of his self, the Supersoul, the world and their interrelation; everything is possible by controlling the senses.2

Spiritual life becomes very meaningful when we understand the blessings that discipline can bring into our consciousness. In the Bhagavad-gītā, Krishna explains that the mind can be either our best friend, or our worst enemy. One doesn’t have to be yearning for divinity to understand this in a very visceral and practical way. Krishna then goes on to describe certain “regulative principles of freedom”3 which allow us to be no longer held hostage by our uncontrolled minds and senses.

Followers of the bhakti tradition, from monks like myself to those who are married together, attempt to honor and hold four main regulative principles to enhance our spiritual experience. First, we are vegetarian (and vegan, if we so choose), avoiding all meat, eggs, and fish to uphold the sacred principle of ahimsa, or non-violence, which is essential to spiritual development. Second, we avoid intoxication, even caffeine and tobacco, in order to clarify and purify our vision and thought.

Third, we do not gamble or speculate, in order to avoid falling into the various illusory traps that greed may offer us. Lastly, we only practice sex in marriage, and mainly for the procreation of children, in order to defend the sacred nature of sexuality, and not allow it to be degraded into a matter of selfish lust, which can destroy any spiritual aspirations we may have.

All this talk of regulations and discipline can leave one a little hesitant, one foot in, one foot out. Discipline has fallen out of fashion in our post-post-modern world. Whereas in previous generations it was seen as a rite of passage, or even as a fashion and calling (look at the strictness and sacrifice of the American peoples supporting the war effort in World War II as an example), now it is seen as a perversion of our natural desires, of our very striving for freedom.

I hope you may be able to see from my explanation of the regulative principles that we follow in the bhakti tradition how the case is actually the opposite. Without some consideration of the power of our instincts, and a practice thereof to control and harness this power, what we may call “freedom” is actually a servitude to the negative forces of lust, envy, greed, and pride that are within us and all around us.

Discipline has to be understood beyond its surface impressions in order to see how it gives us spiritual freedom. It is a means to a tremendous end, allowing us and helping us to fully understand our loving relationship with the Divine, with God. As the father of monastic life in the West, St. Benedict describes in his Rule:

Therefore we must establish a school of the Lord’s service; in founding which we hope to ordain nothing that is harsh and burdensome.

But if, for good reason, for the amendment of evil habit or the preservation of charity, there may be some strictness of discipline do not at once be dismayed and run away from the way of salvation, of which the entrance must needs be narrow.

But as we progress in our monastic life and in faith, our hearts shall be enlarged and we shall run with unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God’s commandments.

A firm yet healthy discipline of our body and mind helps to a deeper discipline of will and intention. To discipline our intention means to remove our selfishness. This also is not as black-and-white as it may seem on the surface, for we must also consider what it means to be selfish.

In other parts of the bhakti scriptures, it is described that the key regulative principle, over and above all
others, is to always do what is favorable for the development of one’s devotion to God, and conversely always avoid that which is unfavorable. Selfishness is that which focuses the power of our will and intention solely on the pleasure and well-being of our own self, as if we are the center of the universe, rather on the pleasure and well-being of God and all of our living brothers and sisters in this world.

There is a certain risk to be walked through here, in that if we are striving to stifle our negative selfish tendencies, we may actually go too far in the opposite direction, and lose touch with the actual needs of our self, with the ambitions we hold which can still carry us running towards God if we know how to utilize them properly.

Swami Prabhupada further explains:

Real self-realization by means of controlling the senses is explained herein. One should try to see the Supreme Personality of Godhead and one’s own self also.4

Our relationship with God is a two-way street. We are interested to know God fully, and He is interested to know us fully, and to help us offer the very best that we can to Him. It is our sacred duty to participate in this relationship, and it is a very healthy and mature attitude to always be exploring how we can best offer our talents and aspirations the very best of ourselves, to God, insuring we find the deepest fulfillment we can find as seekers and students of the Divine.

As I look forward into my own life, throwing off a certain sense of naivete and inertia, looking towards academic, social, and Interfaith opportunities to imbibe and expand Prabhupada’s mission in New York City in whatever humble way I see fit, I carry a determination to know who I am, for better and for worse. We can’t avoid, as we develop our sincere spiritual ambitions, the weeds in the garden of our heart which blur and corrupt these ambitions.

Our spiritual journey is meant to guide us into and beyond our lower nature, but not through evasion and aversion, but through a courageous and honest engagement with the loving support of our fellow community of seekers.

To come out the other side, into the best of our self that we can offer to God, we must allow the discipline we voluntarily impose on our body and mind to help also discipline our intention. What is that discipline of intention? To keep everything do wrapped in the spirit of service. As we develop the unique facets of our personal offering to God, we must keep this foundation strong in order to prevent us from wandering back into the deserts of our selfishness.

Discipline is, at its essence, an art of focus, of revelation of the best that we carry, not merely the denial of the worst we hide from ourselves and others. The principles we follow, spiritually and otherwise, to regulate our consciousness and its intention, give us a freedom that is not temporary and not relative, that is not material. It gives us the enlightenment which is our most natural instinct, and also the opportunity to give a humble yet powerful example to help others rise above.

1http://vedabase.com/en/sb/3/31/19

2http://vedabase.com/en/sb/3/31/19

3http://vedabase.com/en/bg/2/64

4http://vedabase.com/en/sb/3/31/19

The Regulative Principles of Freedom
→ Life Comes From Life

Swami Prabhupada also writes in the Bhagavat Purana:

Therefore we must establish a school of the Lord’s service; in founding which we hope to ordain nothing that is harsh and burdensome.

But as we progress in our monastic life and in faith, our hearts shall be enlarged and we shall run with unspeakable sweetness of love in the way of God’s commandments.

Swami Prabhupada further explains:

Real self-realization by means of controlling the senses is explained herein. One should try to see the Supreme Personality of Godhead and one’s own self also.4

1http://vedabase.com/en/sb/3/31/19

2http://vedabase.com/en/sb/3/31/19

3http://vedabase.com/en/bg/2/64

4http://vedabase.com/en/sb/3/31/19

Eco-Ethics
→ Life Comes From Life

A new essay, based on a lecture from Varsana Swami, published at Elephant Journal

In 1965, teacher and scholar A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami transplanted the culture of Bhakti, or the yoga of devotion, from its roots in the ancient culture of India to the Western world.

Bhaktivedanta Swami was “ahead of his time” in the realm of living ecology. A few years before the modern ecological movement found its ground, Bhaktivedanta Swami was teaching his young students the ideal of “simple living and high thinking.” He encouraged them to break out of their industrialized and technological conditioning of mass consumption to return to a less complicated way of being, in order to free the mind for spiritual enlightenment. His students imbibed his audacity, starting farm communities in the model of the Vedic village culture in numerous places across North America, Europe, Africa, South America, Australia, and back to India.

They understood that what they were trying to do was, in a sense, both revolutionary yet eternal. The spiritual ecology and culture of the Bhakti tradition and of the Vedas is nothing new, yet to understand its precepts could bring profound auspicious change to our human condition, and to our increasingly fragile relationship with our Mother Earth.

We stand on the cusp of an abyss. We can see, with the correct lens of vision, that our collective reliance on machine and industry, on hardware and software, on an exploitative relationship with Mother Earth, has created the prospect of a total collapse of the comforts and easy access to resources that we take for granted.

Over the last forty years — beginning from the crystallized aesthetic beauty of the famous “Blue Marble” picture of our Mother Earth taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17 — we have come to understand that we all share the same planet, the same air, the same soil. We carry within us the strong, yet mostly unconscious inkling, that the Earth is our collective mother and our collective psyche.

The degree of our forgetfulness of this is the degree of pain we now all share at the breaking of our symbiosis with the planet which shelters us, nurtures us, and gives us everything she has. What would we do if the fragile relationship we have left with Mother Earth shattered?

What would we do if the chain of easy flow and access to the consumer goods and resources we take for granted broke down?

In an article by Mike Adams at Natural News, (How Fragile We Are: Why The Complexity of Modern Civilization Threatens Us All) the author bluntly states:

“ There is almost no slack in the systems that deliver your food, fuel, electricity, water or consumer products. That means if something goes wrong, even for a little while, you’ll need to depend on yourself to provide these things. Yet how many people have the ability to provide all these essentials for themselves — disconnected from the grid — for even as little as one weekend?   Few, it turns out.

They have unknowingly bet their lives on the reliability of just-in-time delivery systems and complex infrastructure interdependencies. When the water stops flowing, or the electricity goes off, or the gasoline runs out, they literally will have no idea what to do.”

We must also understand that this problem cannot be inherently solved by the same mechanisms that created it. Technology and science cannot be assumed to be the cure for the same problems they caused. Contemporary philosopher John Gray has written:

“Science is a tool for problem-solving…but it has this peculiarity, that when it is most successful it creates new problems, some of which are insoluble. This is an unpopular conclusion, and it is not only those who believe technology can overcome mortality that resist it. So do Greens who support renewable technologies and sustainable development. If humans have caused climate change, Greens insist, humans can also stop it.”

This is not to say that we should abandon the innovation and enthusiasm to create scientific and technical tools which can help to reverse the tide, but Gray suggests that we not exclusively worship at the same altar to the same gods who gave us what we asked for.

There is another ingredient to be added to the recipe for solution which we must consider, which is our inherent divinity.

We must go to the ground of our being, to the level of our consciousness, our thought patterns, our actions, our aspirations, our desires, to the engine of our inner psyche, towards our soul and towards God, to understand why we do what we do, and to understand why we have chosen exploitation instead of integration, dissonance instead of harmony, affluenza instead of illumination, in our sacred relationship with Mother Earth.

This platform of consciousness, where we can understand our relationship with the Divine, with God, is where we can properly begin to understand the reality of true eco-ethics. Eco-ethics is the proper protocol of thought, action, obligation, and responsibility between organisms and their collective shared environment or ecology.

Any purely materialistic angle of vision of approach to eco-ethics will reach its limitations unless we include the perspective of universal, divine wisdom. This wisdom, or dharma, is from the transcendent realm, well beyond even this material world, yet intrinsically pervading our individual and collective consciousness. Dharma is the codices and well-worn common-sense which allows us to understand our intrinsic spiritual nature, and our link to God through understanding our function and duty as beings in relation to universal law.

The key aspect of dharma in Vedic theology revolves around actualizing the full nature of our personality and our relationships. The core concept of dharma is known as sanatana-dharma, which describes the constitutional nature of our soul in the mood of loving service or devotion (Bhakti) to God, creating an all-inclusive matrix that takes in and fulfills the obligations of our relationship to family, society, humanity, and our ecology.

Those who understand the Earth as our Mother, and who really value that relationship in their heart and in their actions, approach our crisis and its potential solutions from the heart of this universal dharma, which extends across all spiritual cultures. This relationship is not to be understood in any kind of purely mythological or vapid manner. Instead, the theology of Vedic culture explains the link between our actions, and what the Earth is divinely inspired to give us.

This science of action revolves around the culture of selfless action in the mood of sacrifice. Sacrifice, in its purest form, means to give up something in order to please someone else, which is the essence and heart of all real relationships, and the heart of the Bhakti tradition, in which one tries to offer all of the fruits of one’s efforts to please God.

It is the great blessing of our Mother Earth in that she wants to give her gifts to us in order that we may offer them in return to God who has supplied her with her natural bounty.

Photo: Just Karen

When this cycle of receptivity, abundance, and sacrifice is fully adhered to, harmony in our ecology is fixed. The temple of our personal and collective mind, body, and soul stands strong. She is happy to provide for everyone, if everyone is utilizing her gifts properly. This traditional model of agriculture meant that, on the natural level, everything that came from the Earth went back into the Earth. This is the true synchronicity of God’s arrangement.

Any organic farmer can experience this, using manure as organic fertilizer for example. What is the contrast? What goes back into the Earth through factory farm agriculture? Blood meal, bone meal, and chemical fertilizers, all boons of the so-called “Green Revolution.” We also have synthetic nitrogen, which comes from petroleum, saturating much of our valuable soil, killing the needed microrganisms in the earth, which then creates the need for more and more chemicals to get more and more yield from the dying soil.

The classic Vedic text Mahabharata tells us that agriculture is the most noble of occupations. That we have lost sense of this, speaking from the perspective of my own experience and my own generation, is a painful knot in the heart.

I do not want to generalize here, but a personal anecdote may suffice. I spent the better part of two years at a Bhakti community in the hills of West Virginia, living as a monk, and one of my services was to assist with our organic gardening projects. I began with great enthusiasm, until the degree of effort and hard work required hit me like a ton of bricks. I relayed my difficulty to resident sage Varsana Swami, who had spent decades at this project creating the natural infrastructure, and he said that my experience was not uncommon.

He had seen many people come to work and serve there with a sense of romanticism towards the tilling of the land, and he came to see that this romanticism was not a sustainable fuel for the sacrifice that was really needed to gain access to the integrity and determination needed to give life to the land. I took this to heart in my own experience and it was a harsh lesson for me to learn, but it is one I strive to deeply imbibe and carry within me to purify my heart, so that I may be able to understand and participate in the true nobility of the community of real agriculture, on the material and spiritual level.

This sublime culture has two pillars at its core: the culture of brahminical knowledge and the protection of one of the most dynamic living beings we share this planet with, the cow. At its core, brahminical culture means knowing the difference between matter and spirit, between our eternal nature as souls and our temporary situation in these material bodies, and living our lives in an according way to actualize that knowledge.

The cow, also one of our dear mothers, helps to give all the essential gifts of proper sacrifice and offering to the Divine. Ayurvedic science tells us that milk, particularly in its natural, raw, unpasteurized state, is a tremendous boon for physical health. It also helps to develop the finer tissues of the brain, which are conducive to the development of deeper spiritual understanding.[1] The cow’s masculine counterpart, the bull/ox, was primarily responsible for tilling the land in traditional Vedic culture.

It was this abandonment (and eventual exploitation) of the cow, bull, and ox, and the conversion to tractor power which played a large part in ruining traditional local farm economies in India, America, and across the globe. Eventually from this, multinational corporations could co-opt the chain of command as to how we ate and what we grew.

Most of the foodstuffs we mainly have access to in our local shops come from California and other far-flung places. Having the food supply in the hands of big agribusiness creates, by and large, a situation of exploitation. The sacred relationship and the nobility of agriculture becomes long lost.

Because the sacred art of agriculture always returns us to the essence of relationships, to the knowledge that we are inter-dependent on others, from our fellow earthlings, from the mercy of God, for our sustenance, we get a sense of its magnanimous heart. Agriculture encourages cooperation, whereas technology and industry tend to encourage competition. The nature of competition, and the envy it produces, is destructive to the relationship between the individual and the whole. It encourages the perversion of selfishness, that the whole should be serving the parts.

Real health is when the parts are serving the whole-serving the root of everything material and spiritual, giving one’s love to God and being imparted from Him the art and actions of love and compassion.

Understanding our predicament from a spiritual perspective begins at the level of desire. We confuse our legitimate needs with our illegitimate desires. We are conditioned to believe that material prosperity is the only route to happiness in this world. Real prosperity, guided by the light of transcendent eco-ethics, means access to wisdom, health, and real progress towards the goal of life, the re-establishment of our loving relationship with God through self-realization.

God has created a perfect synergy for us to have access to. He is deeply pleased when we cooperate and sacrifice together. Our efforts combine to create a conduit for His mercy, to create an abundance that truly sustains us. We want to feel that we are part of something greater than ourselves. If we can develop our relationship to this Divine arrangement, to the Earth as our mother, goddess, and supreme teacher, through gratitude, humility, and prayer, she will help us to understand and open our heart to our relationship with the Divine, to become channels of real change in this world, unfolding the solution in every step we take.

Sources:
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=milk+finer+brain+tissues&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Eco-Ethics
→ Life Comes From Life

A new essay, based on a lecture from Varsana Swami, published at Elephant Journal

In 1965, teacher and scholar A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami transplanted the culture of Bhakti, or the yoga of devotion, from its roots in the ancient culture of India to the Western world.

What would we do if the chain of easy flow and access to the consumer goods and resources we take for granted broke down?

In an article by Mike Adams at Natural News, (How Fragile We Are: Why The Complexity of Modern Civilization Threatens Us All) the author bluntly states:

There is another ingredient to be added to the recipe for solution which we must consider, which is our inherent divinity.

It is the great blessing of our Mother Earth in that she wants to give her gifts to us in order that we may offer them in return to God who has supplied her with her natural bounty.

Photo: Just Karen

Sources:
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=milk+finer+brain+tissues&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

The Strange Art of Relationships, Part 3
→ Life Comes From Life

I have been trying to relate some of my own realizations, for better or for worse, on the strange art of relationships. This is perhaps the most difficult of the arts to grasp, for we are speaking of hearts full of hopes and wounds and ideals …

The Strange Art of Relationships, Part 3
→ Life Comes From Life

The Strange Art of Relationships, Part 2
→ Life Comes From Life

Continuing from our previous meditation on the strange art of relationships, let me humbly offer some straight dope. There is no way we can avoid conflict in our relationships, nor should we want to avoid conflict. Without conflict, our relationships will never grow and flower fully into the deep, sacred love that is at the essence of our shared affection and experiences together.

One of the key points we established last time was the need to understand and be in full touch with our conscience. Our conscience is our tool and our guide to the proper processing of our conflicts. Swami Prabhupada deftly defines one key element of our conscience as being able to understand the suffering and happiness of other living entities. This begins when we are in touch with our own suffering and happiness, when we are no longer afraid of our own suffering and happiness.

We walk across the desert of our own heart in order to walk hand-in-hand with those we strive to love in this world and in this life. Let’s go back again to Bhakti Tirtha Swami’s Four Principles of Community Building, particularly principle #2

Anytime there is a problem in a relationship, you should first see it as your own fault. Even if others are to blame, you will only add to the problem by considering them to be at fault.

This is certainly a provocative ideal. That provocation goes to an even deeper level when we step back and consider it from the philosophical perspective of the Bhakti-Yoga tradition, which tells us that when a conflict arises and we feel pain, this pain is a karmic reaction we are receiving. The other person bringing this difficulty into our relationship is understood to be an instrument of our own karma.

I know this doesn’t sound good or taste good. Discussions I’ve had around this idea reveal, on one level, that to place or lay blame at any party in a conflict may not do much to resolve the problem. I can certainly agree with this to an extent, for blame is a very strong word, a very loaded concept. What to speak of karma, which is well beyond anyone’s understanding.

What these principles encourage us to do, if we can look past our surface discomfort and misunderstanding, is to learn the value of taking ownership of our problems. Someone may be fully at fault for a certain conflict. You can objectively look at the particular situation and say “I did nothing here to cause this particular situation to arise. It is all the other’s person fault, totally and truly.” How I understand BT Swami’s principle here is to transcend the objective and return to a deeper look at our own subjective contribution, which is not so obvious.

We may find that the neglect and pain we have given to this person in the past has a direct link to the neglect and pain they are causing us now. In other words, if we are really brave enough to look and to consider, we can see that no conflict lives in a vacuum. Someone who is mistreating us now is simply reacting, consciously or unconsciously, to some mistreatment we have laid upon them in the past.

I’ll give a recent example from my own experience: A few weeks back, I asked one of my fellow monks to cover a service I had for one of our temple’s monthly meditation programs. My friend gave me a genuine response in return: “Let me think about it”, which I instantly construed as being “I don’t want to.” I expressed some instant frustration at the non-committal reply, which later blew up into a full-blown conflict, featuring the shouting out of generalities, irrationalities, and accusations (I did all the shouting too-my fellow monk seems to understand that monastic life should feature a minimum of shouting).

Of course, I had been thinking about the nature of conflict at the same time, and as much as my mind was telling me that I was totally right, and that I had the right to expect everyone to drop what they’re doing and help me at a moment’s whim, I had to go deeper. I could understand then that this particular conflict was a manifestation of other harsh dealings I had had with this monk. His reluctance to help me with my request was rooted in previous episodes where I had not helped him when he asked, and also where I had not expressed my emotions or feelings in a constructive way.

The fact is that he and I have a good relationship, where we can and have shared our intimate struggles and inspirations in ways we don’t normally share with other monks in our monastery. One wrinkle of that for me is that with those I feel closely with, I am more able to express my emotions, one of which is anger.

The silver lining there is that this intimacy in my relationship compels me to closely examine the nature of any conflict I may have with this particular person, and although it’s never comfortable, I have found that this honest introspection, and taking ownership at my own feet when I offend this person, has only made that relationship grow and become more mature.

No physician hesitates to give pain in order to give health, and we must have this mentality to do the needful on our inner journey. Restoring our connection to our conscience, to the presence of the Divine within us, is not easily or cheaply won. To know of, to feel, the suffering and happiness of those we love or strive to love in our life is no small thing. Only when we take ownership of our own suffering and happiness, and its effect on the relationships in our lives, will we learn to connect heart-to-heart.

The winds of conflict are so powerful that unless we have a deep inner core, rooted to God and service to God, our fragile hearts will never survive the contradictions that come when two souls in human form try to understand and love one another in a meaningful way.

The Strange Art of Relationships, Part 2
→ Life Comes From Life

Anytime there is a problem in a relationship, you should first see it as your own fault. Even if others are to blame, you will only add to the problem by considering them to be at fault.

Occupy Yourself
→ Life Comes From Life

My latest essay at the World Faith Blog

Nearly a decade ago, I had the fortune of reading American Holocaust by David Stannard, which detailed the horrific conquest of Native American culture behind the “founding” of America. I found the very framework of my own cultural understanding thrown asunder. I realized that the “American Dream” had been largely birthed from a nightmare of unimaginable proportions.

I felt like I had been lied to, that the real fabric behind all the myths and legends of America was something else entirely that what I had absorbed as a open-minded youth in school. I now wanted to know what the truth really was, what truth really meant, and how to grasp a truth whose meaning would not be elusive or steeped in hypocrisy.

My own search for truth took me through many experiences and personal experiments into social justice and progressive philosophy into the realm of the spiritual, where I now live as a monk of the Hindu tradition in New York City. Yet I feel my journey is far from complete, as the bridge between the spiritual and activist spaces within my mind, heart, and soul feels unwalked to me. I want to know how I, as a monk, as a truth-seeker, with an open heart, can help to effect the kind of change we need in this world which is not ephemeral, which is linked to the eternal.

This disconnect came to the fore for me as I observed the march forward of the Occupy Wall Street movement over the past few months, its nucleus at Zuccotti Park just a short walk from my own monastery. I felt both a great inspiration for the courage and clamor of the huddled masses defying the fortress of inequality, yet I also felt a distance, a certain aloofness. I couldn’t connect, or find a deep personal motivation to become involved, to put my own body on the line.

As a monk, committed as much as I am to the inner spiritual journey, to the revolution of the heart, the realm of the politic feels incomplete without the consideration of the big picture. I am having a hard enough time occupying myself, knowing that unless I rend asunder my own greed, how can I make any impact taking on the forces of avarice that dominate our world? As great as the carnival spirit of OWS was and is, I desire a deeper connection, a clear bridge between our determination and our divinity.

A recent piece by Dylan Ratigan at the Huffington Post, titled “This Thanksgiving, Occupy Yourself”, helped to crystallize some of my own feelings and hopes with our grand new social justice movement. Dylan boldly challenges our own conception of the “villain” in the struggle that we face, asking us to look within the precepts of our own heart and being.

He writes:

I would point to the concept of the villain itself as the villain. For a villain, “the other”, lets us avoid dealing with the dark part that resides in each of us.

We all have dark thoughts — individually and as a nation. Fear, lust, anger, jealousy, deceit drive much of our decision-making. Yet, these are parts of ourselves we run away from. As a society, we have crafted a culture and set of institutional arrangements to deny this part of ourselves. This is why it has taken so long to even admit we have a problem of wealth inequality. It’s the denial of the dark part of ourselves.

But diabolical energy is part of human spirit, because we are dualistic beings. You cannot know honesty without knowing deceit, good cannot exist without evil, and life is not life without death. Our challenge is to reconcile all of these forces as they all exist in each of us. Any institutional arrangement that denies this, that relies on images of perfection bereft of the shadow, will inevitably be dominated by the very forces of that darkness. Namely fear of the shadow, ironically.

He quotes from Deepak Chopra’s The Shadow Effect:

We have been conditioned to fear the shadow side of life and the shadow side of ourselves. When we catch ourselves thinking a dark thought or acting out in a behavior that we feel is unacceptable, we run, just like a groundhog, back into our hole and hide, hoping, praying, it will disappear before we venture out again.

Why do we do this? Because we are afraid that no matter how hard we try, we will never be able to escape from this part of ourselves. And although ignoring or repressing our dark side is the norm, the sobering truth is that running from the shadow only intensiﬁes its power. Denying it only leads to more pain, suffering, regret, and resignation. the shadow will charge, and instead of us being able to have control over it, the shadow winds up having control over us, triggering the shadow effect.

This is a deep, deep spiritual meditation, a call to face the injustice we cause to our own heart, to our own self. It echoes the tradition of the Bhagavad-Gita, which tells us that the only real enemy we face is the vicissitudes of our own mind, and which call for us to find a
radical and progressive forgiveness towards those we hope can change for the better in their thought and action.

It is my fervent hope that by occupying the secret yet potentially sacred spaces in my own heart and mind, with the courage supplied to me by the great souls around me in my monastery and beyond, that I will be able to make a humble contribution to the OWS movement and to all the peoples struggling and striving to fulfill our common destiny as a human family.

If we want to give divine solace to the pain so many people are feeling, not being allowed their inviolable right to the pursuit of happiness, we must learn to face the pain within us, and learn to speak the language of forgiveness and transcendence.

Chris Fici is a writer/teacher/monk of the bhakti-yoga tradition. He has been practicing at the Bhaktivedanta Ashram in New York City since 2009. After receiving a degree in film/video studies at the University of Michigan, Chris began his exploration and study of the bhakti tradition. He currently teaches classes on the culture and art of vegetarian cooking, as well as the living philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, at New York University.

Occupy Yourself
→ Life Comes From Life

My latest essay at the World Faith Blog

He writes:

I would point to the concept of the villain itself as the villain. For a villain, “the other”, lets us avoid dealing with the dark part that resides in each of us.

He quotes from Deepak Chopra’s The Shadow Effect:

Faith House Manhattan Tour Bus: Experience Your Neighbor’s Faith to Deepen Your Own
→ Life Comes From Life

From Samir Selmanovic and Bowie Snodgrass from Faith House Manhattan at the Huffington Post

Click through the slideshow to look at photos from the Faith House Manhattan Tour Bus:

We are coming to a realization that religious zealots cannot be fought with indifference. Extremists of all nationalities and religious persuasion feeding on prejudice, legislating exclusion, and resorting to violence cannot be prevailed upon by people with less passion. Telling them to “cool down” and to “be moderate” will not do it. We must allow fires greater than theirs to arise. Our passion for a whole and interdependent word must rise above their passion for a segregated and zero-sum world.

In Faith House Manhattan, a non-profit inter-religious “community of communities,” we believe that the time of isolated faith is over. We believe that to know who I am, I must also know who you are. For three years now we have hosted more than 60 Living Room gatherings where people can experiences the practices of another religion (or path, including atheism). We invite all to join our “co-laboratory” of interdependence: “Experience your neighbor’s faith, deepen your own.”

Our call is to get radical. Very radical. We hold that in today’s world, religious people have to remap their reality to include — in tension and in gratitude — ‘the other.’ While our ancestors may have fought for independence, ours is the great struggle for interdependence. ‘The other’ is not over there, but all around us. While we have been conceiving of the world in vertical terms (whose party is better, whose institution is larger, whose nation is stronger, whose god is bigger), the world is becoming increasingly horizontal, and wonderfully so. Can we learn to be a part of the whole?

This past year, Faith House started a new program with four religious communities in Manhattan, who were part of a “Tour Bus” with reciprocal visits to each of our main religious gatherings. We brought people together to trespass imaginary boundaries while preserving the real ones. From an experience of worship at a Hindu temple, to a Jewish Shabbat service, to a Sufi Zikr, to midweek “Space for Grace” at a major Protestant church — either as “Interfaith 101″ or an opportunity for seasoned pilgrims to be hosts or guests in their own setting — this seven-week adventure was a unique New York City experience.

One of the participants, Bhakti Center monk and teacher, Chris Fici, summarized the experience this way:

Experience Your Neighbor’s Faith, Deepen Your Own. This is a personal revelation a lot of us have shared recently on the Faith House Bus Tour, as the different sounds, colors, tastes and waves of devotion we have experienced together in our different houses of faith have made a deep communal resonance in our souls.

Too often (at least from my own perspective) our own practice can become caught in the mechanical. Living as a monk, in an intense and insulated environment, I often see how my consciousness during our morning meditation is directed towards how tired I am, or how I might be upset with this monk or that monk. The beautiful essence of our prayers and singing and dancing together remains lost to me.

As I was soaking up the whirling sanctity at our wonderful Bus Tour event at the Dergah of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order, the pain of my own disconnection in my own practice became manifest, and that void was quickly filled by the wonderful and mystical people I saw around me, deeply absorbed in the love and vision of the Divine. I came to realize that what they were experiencing was something I had access to every day, if I chose to. I saw very clearly how we were all pearls on the same thread of God’s mercy. I returned to my own community and practice with a sense of renewal that has stayed with me ever since.

The interfaith experience is very important for me, and I think for all of us as a common human family. The turbulence of our age calls for a communication between peoples of faith that transcends our superficial differences and allows us to drink from the immense well of wisdom God has given us, to give solace and take profound action to help cure our shared ills.

This turbulence also calls from us a tremendous maturity from our humility, from a recognition that we cannot possibly have the exclusive answers, that the pieces of the puzzle we need come from our brothers and sisters in faith. In Thomas Merton’s journals of his final and fateful journey to India and Indonesia, where he breathed deeply of the eastern faiths that had always intrigued and inspired him, he related a realization in this regard that has deeply touched me.

He says that those who are mature in their faith are able to enter into the experience, philosophy, and practice of another faith and gain a practical wisdom which they can take back into their own renewed and strengthened spiritual life. This is the essence of my own personal adventure in interfaith. To be able to see of and hear of and speak about and taste of and move within the common thread of our faiths together is one of the most profound experiences I have ever had in my life. It links me to the maturity needed to answer the spiritual call of our time, and I imagine it may do so for you as well.

I am always eager to point out to others that New York City is a deeply spiritual place. I want to encourage others to develop the vision of the great rivers of faith which run through this town, which are not always visible beyond the surface tumult and loosely organized chaos.

When you come to New York City, you can enjoy a Broadway show, walk the Brooklyn Bridge, check out that special night club you found on Google, enjoy this gastronomical paradise with more than 4,000 restaurants, but don’t miss the rich undercurrent of spirituality you can find at every corner. The many religious traditions can help you understand yourself, and perhaps rekindle a passion for your own faith, an encounter that will change you forever. You might even come back to your home and do something radical like taking time to understand the faith of the other, whose life is now inextricably intertwined with yours. Read articles and reflections about each stop on the Faith House tour here.

Faith House Manhattan Tour Bus: Experience Your Neighbor’s Faith to Deepen Your Own
→ Life Comes From Life

From Samir Selmanovic and Bowie Snodgrass from Faith House Manhattan at the Huffington Post

Click through the slideshow to look at photos from the Faith House Manhattan Tour Bus:

One of the participants, Bhakti Center monk and teacher, Chris Fici, summarized the experience this way:

Experience Your Neighbor’s Faith, Deepen Your Own. This is a personal revelation a lot of us have shared recently on the Faith House Bus Tour, as the different sounds, colors, tastes and waves of devotion we have experienced together in our different houses of faith have made a deep communal resonance in our souls.

Too often (at least from my own perspective) our own practice can become caught in the mechanical. Living as a monk, in an intense and insulated environment, I often see how my consciousness during our morning meditation is directed towards how tired I am, or how I might be upset with this monk or that monk. The beautiful essence of our prayers and singing and dancing together remains lost to me.

As I was soaking up the whirling sanctity at our wonderful Bus Tour event at the Dergah of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order, the pain of my own disconnection in my own practice became manifest, and that void was quickly filled by the wonderful and mystical people I saw around me, deeply absorbed in the love and vision of the Divine. I came to realize that what they were experiencing was something I had access to every day, if I chose to. I saw very clearly how we were all pearls on the same thread of God’s mercy. I returned to my own community and practice with a sense of renewal that has stayed with me ever since.

The interfaith experience is very important for me, and I think for all of us as a common human family. The turbulence of our age calls for a communication between peoples of faith that transcends our superficial differences and allows us to drink from the immense well of wisdom God has given us, to give solace and take profound action to help cure our shared ills.

This turbulence also calls from us a tremendous maturity from our humility, from a recognition that we cannot possibly have the exclusive answers, that the pieces of the puzzle we need come from our brothers and sisters in faith. In Thomas Merton’s journals of his final and fateful journey to India and Indonesia, where he breathed deeply of the eastern faiths that had always intrigued and inspired him, he related a realization in this regard that has deeply touched me.

He says that those who are mature in their faith are able to enter into the experience, philosophy, and practice of another faith and gain a practical wisdom which they can take back into their own renewed and strengthened spiritual life. This is the essence of my own personal adventure in interfaith. To be able to see of and hear of and speak about and taste of and move within the common thread of our faiths together is one of the most profound experiences I have ever had in my life. It links me to the maturity needed to answer the spiritual call of our time, and I imagine it may do so for you as well.

I am always eager to point out to others that New York City is a deeply spiritual place. I want to encourage others to develop the vision of the great rivers of faith which run through this town, which are not always visible beyond the surface tumult and loosely organized chaos.

The Thread Underneath The Pearls: Final Reflection on Tour Bus
→ Life Comes From Life

by Chris Fici, Monk and Teacher at the Bhakti Center
From the Faith House Manhattan blog

One of my favorite verses in the Bhagavad-Gita is when Krishna tells his warrior friend Arjuna of how He is the connecting thread behind all reality.

O conqueror of wealth, there is no truth superior to Me. Everything rests upon Me, as pearls are strung on a thread.

I’ve noticed how this thread connects out to a recent update of the Faith House tag line, which now reads Experience Your Neighbor’s Faith, Deepen Your Own. This is a personal revelation a lot of us have shared recently on the Faith House Bus Tour, as the different sounds, colors, tastes, and waves of devotion we have experienced together in our different houses of faith have made a deep communal resonance in our souls.

Too often (at least from my own perspective) our own practice can become caught in the mechanical. Living as a monk, in an intense and insulated environment, I often see how my consciousness during our morning meditation is directed towards how tired I am, or how I might be upset with this monk or that monk. The beautiful essence of our prayers and singing and dancing together remains lost to me.

As I was soaking up the whirling sanctity at our wonderful Bus Tour event at the dergah of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi Order, the pain of my own disconnection in my own practice became manifest, and that void was quickly filled by the wonderful and mystical people I saw around me, deeply absorbed in the love and vision of the Divine. I came to realize that what they were experiencing was something I had access to every day, if I chose to. I saw very clearly how we were all pearls on the same thread of God’s mercy. I returned to my own community and practice with a sense of renewal that has stayed with me ever since.

The interfaith experience is very important for me, and I think for all of us as a common human family. The turbulence of our age calls for a communication between peoples of faith that transcends our superficial differences and allows us to drink from the immense well of wisdom God has given us, to give solace and take profound action to help cure our shared ills.

This turbulence also calls from us a tremendous maturity from our humility, from a recognition that we cannot possibly have the exclusive answers, that the pieces of the puzzle we need come from our brothers and sisters in faith. In Thomas Merton’s journals of his final and fateful journey to India and Indonesia, where he breathed deeply of the Eastern faiths that had always intrigued and inspired him, he related a realization in this regard that has deeply touched me.

He says that those who are mature in their faith are able to enter into the experience, philosophy, and practice of another faith and gain a practical wisdom which they can take back into their own renewed and strengthened spiritual life. This is the essence of my own personal adventure in interfaith. To be able to see of and hear of and speak about and taste of and move within the common thread of our faiths together is one of the most profound experiences I have ever had in my life. It links me to the maturity needed to answer the spiritual call of our time, and I imagine it may do so for you as well.

I am always eager to point out to others that New York City is a deeply spiritual place. I want to encourage others to develop the vision of the great rivers of faith which run through this town, which are not always visible beyond the surface tumult and loosely organized chaos. I think we most easily get this personal revelation through the communities we keep and build and hold together, through the families we cherish and keep in our faith and interfaith communities.

In the love we attempt to cultivate together, for each other and towards God, we see we are all the same wonderful pearls on the thread of His love and reality manifest in this world, drawing us towards Him in our unique but shared pathways.

So I am very happy and grateful to be allowed to be part of the Faith House community, and very grateful to be able to share my thoughts with you, and I hope now and into the future some of these thoughts, simply chances for me to pass on the wisdom I have received, may inspire you in many diverse way in your faith, and that they may help us all in the great and wonderful task of opening our heart and opening our mind.

The Thread Underneath The Pearls: Final Reflection on Tour Bus
→ Life Comes From Life

O conqueror of wealth, there is no truth superior to Me. Everything rests upon Me, as pearls are strung on a thread.

Share this:

Share this:

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Share this:

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Genius is a multifaceted jewel. It has many rough edges, and it doesn’t care for any mundane norms or compromises.

Why do we assume simple is good?….Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple you have to go really deep.

Share this:

Genius is a multifaceted jewel. It has many rough edges, and it doesn’t care for any mundane norms or compromises.

Why do we assume simple is good?….Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of complexity. To be truly simple you have to go really deep.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: