By Ravindra Svarupa dasa
My first connection with the Hare Krishna maha-mantra happened during the “Summer of Love” in August, 1967 in the course of a wedding within a three-room apartment in Powelton Village, the budding hippie district in Philadelphia. The wedding epitomized the time and place.
The groom and I had become close friends during our travails as fellow philosophy majors at the nearby University of Pennsylvania. Thin, angular, his pale beak-nosed face densely hedged with a curly black beard, Steve presented “the Jew” with a delicious hint of self-parody. His bride Catherine was black and beautiful and very pregnant. Behind the altar—a massive wooden table, knobby legged and claw-footed—a goateed United Church of Christ minister of progressive views officiated. As recitations from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tao Te Ching sounded out, a mottled cat manifested itself on the altar and began weaving balletically through a maze of objets, sacred and profane.
Then the reception: with our mirth and good wishes amplified by the herb of choice, our hearts soon swelled to the mighty anthems of the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and Buffalo Springfield. We lit our fires. We fed our heads.
Some of us—the philosophy B.A.’s there—formed ourselves into opposing cheer leading squads for the football teams of two rival high schools: Husserl High and Heidegger High. We cheered our teams on: “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Husserl!” “Hi! Hi! Hi! Heidegger!”
At some point Steve lead a group of us down a step into the bedroom. He had something special to reveal. As we made ourselves comfortable on the big bed and floor cushions, Steve leaned over a reel-to-reel tape recorder perched on a dresser.
“This is far out. You got to dig it. It’s really far out.” He diddled with the machine. “A friend from Buffalo sent me this.” Steve had been a student at SUNY-Buffalo before he’d transferred to Penn.
Satisfied, he turned and faced us with his signature look: serious, searching eyes peering over a small, tentative smile. “Ahhh—here . . . .” A click.
A drum tapped with fingers, some kind of cymbal, wooden sticks knocking together, a single twanging string—a simple beat . . . and then a deep voice, the voice of an older man, singing something, not English.
“The Swami,” Steve announced. “Sanskrit.”
I try to follow the complicated words, sung by the Swami with both ease and precision. I am fascinated. And then the music seems to shift gear, and the words suddenly become simpler, just a few words in some kind of repeating pattern:
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare
I had already been exposed to the media icon “Hippies Chant Hare Krishna” but now for the first time I hear the mantra chanted, and it is astonishingly different from what I had imagined. But before I can think about that, I am startled by the entrance of young voices repeating the mantra in unison, their vowels clearly American, their chanting a little tentative, a little—well—lightweight. Then the Swami takes it up again. After a few repetitions, I notice that the Swami sings the melody with some subtle inflections and modulations, but the chorus seems unable to reproduce them.
Then Steve begins to chant along with the chorus, and gradually we join in with him. As I chant and listen, my mind boggles. The chant is as simple and naive as a nursery rhyme, yet it plumbs profound depths, evokes uttermost seriousness. How? And what is it expressing? I have no idea, so I quit worrying about it and absorb myself in the chanting. There is no change other than a gradually increasing tempo. I do not know how much time passes.
Then a strange feeling takes hold of me, and an image forms in my mind: There is a ship, a ship lost at sea, lost utterly in the dense dark of night and in waters whipped wild. And from far away come the sound of a foghorn—not warning, but calling me back, drawing me back to safe haven. A lighthouse stands fast on the edge of the foaming ocean, casting its beacon and its horn out across the tempest. And the voice of the Swami seems to be calling, calling to me, calling me from far far away.
And I call back . . . .
And it is over. Quiet. “Well,” says Steve, “Far out, huh? Wasn’t that something?”
I nod. It was indeed. Whatever it was.
That was my first connection, yet the experience quickly became covered over. In those days we had many ‘far out’ experiences. Soon after the wedding, I began studies for a PhD at the new Department of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. Several more years were to pass before my next encounter with the maha-mantra. All the same, the image of being lost at sea and of being called or summoned through the dangerous darkness stayed with me. Though I was lost and covered, gradually, without my knowing it, I was answering the call and turning toward home.
A group of us gathered in the bedroom after the wedding, and as the large reels of the tape recorder slowly revolved, the room filled with the sound of “the Swami” leading the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra. I sang in response, answering his call. Looking back, the chanting on that August afternoon in 1967 appears to me now as a rare moment in time, a kind of karmic singularity, like the pinched waist of an hourglass, into which my whole past poured and from which my entire future would expand.
The wedding took place in the same neighborhood my wife Connie and I had lived as students at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, after only a year’s absence, we’d returned. In 1966, after Penn had awarded us each a bachelor’s degree—mine in Philosophy and hers in English—we had gone off to Amherst, where I had enrolled in a Master’s program in English literature at the University of Massachusetts. We timed our return to Philly to make our friend’s wedding, which took place two weeks before I was to begin doctoral studies in the new religion department at Philadelphia’s Temple University.
• • •
Religion had been the last thing in my mind when I entered college in 1962 with the parentally inculcated goal of medical studies. However, in the course of my first undergraduate year I became, to my surprise, increasingly preoccupied with the peculiar groundlessness of modern life. It seemed as if we were all slowly falling in a mysterious void. It seemed there were no certain truths or values to grasp, no sure foundations on which to build a life—my life.
Were there no absolutes? And if there were, how could we recognize them with certainty? Of course, such thoughts were allowed voice during late-night dormitory bull sessions. But then, you grew up; you forgot all of that stuff and got on with the pursuit of tangible goals—status, power, wealth, fame, and all the glittering trophies in their train.
I was abnormal. I seemed constitutionally incapable of the requisite forgetfulness.
So—a philosophy major. When I announced my decision at a family dinner, my father lunged across the table and displayed a quiverful of bread slices clasped tightly in his fist. He shook the trophy in my face: “What are you going to do about this?” he demanded. “What are you going to do about this?”
The philosophy department at Penn in the early sixties adhered closely to the Anglo-American analytic tradition. It was practically the last bastion in America of logical positivism, a hard-nosed school aiming at the final elimination of all metaphysical (and religious) questions. At its heart lay a criterion of meaningfulness. A statement is meaningful, logical positivism held, only if some possible sense experience could verify (or better, falsify) it. Thus, the assertion “There is a God,” being empirically unverifiable, is without meaning. For the same reason, “There is no God” is also nonsensical. Any discourse about God is outlawed, proscribed. In this way, logical positivism managed to be even more inimical to divinity than mere atheism.
Or consider this standard analysis of value-judgments: If I say something is morally (or aesthetically) good, I indicate really nothing more than my approval of it. (In the jargon: “x is good means I approve of x.”) And perhaps I am urging you to approve of it also.
In a similar fashion, the statement “I believe in God,” while strictly nonsensical, may be accepted as a round-about way of expressing one’s emotive condition, such as “I feel good about the universe.”
This is my initiation into the study of philosophy:
I am sitting in a tall classroom in College Hall with other underclassmen on the first meeting of “Introduction to Philosophy.” Our instructor is a graduate student, a native of the English midlands.
“What is philosophy?” he asks. This is not a rhetorical question. He wants our answers. Some of us raise hands, not knowing what we are in for. As we volunteer our responses one after another, he writes them on the board.
Our instructor calls on me. I propose, “Philosophy means asking questions like, Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?” He gives a little start. Smirking, he writes my answer on the board.
When there are no more offerings, our instructor works his way down the list, demolishing each answer with great acumen, cleverness, and scathing wit. When he comes to my offering, his eyes light up.
“Oh, yes,” he say in a voice freighted with sarcasm, “‘Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?’” Just the way he says them makes them sound stupid. “These questions.” He pauses a moment. “We have one person in this department who goes around asking them. And I reply, ‘My name is Ken Young. I am coming from College Hall, and I am going to Bennett Hall.’” Presenting a mundane stroll between two campus landmarks as the proper response to metaphysical questions, he smirks again, and with a flourish, strikes through my pitiful offering with a thick line.
I was much impressed by this philosophy of demolition. It required a capacity for painstaking study coupled with a quick wit—a mental fast-ball—for it prized above all the utterly devastating comebacks, as epitomized for us in a legendary tale of Sidney Morgenbesser, who had received his PhD from our own philosophy department.
Philosophy was supposed to cure me of the disease of asking nonsensical questions like that. Inexplicably, the cure failed. For a while, my disease went into remission. By my junior year, the questions had returned, never to go away.
At the same time, philosophy in the analytical mode seemed to be getting less doctrinaire, with no sacrifice of rigor.
In my sophomore year the American edition of New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1964), edited by Antony Flew and Alasdair MacIntyre, came into my hands. In this collection of essays, English analytical philosophers took theological issues seriously. I was fascinated.
A year later I read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This work presents a rigorous empirical investigation of the history of science as a social enterprise. In his study, Kuhn shows how science undergoes periodic “revolutions” centered on “paradigm shifts”—fundamental reconstructions in the way science thinks and works—before “normal science” resumes. Kuhn’s analysis brings out the unavoidable role “received belief” and “faith” plays in science, in both its normal and crisis mode. This work was much disliked in the department.
As I worked my way through my philosophy requirements, I took as many literature courses as philosophy. “I love English literature too much to major in it,” I would explain; people knew exactly what I meant.
Literature was my real love. I had become an addictive reader by the end of the first grade, and by high school I was giving myself an eager if uneven education in the world’s literary classics.
And then, at Penn, this happened: During a tedious lecture in a freshman English class in an overheated room, I sat leafing idly through the pages of our reading anthology. My eyes lit upon an unfamiliar poem, and, while trying at the same time to track the professor’s lecture, I began reading Yeats’ “Among School Children.” I only hazily followed the narration, which seemed to jump around from stanza to stanza. I didn’t grasp the imagery nor understand the religious and philosophical allusions. Even so, when I completed the last stanza, my heart was pounding, my nerves vibrating, and my hair standing on end. I was transfixed.
The poem had conveyed something vital to me—had done something momentous to me—and I did not even know what it was. I sat in awe, oblivious to the droning professorial voice, and wondered what had happened, how it happened, and why it happened. I resolved then that I would strive to understand the poem and try to understand the uncanny power it wielded to work so powerfully upon even me, an ignorant, distracted reader.
I had not a clue, sitting in that winter classroom, that Yeats’ poem spoke to me about my own life—it told me about my past and about my future as well: http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Yeats/Among.htm
—to be continued—
By Giriraj Swami
By Kalakantha dasa
By Urmila Devi Dasi
Question: Did Radharani marry someone else, or are they simply engaged?
Maybe. But this doesn’t change the fact that they wedded people other than Krishna. It does, however, very nicely illustrate that even these people who are “other than Krishna” are actually manifestations of Krishna’s śakti and therefore, in a philosophical sense, are not different than Krishna.
But, as the abhiman plays out, he returns to his royal birth-family in Mathura and soon thereafter relocates accross the subcontinent to Dvārakā. There is an incident where there was an eclipse and the two (Radha and Krishna) went to the same place at the same time (Kurukṣetra) to perform ceremonies pertaining to the eclipse.
What makes it complex is that exalted souls mature more quickly than normal people. Krishna and the gopīs mature at 150% the normal rate. Sometimes their age is described via their actual maturity level. Sometimes it is decribed via chronology. And sometimes these are mismatched. For example, by Chronology Krishna was 11-12 when he left Vraja, but by maturity he was 16-18.
To take Srimati Radharani as our mother may be reasonable in some sense. There is vatsala rati (parental affection) mixed in sakhya-rati (friendly affection) when the friends are slightly inferior/superior to one another. So when Srimati is seen as our superior, protective friend, there is some legitimate sense of motherliness in that. But even there, the predominant mood is friendship and companionship with Sri Radha. The vatsala-rati is an adjunct to that.
By Mayapur-shashi Dasa
By Kavicandra Swami
By Narasimha Swami Dasa
