Planet ISKCON

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Prerana-Dining With A Monkey–Learning To Live With The Mind -Chaitanya Charan Prabhu 2016 02 26

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The post Chatur Shloki Bhagavatam 2 – Understanding Maya appeared first on The Spiritual Scientist.

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The post Chatur Shloki Bhagavatam 1 – Understanding the Absolute Truth appeared first on The Spiritual Scientist.

By Krpakara dasa

When is a person Krsna conscious enough to preach? Lord Caitanya encouraged all His disciples and followers to preach Krsna consciousness widely-to every town and village. The Krsna consciousness movement following in the footsteps of Sri Caitanya is very much a missionary movement, and our founder Srila Prabhupada exemplifies that preaching spirit. Prabhupada travelled to the West to introduce Krsna Consciousness for no other reason than to fulfill the desires of his spiritual master, the previous acaryas, and the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Those desires are to give everyone the chance to know about Krsna, to give everyone the benediction of Krsna Consciousness. That desire of the acaryas is so strong because they see the suffering of the people without Krsna Consciousness. Continue reading "Preaching
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By Karnamrita dasa

The concept that we are not our bodies is considered a preliminary basic understanding for devotees, yet this conception has proved not so easy to put into practice. We can all look within ourself and at our communities and society and contemplate how our failure to realize this truth is the cause of many of our disagreements and heated debates. Lets look at the basics of our embodiment. The soul takes on a material body and mind, with an ego that says, “This is me.” The false ego (“false” because we have a real spiritual identity beyond physical forms) or our material “I” defines itself by what it thinks it possesses--what is mine, our “mys”. This “my-ness” is the basis of all problems the soul faces in the material world, including our problems in dealing with other persons, or souls also conditioned by “my-ness”. It is interesting how “my-ness” sounds like minus, since our material conceptions of identity can only exist if our spiritual identity is forgotten (the soul minus its true eternal identity is a forgetful soul habituated to living under the conditions or laws of matter.) Continue reading "The Problem with the World in Two Letters: MY
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By Bhakti Nilaya das

A sign of a good leader is that he does not request those under him to do something that he is not prepared to do. So before we desire to distribute this Vedic culture to the whole world, we ourselves have to be following it in such a way that nobody can find even a minute discrepancy in our practice. People are too attached to their sense gratification and won't be so readily eager to give it up, and although they may have some attraction to the Vedic culture, if the mind can find an excuse for why they should not practice it, they will most likely follow the mind. They have seen that the Vedic culture is the actual original culture with the most bonafide and practical philosophy. They want to see whether this is really what they and their family will want to commit to. They usually base their decisions upon seeing the way the current practitioners practice. The common question that arises is: ''The Vedic culture has the worlds best philosophy but is it practical for me and my family?'' So if the character of the preacher is spotless then they will wholeheartedly embrace this culture, the opposite is also there. Continue reading "Promoting the Vedic Culture
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“I want you to go to China.”
Tamal Krishna Goswami: Our Radha Damodar party was quite energetic. By the time a year was over, forty percent of the total BBT proceeds came from our party. But we were creating quite a bit of disturbance because some brahmacharis were leaving their temples, wanting to be with the sannyasis, and the sannyasis were saying, “It’s better for the brahmacharis to be with us than to be under these grihastha temple presidents.”
So, by the time we went to India, we brought with us ninety brahmacharis. The Radha Damodar party had the whole third floor of the lotus building. We were riding the crest waves of success.
The Christmas marathon had been a heavy competition between Jayatirtha in California and the Radha Damodar party. Ramesvara kept on asking me, “How much are you going to give to the book fund?”
I said, “I’m going to send you a blank check. Put it in your safe and whatever the amount Jayatirtha gives, add ten thousand and deposit it and it will clear at the end of the month.” I was very determined to defeat them.
By the end of the 1975 Christmas marathon, the Radha Damodar Party gave one hundred ninety-five thousand dollars to the book fund. We did a quarter of a million Back to Godhead’s and sixty thousand big books. It was a massive thing.
But people were getting agitated. In Mayapur, all the temple presidents complained to Prabhupada. I was sitting in the room and Prabhupada was looking at me. When everybody left I kept sitting there because I thought, “I’d better talk to Prabhupada alone.”
Prabhupada looked at me and I said, “I don’t know what to do. Maybe I should go to China or something.” To go to China was like going to the moon. It was said like that. Anyway, I walked out.
The next morning, right in the middle of arati, Prabhupada’s servant tapped me and said, “Prabhupada wants to see you.” I said, “I’m not going.” I meant, “I’m not going up to see him, and I’m not going to China.”
Finally I had to go to Prabhupada. Prabhupada said, “I want you to go to China.” I said, “China? The Radha Damodar Party—I have to be there.” He said, “No, I want you to go to China,” and he walked out to go to the bathroom, brush his teeth, and freshen up for his walk.
He came back and put on tilak. He said, “I want you to go to China.” I started to give excuses, that “If I go to China, what’s going to happen to the Party?” Prabhupada said, “Don’t worry about the Party.”
His bottom lip started to quiver. His hand was shaking. He said, “Don’t worry about the Party.” I said, “But this is an important service.” He said,
“Then I take that service away from you. You have no other service to do now. Either you go to China, or you sit in Mayapur and chant Hare Krishna. There’s nothing else for you to do.”
Gurukripa was sitting behind me, and he said, “I’ll go to China.” Prabhupada said, “No, he must go to China.” I was sitting there going, “Oh.” Then I suddenly realized, “Wait a moment, the Radha Damodar Party is meant for Prabhupada’s pleasure, and if by going to China Prabhupada will be pleased, my life is made.”
So I immediately looked at Prabhupada and said, “Okay, I’m ready to go.” Prabhupada beamed. We went upstairs, because Prabhupada would walk around and around on the roof.
He announced, “Tamal Krishna Maharaj is going to China.” Everybody went, “Jai, hari bol!” Prabhupada turned this heavy situation into a glorious act. He was so expert. He never said too much about the whole thing.
He never said to me, “People are complaining about you,” or this or that. He found a way to correct the entire situation and open up something wonderful for Krishna. He found a way to turn what appeared to be a negative situation into a positive event.
—Tamal Krishna Goswami
Excerpt from “Memories-Anecdotes of a Modern-Day Saint”
by Siddhanta das www.prabhupadamemories.com

March 7. ISKCON 50 – S.Prabhupada Daily Meditations.
Satsvarupa dasa Goswami: Prabhupada Wrote His Books for Us!
Prabhupada loved to write because it was an effective way to spread Krishna consciousness. He got good results from his writing. He also communed deeply with the previous acaryas when he wrote. He felt their power, even when his essays weren’t being read. Writing seemed to be his dharma. Even his spiritual master encouraged him to write. So, Srila Prabhupada became occupied with writing books, and he saw temple construction as not important for him, especially in the years before he came to America. He saw himself as following his guru’s example, and his order: “If you ever get money, print books.” Prabhupada wrote that the first duty of a sannyasi is to write books.
Prabhupada’s books teach us about the spiritual relationship between the disciple and the spiritual master. Prabhupada’s books are like the map, but I still have to undertake the journey myself. I study the symbols on the page; they refer to a situation like my own, describing what is required of me as a disciple in giving my whole life to Srila Prabhupada. The map marks out hazard areas – don’t be whimsical, don’t disrespect the spiritual master, pray to him, inquire from him … But it remains general. Each of us has to make our own journey guided by the map of the sastra. The journey is meant to be long; one has to pass through all phases of life in this body while he traverses the path. But still, the sastra gives us only general guidelines.
The Nectar of Devotion states that one should accept the shelter of a bona fide spiritual master, accept initiation from him, and receive instruction in Krishna consciousness while serving him in faith and confidence. But even Rupa Gosvami admits that he is speaking only basic principles. Prabhupada comments,
To read the entire article click here: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=20490&page=6

Head over to the SilverStripe team page and take a look at Hamish Friedlander, the SilverStripe CTO. Now take a look at me, then look back to Hamish, then back to me. What do you see? I think you will see that I am not nearly as smart as Hamish.

You might be thinking: “No way! Dr. Seidenberg, you have a PhD, you must be supremely smart!” But that’s not true, I assure you, I can’t match Hamish’s intelligence, not even close. But that’s okay. Why? Well, that’s what this blog post is about.

While it is very difficult to increase raw intelligence. There is much more to being a good developer (and getting a PhD) than being smart. So, for us lesser mortals, here are some tips for becoming a better developer.

Being a better developer is about four things:

1. Qualities
2. Attitude
3. Techniques
4. Communication

 

1. Qualities

Humility

C.S. Lewis once said:

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less”.

A great developer will act for the good of the software, not their own ego. The best ideas and the best code need to win, regardless of their origin. A great developer will listen to the even the most quiet intern who has a great idea for improving the project. They will say: “Oh, great point! I didn't think of that. Let's do as you suggest.”

Grit

After 4.5 years of researching Semantic Web ontologies, I was ready to quit. But I didn’t. I had some grit. Grit is the ability to pursue long-term goals despite numerous struggles and setbacks. I had enough grit, enough tenacity, perseverance and drive to push through and finish the PhD.

A great developer has lots of grit. You might try this self-test to see how gritty you are. Learn more about grit on this TED talk.

Enthusiasm

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Enthusiasm is necessary. No one likes a mopping developer who complains about everything. That brings down everyone’s morale. A great developer likes technology and finds programming fun, interesting and rewarding. If you are currently not overly enthusiastic, fake it till you make it. Soon you and the rest of your team will be genuinely bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm.

2. Attitude

Desire

The first step in any action is desire. Without desire nothing happens. Ask yourself: do you actually want to be a better developer? You might be surprised that for some people the answer is “no”. Some developers are content with their current skill level. For some people, it’s enough to have a stable job, do adequate work, support their family and pay the bills. That’s a perfectly reasonable life decision for someone to make. But that’s not who this blog post is for. This post is for someone who desires to be supremely awesome at their job.

However, say, for example, you don’t have the desire to become a super-developer, but you wish you did. Congratulations! That kind of recursive meta-desire is both a good first step and a very cool concept in and of itself. The way to develop desire is to associate with others who have a strong desire already. So, find some developers who really care about improving themselves, make friends and hang out with them. Soon their infectious desire will rub off on you.

Appreciation

A good developer appreciates beautiful code. Let me give you an example. Take a look at this code sample:

Can you guess what the code is? It’s the Quicksort algorithm implemented in Javascript. This algorithm was developed by Sir Tony Hoare in 1959 and is still in use today. Just look at that code. It’s beautiful. It’s poetry. So clever, clean, and concise. I love it!

A good developer must genuinely appreciate excellent code. To be truly good at programming you need to appreciate good coding when you see it - just like a good musician naturally appreciates good music.

Ask for help

There is no shame in asking for help. Some lone-wolf developers would rather hack away at a problem for days, rather than admitting that they could use some help. Don’t be that person. Ask for help. Sometimes a second set of eyes will point out the obvious to you. Sometimes just explaining your thinking to another person will give you the critical insight. Sometimes someone doing right kind of socratic questioning on you will make you think of something you hadn’t previously considered. Great developers love asking for help.

Ownership

The difference between a senior developer and an intermediate developer is that the senior developer takes ownership of the software they are creating. An intermediate developer will do a good job working on their assigned task, competently implementing all the requirements. A senior developer, however, will discover five additional requirements the person writing the requirements document hadn’t even considered and make sure those are done, too. The senior developer takes ownership of the software.

3. Techniques

Memory management 

No, not the computer’s memory. The developer’s memory. Humans can only hold 5-9 conceptsin their short term memory at one time. That is an extremely limited amount of RAM we have to work with. So, while programming, a good developer always uses abstraction and interfaces to make it possible for them to understand what one aspect of the application is doing without having to remember the whole thing. A good developer constantly juggles layers of information they hold in their memory while programming. Sometimes focusing-in on the details of a particular method, other times zooming out to arrange software components at a high level.

I would also recommend adding copious amounts of comments to remind oneself what one was thinking when one wrote a particular class or method. That makes zooming-in so much quicker.

Plan

It’s so tempting to dive in and start coding right away. Don’t do it! Any programming task can benefit from a bit of up-front thought. Maybe draw a little diagram, maybe sketch something out on a whiteboard, maybe write some high-level pseudo-code, maybe just think about your approach for an hour or two, whatever you do, do some planning.

ToDo is a NoNo

Have you written a comment something like this before?

//TODO: This is kind-of a hack, it might fail in a way that is unlikely to happen, but will totally break production when it does, and it will be impossible to diagnose. We should refactor this sometime.

Don’t ever do this. No one ever goes back through all the random todo comments in a codebase. I find there are two reasons why developers add todo comments:

1. They are lazy and can’t be bothered to implement something properly.
2. Doing something properly will genuinely take too long at the current stage of the project.

If you find yourself in scenario #1: easy, don’t be lazy! With scenario #2: don’t use a todo that no one will remember. Instead, use your project management software to write a task and make sure the Project Manager knows about it and why it is important, so they can prioritise the task appropriately.

Take a break

There is some false bravado in working long hours, hacking away at a problem. But the brain works in mysterious ways. Our subconscious is often much better at solving a problem without our conscious awareness, certainly better than our haze of sleep-deprived, caffeine-fueled forced-thinking.  It happens to me all the time: I’m faced with an impossible problem, spend the whole day working on it, get nowhere; then, after a good night’s sleep, I solve the problem in 10-minutes flat.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is to stop working. A good developer will know themselves well enough to know when they should work and when they should relax.

4. Communication

Teamwork

The productivity of the team is more important than one’s own productivity. A great developer will gladly spend the entire day helping team members who are stuck, even if it means they get nothing done that day themselves. This highly scientific formula explains it: (One developer working + five developers stuck) < (one developer getting nothing done + five developers working).

Talk

Talking in-person is a great way to communicate. Talking in-person allows people to communicate rapidly and use non-visual cues to focus on the exact knowledge that needs to be communicated.

Introverted developers like to focus on their computer, maybe occasionally using instant messaging, or email to communicate. But written communication is slow and easy to misunderstand. A good developer will know when it’s time to stand up, walk three meters to the next desk and talk to their fellow developers.

Pair program

Awesome developers have a secret superpower. It’s a power one level up from the awesome “talking in-person” superpower. Pair programming is this power.

Pair programming is something all developers should do when faced with a difficult programming challenge. Two developers working together can solve a difficult problem much quicker and much better than one developer working alone. Two developers can talk with each other, sharing understanding and vocalising their thoughts, they can keep each other focused on the task at hand, giving the task far more concentrated attention than a single developer could bring to bear, and they can constantly be checking each other’s work for bugs or oversights. Finally, at the end of the endeavour, both developers have a detailed understanding of the solution. It’s also just plain fun. So, be a great developer, use the pair programming superpower.

Get in the zone

Watch a Starcraft tournament sometime. Starcraft is a serious sport with the top players (all Korean) winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money and sponsorships. As you watch a Starcraft game occasionally the camera will show the players’ faces. The players are ultra-focused on the game. They are some of the most concentrated people you will ever see in your life. They are in the zone.

If you have experienced the zone, then you know it is blissfully absorbing. Your attention is completely taken away from other things. Your mind detaches from your body. You are fully in the moment, not conscious of the body, outside reality, or the passage of time. The zone produces an inner clarity where the activity you are doing becomes its own reward and you feel fantastic.

Needless to say, programming in the zone is super-productive. The best developers try to get into the zone as often as possible, and a long time period with no distractions is a prerequisite for entering into the zone.

So, if you want to enter the zone, arrange your day so all the meetings are clustered together and you have a big chunk of uninterrupted time. Also, use an obvious visual cue, like wearing big headphones, and explain to everyone around that it means: “if you value your life, don’t interrupt me unless something is on fire”. Then relax and enjoy your amazing zone-level programming productivity.

Conclusion

You don’t need Hamish-level intellect to be a good developer. Just develop excellent qualities, adopt the right attitude, practice good development techniques and communicate well; and soon you’ll be developing with the best of them. Good luck!

(previously published on SilverStripe.org)

Head over to the SilverStripe team page and take a look at Hamish Friedlander, the SilverStripe CTO. Now take a look at me, then look back to Hamish, then back to me. What do you see? I think you will see that I am not nearly as smart as Hamish.

You might be thinking: “No way! Dr. Seidenberg, you have a PhD, you must be supremely smart!” But that’s not true, I assure you, I can’t match Hamish’s intelligence, not even close. But that’s okay. Why? Well, that’s what this blog post is about.

While it is very difficult to increase raw intelligence. There is much more to being a good developer (and getting a PhD) than being smart. So, for us lesser mortals, here are some tips for becoming a better developer.

Being a better developer is about four things:

1. Qualities
2. Attitude
3. Techniques
4. Communication

 

1. Qualities

Humility

C.S. Lewis once said:

“Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less”.

A great developer will act for the good of the software, not their own ego. The best ideas and the best code need to win, regardless of their origin. A great developer will listen to the even the most quiet intern who has a great idea for improving the project. They will say: “Oh, great point! I didn't think of that. Let's do as you suggest.”

Grit

After 4.5 years of researching Semantic Web ontologies, I was ready to quit. But I didn’t. I had some grit. Grit is the ability to pursue long-term goals despite numerous struggles and setbacks. I had enough grit, enough tenacity, perseverance and drive to push through and finish the PhD.

A great developer has lots of grit. You might try this self-test to see how gritty you are. Learn more about grit on this TED talk.

Enthusiasm

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Enthusiasm is necessary. No one likes a mopping developer who complains about everything. That brings down everyone’s morale. A great developer likes technology and finds programming fun, interesting and rewarding. If you are currently not overly enthusiastic, fake it till you make it. Soon you and the rest of your team will be genuinely bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm.

2. Attitude

Desire

The first step in any action is desire. Without desire nothing happens. Ask yourself: do you actually want to be a better developer? You might be surprised that for some people the answer is “no”. Some developers are content with their current skill level. For some people, it’s enough to have a stable job, do adequate work, support their family and pay the bills. That’s a perfectly reasonable life decision for someone to make. But that’s not who this blog post is for. This post is for someone who desires to be supremely awesome at their job.

However, say, for example, you don’t have the desire to become a super-developer, but you wish you did. Congratulations! That kind of recursive meta-desire is both a good first step and a very cool concept in and of itself. The way to develop desire is to associate with others who have a strong desire already. So, find some developers who really care about improving themselves, make friends and hang out with them. Soon their infectious desire will rub off on you.

Appreciation

A good developer appreciates beautiful code. Let me give you an example. Take a look at this code sample:

Can you guess what the code is? It’s the Quicksort algorithm implemented in Javascript. This algorithm was developed by Sir Tony Hoare in 1959 and is still in use today. Just look at that code. It’s beautiful. It’s poetry. So clever, clean, and concise. I love it!

A good developer must genuinely appreciate excellent code. To be truly good at programming you need to appreciate good coding when you see it - just like a good musician naturally appreciates good music.

Ask for help

There is no shame in asking for help. Some lone-wolf developers would rather hack away at a problem for days, rather than admitting that they could use some help. Don’t be that person. Ask for help. Sometimes a second set of eyes will point out the obvious to you. Sometimes just explaining your thinking to another person will give you the critical insight. Sometimes someone doing right kind of socratic questioning on you will make you think of something you hadn’t previously considered. Great developers love asking for help.

Ownership

The difference between a senior developer and an intermediate developer is that the senior developer takes ownership of the software they are creating. An intermediate developer will do a good job working on their assigned task, competently implementing all the requirements. A senior developer, however, will discover five additional requirements the person writing the requirements document hadn’t even considered and make sure those are done, too. The senior developer takes ownership of the software.

3. Techniques

Memory management 

No, not the computer’s memory. The developer’s memory. Humans can only hold 5-9 conceptsin their short term memory at one time. That is an extremely limited amount of RAM we have to work with. So, while programming, a good developer always uses abstraction and interfaces to make it possible for them to understand what one aspect of the application is doing without having to remember the whole thing. A good developer constantly juggles layers of information they hold in their memory while programming. Sometimes focusing-in on the details of a particular method, other times zooming out to arrange software components at a high level.

I would also recommend adding copious amounts of comments to remind oneself what one was thinking when one wrote a particular class or method. That makes zooming-in so much quicker.

Plan

It’s so tempting to dive in and start coding right away. Don’t do it! Any programming task can benefit from a bit of up-front thought. Maybe draw a little diagram, maybe sketch something out on a whiteboard, maybe write some high-level pseudo-code, maybe just think about your approach for an hour or two, whatever you do, do some planning.

ToDo is a NoNo

Have you written a comment something like this before?

//TODO: This is kind-of a hack, it might fail in a way that is unlikely to happen, but will totally break production when it does, and it will be impossible to diagnose. We should refactor this sometime.

Don’t ever do this. No one ever goes back through all the random todo comments in a codebase. I find there are two reasons why developers add todo comments:

1. They are lazy and can’t be bothered to implement something properly.
2. Doing something properly will genuinely take too long at the current stage of the project.

If you find yourself in scenario #1: easy, don’t be lazy! With scenario #2: don’t use a todo that no one will remember. Instead, use your project management software to write a task and make sure the Project Manager knows about it and why it is important, so they can prioritise the task appropriately.

Take a break

There is some false bravado in working long hours, hacking away at a problem. But the brain works in mysterious ways. Our subconscious is often much better at solving a problem without our conscious awareness, certainly better than our haze of sleep-deprived, caffeine-fueled forced-thinking.  It happens to me all the time: I’m faced with an impossible problem, spend the whole day working on it, get nowhere; then, after a good night’s sleep, I solve the problem in 10-minutes flat.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is to stop working. A good developer will know themselves well enough to know when they should work and when they should relax.

4. Communication

Teamwork

The productivity of the team is more important than one’s own productivity. A great developer will gladly spend the entire day helping team members who are stuck, even if it means they get nothing done that day themselves. This highly scientific formula explains it: (One developer working + five developers stuck) < (one developer getting nothing done + five developers working).

Talk

Talking in-person is a great way to communicate. Talking in-person allows people to communicate rapidly and use non-visual cues to focus on the exact knowledge that needs to be communicated.

Introverted developers like to focus on their computer, maybe occasionally using instant messaging, or email to communicate. But written communication is slow and easy to misunderstand. A good developer will know when it’s time to stand up, walk three meters to the next desk and talk to their fellow developers.

Pair program

Awesome developers have a secret superpower. It’s a power one level up from the awesome “talking in-person” superpower. Pair programming is this power.

Pair programming is something all developers should do when faced with a difficult programming challenge. Two developers working together can solve a difficult problem much quicker and much better than one developer working alone. Two developers can talk with each other, sharing understanding and vocalising their thoughts, they can keep each other focused on the task at hand, giving the task far more concentrated attention than a single developer could bring to bear, and they can constantly be checking each other’s work for bugs or oversights. Finally, at the end of the endeavour, both developers have a detailed understanding of the solution. It’s also just plain fun. So, be a great developer, use the pair programming superpower.

Get in the zone

Watch a Starcraft tournament sometime. Starcraft is a serious sport with the top players (all Korean) winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money and sponsorships. As you watch a Starcraft game occasionally the camera will show the players’ faces. The players are ultra-focused on the game. They are some of the most concentrated people you will ever see in your life. They are in the zone.

If you have experienced the zone, then you know it is blissfully absorbing. Your attention is completely taken away from other things. Your mind detaches from your body. You are fully in the moment, not conscious of the body, outside reality, or the passage of time. The zone produces an inner clarity where the activity you are doing becomes its own reward and you feel fantastic.

Needless to say, programming in the zone is super-productive. The best developers try to get into the zone as often as possible, and a long time period with no distractions is a prerequisite for entering into the zone.

So, if you want to enter the zone, arrange your day so all the meetings are clustered together and you have a big chunk of uninterrupted time. Also, use an obvious visual cue, like wearing big headphones, and explain to everyone around that it means: “if you value your life, don’t interrupt me unless something is on fire”. Then relax and enjoy your amazing zone-level programming productivity.

Conclusion

You don’t need Hamish-level intellect to be a good developer. Just develop excellent qualities, adopt the right attitude, practice good development techniques and communicate well; and soon you’ll be developing with the best of them. Good luck!

(previously published on SilverStripe.org)

Say you have a SilverStripe website. Then along comes a bot probing your security vulnerabilities on your site. This bot could be written by a Chinese hacker, the NSA or, most embarrassingly, by a security firm you hired to tell you if your website is vulnerable to attack.

The next thing you know: your server’s load goes through the roof; the server runs out of memory; and the website crashes, failing to respond to any requests until you do a hard-reboot.

What just happened?

The inner life of security bots

Security scanning bots work is by sending requests to your website trying to detect potentially exploitable code. The bot has a long list of possible URLs that indicate your website is running xyz software. If xyz software is detected, the bot can try various exploits on that software. Since you are running a SilverStripe website, most of the probing tests result in a 404 responses. There is, for example, no “/wp-admin” on your website.

SilverStripe and 404 Page Not Found requests

Here is what happens when you send request to a SilverStripe site, and that request results in a “Page not found” response:

The request goes to Apache and then Apache runs rules to check for a static file matching the request.

1. Apache passes the request to SilverStripe.
2. SilverStripe spins up, loads 1000s of files, checks for logged-in users, etc.
3. SilverStripe checks for routes that match request.
4. SilverStripe checks for controllers that match request.
5. SilverStripe does a bunch of database queries to try and match the request to URLSegments of pages in the database.
6. SilverStripe fetches the “Error page” from the database.
7. SilverStripe asks the “Error page” to construct a response.
8. The response object is rendered to HTML.
9. The server passes the HTML response back to the web browser.

That whole process typically takes somewhere between 200 - 1000ms, depending on the complexity and page count of your website.

If the bot has no request throttling built-in, it will send a flood of probing requests to your site, all resulting in 404 responses. Each of these requests will trigger multiple database queries, tying up server threads and preventing your site responding to genuine user requests. If too many requests come in all at once, then your server experiences a Denial of Service (DoS) attack and goes down in flames.

I wrote a simple script to simulate a bot scanning for security vulnerabilities. The script sequentially queries 880 potentially vulnerable URLs and reports how long the scan takes. The longer this mock-scan takes, the worse your website will do targeted by a real scan. The result here:

• Large fully-featured SilverStripe website with 2000 pages: 302 seconds
• Base SilverStripe installation: 138 seconds
• Large fully-featured SilverStripe website with Route Whitelist installed: 8 seconds

Route Whitelist

Now I bet you are wondering: what’s this Route Whitelist thing and how does it makes the security scanning problem go away?

Route Whitelist is SilverStripe module that generates a whitelist of potentially valid URLs. That is, a list of URLs that may result in a 200 response. Any request not matching a URL in the whitelist will definitely result in a 404.

It is nearly impossible to generate a list of every possible valid URL for a large complex site. So, instead, the Route Whitelist module generates a list of only all top-level routes, all top-level pages and all controllers. The whitelist will include, for example:

/admin
/who-we-are
/Page_Controller

The module then adds a check to the very first step of the SilverStripe page serving process. That is, it adds an Apache htaccess rule to immediately serve a 404 if a request does not match a URL in the whitelist. That’s why it’s so fast. It cuts out 9 unnecessary steps.

But it only includes top-level items. What about subURLs like: “/who-we-are/our-team”?

Route Whitelist will match only on the first segment of a URL. A request for an invalid subURL (/who-we-are/zyx-cheap-viagra) still gets processed in the slow traditional way.

But that’s okay. We don’t need to speed up every possible “Page Not Found” request. Speeding up 99.9% of 404-requests is plenty good enough. It’s a pragmatic compromise to make this module work.

No fear of the big bad bot

In summary, by installing Route Whitelist you no longer need to fear that a security scanning bot might accidentally or intentionally take down your website.

If that sounds like something you’d like to have running on your website, then go ahead, download a copy of the Route Whitelist module.

(previously published on SilverStripe.org)

Say you have a SilverStripe website. Then along comes a bot probing your security vulnerabilities on your site. This bot could be written by a Chinese hacker, the NSA or, most embarrassingly, by a security firm you hired to tell you if your website is vulnerable to attack.

The next thing you know: your server’s load goes through the roof; the server runs out of memory; and the website crashes, failing to respond to any requests until you do a hard-reboot.

What just happened?

The inner life of security bots

Security scanning bots work is by sending requests to your website trying to detect potentially exploitable code. The bot has a long list of possible URLs that indicate your website is running xyz software. If xyz software is detected, the bot can try various exploits on that software. Since you are running a SilverStripe website, most of the probing tests result in a 404 responses. There is, for example, no “/wp-admin” on your website.

SilverStripe and 404 Page Not Found requests

Here is what happens when you send request to a SilverStripe site, and that request results in a “Page not found” response:

The request goes to Apache and then Apache runs rules to check for a static file matching the request.

1. Apache passes the request to SilverStripe.
2. SilverStripe spins up, loads 1000s of files, checks for logged-in users, etc.
3. SilverStripe checks for routes that match request.
4. SilverStripe checks for controllers that match request.
5. SilverStripe does a bunch of database queries to try and match the request to URLSegments of pages in the database.
6. SilverStripe fetches the “Error page” from the database.
7. SilverStripe asks the “Error page” to construct a response.
8. The response object is rendered to HTML.
9. The server passes the HTML response back to the web browser.

That whole process typically takes somewhere between 200 - 1000ms, depending on the complexity and page count of your website.

If the bot has no request throttling built-in, it will send a flood of probing requests to your site, all resulting in 404 responses. Each of these requests will trigger multiple database queries, tying up server threads and preventing your site responding to genuine user requests. If too many requests come in all at once, then your server experiences a Denial of Service (DoS) attack and goes down in flames.

I wrote a simple script to simulate a bot scanning for security vulnerabilities. The script sequentially queries 880 potentially vulnerable URLs and reports how long the scan takes. The longer this mock-scan takes, the worse your website will do targeted by a real scan. The result here:

• Large fully-featured SilverStripe website with 2000 pages: 302 seconds
• Base SilverStripe installation: 138 seconds
• Large fully-featured SilverStripe website with Route Whitelist installed: 8 seconds

Route Whitelist

Now I bet you are wondering: what’s this Route Whitelist thing and how does it makes the security scanning problem go away?

Route Whitelist is SilverStripe module that generates a whitelist of potentially valid URLs. That is, a list of URLs that may result in a 200 response. Any request not matching a URL in the whitelist will definitely result in a 404.

It is nearly impossible to generate a list of every possible valid URL for a large complex site. So, instead, the Route Whitelist module generates a list of only all top-level routes, all top-level pages and all controllers. The whitelist will include, for example:

/admin
/who-we-are
/Page_Controller

The module then adds a check to the very first step of the SilverStripe page serving process. That is, it adds an Apache htaccess rule to immediately serve a 404 if a request does not match a URL in the whitelist. That’s why it’s so fast. It cuts out 9 unnecessary steps.

But it only includes top-level items. What about subURLs like: “/who-we-are/our-team”?

Route Whitelist will match only on the first segment of a URL. A request for an invalid subURL (/who-we-are/zyx-cheap-viagra) still gets processed in the slow traditional way.

But that’s okay. We don’t need to speed up every possible “Page Not Found” request. Speeding up 99.9% of 404-requests is plenty good enough. It’s a pragmatic compromise to make this module work.

No fear of the big bad bot

In summary, by installing Route Whitelist you no longer need to fear that a security scanning bot might accidentally or intentionally take down your website.

If that sounds like something you’d like to have running on your website, then go ahead, download a copy of the Route Whitelist module.

(previously published on SilverStripe.org)

We all like fast websites, and doing website optimisation work is fun. This blog post will give you five principles that you can use to build blazingly fast websites.

Why optimise?

But before we begin we need to consider: why optimise in the first place? Or rather, how do you convince your boss/product-owner/client/spouse that you need to spend the time/money to make your website faster?

Take a look at some research Walmart did to convince themselves to speed up their website. The research shows: the slower your site, the lower your sales. Customers simply get bored waiting for your slow site to load and go elsewhere.

Also, Google now takes website speed into account when calculating your site’s search engine ranking. An analysis clearly shows, all other things being equal, the slower your website speed, the lower its ranking in the Google search results.

Finally, Facebook, frustrated with the slowness of the mobile web, has implemented Facebook Instant Articles. This feature makes certain supported articles in the Facebook news feed load instantly, giving a much better user experience, and getting users to spend (even) more of their time in the Facebook app.

So, without further ado, here are five principles you can use to increase sales on your site, boost your search ranking and increase user engagement.

1. Measure everything

It isn’t useful to micro-optimising something that was really fast to begin with. When optimising anything, it’s important to focus on the slowest part of the application first. Clearing such bottlenecks gives the most speed benefit for the least amount of work. There are a bunch of tools available to help you find the bottlenecks. 

Analyse and profile

An easy way to measure how long a website takes to load is to look at the red “Load” measure at the bottom of the Chrome Network tab. That tells you how long it takes for your page to fully load.

If you want to go a bit deeper, the Chrome dev tools also have an excellent timeline profiling tool available.

You can also run YSlow and PageSpeed Insights on your website to get a report of optimisations you can make.

The JSPerf website is a useful tool to benchmark variations in Javascript code snippets and across different browsers.

Facebook’s XHProf is a great tool for profiling PHP, and it can create nice graphs of the call stack showing bottlenecks highlighted in red and yellow. XHProf also gives you the ability to compare multiple runs, so you can see if and how your optimisation efforts are helping make the code run faster.

Log slow requests

Configuring your web server to show you slow requests is a great way to zero-in on performance problems to focus your optimisation efforts. Here are some things you can do.

Log the request speed by adding the “%D” parameter to your Apache access log. Logging request speed adds a tiny bit of performance overhead, but gives you great visibility on what aspects of your website are running really slowly. Add this to your Apache configuration:

/usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\" %D" combined

Then you can, for example, get a real-time view of all http requests taking longer than 0.5 seconds by running:

tail -f /var/log/apache/access.log | awk '$(NF) > 500000'

You can also enable the slow query log in your MySQL/MariaDB database to gain some insight into performance problems stemming from slow database queries. 

Load test

A website might run fine when doing single requests, but fall over as soon you hit it with multiple concurrent requests. That’s why it is important to load test your website. Load testing tools give you a nice report of how your website performs under load.

Two load testing tools I like are Siege (guide) and Apache Bench (guide). Siege is better at simulating real-world requests patterns while Apache Bench is easy-to-use and comes pre-installed on almost any server.

2. Ignore your job title

Minimalist content and design

Are you a content author, information architect, or designer? Some of the biggest performance gains or losses result from decisions made by those disciplines. So, what to do if that’s not your job title? Easy, insert yourself into those discussions anyway and try to make a difference.

For example, try loading these two websites: Google and Dick Smith Electronics. Which takes longer to load? Oh, it’s not a fair comparison you say? The Dick Smith website has a whole bunch of huge banners, images, annoying pop-overs, lots of CSS and slow JS while the Google website is just one image and a search box. Yeah, my point exactly.

Scale horizontally

Are you an Infrastructure Architect? If you have a high-traffic website, then ignore your lack of title, put on your Infrastructure Architecture hardhat and make some changes. You can gain huge performance under load by horizontally scaling out your server stack.

Use a load balancer, introduce multiple web servers, and create multiple database read replicas. It takes some doing to get right and costs a bit more money, but, in circumstances where a single server is struggling and you’ve done all you can to optimise your code, it’s time to scale horizontally and add more servers.

Hint: adding more servers is so much easier if you are in a cloud hosting environment likeAmazon Web Services (AWS).

Spend money, not time

Are you a CEO? Do you have budget approval to purchase third-party software that costs thousands of dollars?

Because most of us don’t have such budget approval, we hesitate to use high-quality commercial software components. For example, you might spend months implementing a charting solution for your website, or you could buy Highcharts. A month of your salary almost certainly adds up to more than the price of Highcharts, and yet I’ve seen developers struggle for months to implement a home-grown charting solution.

Don’t be a penny wise and pound foolish developer. Make use of paid software components and make your project come in early and under-budget.

3. Push to the left

Cache database queries

Take a look at this five-tier website architecture.

The database is the slowest component and it is way on the right. You can get massive speed-gains by pushing content from the right to the left of the architecture. The fastest possible database request is a request that is cached by the application server and never actually reaches the database.

Use Nginx (other reverse proxy)

Using a reverse proxy server such as Nginx allows you to cache your static content at the reverse-proxy tier. Nginx is really good at efficiently serving static content (and yes, Apache can be almost as fast if you disable all the features that make Apache so good at serving dynamic content, such as switching Apache from prefork-mode to worker-mode and turning off htaccess file parsing; but doing those things defeats its purpose). Let Nginx handle the static requests and use Apache to handle your complex dynamic request, and you get the best of both worlds.

Use a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) takes your content and distributes it to end-points all over the world. It does this because the speed of light is too slow. Or rather, light is pretty fast, but light doesn’t travel through optical fibre at the actual speed of light, and there are a bunch of routers, repeaters and stuff that slow the light down. The end result is that a request from New Zealand to Europe has a latency of over half a second and there is nothing you can do to speed that up. Well, if you’re Elon Musk you can launch your own fleet of 4000 Low Earth Orbit satellites but, chances are, you’re not Elon Musk, so use a CDN instead (if you are Elon Musk, please give meTesla).

Some CDNs that have endpoints in New Zealand are: Fastly, Akamai, Incapsula, CloudFlare.

If I were choosing a CDN right now, I’d choose CloudFlare. But your experience and requirements may vary. So, please do your own research.

Let the browser do the work

Taking the principle to the extreme, you can push your content to the far left. Push it all the way into the browser.

You can set caching headers so the browser caches content appropriately and doesn't ask for the same content again. Use a cachebuster GET parameter to invalidate content, rather than trying to invalidate using ETags, content expiry settings, etc. You can even use this technique forimage references within CSS.

Do as much processing as possible in JavaScript. For example, an online calculator that does its processing in JavaScript is so much faster than one that needs to ask the server for the result. Doing stuff in the browser takes a load off your server and gives a better user experience to boot.

4. Deliver fast content

Pre-compute

A static request is much faster than a dynamic request. If you can pre-compute the result of a dynamic request and save it as static content, that greatly improves performance. You might generate a JSON file onAfterWrite of a SilverStripe DataObject, rather than generating it dynamically on every request. You might statically cache page HTML, so you can serve a page without invoking any PHP. Or you might de-normalise some database tables when joins are too slow.

Minify and combined

Take your JavaScript and CSS and remove all the whitespace, comments and line breaks. Then rewrite all your variable names to make them shorter. Now take all your files and combined them into a single file. A single http request for a large file is quicker than multiple requests for several smaller files, so combining files makes your site load faster.

Luckily, you don’t need to do any of these optimisation by hand. There are tools to help you. SilverStripe has the built-in Requirements::combine_files feature. If you want to do more fine-grained optimisation, then you should look into using a build system such as Grunt, Gulp orWebpack.

Compress

Compressing textual content is an easy way to speed things up. All browsers support compressed content (even IE6 with SP2+). Test your site to see if it is already using compressing. If not, then you can easily enable gzip compression by vomiting up some punctuation into (adjusting) your Apache configuration.

Inline content

Consider the following scenario: you have a web page that displays a list of a few thousand items from a server database by loading in a JSON file (a file that you have cleverly pre-generated using the “Pre-compute” principle). You load your page, then the document.ready event fires off an AJAX request to load the JSON file and display it on the front-end, using JavaScript to page through it (cleverly using the “Let the browser do the work” principle). All is well, right? No!

You can speed this page up by having that data already loaded into the HTML of the page. That way the browser doesn’t need to wait for any events and doesn’t need to do any more HTTP requests. The data is right there so that as soon as the JavaScript is loaded, it can display the content.

You can do this by inlining the content directly into the HTML of the page. Be careful not to do this with libraries that might already be cached in the browser, or with files that you are reusing across multiple pages of the site. But, if you have content that sits in a single file and isn’t used anywhere else on the site, and you can efficiently write the file’s content into the HTML of your page, that gives you a nice optimisation. Be sure to json_encode your inlined content to protect against cross-site scripting attacks. 

Know your framework

Spend some time getting to know your framework. You need to know your tools like the back of your hand. Know all the little tricks and implementation details that let you make smart decisions and write efficient code.

For example: know that jQuery.find() is faster than jQuery.children(), because it is a native browser method; know that AngularJS ng-if is faster that ng-show, because it completely removes elements from the DOM instead of just hiding them; and know that SilverStripe <% cached %> partial caching is essential for efficiently generating a menu.

5. Cheat

Great performance isn’t so much about actual raw speed, but more about the perception of speed. If you can make something seem really fast without doing the hard work of actually making it fast, then, by all means, do that. I promise I won’t tell anyone you cheated.

Load in the background

Do you know how Facebook Instant Articles work? They simply pre-load the article before you actually click on it, using up all your bandwidth in the process. You can do that, too. If you have a single-page app, you can use analytics to measure what your user is most likely to click next and load that content before they actually click. The result: instant UI, without any actual increase in speed.

Similarly, you can load additional content as a user scrolls down a long webpage, resulting in so-called infinite scrolling. The old-fashion way would be to display a “next” button. But users typically don’t click onwards to the next page, so infinite scrolling can improve your user-experience in certain cases.

Queue

Sometimes you can respond to the user instantly while doing the actual processing in the background.

This happens, for example, when you send an email in Gmail, or try to order an iPhone on a launch day. Gmail tells you “message sent”, but actually just queues the message for sending at some later time. Similarly, Apple takes your credit card details when you order, puts them into a giant message queue, processes them later, then sends you a message if your payment validation fails, asking you to try again.

Both examples show how you can achieve the illusion of speed by using a queue to immediately respond to the user and delay some slow processing until later. That’s great user experience.

Run less code

Sometimes you don’t need that massive framework. Sometimes a few lines of PHP are all you need. You don’t need to include thousands of PHP files just to increment a counter, give an autocomplete result, or redirect to a different URL.

When you find yourself writing a feature that doesn’t need all the power of SilverStripe, cheat a little: betray your beloved framework, go behind its back and write a cute little stand-alone PHP file. 

Generalise the optimisation

You’ve done all this work, applying all these principles to create a perfectly optimised website. What are you going to do for your next project? Do it all again? Please, don’t do that. Instead, figure out a way to generalise all the great optimisation work you do, so you can take advantage of it for all future projects.

SilverStripe Platform is one way to do just that.

(previously published on SilverStripe.org)

We all like fast websites, and doing website optimisation work is fun. This blog post will give you five principles that you can use to build blazingly fast websites.

Why optimise?

But before we begin we need to consider: why optimise in the first place? Or rather, how do you convince your boss/product-owner/client/spouse that you need to spend the time/money to make your website faster?

Take a look at some research Walmart did to convince themselves to speed up their website. The research shows: the slower your site, the lower your sales. Customers simply get bored waiting for your slow site to load and go elsewhere.

Also, Google now takes website speed into account when calculating your site’s search engine ranking. An analysis clearly shows, all other things being equal, the slower your website speed, the lower its ranking in the Google search results.

Finally, Facebook, frustrated with the slowness of the mobile web, has implemented Facebook Instant Articles. This feature makes certain supported articles in the Facebook news feed load instantly, giving a much better user experience, and getting users to spend (even) more of their time in the Facebook app.

So, without further ado, here are five principles you can use to increase sales on your site, boost your search ranking and increase user engagement.

1. Measure everything

It isn’t useful to micro-optimising something that was really fast to begin with. When optimising anything, it’s important to focus on the slowest part of the application first. Clearing such bottlenecks gives the most speed benefit for the least amount of work. There are a bunch of tools available to help you find the bottlenecks. 

Analyse and profile

An easy way to measure how long a website takes to load is to look at the red “Load” measure at the bottom of the Chrome Network tab. That tells you how long it takes for your page to fully load.

If you want to go a bit deeper, the Chrome dev tools also have an excellent timeline profiling tool available.

You can also run YSlow and PageSpeed Insights on your website to get a report of optimisations you can make.

The JSPerf website is a useful tool to benchmark variations in Javascript code snippets and across different browsers.

Facebook’s XHProf is a great tool for profiling PHP, and it can create nice graphs of the call stack showing bottlenecks highlighted in red and yellow. XHProf also gives you the ability to compare multiple runs, so you can see if and how your optimisation efforts are helping make the code run faster.

Log slow requests

Configuring your web server to show you slow requests is a great way to zero-in on performance problems to focus your optimisation efforts. Here are some things you can do.

Log the request speed by adding the “%D” parameter to your Apache access log. Logging request speed adds a tiny bit of performance overhead, but gives you great visibility on what aspects of your website are running really slowly. Add this to your Apache configuration:

/usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b "%{Referer}i" "%{User-agent}i" %D" combined

Then you can, for example, get a real-time view of all http requests taking longer than 0.5 seconds by running:

tail -f /var/log/apache/access.log | awk '$(NF) > 500000'

You can also enable the slow query log in your MySQL/MariaDB database to gain some insight into performance problems stemming from slow database queries. 

Load test

A website might run fine when doing single requests, but fall over as soon you hit it with multiple concurrent requests. That’s why it is important to load test your website. Load testing tools give you a nice report of how your website performs under load.

Two load testing tools I like are Siege (guide) and Apache Bench (guide). Siege is better at simulating real-world requests patterns while Apache Bench is easy-to-use and comes pre-installed on almost any server.

2. Ignore your job title

Minimalist content and design

Are you a content author, information architect, or designer? Some of the biggest performance gains or losses result from decisions made by those disciplines. So, what to do if that’s not your job title? Easy, insert yourself into those discussions anyway and try to make a difference.

For example, try loading these two websites: Google and Dick Smith Electronics. Which takes longer to load? Oh, it’s not a fair comparison you say? The Dick Smith website has a whole bunch of huge banners, images, annoying pop-overs, lots of CSS and slow JS while the Google website is just one image and a search box. Yeah, my point exactly.

Scale horizontally

Are you an Infrastructure Architect? If you have a high-traffic website, then ignore your lack of title, put on your Infrastructure Architecture hardhat and make some changes. You can gain huge performance under load by horizontally scaling out your server stack.

Use a load balancer, introduce multiple web servers, and create multiple database read replicas. It takes some doing to get right and costs a bit more money, but, in circumstances where a single server is struggling and you’ve done all you can to optimise your code, it’s time to scale horizontally and add more servers.

Hint: adding more servers is so much easier if you are in a cloud hosting environment likeAmazon Web Services (AWS).

Spend money, not time

Are you a CEO? Do you have budget approval to purchase third-party software that costs thousands of dollars?

Because most of us don’t have such budget approval, we hesitate to use high-quality commercial software components. For example, you might spend months implementing a charting solution for your website, or you could buy Highcharts. A month of your salary almost certainly adds up to more than the price of Highcharts, and yet I’ve seen developers struggle for months to implement a home-grown charting solution.

Don’t be a penny wise and pound foolish developer. Make use of paid software components and make your project come in early and under-budget.

3. Push to the left

Cache database queries

Take a look at this five-tier website architecture.

The database is the slowest component and it is way on the right. You can get massive speed-gains by pushing content from the right to the left of the architecture. The fastest possible database request is a request that is cached by the application server and never actually reaches the database.

Use Nginx (other reverse proxy)

Using a reverse proxy server such as Nginx allows you to cache your static content at the reverse-proxy tier. Nginx is really good at efficiently serving static content (and yes, Apache can be almost as fast if you disable all the features that make Apache so good at serving dynamic content, such as switching Apache from prefork-mode to worker-mode and turning off htaccess file parsing; but doing those things defeats its purpose). Let Nginx handle the static requests and use Apache to handle your complex dynamic request, and you get the best of both worlds.

Use a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) takes your content and distributes it to end-points all over the world. It does this because the speed of light is too slow. Or rather, light is pretty fast, but light doesn’t travel through optical fibre at the actual speed of light, and there are a bunch of routers, repeaters and stuff that slow the light down. The end result is that a request from New Zealand to Europe has a latency of over half a second and there is nothing you can do to speed that up. Well, if you’re Elon Musk you can launch your own fleet of 4000 Low Earth Orbit satellites but, chances are, you’re not Elon Musk, so use a CDN instead (if you are Elon Musk, please give meTesla).

Some CDNs that have endpoints in New Zealand are: Fastly, Akamai, Incapsula, CloudFlare.

If I were choosing a CDN right now, I’d choose CloudFlare. But your experience and requirements may vary. So, please do your own research.

Let the browser do the work

Taking the principle to the extreme, you can push your content to the far left. Push it all the way into the browser.

You can set caching headers so the browser caches content appropriately and doesn't ask for the same content again. Use a cachebuster GET parameter to invalidate content, rather than trying to invalidate using ETags, content expiry settings, etc. You can even use this technique forimage references within CSS.

Do as much processing as possible in JavaScript. For example, an online calculator that does its processing in JavaScript is so much faster than one that needs to ask the server for the result. Doing stuff in the browser takes a load off your server and gives a better user experience to boot.

4. Deliver fast content

Pre-compute

A static request is much faster than a dynamic request. If you can pre-compute the result of a dynamic request and save it as static content, that greatly improves performance. You might generate a JSON file onAfterWrite of a SilverStripe DataObject, rather than generating it dynamically on every request. You might statically cache page HTML, so you can serve a page without invoking any PHP. Or you might de-normalise some database tables when joins are too slow.

Minify and combined

Take your JavaScript and CSS and remove all the whitespace, comments and line breaks. Then rewrite all your variable names to make them shorter. Now take all your files and combined them into a single file. A single http request for a large file is quicker than multiple requests for several smaller files, so combining files makes your site load faster.

Luckily, you don’t need to do any of these optimisation by hand. There are tools to help you. SilverStripe has the built-in Requirements::combine_files feature. If you want to do more fine-grained optimisation, then you should look into using a build system such as Grunt, Gulp orWebpack.

Compress

Compressing textual content is an easy way to speed things up. All browsers support compressed content (even IE6 with SP2+). Test your site to see if it is already using compressing. If not, then you can easily enable gzip compression by vomiting up some punctuation into (adjusting) your Apache configuration.

Inline content

Consider the following scenario: you have a web page that displays a list of a few thousand items from a server database by loading in a JSON file (a file that you have cleverly pre-generated using the “Pre-compute” principle). You load your page, then the document.ready event fires off an AJAX request to load the JSON file and display it on the front-end, using JavaScript to page through it (cleverly using the “Let the browser do the work” principle). All is well, right? No!

You can speed this page up by having that data already loaded into the HTML of the page. That way the browser doesn’t need to wait for any events and doesn’t need to do any more HTTP requests. The data is right there so that as soon as the JavaScript is loaded, it can display the content.

You can do this by inlining the content directly into the HTML of the page. Be careful not to do this with libraries that might already be cached in the browser, or with files that you are reusing across multiple pages of the site. But, if you have content that sits in a single file and isn’t used anywhere else on the site, and you can efficiently write the file’s content into the HTML of your page, that gives you a nice optimisation. Be sure to json_encode your inlined content to protect against cross-site scripting attacks. 

Know your framework

Spend some time getting to know your framework. You need to know your tools like the back of your hand. Know all the little tricks and implementation details that let you make smart decisions and write efficient code.

For example: know that jQuery.find() is faster than jQuery.children(), because it is a native browser method; know that AngularJS ng-if is faster that ng-show, because it completely removes elements from the DOM instead of just hiding them; and know that SilverStripe <% cached %> partial caching is essential for efficiently generating a menu.

5. Cheat

Great performance isn’t so much about actual raw speed, but more about the perception of speed. If you can make something seem really fast without doing the hard work of actually making it fast, then, by all means, do that. I promise I won’t tell anyone you cheated.

Load in the background

Do you know how Facebook Instant Articles work? They simply pre-load the article before you actually click on it, using up all your bandwidth in the process. You can do that, too. If you have a single-page app, you can use analytics to measure what your user is most likely to click next and load that content before they actually click. The result: instant UI, without any actual increase in speed.

Similarly, you can load additional content as a user scrolls down a long webpage, resulting in so-called infinite scrolling. The old-fashion way would be to display a “next” button. But users typically don’t click onwards to the next page, so infinite scrolling can improve your user-experience in certain cases.

Queue

Sometimes you can respond to the user instantly while doing the actual processing in the background.

This happens, for example, when you send an email in Gmail, or try to order an iPhone on a launch day. Gmail tells you “message sent”, but actually just queues the message for sending at some later time. Similarly, Apple takes your credit card details when you order, puts them into a giant message queue, processes them later, then sends you a message if your payment validation fails, asking you to try again.

Both examples show how you can achieve the illusion of speed by using a queue to immediately respond to the user and delay some slow processing until later. That’s great user experience.

Run less code

Sometimes you don’t need that massive framework. Sometimes a few lines of PHP are all you need. You don’t need to include thousands of PHP files just to increment a counter, give an autocomplete result, or redirect to a different URL.

When you find yourself writing a feature that doesn’t need all the power of SilverStripe, cheat a little: betray your beloved framework, go behind its back and write a cute little stand-alone PHP file. 

Generalise the optimisation

You’ve done all this work, applying all these principles to create a perfectly optimised website. What are you going to do for your next project? Do it all again? Please, don’t do that. Instead, figure out a way to generalise all the great optimisation work you do, so you can take advantage of it for all future projects.

SilverStripe Platform is one way to do just that.

(previously published on SilverStripe.org)

SEO or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of getting your website to show up high in search results. SilverStripe 3 provides a number of great SEO features out-of-the-box. Here is a quick rundown of the most useful of these features:

• Automatic and manual redirects
• Clean search-engine-friendly URLs
• Broken link reports
• Ability to customize meta-tags on each page
• Easy-to-use CMS UI to craft your website’s content
• Powerful developer API to implement anything you want

This blog post is about the last two points. How you can use SilverStripe 3 to build a website that is nicely optimized for Google searches (yes, there are other search engines, but let’s face it, no one uses them).

Alright, let’s get to it. Here are some specific optimization techniques you can use to improve your search ranking.

Don’t be a spammer

Google makes 500+ changes to its search ranking algorithm every year. The last two major updates to this search algorithm were called Panda and Penguin. Both these updates focused on detecting low-quality content, content created by spammers with the purpose of tricking Google into ranking their website high in the search results, attracting lots of gullible visitors, displaying lots of ads and ultimately making lots of money. Google now employs many clever techniques to detect this kind of black-hat SEO and penalize sites that use it.

You need to make sure your website doesn’t look like a spam website to Google. That way Google won’t decide to reduce your search engine ranking and you will continue to enjoy lots of visitors coming to your site. Here is the one golden rule to keep in mind:

Build a website that looks like a human built it.

That may seem obvious, but let me break that down into some concrete recommendations:

• Keep your page titles and headings short and descriptive
• Vary the anchor text of your links
• Place no more than 100 links on a single page
• Avoid duplicate content like the plague (or use rel="canonical")
• Use only a few carefully selected keywords on each page
• Remove links to low quality “spam” content

Read more about the Panda and Penguin updates here:

Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Journal

Write compelling content

Ultimately, the most importing thing you can do for your website is to write good content. Great content is what attracts visitors to your websites, causing them to recommend your site to others, mention your site on their blog, tweet about it, post it to facebook, etc. I can’t offer much advice on what makes for amazing content. I can say: don’t be afraid to experiment. You can then use Google Analytics to track how many people look at each page on your website and thereby find the best content on your site from an SEO point-of-view and write more content like that.

Learn more about Google Analytics. 

Use the SilverStripe Google Analytics module to make installing Google Analytics easy.

Landing pages are your best friend

Create landing pages. They are a great way to rank highly in Google search results and they are useful for humans visiting your website, too.

A landing page is a special page on your site that you have optimized for one or two keywords that you want to rank highly for. It’s quite simple: all you need to do is craft a page that is a great resource for someone searching for a specific keyword.

The first step is to do some research to find the keywords you want to target. Then you can write an overview of the topic each keyword relates to, include a few links to other websites that people might find useful, include some deeper links into your own websites that go into more detail on various sub-topics and put all that on an attractively designed page. Keep the entire page short and uncluttered and be sure to link to it directly from your website's homepage (keeping in mind not to put too many links on your homepage).

Check out the guide to creating a good landing page and some examples of effective landing pages.

Decide to go multi-site or single-site

An important decision about how you want to build your website is if you want to put all your content into a single website on a single domain, or if you want to spread it out across multiple websites on separate domains.

Multiple websites mean that you can take advantage of a special boost that Google gives your website if your domain is an exact match for what someone is searching for. E.g. if someone searches for “silverstripe cat food” and you happen to own silverstripecatfood.com, then you get a huge boost in your Google ranking. So, if your goal is to get as many people as possible to visit your network of websites, because more visitors means more advertising revenue for you, then multi-site might be the right way to go.

A single-site approach also has its advantages. If you put all your content onto a single website, then that website benefits from all your compelling content. The site can become the ultimate resource for whatever your organization is about. It might not attract quite as many total visitors as the multi-site approach, but if you are selling a product or service on your single website, then that is where you want your visitors to land. No use attracting visitors to numerous other websites, even if those sites have links back to your main website, if those visitors could just as well be coming directly to your main website.

Read more about the trade offs between multi-site or single-site website structures here.

If you want to go “multi-site”, then you can avoid many of the headaches that come with maintaining and administrating multiple websites by using the SilverStripe Subsites module.

Speed up your site

Website speed makes a small but noticeable difference in your Google ranking. This is especially true if your website loads particularly slowly. Besides hurting your Google rank, a slow website is extra load on your web-server, a bad user experience and risks that your website will go down if it gets an unexpected spike in visitors.

The good news is that we have optimized SilverStripe 3 to be faster. Here are some of the new features in SilverStripe 3 that increase its performance.

• New faster ORM
• New faster config system

In addition to those benefits that you get simply by using SilverStripe 3, you can implement specific optimizations to further improve your websites performance. Here is a list of techniques. We can go into detail on some of these in future blog posts.

• Static caching
• Partial caching
• Enabling gzip compression
• Adding expiry headers
• Optimizing your Javascript performance
• Combining and minifying Javascript
• Combining and minifying CSS
• Creating image sprites
• Resampling and re-compressing images

Read more about more techniques for improving website performance here:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

(previous published on SilverStripe.org)

SEO or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of getting your website to show up high in search results. SilverStripe 3 provides a number of great SEO features out-of-the-box. Here is a quick rundown of the most useful of these features:

• Automatic and manual redirects
• Clean search-engine-friendly URLs
• Broken link reports
• Ability to customize meta-tags on each page
• Easy-to-use CMS UI to craft your website’s content
• Powerful developer API to implement anything you want

This blog post is about the last two points. How you can use SilverStripe 3 to build a website that is nicely optimized for Google searches (yes, there are other search engines, but let’s face it, no one uses them).

Alright, let’s get to it. Here are some specific optimization techniques you can use to improve your search ranking.

Don’t be a spammer

Google makes 500+ changes to its search ranking algorithm every year. The last two major updates to this search algorithm were called Panda and Penguin. Both these updates focused on detecting low-quality content, content created by spammers with the purpose of tricking Google into ranking their website high in the search results, attracting lots of gullible visitors, displaying lots of ads and ultimately making lots of money. Google now employs many clever techniques to detect this kind of black-hat SEO and penalize sites that use it.

You need to make sure your website doesn’t look like a spam website to Google. That way Google won’t decide to reduce your search engine ranking and you will continue to enjoy lots of visitors coming to your site. Here is the one golden rule to keep in mind:

Build a website that looks like a human built it.

That may seem obvious, but let me break that down into some concrete recommendations:

• Keep your page titles and headings short and descriptive
• Vary the anchor text of your links
• Place no more than 100 links on a single page
• Avoid duplicate content like the plague (or use rel="canonical")
• Use only a few carefully selected keywords on each page
• Remove links to low quality “spam” content

Read more about the Panda and Penguin updates here:

Search Engine Watch

Search Engine Journal

Write compelling content

Ultimately, the most importing thing you can do for your website is to write good content. Great content is what attracts visitors to your websites, causing them to recommend your site to others, mention your site on their blog, tweet about it, post it to facebook, etc. I can’t offer much advice on what makes for amazing content. I can say: don’t be afraid to experiment. You can then use Google Analytics to track how many people look at each page on your website and thereby find the best content on your site from an SEO point-of-view and write more content like that.

Learn more about Google Analytics. 

Use the SilverStripe Google Analytics module to make installing Google Analytics easy.

Landing pages are your best friend

Create landing pages. They are a great way to rank highly in Google search results and they are useful for humans visiting your website, too.

A landing page is a special page on your site that you have optimized for one or two keywords that you want to rank highly for. It’s quite simple: all you need to do is craft a page that is a great resource for someone searching for a specific keyword.

The first step is to do some research to find the keywords you want to target. Then you can write an overview of the topic each keyword relates to, include a few links to other websites that people might find useful, include some deeper links into your own websites that go into more detail on various sub-topics and put all that on an attractively designed page. Keep the entire page short and uncluttered and be sure to link to it directly from your website's homepage (keeping in mind not to put too many links on your homepage).

Check out the guide to creating a good landing page and some examples of effective landing pages.

Decide to go multi-site or single-site

An important decision about how you want to build your website is if you want to put all your content into a single website on a single domain, or if you want to spread it out across multiple websites on separate domains.

Multiple websites mean that you can take advantage of a special boost that Google gives your website if your domain is an exact match for what someone is searching for. E.g. if someone searches for “silverstripe cat food” and you happen to own silverstripecatfood.com, then you get a huge boost in your Google ranking. So, if your goal is to get as many people as possible to visit your network of websites, because more visitors means more advertising revenue for you, then multi-site might be the right way to go.

A single-site approach also has its advantages. If you put all your content onto a single website, then that website benefits from all your compelling content. The site can become the ultimate resource for whatever your organization is about. It might not attract quite as many total visitors as the multi-site approach, but if you are selling a product or service on your single website, then that is where you want your visitors to land. No use attracting visitors to numerous other websites, even if those sites have links back to your main website, if those visitors could just as well be coming directly to your main website.

Read more about the trade offs between multi-site or single-site website structures here.

If you want to go “multi-site”, then you can avoid many of the headaches that come with maintaining and administrating multiple websites by using the SilverStripe Subsites module.

Speed up your site

Website speed makes a small but noticeable difference in your Google ranking. This is especially true if your website loads particularly slowly. Besides hurting your Google rank, a slow website is extra load on your web-server, a bad user experience and risks that your website will go down if it gets an unexpected spike in visitors.

The good news is that we have optimized SilverStripe 3 to be faster. Here are some of the new features in SilverStripe 3 that increase its performance.

• New faster ORM
• New faster config system

In addition to those benefits that you get simply by using SilverStripe 3, you can implement specific optimizations to further improve your websites performance. Here is a list of techniques. We can go into detail on some of these in future blog posts.

• Static caching
• Partial caching
• Enabling gzip compression
• Adding expiry headers
• Optimizing your Javascript performance
• Combining and minifying Javascript
• Combining and minifying CSS
• Creating image sprites
• Resampling and re-compressing images

Read more about more techniques for improving website performance here:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

(previous published on SilverStripe.org)

Written by Harsarani dd

A day in Leicester

As the cold and freezing mornings of the winter season were set to leave, the sun slowly pushed its way through with its effulgence, welcoming spring to reappear once again. It was Saturday, 06 February, when Kadamba Kanana Swami arrived in Leicester with his warm and charismatic smile. He was enthusiastically welcomed by the cheerful devotees, from local regions and other parts of the UK, who were eager to receive his association. Maharaj was to spend the entire day in Leicester and planned to return to Bhaktivedanta Manor, in London, in the evening.

Jaganatha Suta Prabhu and Artee Mataji’s had invited Maharaj to their home to facilitate the morning program. The savoury aroma of the mountains of prasadam was wafting into the air from the kitchen; devotees were famished and waiting to be served. Whilst almost everyone was indulging in delicious breakfast such as paneer sabhji, and pancakes filled with cream and forest fruits amongst other treats, Maharaj was tucking into a plateful of fruit, along with some freshly homemade bread and cheese.

After having fed our external bodies with prasadam, it was now time to feed and nourish the soul. Maharaj started with an uplifting and soul vibrating kirtan in a meditative mood. He had the devotees chanting so nicely and loudly that the holy name echoed throughout the house and beyond!

After the blissful kirtan had stopped, Maharaj then opted to give a lecture based on Canto 5, Chapter 14 of Srimad-Bhagavatam, titled ‘The Material World as the Great Forest of Enjoyment’. He started by speaking elaborately on the pushings of the senses and how we cannot control our senses but can engage them by being absorbed in devotional service. Then he referred to devotees who were inclined to take on any type of devotional service, by naming them ‘Jack of all trades’ and the service attitude of the surrendered souls who were always willing and present to do the service.

Maharaj briefly narrated the story of Gajendra the elephant from Canto 8, Chapters 2-4 of Srimad-Bhagavatam, where Gajendra was enjoying himself with the female elephants in the waters of the beautiful mountain of Trikūṭa when suddenly he got attacked by a crocodile. He tried to fend-off the crocodile who bit into his leg, but because Gajendra’s natural position was not in water, but rather on land, he did not have the strength to fend-off the crocodile.

This story was to highlight the subject matter of varnasrama as Srila Prabhupada quotes, “We must choose an asrama where we are comfortable.” Maharaj added that one should also stay in the asrama that he feels comfortable with, either brahmacārī, gṛhastha, vānaprastha or sannyāsī. To conclude Maharaj stated, “Wherever we are, let us do something for Krsna. It does not matter which asrama we are in… the essence of varnasrama is let us do some service and that will be an effort.”

Later in the day…

Maharaj took lunch at Hara Mataji’s and Puskaar Prabhu’s home. The afternoon program was held at the Temple which was situated in the heart of Leicester City Centre. Maharaj started the lecture by glorifying Lord Krsna and how his unlimited beauty, can be attracted by almost anyone. And although there are a lot of conceptions of Krsna within India, only a few can comprehend that he is the origin of all other manifestations.

Maharaj went on to say how all information is in the Srimad-Bhagavatam and unlike the Bhagavad-gita, it consists of descriptions of the sweetness of Lord Krsna. Maharaj pointed out, “Our culture is to speak Srimad-Bhagavatam.” Maharaj emphasised that Lord Krsna appeared into this world by setting social custom based on behaviour, and to re-establish religion based on prescribed duties of varnasrama, in order for others to follow his example. Srimad-Bhagavatam Canto 1 Chapter 8 titled ‘Prayers by Queen Kunti’ was highlighted where Lord Krsna displayed signs of respect to those who were older than him by paying obeisances to King Yudhisthira, which displayed a society on the groundings of humility and opposed to pride which is the case in this contemporary world.  Maharaj described Krsna as being ‘Bhakta-Vatsala’ the protector and well-wisher of devotees who would break the rules of dharma in order to protect his devotees.

According to Maharaj, the rule of dharma in Vrindavan is, “Service to Krsna and glorification of Krsna.”  Maharaj touched upon the topic of prescribed duty by explaining that if one follows their prescribed duty then there would be an essence of morality reflected within their behaviour. Maharaj then started to compare the material world to spiritual world by stating that time is a ruling factor in the material world as opposed to the spiritual world which is heavily centred on the relationship with Krsna. As Maharaj explained, the spiritual world is inconceivable due to dealings such as the ‘talking sweet rice’ for which such experiences cannot be encountered within the material world.

The lecture then shifted onto great Vaishnava’s who had the ability to see Krsna. Maharaj pointed out that Srila Prabhupada had the vision to see Krsna. A short story about Prabhupada and a journalist was narrated to explain further. Maharaj also started to reflect on his conversation with Tamal Krsna Goswami, who remarked, “The duty of spiritual master is to give his disciple a vision of life greater than what the disciple can imagine himself or herself it to be.” Maharaj made the following comment, “The duty  of the spiritual master is NOT to answer all of his emails, all day! Then he will not have the time to chant Hare Krsna.” Artificial amenities such as electronics and computers etc. make life so complicated, as Maharaj recalled his life in Vrindavan in the past, where there was only the one telephone and post was very rarely delivered, in fact it was normal to receive post that was one year old, and where the water had to be fetched from the well. He found that type of simple life as being very nice…

Toward end the lecture, Maharaj said that it was up to us to make the change in Leicester by spreading the glories of Srimad Bhagavatam, that will result in an increase in people following the rules and regulations, making Leicester a revolution, and then Ratha Yatra in Leicester will have three chariots as oppose to just the one.

And thus ended his visit to Leicester!

---

England, 08 February 2016

Written by Nandan

It was Maharaj’s last day in London for this trip. Again I had the great joy and privilege of driving Maharaj back to the Airport. It was a smooth journey and apart form a few verbal exchanges here and there, Maharaj was taking rest for most of the journey. The weather was atrocious, biting cold, heavy rain and incredibly strong winds.

When we got out of the car and walked towards the terminal, the wind was blowing full force against us. Some of the devotees were even concerned their dhotis may come off from the sheer force of the wind!! It truly was a horrible walk. In the midst of all the bother, we eventually made it inside the terminal; Maharaj looked at us with a sarcastic grin,

“Well! That was a nice pleasant walk to the terminal!”

Vidura Prabhu, born November 25, 1944, left his body peacefully at his home in New Vrindaban, WV, on the auspicious appearance day of Lord Nityananda, February 20, 2016, at the age of 71.

A disciple of Srila Prabhupada and long time resident of New Vrindaban, Vidura and his wife of 45 years, Tryadhisa, have been serving in the Dhama since 1984.

On July 31st of 1970 Vidura and Tryadhisa married, soon after Vidura ran across a copy of the Bhagavad Gita As It Is in a used book store and began his spiritual awakening. That same year while in Boston they ran into devotees in downtown Boston performing sankirtan. “Jadhurani was taking donations in a conch shell and gave us the pamphlet on chanting Hare Krishna” recalls Tryadhisa. Shortly afterwards they both joined ISKCON in Boston and Vidura took first initiation from Srila Prabhupada, July 18, 1971.

Vidura served as the sankirtan leader in many cities and setup college preaching programs wherever he went. A land surveyor by profession, he endeavored on many projects in New Vrindaban such as the brick road, parking lot, devotee houses and many land surveys. In 1973, he participated in the construction of the Krishna Balarama Mandir in Vrindavan, India.

After living in Boston for some time Vidura missed Sri Sri Radha Vrindaban Chandra and in 2008 he built his own house, close to the temple in New Vrindaban, mostly himself. He woke up every morning at 4:30 to chant his rounds, and read from Srimad Bhagvatam for the rest of his life. He enjoyed listening to Prabhupada lectures and kirtans throughout the day.

Back in 2013, Vidura was diagnosed with cancer of the tonsils and began two rounds of chemotherapy and radiation at Wheeling Hospital in West Virginia. At first the doctors thought his condition was improving; however, a PET scan on August 28, of 2015 revealed that the cancer had metastasized, spreading to his lungs and they gave him 6 months to live. As the months progressed his condition declined and it became increasingly difficult for him to breath.

Then on Lord Nityananda’s appearance day, Vidura’s breathing went from labored to shallow as his loving wife was reading to him from Srimad Bhagavatam about the soul going back to Godhead. She sprinkled Ganga jala into his mouth and on to his head as she chanted Hare Krsna to him. He left his body at 10:15 am February 20, 2016, as Srila Prabhupada was singing Nitia Pada Kamala softly in the background.

Vidura Prabhu is survived by his wife of 45 years, Tryadhisa Dasi, and many friends around the world.

2nd Day of Gaura Purnima festival in Mayapur- 6 Feb 2016.
After the ecstatic Sri Radha-Madhava Elephant Procession & Adhivas ceremony of Kirtan mela on the first day of the festival, the day 2 of the Gaura Purnima began with packed Mangala arotika & Srngar arotika darshan and HH Sivaram Swami‘s lecture on the glories of the Holy name -a topic in line with Kirtan Mela! Maharaj spoke on the verse from Brihad Bhagavatamrta, which is:
“Dearer to the Lord than even His own beautiful form, His easily worshiped holy name benefits the entire world. Indeed, nothing is as full of nectar as the holy name of the Lord.”
After Sravanam, devotees joyfully took breakfast prasada at Gada hall, sponsored by Mr. Naresh Soken. Kirtan Mela day1 started with Agnidev prabhu’s kirtan, followed by Kamalgopal Prabhu.
HH Jayapataka Swami has arrived in Mayapur. We are happy to welcome HH Jayapataka Swami. A new Annadan complex , an initiative of Food for Life is being opened today with the deity installation and Maharaja will grace the occasion to bless the project.

Barsana Parikrama (Album with photos)
Deena Bandhu Das: Barsa means rain. We wandered through the enchanting pastime places that are sprinkled around Barsana, begging for Radharani’s mercy! For here, not ordinary rain is falling, but rain of Krishna Prema! Then we went to Vrinda Kunda to honor the delicious wedding feast of Warsa and Vyas from Holland! Dive into the nectar with Vittalrukmini’s pics!
Find them here: https://goo.gl/1bng4Z

Srila Prabhupada In Bombay (Album with 409 beautiful photos)
Morning Walks, Inauguration, Sri Radha Rasabihariji Darsan , Lecture and Prabhupada Quarter, Prasadam Distribution ,Cross Maidan Program etc.
Find them here: https://goo.gl/aHUvCA

Mayapura Bhagavatam class.

The post Introduction to kirtana-mela appeared first on SivaramaSwami.com.

By His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

My suggestion is that people should utilize all this vacant land for crops. I have seen so much land lying dormant. For instance, in Australia and also in America, there is so much land lying dormant. The people are not utilizing it. And whatever produce they get, sometimes they dump tons of it into the ocean to keep the prices high. And I have heard here in Geneva that when there was excess milk production, some of the people wanted to slaughter twenty thousand cows just to reduce the milk production. This is what is going on in people's brains. Actually, they have no brains. So if they want to get some brains, they should read these authentic Vedic literatures, and they should take spiritual guidance. And that guidance is simple: produce your food – all the food the world needs – by properly utilizing the land. But today people will not utilize the land. Rather, they have left their villages and farmlands and let themselves be drawn into the cities for producing nuts and bolts. All right, now eat nuts and bolts. Continue reading "The Solution to Food Shortages
→ Dandavats"

The post Daily Darshan: March 6, 2016 appeared first on Mayapur.com.

Download the audio for this lecture here:

http://www.mayapurtvarchives.com/p/downloads-2016.html

From Sri Mayapur Chandrodaya Mandir

Date: February 23, 2016

Speaker: HH Bhanu Maharaj

Subject: S.B.7.2 1-6

TEXT 1

śrī-nārada uvāca

bhrātary evaṁ vinihate

hariṇā kro

a-mūrtinā

hiraṇyakaśipū rājan

paryatapyad ruṣā śucā

TRANSLATION

Śrī Nārada Muni said: My dear King Yudhiṣṭhira, when Lord Viṣṇu, in the form of Varāha, the boar, killed Hiraṇyākṣa, Hiraṇyākṣa’s brother Hiraṇyakaśipu was extremely angry and began to lament.

PURPORT

Yudhiṣṭhira had inquired from Nārada Muni why Hiraṇyakaśipu was so envious of his own son Prahlāda. Nārada Muni began narrating the story by explaining how Hiraṇyakaśipu had become a staunch enemy of Lord Viṣṇu.

TEXT 2

āha cedaṁ ruṣā pūrṇaḥ

sandaṣṭa-daśana-cchadaḥ

kopojjvaladbhyāṁ cakṣurbhyāṁ

nirīkṣan dhūmram ambaram

TRANSLATION

Filled with rage and biting his lips, Hiraṇyakaśipu gazed at the sky with eyes that blazed in anger, making the whole sky smoky. Thus he began to speak.

PURPORT

As usual, the demon is envious of the Supreme Personality of Godhead and inimical toward Him. These were Hiraṇyakaśipu’s external bodily features as he considered how to kill Lord Viṣṇu and devastate His kingdom, Vaikuṇṭhaloka.

TEXT 3

karāla-daṁṣṭrogra-dṛṣṭyā

duṣprekṣya-bhrukuṭī-mukhaḥ

śūlam udyamya sadasi

dānavān idam abravīt

TRANSLATION

Exhibiting his terrible teeth, fierce glance and frowning eyebrows, terrible to see, he took up his weapon, a trident, and thus began speaking to his associates, the assembled demons.

TEXTS 4–5

bho bho dānava-daiteyā

dvimūrdhaṁs tryakṣa śambara

śatabāho hayagrīva

namuce pāka ilvala

vipracitte mama vacaḥ

puloman śakunādayaḥ

śṛṇutānantaraṁ sarve

kriyatām āśu mā ciram

TRANSLATION

O Dānavas and Daityas! O Dvimūrdha, Tryakṣa, Śambara and Śatabāhu ! O Hayagrīva, Namuci, Pāka and Ilvala! O Vipracitti, Puloman, Śakuna and other demons! All of you, kindly hear me attentively and then act according to my words without delay.

TEXT 6

sapatnair ghātitaḥ kṣudrair

bhrātā me dayitaḥ suhṛt

pārṣṇi-grāheṇa hariṇā

samenāpy upadhāvanaiḥ

TRANSLATION

My insignificant enemies the demigods have combined to kill my very dear and obedient well-wisher, my brother Hiraṇyākṣa. Although the Supreme Lord, Viṣṇu, is always equal to both of us—namely, the demigods and the demons—this time, being devoutly worshiped by the demigods, He has taken their side and helped them kill Hiraṇyākṣa.

PURPORT

As stated in Bhagavad-gītā (9.29), samo ’haṁ sarva–bhūteṣu: the Lord is equal to all living entities. Since the demigods and demons are both living entities, how is it possible that the Lord was partial to one class of living beings and opposed to another? Actually it is not possible for the Lord to be partial. Nonetheless, since the demigods, the devotees, always strictly follow the Supreme Lord’s orders, because of sincerity they are victorious over the demons, who know that the Supreme Lord is Viṣṇu but do not follow His instructions. Because of constantly remembering the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Viṣṇu, the demons generally attain sāyujya–mukti after death. The demon Hiraṇyakaśipu accused the Lord of being partial because the demigods worshiped Him, but in fact the Lord, like the government, is not partial at all. The government is not partial to any citizen, but if a citizen is law-abiding he receives abundant opportunities from the state laws to live peacefully and fulfill his real interests.

MAHARAJ:

Pranam mantras.

This is the beginning of the chapter and the previous verses were just explaining how Hiranyakasipu was upset because his brother was killed by the Supreme Lord in the form of Varaha. Here he is addressing everyone and criticizing the devatas and criticizing the Supreme Lord because of this great problem to his family member. Apparently it looks as if he is accepting Vishnu and saying he is equal to everyone but now He is not equal, etc.

Sometimes we see that the great demons do seem to accept the Supreme Lord in some way or the other. But we always see that they actually don’t accept Him because to accept the Lord means that He is faultless. Immediately here, though, Hiranyakasipu says well He’s supposed to be equal to everybody but actually He’s not. He is partial to the devatas. He has taken their side. He’s finding fault in the Supreme Lord.

Sometimes, of course, it is a little difficult for us to understand the Lord’s actions. It may look like there’s no apparent fault, especially when it comes to Krishna because He does such strange things sometimes that are contradictory to the normal rules. Krishna is even more subject to criticism by ignorant people than others. That is why it says that it is very hard to understand Krishna because of all the different activities He does which look a little bit subject to criticism by people who don’t understand.

In any case, those who are ignorant, and particularly the demons, will find every opportunity to find fault in another person and particularly the Supreme Lord. Though they are talking about Vishnu and seemingly accepting Him in one sense, they actually don’t accept Him. They don’t accept His position. They accept Him as an ordinary person to that extent because they have seen Him visibly. He’s not a fiction at all. But they think He is a material person.

This goes not only for Hiranyakasipu. When Ravana saw Rama he thought oh, same person again. Vishnu is here again. He killed me last time as Nrsimhadeva. Now He is Rama. He’s got that position because of pious activities. Again, I will try to kill Him. Maybe this time he’ll succeed. He doesn’t really believe that the Supreme Lord has extraordinary powers and that no matter what you do, you cannot really defeat Him. Even if it looks like the Lord is defeated, He’s not defeated.

In other words, the demons may politely praise the Lord or accept the Lord in some sense but they just take Him as a material person. When they show hostility towards the Lord to an extreme degree, then we call them demons. We see that demons are always present just before Krishna’s appearance. Kamsa became a big demon and had many, many allies also who were in the same category.

Not only do they not accept the Lord, but they actually hate the Lord. They hate Him as a material person. At that time the Lord manifests himself in this material world.

We see in the Bhagavatam that the demons are present from the very beginning. When Brahma creates the material world he creates demons. Later on we see through the Ditti and Aditti that we get devas and demons from the same family. Hiranyakasipu and Hiranyaksa coming out as well as the vasus and the devas and other persons. It’s more or less inherent in the universe because the universe is made up of gunas. It’s material.

So we have sattva, rajas, and tamas. When the lower gunas combine and become strong we get big demons. The material world is such that the gunas are always changing. Sometimes tama guna becomes strong. Sometimes raja guna becomes strong. Sometimes satva guna becomes strong.

It’s explained in the Srimad Bhagavatam that when sattva guna is prevalent, that means that the devatas are in their proper position and powerful because they are the sattva controllers from svarga loka etc. When sattva is strong, then the devatas are dominating. They control the material world and rule very nicely. When tama guna and raja guna become prominent, we get the demons and the rakshasas and others rising up and becoming very prominent.

Why does it happen like this? We see it throughout the Bhagavatam that the demons become powerful. They become so powerful that they take over svargaloka temporarily. Then they get kicked back down again. Sometimes they become so strong that the Lord, Himself, has to intervene as in the case of when Krishna comes, or Rama.

Why is it like this? It’s like this because this is the nature of the material world. It’s made up of gunas. The gunas do not stay the same all of the time. They fluctuate. We see the fluctuation takes place on a broad scale. We have satya yuga, treta yuga, dvarpa yuga, and kali yuga. In satya yuga it’s very satvic. And in kali yuga it’s very tamasic. In between we get this gradual decline – from satva into raja into tama guna. At the end of kali yuga again, the cycle of material nature itself under the operation of Brahma and the Supreme Lord, create a sattvic situation. And again it declines into tama guna. Thus is one thousand times in a day of Brahma. This goes on every day of Brahma’s month and Brahma’s year for one hundred years. The rotation of satva to tama, satva to tama. That’s the general thing. And then at the end of one day it’s too much and then it’s night and everyone goes to sleep for millions of years. Then they wake up the next morning and they start all over again. After the one hundred years everyone sleeps, even Brahma disappears. Big sleep.

This whole rotation of the gunas goes on in bigger cycles and smaller cycles. Then within the yugas themselves we have uprising sometimes. Within kali yuga we will have a rise of sattva or a degradation into tama guna. In satya yuga itself sometimes will rise tama guna, in spite of the fact that satva guna is prominent in satya yuga.

All of these variations take place because it is the nature of the material world. This fluctuation is always taking place. Therefore we have, from the very beginning of creation, we have tama guna people, raja guna people, and satvic people. We have people in all modes of material nature. At the extreme ends we get the demons and the devatas.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna classifies into two types of people the devatas and the demons. Of course we have people in between also. They may go one way or the other. But at the two ends we get these polarities, the devas and demons. Ultimately, it may end up in conflict, not because of the hostility of the devatas, they don’t want conflict. They are satvic. The demons cause the conflict. Then the devatas are forced to counteract. We get some battles and so on.

So, we see these battles taking place. Sometimes it’s the devatas verses the demons and the Lord sides with the devatas. Sometimes, the Lord Himself comes and intervenes as we will see here in the case of Hiranyakasipu and Nrsimhadeva. When there is a big problem, then the Lord Himself interferes.

Though the Lord is equal to all living entities, we should not misapply this term. Therefore they said He should not interfere at all in anything. If the Lord were to do so, then we would criticize the Lord more. Why does the Lord just make a world like this and then not interfere and help anybody at all, not help the people who are doing the proper thing and punish those who are not?

The Lord rewards according to your qualification. Or, He punishes according to the qualification. In that sense He is sama. But He doesn’t have to do it directly. He does it through the law of karma. The whole material world is such that it operates by the law of karma. So those people who commit sinful acts, ultimately, they have to suffer for that. That’s the law of karma.

The Lord does not personally interfere, but He makes a law. That law is stuck to material nature and we can’t separate the two things. We have prakriti which is the substance of the material world in a subtle state. Of course it evolves into all of the other elements, subtle and gross, ahankara and manasa and the five material elements which form into bodies, etc. We have gross and subtle bodies. All of that is material, it’s matter.

The other aspect of the material world is the subtle aspect of maya that is time and karma. They are not substance by their material. They are aids of the Supreme Lord to make this material world operate according to the Lord’s plan. Therefore time operates in such a way that we get rotations of yugas, days of Brahma, lifetimes of Brahma, repetition of creations of universes, etc. That’s the time factor.

Then, to make sure that everybody is getting their proper rewards or punishments, He has the law of karma. It’s inevitable for all the bodies in the material world to have to accept karma. This is how the Lord is sama.

However, this law of karma operates in favor of the Lord we can say, in one sense, it’s made in such a way that if you do satvic activities you get good rewards and if you do tamas activities you get punishment. Why does the Lord favor the satva and give rewards for that?

Krishna also explains in Bhagavad Gita that satva guna is the best of the gunas. Of course, all of the material world is bad, even satva guna is like golden chains compared to iron chains. It’s all chains anyways. The guna of satva is better, golden chains. But it is still that the Lord prefers it.

Why does the Lord prefer satva guna? Why does He praise the gunas when they are all actually bad, when all gunas are material? It’s because the Lord is very clever. Built into prakriti itself, within satva guna, there is an escape hole by which you can get out of the material world. It’s material but it also has something very interesting in it.

The nature of satva guna is vidya, knowledge, jnana. The jnana does not mean material knowledge because you can get that in raja or tama guna a little bit. In satva guna the jnana takes the form of beginning to understand that we are not the material body. This is the natural result of satva guna. We become detached from material enjoyment and begin to understand that we are not the material body but that we are atma. We begin to accept scriptures.

This is the door to getting out of the material world. Built into the material world is the method of getting out through satva guna. In that sense, it’s considered to be better than the other gunas. It’s the doorway to get out of the material world as well as to stay in the material world. In other words, liberation is the quality or the goal that becomes manifest in satva guna. Whereas in tama or raja guna we have arta, dharma, and karma manifesting. In that sense, better.

This is one of the natural arrangements of the Supreme Lord for raising peoples consciousness so that they can get out of the material world. Why? For the betterment of the jiva. The whole interest is for the betterment of the jivas in the material world. He makes arrangements like this. We can say these are indirect arrangements. The gunas, etc.

Then the Lord makes direct arrangements as well. The Lord establishes scriptures, eternal Vedas, He comes as avatars to show that He is present, that He actually is a real entity. He is not an abstraction, He is a real person. He has devotees in the material world manifesting to preach the glories of the Lord. He has different methods to raise the jivas from lower to higher gunas. That is His varnashram system, then jnana yoga, sthanga yoga, and bhakti yoga.

The Lord places all of these in the material world to help the jivas and, in this way, benefit them. We can say that this is not simply being equal because the Lord does show partiality in the material world. He rewards those who rise up and improve their consciousness. But, still, the Srimad Bhagavatam says, Krishna Himself says in the eleventh canto, I don’t really care for these other processes, even karma yoga, jnana yoga, asthanga yoga, sankhya, and vyragya, and all of these things. I care for bhakti.

That of course is what the Lord says. Yes, I am equal to every living entity, but, I favor the devotee. The Lord does show some sort of sama on a normal level. Again, His intention is to actually aid the jivas to get out of the material world. When the jiva responds in the best way by becoming a devotee, then the Lord is no longer sama, He can no longer control Himself. He begins to interact with that particular person, that devotee.

We have six qualities mentioned in the Nectar of Devotion. The last one is Krishna karshani. Krishna is attracted to bhakti. That particularly refers to the highest level, prema, where Krishna comes under the control of the devotee. Not only Krishna, even Vishnu will come under the control of the devotee as we see in the case of Ambarish. Ambarish was insulted by Durvasa. Durvasa went to the Supreme Lord and the Supreme Lord said I can do nothing, the devotee is in control. Go to him and apologize and maybe the sudarshan chakra will stop following you and burning you up. But it’s My devotee, I gave the sudarshan chakra to him. It’s his.

The Lord comes under the control of the prema bhaktas especially. It doesn’t only apply to the prema bhakta. It also applies to the person in the material world who is practicing bhakti. The Lord definitely favors His devotee. Therefore He says that very quickly the devotee comes to me. That means that he is not perfect yet, but he quickly comes to Me.

He does not make this promise to the jnani, karmi, or the yogi. But He promises to the devotee, yes, He is very quickly relieved from this material world. Why? Because of the intervention of the Lord. The Lord is affected by the response of that particular person, the devotee.

This is the outstanding quality of the Lord. It is not a fault that the Lord is partial to the devotee. This is actually His greatest quality. If we were to say that the Lord should be equal to everyone and should not show emotions, favoritism, or a special liking to a devotee, etc., then He’s also subject to criticism. The more we surrender and sacrifice for the Lord, the more the Lord should be attracted and sacrifice for us.

So, that’s exactly the nature of the Lord. If we show affection for the Lord, then He shows equal or more affection for us. That is the proper mode of devotion or love, when there is an equal or greater response. For the Supreme Lord, we can say this is His ideal quality. He responds ideally and perfectly for each individual on all levels.

On the highest level of course, He responds to each individual. If the devotee sees the Lord as their child, then He becomes a child and the person is able to express vatsaliya rasa, madhurya rasa, or sakhya rasa. The Lord responds individually for every jiva according to his desire. Of course this is a high level.

Even on a lower level before we even manifest preference for rasa, etc., the Lord is there. It’s not just paramatma witnessing everything in the heart. When Krishna says that I give the intelligence by which you will come to Me, it’s not just paramatma acting as a mechanical feature. It is Krishna Himself, guiding the devotee personally and interacting with that particular devotee.

It is not on the same level as a premabhakta, but, as we know accordingly, as you surrender unto Me, I respond to you. If you surrender a little, Krishna gives a little. He responds according to the amount of devotion that you show. Therefore, the devotees who are practicing seriously get a response from the Supreme Lord. He gives them intelligence and guidance by which they can progress in this material world.

Even though the gunas are always fluctuating and we can never predict which guna is going to be prominent, satya yuga will have tamasic situations, kali yuga will get satvic situations. Ultimately, the devotee gets trained to not be too attached to the situations in the material world. They are all gunas, they are all material, and they are subject to change.

The body is subject to change. We don’t know what’s going to happen to the body at any moment. You can have a nice satvic situation and still you can get sick or whatever. We don’t know the reason. We can’t predict it.

The devotee learns to be a little impervious to that and instead concentrate upon his relationship with the Supreme Lord and increase his surrender and attraction to the Lord. Consequently, the Lord responds. What happens through that? The devotee gets happiness. That is the ultimate goal of the jiva, his capacity for happiness or bliss. It is the process of bhakti which yields that bliss, ultimately, more than any other process.

Very fortunately, the process of bhakti surpasses the gunas in its very essence. We may think, well, if you’re in prema you’re beyond the gunas. But bhakti is beyond the gunas. It’s very nature is beyond the gunas. It is nirguna by its nature. They holy name is non different than Krishna. It is beyond the gunas.

Chanting the holy name is beyond the gunas. We may not be able to appreciate that if we are so covered over. But still, it is beyond the gunas. Even if we can’t appreciate it, it still helps to get us beyond the gunas in spite of that. So when we do the activities of bhakti, engaging our voice, or our eyes in seeing the deities, or chanting the holy name, hearing Bhagavatam, etc. with some sincerity, then that act is nirguna. It is beyond the gunas. It is the svarup shakti of Krishna Himself. It’s non different from Krishna. It’s His best part. His hladini shakti is operating for the jiva. The whole process of bhakti is beyond the gunas.

By practicing bhakti, and particularly, by chanting the holy name, we can surpass all of the problems of the material world in any situation whether it’s satya yuga or kali yuga. Through the process of chanting we can surpass all of this. In the second chapter of the tenth canto, Srila Prabhupada remarks in one of the purports that yes, Krishna is no longer here. Previously He manifested Himself. He killed Kamsa and protected Vasudeva and Devaki and the Yadus and the Vrajabasis from Kamsa’s wrath. But it doesn’t really matter now that he’s gone because the holy name is non different than Krishna.

So He is still present. Krishna is present in the kali yuga through the name. We chant the holy name which is non different from Krishna. Therefore, we have the protection of Krishna in any case. Even though He is not personally present, He is present because we have the holy name. Through the holy name we can counteract all of the bad situations of tama guna, raja guna, and even satya guna. We can go beyond the material gunas simply by the chanting of the holy name.

The whole goal of chanting is not simply to go beyond the gunas. If we simply do that then we end up with liberation, which is not our goal. The whole process of chanting is simply to please Krishna. If we do that as our goal then certainly we do get beyond the material problems but we also attain the lotus feet of Krishna.

Devotee question: (inaudible)

Maharaj: Chanting is beyond the gunas but we are in the gunas. Ok. That is the what happens in sadhana bhakti. We’re not beyond the gunas as such because we’re going through anartha nivriti. We still have a material body. We are still in the material world. So we cannot escape at this point. Even if you’re at prema you are still in the material world. So there is no real escape as long as we have a material body and are in the material world. Somehow the gunas are there.

If we are doing sadhana, we are not in prema, obviously, our body can still get affected by the gunas. We’re not pure. Even in bhava there is a slight vijna or a slight obstacle which can cause you to fall or waiver from that stage. Definitely in the process of doing sadhana bhakti then yes, we are going to have different effects, different obstacles, different anarthas, different gunas manifesting at different times. However, we have to follow the instruction of the Nectar of Devotion and that first principle. Well, look, I’m not free from desires. How can I practice pure bhakti and sadhana, I’m not free from desires?

Obviously we’re not because we’re going through anartha nivriti which goes all the way into the bhava stage. It’s a contradiction of terms to do sadhana bhakti and be beyond material desires, in one sense. What that means is that in sadhana bhakti also because at least in the performance of our bhakti we are not constantly praying for things. Hare Krishna please get me married. Hare Krishna please get me money. Hare Krishna please get me a better job. That’s not our thing.

We have to be a little careful when we’re doing sadhana bhakti and we’re chanting or doing our deity worship so that our mind is focused on let me try to give up all of my desires and simply please Krishna. Then it is pure bhakti in sadhana bhakti.

Of course, we’re not always in that state. Underneath we have all of these desires still in us. Gradually, as we go through anartha nivriti, they become less and less but they are still there. But we call the whole process pure bhakti because that’s the only way, at least excluding them when we are doing our particular sadhana, that we can get to the higher stages of bhava and prema where there is that absolute state of surrender to Krishna. It’s not the ideal state, sadhana bhakti, but still we call it pure bhakti because consciously we are trying to reject the desires in spite of the fact that they are there.

Devotee question: (inaudible)

Maharaj: We can say that when we do the act of bhakti we deliberately reject our material desires. Consciously, we have the goal of pure bhakti. We try to do our best. That is our intention. We can say that even though we are contaminated, our intention is pure bhakti. Therefore, Krishna accepts that as part of the pure bhakti process.

It’s a lower stage. That’s why sadhana bhakti is considered less than bhava bhakti or prema bhakti. It’s not as pure. If we just begin with sraddha then it’s less pure than when we are at nistha or ruchi or asakti. That’s why we grade it. We have the different levels according to the amount of attraction for Krishna and the less amount of material desires or gunas or ego. The less it becomes, the better it is. That’s how we measure progress.

One who has less attraction for material things, less gunas, etc., then he is more advanced. One with more of those influences is less advanced. Never the less, we accept them all as devotees, especially if they are practicing the process of pure bhakti. If they are not practicing pure bhakti as such, we still accept them as devotees.

As explained in the Caitanya Caritamrita even the sahajiyas, we can accept in one sense, are chanting the holy name but we don’t associate with them. We can accept them in one sense but we really accept those devotees who are following this process of pure bhakti as stated by Rupa Gosvami and Caitanya Mahaprabhu. Even if they are in the low sadhana stage.

Devotee question: (inaudible)

Maharaj: Not literally pure, but, the intention is to attain that purity.

Devotee question: (inaudible)

Maharaj: I think He always does. Whatever we do, He is eager to give more. He is very, very eager. He is reciprocal but no body is going to criticize if He gives more. We will say He is very good if He gives a little more than necessary. If He gives more, is it real reciprocation? If He gives more than He should give? Although, the nature of Krishna is that He gets uncontrolled with the devotees so sometimes He may give more than He should, even, as we see in the case of Krishna with Sudhama. He started eating the rice and he was eating too much and then his wife said, don’t take anymore, don’t take anymore, you’re giving him too much mercy. But He wanted to take more because He was so enthusiastic because of the devotion that Sudhama showed.

Devotee question: (inaudible)

Maharaj: With the devotees? No, definitely it’s not equal. He’s more eager to give than you can express yourself.

Devotee question: (inaudible)

Maharaj: Yeah, and again, we are not going to criticize that. It’s the eagerness of Krishna for the devotee that He will do anything for the devotee. In the story also of Gajendra, I think Parasura Bhakta describes that, he has the whole thing about the Gajendra lila, that it’s Vishnu and not even Krishna. Even Vishnu is so eager to help the devotees that when He heard the cry of help from Gajendra – He was in Vaikuntha enjoying with Laksmi – but immediately when He heard that crying, He forgot about Laksmi completely. He jumped on Garuda. Immediately He was trying to get Garuda to move faster and faster to come to the material world and rescue Gajendra from the crocodile. He forgot about Laxmi who is His sakti, His consort, and He was attracted to the devotee.

We can say that is unequal also. He wasn’t even a pure devotee. He was praying to the Lord because he was eaten by the crocodile. It wasn’t even pure bhakti but still the Lord was very attracted. We can say that is excessive attraction to the devotee even when he wasn’t doing pure bhakti.

The Lord does do that. He gives extraordinary mercy. He gives extraordinary mercy even to the demons. Krishna kills Putana who tried to murder Him and she got a place in the spiritual world. We could say that is a completely unequal response. But it is expected of the Lord that He will do extraordinary things, show extraordinary mercy for extraordinary circumstances, and for extraordinary demons, even. The Lord does extraordinary things sometimes which we do not even expect in terms of His mercy.

Devotee: Maharaj, you are talking a lot about the modes of nature. In the Gita Krishna is saying that whatever mode you die in, that will determine your next birth, up, down, or middle. In western religion they don’t understand the modes of nature but they have the idea that you have faith in God, or their concept of love of God, and by doing that you will go to heaven, the spiritual world. Sometimes we will say that my mother was a very religious person and so we consider that she went up. But by action in western culture, it’s mostly passion and ignorance. How does faith deal in this whole mixture? Is it purely the actions in the modes of nature, or, is it actions in modes plus your religious faith? I don’t know if you would call western religion religious activity as always religious, but it’s done in a religious institution. You understand what I’m saying. Does that nullify it or is it purely material laws? Just that you believe in God, but your life was in ignorance, so you’re going to take birth as an animal.

Maharaj: Well, if we have material religions and they are sattvic religions, then if you practice it then you will rise up in sattva. Just as in karma yoga and you worship devatas without attachment to material results, then you rise up in sattva guna, generally. If you worship rakshasas you’re in raja guna. If you worship ignorant creatures and ghosts then you’re in tama guna. According to the guna of your faith, you worship different objects, you have different religions, and you get different results.

It may be a little difficult to classify Christianity or something as to which guna it is. Some of the sects may be tamasic and some may be rajasic and some may be sattvic. Some may be transcendental, even. Some aspects of it may be nirguna even.

Devotee: Let’s get specific. You drink wine. You eat meat. And you go to church. You sing praise to God and you read the Bible. Is that transcending your tama guna activity or is tama guna dominating because it’s your law of nature if you’re in ignorance.

Maharaj: Well there is something like that even in the varnashram system. The people in the lower gunas, traditionally, they can eat meat or they can take liquor or whatever. The whole idea is that with gradual restriction they rise through the gunas over many lifetimes. Of course, they don’t have that concept in Christianity.

For us we would say that by practicing something they gradually get purified over many births and rise in the gunas until come to sattva guna. Then they will renounce a lot of these things completely and end up with what we would call a more bonafide form of religious activity. At that point the probably get into atma jnana and that I’m not the material body at all if they get to sattva guna.

We can say that it’s something like karma yoga that helps raise them up gradually over many births.

Hare Krishna.

Sri Isvara Puri appeared in this world on the full moon day of the month of Jyestha. He served his guru, Sri Madhavendra Puri, very faithfully, especially during the end of Sri Puripada’s life.

On day when Caitanya Mahaprabhu visited Gaya, He approached Sri Isvara Puri and requested that he initiate Him with the divine mantra. “My mind is becoming very restless in anticipation of this initiation. “Srila Puripada very blissfully replied, “What to speak of mantras, I am prepared to offer You my very life.”

Thereafter Srila Isvara Puri initiated Mahaprabhu with the divine mantra.

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From Sri Mayapur Chandrodaya Mandir
Date: February 29, 2016 Speaker: HH Bhakti Caru Maharaj
Subject: on HH Gour Govinda Swami on Occasion of his 20th Disappearance Day Anniversary

Yesterday was the disappearance day of our very dear and very exalted godbrother, His Holiness Gour Govinda Swami Maharaj. Because those two occasions are clashing, it was decided that we will have a special class on Srila Gour Govinda Swami Maharaj. Therefore, instead of having a class on the book Bhagavat, we’ll have a class today on the peron Bhagavat.

HH Gour Govinda Swami Maharaj ki jaya!

HH Gour Govinda Swami Maharaj’s tirobhava mahotsvaha ki jaya!

Gaura Premanade Hari Hari Bol!

On the disappearance days of exalted devotees, we sing a special song composed by Srila Narottama Das Thakur. It goes like

je ānilo prema-dhana koruṇā pracur
heno prabhu kothā gelā ācārya-ṭhākur
 
kāhā mora swarūp rūpa kāhā sanātan
kāhā dāsa raghunātha patita-pāvan
 
kāhā mora bhaṭṭa-juga kāhā kavirāj
eka-kāle kothā gelā gorā naṭa-rāj
 
pāṣāṇe kuṭibo māthā anale paśibo
gaurāńga guṇera nidhi kothā gele pābo
 
se-saba sańgīra sańge je koilo bilās
se-sańga nā pāiyā kānde narottama dās

Although most of you know this song, let us read the translation first before singing this song.

He, who brought the treasure of divine love and who was filled with compassion and mercy–where has such a personality as Advaita Acarya gone?
 
Where are my Svarupa Damodara and Rupa Gosvami? Where is Sanatana? Where is Raghunatha Dasa, the savior of the fallen?
 
Where are my Raghunatha Bhatta and Gopala Bhatta, and where is Krsnadasa Kaviraja? Where did Lord Gauranga, the great dancer, suddenly go?
 
I will smash my head against the rock and enter into the fire. Where will I find Lord Gauranga, the reservoir of all wonderful qualities?
 
Being unable to obtain the association of Lord Gauranga accompanied by all of these devotees in whose association He performed His pastimes, Narottama Dasa simply weeps.

Pranam Mantras

HH Gour Govinda Swami Maharaj ki jaya

Srila Prabhupada attracted many exalted spiritual personalities. HH Gour Govinda Swami Maharaj is one of them. When we look at his life we can see that from the very beginning of his life, he had been a very, very dedicated devotee of Krishna. He was a very exalted devotee of Krishna.

Maharaj appeared in a small villiage in a small village in Orissa called Jagannathapur. He appeared in a devotee family. His father Ishavar Manik and mother were very wonderful devotees. His maternal grandfather, his mother’s father, was such an exalted devotee of Krishna that the whole day he used to just chant the holy names. He was also very famous as a kirtaniya. He had his kirtan and I heard that on special occaisions, the King of Orissa used to call his group to Jagannath Puri and to the capitol to chant the holy name of the Lord.

His mother’s family, in a village called (inaudible), which was about fourteen kilometers from Jagannathapur, had been worshipping Sri Sri Radha Gopal deities for more than 350 years. We can see that by Krishna’s divine arrangement, he appeared in a devotee family and had a very wonderful spiritual upbringing from his childhood.

He was born on 2nd September, 1929. When he was eight years old, he already read Bhagavad Gita, Srimad Bhagavatam, and Caitanya Caritamrita. Not only did he study these scriptures, but he could actually give classes and speak on those topics as an eight year old boy.

He was also a very brilliant student. Unfortunately, his father left this planet when he was 27 years old and the responsibility of maintaining the family came upon him. He could not go to the university. But although he did not have the opportunity to go to the university, on his own, he studied. During the day he used to work and at night he used to prepare for his graduation course. Although he appeared privately, he stood second in the whole university. That shows what a brilliant personality he was.

After doing his BA, he did his B8, and he took the occupation of a teacher. Although he was involved in his household life, he was extremely detached. I personally have seen, like, when Maharaj was in Bhubaneswar, the temple, there were many devotees. I was introduced to one boy who was his son. He was also staying in the temple, but he did not get any special treatment as Maharaj’s son. He was just like any other devotee there. Maharaj was extremely detached.

When he was 45 years old, Maharaj left home. He just left home and started to travel around India to the holy places. He went to the Himalayas and Maharaj, naturally, was quite disappointed in this mayavadi influence in the community of the sadhus. Most of the so called sadhus are impersonalists now a days. It’s very painful for a devotee.

Finally, Maharaj came to Vrindavan and in Vrindavan he thought that he would find the vaisnava association. Although all four sampradayas were very well established in Vrindavan – Maharaj used to go to the different ashrams in Vrindavan and spend days there. He would stay in the ashrams and listen to them. He could see that even though they were vaisnavas, it was not really appealing to his heart because he couldn’t see or find pure Krishna Consciousness in them.

In that respect we can consider that Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu influenced two countries very effectively, two parts of India, Bengal and Orissa. Caitanya Mahaprabhu for the first twenty-four years of His stay on this planet, He stayed in Bengal. He started the sankirtan movement and created a tremendous influence. Nityananda Prabhu continued that.

In Orissa, He Himself was there. The unique thing about Orissa is that it is actually the land of Jagannath. As a result of that, most of the people there are great devotees. They have an inherent attachment to Krishna, to Lord Jagannatha.

Unfortunately, due to the British influence – When the British first came to India they came to Bengal, to Calcutta. They established their set up in Calcutta. As a result of the British influence, Mahaprabhu’s teachings were sort of lost. As you all know, when all kinds of apra sampradays started to pop up and the teachings of Lord Caitanya were practically covered over. Then came the teachings of Ram Krishna. The whole of Bengal became totally spoiled by their thoughts and non spiritual propaganda, whereas Orissa was not affected by any of these things.

Therefore, Krishna Consciousness remained quite in tact in Orissa. Even today we can see the difference between Bengal and Orissa. In Bengal, gradually due to Srila Prabhupada’s influence, things are changing due to our preaching, namahatta preaching in the villages and all. Krishna Consciousness is being established.

Orissa is very different. Even if you go to the villages, you will see that people are so devoted, so Krishna Consciousness. We can understand why Gour Govinda Maharaj was disappointed even when he went to Vrindavan. The pure Krishna bhakti was not there. He could not find it in these four sampradayas.

One day he saw a sign – the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Nothing that impressive, construction was going on, it was a construction site. But the sign was there. It appeared to him, an international society. He went to speak to the people in there. When he went there, he found the westerners, the Americans and Europeans. They had become Krishna Conscious. That impressed him so much. He felt that this was the real thing.

Krishna bhakti is meant for every single living entity. It is not just meant for Indians or Asians. It’s for everyone. Then he started to speak to some devotee who explained to him about Srila Prabhupada and how he went to America and spread Krishna Consciousness there and made them into devotees and how they were affected by Srila Prabhupada’s teachings.

He became eager to see Srila Prabhupada. He was already dressed in saffron and was a sadhu from his appearance. He asked the devotee, can I please meet your guru? That devotee said yes. You have to speak to his secretary. At that time Brahmananda Maharaj was his secretary. He went and spoke to him.

Srila Prabhupada, at that time, had just finished his lunch and was about to take rest. When Brahmananda told him that Srila Prabhupada had just taken lunch but, anyway, I will go and ask him if he would like to meet you. He went and told Prabhupada that one sadhu wanted to see him. Prabhupada’s immediate response was yes, bring him in.

Gour Govinda Maharaj was taken to Srila Prabhupada. At that time his name was actually Brajabandhu. We can see, born in a village called Jagannathpur, he had a name of Brajabandhu, friend of Vraja, friend of Vrindavan. We can see the spiritual background he had actually appeared in.

Prabhupada saw him dressed in saffron. After some exchange, Srila Prabhupada asked him if he was a sannyasi. He said no, I didn’t officially, formally take sannyasa. I’m just wondering around in search of spiritual upliftment. Srila Prabhupada said, I will give you sannyasa. In their first meeting Srila Prabhupada told him that he would give him sannyasa.

Srila Prabhupada gave him first and second initiation. In 1975 on the occasion of the inauguration of the Krishna Balaram Temple, Srila Prabhupada gave him sannyasa and the name Gour Govinda Swami. Srila Prabhupada gave him three instructions. Translate my books into Oria, build a temple, and you preach around the world. Prabhupada saw his spiritual accument.

At that time in Orissa, we got a piece of land given by a wealthy person. This land was far away from the city. Prabhupada told him to go there and build a temple. Being instructed by Srila Prabhupada, he just went. I

nitially, he did not have any place to stay, he had nothing in that place. There was a little village far away. But where the land was, there was nothing around there. The place was so remote that it was the hideout of dacoits. There was a tea shop. In the back of the tea shop was a room. Maharaj made an arrangement to stay in that room. At that time, one student became very affected by Gour Govinda Maharaj. He later became Sacinandan Prabhu. I think he was his first disciple.

Sacinandan Prabhu, on a cycle, used to take Gour Govinda Maharaj. In the carrier of the cycle, on the back, Maharaj used to sit there on the cycle to the city. Maharaj used to go to the offices or houses where he used to preach.

With his own hands he built a hut. He started to stay there.

In 1977, when Srila Prabhupada came to India, soon after the Kumba Mela in Janurary, from the Srila Prabhupada went to Calcutta and from there he went to Bhubaneswar. He stayed there for seventeen days. For Srila Prabhupada a nice arrangement was made in a rich supporters house. But Srila Prabhupada decided not to stay there. He decided to stay on the land in the small hut for seventeen days with a whole lot of his disciples. On the Nityananda Trayodasi day, Srila Prabhupada did the ground breaking ceremony of the temple there.

Gour Govinda Maharaj took up the mission. I have noticed those days that whoever came in contact with Gour Govinda Maharaj became extremely influenced. Even when some personalities were quite difficult to deal with, they committed themselves to serve with Gour Govinda Maharaj. In spite of all those difficulties and hardships, lack of facilities, they stayed there in Bhubaneswar serving and helping him.

One person who I remember is one of our very wonderful god brothers, Tejas Prabhu. I think Srila Prabhupada told Tejas Prabhu to help Gour Govinda Maharaj with funds. Tejas Prabhu is very expert at fund raising and Prabhupada understood that he should help Gour Govinda Maharaj in building that temple.

I remember in those days that Tejas Prabhu used to travel around with Banamali Prabhu, another Orissan devotee. They would travel to different places collecting funds. It was a struggle. The temple was coming up. But gradually we saw how the city started to move there.

Today, if you go to Bhubaneswar Temple, it doesn’t look like it used to be a dacoits den thirty-five or forty years ago. The city has shifted there. You see all high-rises in that area. A beautiful temple has come up.

When Maharaj started to give initiation, in 1985, devotees from all over the world became very much inspired by him. Not only his disciples, but many of our god brothers became very inspired by Gour Govinda Maharaj. They started to support and then the temple came up.

He was a brilliant personality. I remember in those days, during this time of the GBC meeting and Gaura Purnima festival, senior devotees gave a class for one day. But Gour Govinda Maharaj was so popular that he was asked to give the class for two days in a row.

He was extremely erudite and he was very straight forward. In one hand, he was very soft and gentle, smiling, but sometimes he would become hard as a thunderbolt. If somebody would say something without quoting the scripture he would say it’s cheating, how do you substantiate that statement? Where is it in the scriptures?

He had such a profound command over the scriptures. I had the good fortune of having some close exchanges, intimate association with Maharaj. I remember the first time I saw him, it was in the Calcutta temple. I was just a new devotee and one day Maharaj came and, he was a sannyasi so I made arrangements for his prasadam. While I was serving him prasad he was talking to me. All the time he was just smiling and laughing while talking to me. He was happy to see that I had joined.

At that time I did not meet Srila Prabhupada. I had just joined in Mayapur. I met Srila Prabhupada at Kumba Mela in 1977. Prabhupada, in our first meeting, gave me the instruction to translate his books into Bengali. That was the first instruction I received from Srila Prabhupada – you translate my books into Bengali. That gave me the opportunity to come close to Srila Prabhupada.

Then I was with Srila Prabhupada serving him personally. Then Srila Prabhupada from Mayapur went to Bombay, from Bombay to Hrishikesh, from Hrishikesh he came to Vrindavan. At that time, Prabhupada’s health was very bad. As a matter of fact, Srila Prabhupada went to Vrindavan from Hrishikesh in order to leave his body. In Hrishikesh he told us that the time had come for him to leave his body and that he wanted to leave his body in Vrindavan. So we should make arrangements to bring him to Vrindavan immediately. And we did that. That night we packed up and in the morning we left for Vrindavan.

Many devotees were coming to see Prabhupada at that time. Gour Govinda Maharaj also came to see Srila Prabhupada. Prabhupada had some very sweet exchange with him. Gour Govinda Maharaj was saying that the place was so remote where our land is in Bhubaneshwar that hardly anybody is coming. Prabhupada actually told him at that time, don’t worry, that place will become filled with people. I don’t know whether or not Srila  Prabhupada said that the city would shift to that part or not, but one thing he assured him was that many, many people would come to the temple. Don’t worry.

When Gour Govinda Maharaj was leaving, Prabhupada called me. He asked me how he was going to Mathura. I went and asked Maharaj, how are you going to go to Mathura, to catch a train there. Maharaj said that he would take a bus, public transport. Prabhupada said no, tell them to drop him in my car. Prabhupada wanted him to be dropped at Mathura station in his car.

After that, I had on a few occaisions, visited Bhubaneshwar. I remember those days. There were very few devotees. Mostly it was very sweet. Bhagavat Prabhu was there. He was very fond of Gour Govinda Maharaj. He is our god brother from America.

Gour Govinda Maharaj was just absorbed in reading and translating, studying, and giving discourses. I noticed that he would not eat. Sometimes he would come and stay in Calcutta where I used to stay. I noticed that until Maharaj had translated a certain number of pages, I think it was ten pages of Srimad Bhagavatam, he would not eat. He would eat only after he had translated a certain number of pages of Srimad Bhagavatam. It was extremely austere.

Another time I remember Maharaj had some sort of ulcer in his leg. He wouldn’t take any treatment and it was getting worse and worse. The ulcer actually was eating up his bones, but he would not take any treatment. Finally, due to the intense persuasion of his devotees, he accepted the treatment. Otherwise, he was very detached and just depending on Krishna. Tremendous will. Tremendous determination. He was extremely detached. At the same time, rich with his devotion to Krishna.

He became a GBC. We also noticed that in the GBC Meetings, he would rarely speak. When there would be some critical input needed, and if the devotees asked Maharaj, he would give such a pure Krishna Conscious solution. We could see that although he was not speaking, he was listening so intently about the whole proceedings during our meetings.

Maharaj started to travel around the world and I noticed that wherever he went, he got such tremendous appreciation. He was very gentle and meek normally, but when he used to give a class, he was like a lion, roaring. Once one devotee how he was sitting next to him, he was shouting so much, I could hear him straight. I told him, it’s not that, it’s his ecstasy that’s making him speak like that. It’s the ecstasy that makes one speak like that, roaring like a lion.

Maharaj was, wherever he went, he created a tremendous appreciation. Devotees were so fond of him wherever he went. Devotees appreciated his scholarship, the depth of his devotion, and his very profound dealings with everyone in a very loving and intimate way. At the same time, he was extremely straight forward.

Twenty years back, here in Mayapur, Maharaj was here during the GBC Meeting. On the day of Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura’s appearance, that year also was Srila Prabhupada’s 100th anniversary, 1996. One evening, Maharaj gave darshan just before evening arati. He told the devotees to go and attend the arotik. So all of the devotees, after just listening to him, came to the arotik. Maharaj used to stay where my room is in the conch building. Maharaj’s room was three rooms after that. His servant just came running to me. He came and told me that Guru Maharaj fainted. I also ran to his room. In the meantime, one devotee who was not a devotee but who had some experience in whichever way, I came and I found that he was feeling Maharaj’s pulse. He told me that he left his body. It was so sudden that we couldn’t even imagine that he could leave. He gave a class, spoke about Lord Jagannath’s glory, and to the group of devotees sitting there, and in a few minutes after that he just left.

The whole night we chanted kirtan. His leading disciples wanted to take Maharaj’s body to Bhubaneswar. They took Maharaj to Bhubaneswar in a vehicle. Some of us traveled to Bhubaneswar. Radhanath Maharaj and I traveled by train to Bhubaneswar that day. It was such a loss. It came so suddenly. There is no way of knowing how and when Krishna will call his devotees back to a new assignment.

In a similar way we saw how Tamal Krishna Maharaj also left his body so suddenly. At a time like that, we have to understand that Krishna called them to give them a more important assignment, some more important engagement. For us, it’s a great loss. We can’t fathom or understand what is Krishna’s plan, what is Srila Prabhupada’s plan.

I’ll end the class with a pastime that HH Gour Govinda Maharaj narrated about why Krishna came as Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu.

One day in Vrindavan, Radharani was waiting for Krishna. The sakhis arranged the kunja. They met in flower groves. They decorated the place very beautifully for Krishna to come. Radharani was waiting for Krishna, but Krishna had not come. It was quite late but still, Krishna did not come.

One messenger was sent to find out what actually happened, why Krishna was not coming. So she went and found out that Krishna was with Candravali. Candravali, although she is Radharani’s sister, is Radharani’s competitor. Incidentally, in Vraja lila, it is Radharani and Candravali. In Dvarka lila, Candravali becomes Rukmini and Radharani becomes Satyabhama. So they are always with Krishna.

Krishna is with Candravali. Hearing that, Radharani became so upset. She said, if He ever comes here, don’t allow Him to come near me. I don’t want to see His face. When Krishna came, Lalita and Visakha stopped Him saying, no way can You go there. She doesn’t want to even see Your face.

Completely dejected, Krishna left the place and went to the bank of the Yamuna and started to cry, rolling on the ground. Radharani had rejected Him. Purnamasi came and, Purnamasi is yoga maya. She is an elderly lady who makes all of the arrangements for Krishna’s pastimes. That’s yoga maya’s position. She came and asked Krishna what happened. He narrated the whole incident. Then Purnamasi said, serious matter, let me see what I can do. Just stay here and I will make some arrangement, let’s see what I can do.

After a short while, Vrinda devi came there. Vrinda said look, Purnamasi sent me to help You out to unite with Radha, to arrange for you to meet Radha. So Krishna said please do that. In separation, My heart is breaking. Vrinda said look, if you go like this, there is no chance. Krishna said tell me what I should do. She said, get rid of your long hair, shave your head up. Give up the peacock feather on your forehead. Give up your flute. Instead of flute, you take a sannyasa danda. Dress up like a sannyasi. Give up this form of bending in three places and become straight. On top of everything, you have to hide your blue color. If you go there with this complexion, she will automatically recognize you. Assume a golden color.

According to Vrinda’s instruction, Krishna went there as a sannyasi. A sannyasi’s business is to beg. He was singing a song describing that, I am a begger, begging for Radha’s love. When Lalita and Visakha heard, they were very happy. Oh, you are glorifying Srimati Radharani. Where did you learn this song? He said, I learned it from my guru, ghandarvika. Ghandarva means the fine arts. They thought it was the teacher who teaches fine arts.

They thought, oh, you are a very nice sannyasi. What do you want? He said look, I am here to help everybody. Anyone who is in distress, my business is to help them out. They said, you see, our mistress is in great distress. Can you help her out? He said, sure I can. Please come and tell her what she should do. He said yes, I am a great astrologer. I can help her. Just by seeing the lines I can make out what is going to happen. I can suggest accordingly.

They went and reported that such and such a sannyasi came and he said that he can help anyone in distress. We thought that since you are in such distress we should ask him to help you. He agreed. Radharani came to the veranda, the sannyasi was there. She was covering her face because she didn’t see anyone but Krishna. She said, so sannyasi thakur, can you please read her palm? He said I am a sannyasi, I can’t touch a woman! They asked so how will you read the lines? He said no, no. Not the lines of the hand. I can read the lines on the forehead.

Lalita told him look, she doesn’t look at anybody other than Krishna. The only male she looks at is Krishna. No one else but Krishna. He said look, I am a sannyasi. I am beyond all of this bodily concept of life. One should not be ashamed in front of me. Tell your mistress to open her veil and let me see the lines on her forehead. Her veil was lifted, but as soon as the sannyasi saw her face, he could not retain his sannyasi form. He assumed his Shyamasundar form and this is how Krishna met Srimati Radharani and broke her anger.

Sri Sri Radha Madan Mohan ki jaya! Sri Sri Radha Madhava ki jaya!

Srila Gour Govinda Maharaj ki jaya!

Gaura Premande Hari Hari Bol!

Preaching program in Goa with Radhanath Swami.
From 12th to 14th of February 2016 Radhanath Swami was at Goa, India. He addressed 9000 Goans at a two day event called Maha Jagruti, ‘the great spiritual awakening’, celebrating ISKCON’s Golden Jubilee. The festival was held at Dr Shyam Prasad Mukherjee Indoor Stadium.
The chief secretary of the Goan Government R. K. Srivastava, chairman of Dempo group Srinivas Dempo, chairman of NRB group Narayan Bandekar, and chief editor of magazine Viva Goa were present for Maha Jagruti.
At a program in Kranti Yoga Village Radhanath Swami reminisced about his Goan visit of 1971, details of which are found in his book The Journey Home. Kranti is a popular yoga school located amid tranquil coconut groves and luscious palm trees of southern Goa. 60 western yoga students attended the talk; 45 purchased The Journey Home. The Founder and Director of Kranti Yoga, Tarun Agarwal, was also present.
At another event, the inauguration of an ISKCON temple in Goa, Radhanath Swami said, “People from all over the world come to Goa in search of happiness, and so we have the chance to share with them the secrets of spiritual happiness as taught by Sri Chaitanya and Srila Prabhupada.”

Preaching program in England with Kadamba Kanana Swami.
…Finally, we arrived at Suan Mataji’s house. It was a nice and cozy place near the edge of a forest just outside of London. Being a Chinese devotee, her home had an interesting mix of very devotional paraphernalia like Vaishnava paintings, books and sculptures juxtaposed with classic Chinese paraphernalia like those traditional lanterns with red and gold motifs. Curiously enough, on the wall of her living room was a humongous map of the world. Maybe it’s to keep Suan Mataji motivated in her mission to take over the world and flood it with the Holy name!!
And of course in the center of her room were gorgeous deities of Gaura Nitai. The crowd was mostly Chinese students, bankers and doctors but there were also a few European and Nepali students as well.
To read the entire article click here: https://goo.gl/9Z5gfU

Vaisesika Prabhu at ISKCON Mayapur on 2016-02-27, Srimad Bhagavatam Canto 09.11.25

March 6. ISKCON 50 – S.Prabhupada Daily Meditations.
Satsvarupa dasa Goswami: Prabhupada’s Dream.
When asked about his dream on board the Jaladutta, Prabhupada said: “The dream was I must come here … The dream was that Krishna in His many forms was rowing the boat.”
Be true to the great personality who brought pure love of God, be true to yourself who desires pure life and freedom in love of Krishna, be true to this highest mission for the world’s welfare. In other words, I realize I cannot force anyone, and all will have to withstand maya on their own, but if they will only follow His instructions, they will be safe. Otherwise, all this danger, implications; caught in the web of action-reaction.
To read the entire article click here: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=20490&page=6

Prabhupada’s Dream

Written by Nandan

Class at the Manor SB 10.2.22

Continuing his discourse on demonic psychology, Maharaj clarified that demons existed in previous ages as well. If one reads the beginning of Krishna Dharma Prabhu’s Ramayana, Rakshasas were flying in the sky and then killed saints who were performing sacrifices. They killed the saints mercilessly.

This class and yesterday’s has to rank as two of the finest classes Maharaj has ever given, in my opinion. It was a no holds barred, candid understanding of the human psyche, warts and all. And related directly to devotees themselves, Maharaj really put up a mirror to the devotees of the Iskcon community, the reflection in the mirror isn’t always fair and pretty. But then a Guru’s duty is to cut. And Maharaj wasn’t carrying a poxy, little flick knife; he was wielding a foot long kukri machete, ready to chop up all our misconceptions about ourselves and others.

It started with a general study on demons, looking at Kamsa and the Vrindavan demons, their power, attributes and features. How even though they make alliances together, demons deeply hate each other. For example, the Vrindavan demons were never actually friends of Kamsa; they were only his allies because he had defeated them, so it was all fear based. And that’s the key; it’s all based on fear. And Kamsa’s cruelty was magnified by fear. Maharaj talked about Kamsa’s history, being the inauspicious result of an illicit union between Dhrumila and Padmavati. In fact Padmavati, Kamsa’s mother was of a somewhat dubious character, never regretting anything that Kamsa did and always gossiping about Krishna.

In the modern age, we often find ourselves in demonic association. Maharaj revealed having a personal friend who he did not even tell that he joined the Hare Krishna’s because he knew the friend go completely crazy. Once when he brought that friend to his house, his mother called him a hawk. Maharaj realised that in a way, she was protecting him. So nowadays, the demonic culture is integrated into society. Hardheartedness and cruelty are predominant. Animal cruelty and organ trafficking, etc. It is all coming from hard heartedness.

Maharaj gave the example of Aghasura who was not just a snake but had a human form as well. But he liked the snake form because he was completely cold blooded. All humans were just utensils to him… completely ruthless.

Like nowadays when people get married, in many cases it is because they need someone to torture and vent their frustrations on. Sad to say, it happens in the Hare Krishna movement too. At this point, one could sense a lot of the backs were straightening and ears were pricking up in the audience. This is NOT what they expected to hear. One Mataji even let out a little yelp of, “Really!?”Maharaj replied, “Yeees! It’s going on right now.” Maharaj then looked directly at the audience and declared that some of us are doing it or maybe one of you guys listening on the internet, “You know who you are!”

He explained that he does a lot of counselling within the devotee community and he routinely gets cases revolving around some form of abuse. It has come to a point where he is like, “Oh no, not again!!” We can say it’s the work of ‘kali chelas’ in the sankirtan movement. But ultimately we are cruel out of ignorance because we are being cruel to our own destiny.  This tendency of cruelty is rising out of ignorance and step by step we are going down. Little deviations here and there. That is how it is working. The class was very comprehensive and covered many other aspects and is certainly one of the most powerful and hard hitting classes at the Manor. And yet Maharaj has the uncanny knack of conveying hard truths in such a humorous manner. You would have to hear it to believe it, so please hear it. Comes highly recommended!!

Evening Crawley Program

It was literally a crawl through the traffic to get to the Crawley program and that too, late in the evening. Maharaj wasn’t exactly over the moon with the timing of this program. Nonetheless he sees a lot of promise with this sanga group and comes here every time he is in the country. But this time he decided to tell them at the end of the program to adjust the timings, otherwise he won’t be getting back at his house until way after midnight.

Once Maharaj and his group of devotees got to the event, he started of singing the ‘Jaya Radha Madhava’ prayers and at ‘…Yamuna tira vanachari’ the audience would jump the pause before the first line again. After a couple of times of doing this, he stopped the kirtan and smilingly told everyone to be aware of the pause, otherwise the beat of the tune gets ruined. Everyone laughed. He added, “I’m not going to let you kill the tune!” Cue more nervous laughter. Before resuming the prayers, he also told the mrdanga player to hold in the reins and take it easy, that it was not a horse race where he needs to gallop away with the beats. Because Maharaj said it in such a humorous manner, everyone took it in good spirit and it showed Maharaj to be a true perfectionist. After all a Vaishnava is daksha (expert) in whatever seva he performs.

After the prayers, Maharaj started to speak, basing his talk on the esoteric poems of the Padyavali. The main conclusion was that only devotional service counts, nothing else. One of the verses in the Padyavali talked about so many devotees lacking in certain qualities like Kubja who had no beauty, Gajendra who had no knowledge, Dhruva who had no maturity… but in the end, none of that matters; only devotional service counts. We have to make Krishna the centre of our lives and that means physically as well. Your Krishna deity should be in the centre of the home, even if it means we have to settle for a small corner in the room.

A lot of worshipers themselves are unclear as to who Krishna even is. ‘Nam nam akari bahuda nija sarva shakti….’ But how much do we know of Krishna energies? The sankirtan movement is making things crystal clear. Krishna is the original lamp and there is one type of ignorance which is thinking that after getting access to the absolute truth, there will be something more. But they don’t realise that beyond that there is simply more chanting.

And do we even understand who Srila Prabhupada really is!? Once Malati Prabhu had a dream and a beautiful effluent personality appeared and said, “You have no idea who Srila Prabhupada is. He is being worshipped all over the universe.” It transpired that this personality was a Yamaduta. They are generally perceived as being ugly but to devotees this is what they like. Maharaj urged all the devotees to really think about how unique Srila Prabhupada is. He spread the sankirtan movement once in a lifetime of Brahma!

Trivikrama Swami expanded the whole vision of Srila Prabhupada by questioning whether Srila Prabhupada really did go back to Godhead after leaving here. This was in 1979 in Vrindavan and the devotees were alarmed. What was Maharaja saying? And then Maharaj released the bombshell, “Maybe he has gone to another universe to start the whole thing again?” Maharaj recalled how when the devotees heard this, they were fainting. How much do we really know Krishna?

Maharaj spoke on and raised some fantastic points and shared some profound realisations.

But it was getting late and Maharaj was looking to make an exit. As per his decision, at the end of the session he said to the Crawley devotees, “Next time make your programs earlier, then there will be more juice. The later it gets, the less juice there is!”

HH Kadamba Kanana Maharaj Ki Jai!

This time I have rather than written put together a small video explaining were I am and how the current one size fits all system is killing my desire to do service

sadly at this moment I am currently deliberating leaving ISKCON due to the current system that is less about caring and inspiring but more about forms and good class results; it’s killing me

please I beg don’t kill me any more, the life support is failing

KK Bindu #370, three crucial points for making advancement from Vallabhacharya, plus more.
The latest issue of Sri Krishna-kathamrita Bindu e-magazine was just released.
This issue includes:
* DISCIPLE MEANS DISCIPLINE – An excerpt from a lecture by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada.
* BHAJANA IS NOT FOR SHOW – Valuable instructions from a letter written by Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur Prabhupada to a disciple.
* WISDOM, PATIENCE AND SURRENDER – A first time translation done especially for this issue of Bindu from Srila Vallabhacharya’s Viveka-dhairya-asrayah regarding three crucial points for making advancement on the path of devotion.
* NAMA-TATTVA: EVEN DRUNKARDS AND BRAHMIN KILLERS – A verse from the Brahma-vaivarta Purana. It can be downloaded here: https://archive.org/details/bindu370