Planet ISKCON

Our Lord and the Twelve Disciples was the title of a Victorian print hanging on the wall of my childhood Sunday school in Cornwall. I can still see it now. In different attentive postures, the twelve are gathered around their Master, whose right hand is held in benediction. They are in awe at his divine words, and their closeness to the Son of God indicates their status not merely as followers, but as The Twelve Disciples. That picture had a lasting effect on me. Throughout my childhood, the word disciple always meant those twelve – and only them.

Fast forward a few years and I was in Africa speaking to a large group of Ethiopians. It was from them that I first heard the term nefshabbas, the local term for spiritual teacher or guide. The nefshabbas was ‘the soul-father’ and he guided you on your earthly journey towards God. As a disciple, or daqa of such a spiritual helper one would offer reverence and service in exchange for teaching and guidance. Gradually, I learned that every branch of Christianity had versions of this relationship between master and disciple. In Russian Orthodoxy the guide was the starets and his disciple the uchenik, while in Greece the spiritual elder was the geron. In early Ireland he was the anamcara, or ‘soul friend.’ But it didn’t end there.

I discovered that every spiritual path, every religion, had such a master-disciple relationship for compassionate and friendly instruction. For the Sufi Muslims the murshid or pir was the spiritual guide and the murid his acolyte; while in China the teacher was the shifu and over in Japan he was the roshi. European Jews spoke of the mashpiya as the learned guide, and the tzadik as the saintly master. Discipleship, it seems, is a universal approach to spiritual learning and grace, and knows no geographical or cultural boundaries. The twelve disciples did not have the monopoly on discipleship, after all.

India has embodied the master-disciple relationship in millions of spiritual friendships over thousands of years. Although the ancient Sanskrit language is used to describe it – guru and sishya – India gives us the archetypal form of that vital connection which is familiar to all religious or spiritual traditions. No other country has had such a full and rich history of spirituality taught by such a time-tested method. The very history of that land is made up of gurus and their disciples and the detailed science of spiritual transmission has been preserved intact.

For the path of yoga, the guru and sishya relationship was the only way to effect inner transformation. Becoming a disciple was not an easy life, but for someone who wanted to learn both transcendental knowledge and meditation techniques, and to reap the ample rewards of practising both under the guidance of an expert, it was the singular choice to make. It still is today.

So in my book I try to describe the teaching techniques and relationship dynamics of the guru-disciple connection. I find it a fascinating subject. The book seems to be accessible for readers so far. Over the recent festival weekend we sold 70 copies and the comments have been favourable. In the past few days I’ve been organizing the book’s overseas sales. The distributor Motilal UK is handling sales through Amazon UK, USA and India, and also with Nielsens. I’m exploring well known routes for our Vaishnava community.

Hare Krishna! ISKCON’s New Temple in Parsippany, New Jersey
With great pleasure, we cordially invite you to the Bhumi Puja and Groundbreaking Ceremony for the new ISKCON (Krishna) temple in Parsippany, New Jersey. This will be the first ISKCON temple in the Northeast that will be built in a traditional, Vedic architectural style and will feature beautiful elements such as shikhars (domes) and jharokhas (decorative windows) among others. This is a once in a lifetime event welcoming Lord Krishna’s temple to the community and will feature traditional prayers and vidhis (rituals) by qualified brahmana priests. There will also be an array of colorful cultural programs such as kirtans and bhajans (musical presentations) as well as plenty of free prasadam (vegetarian feast prepared with love and devotion to Lord Krishna).
Read the entire article here: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=19736

'Hanuman' by Samadhi Dance Company. Choreography: Vraja Sundari Keilman. Performers: Jeffrey Stuut, Chaitanya Charan Das (Chris) Kuijken, Vraja Sundari Keilman, Rasarani Keilman, Carl Refos, Gino Jagessar. Film: Lars Steenhoff

Launching of monthly youth journal ‘Arunodaya’
ISKCON Navi Mumbai, India happily announces the launch of a monthly youth journal namely ‘Arunodaya’ to enlighten, inspire and guide the Krishna Conscious youth to shoulder greater responsibility in strengthening ISKCON moment.
Read the entire article here: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=19733

Help Mayapur School recover from Flood Damage
Sri Mayapur International School is a not-for-profit Krishna conscious school in the holy dham of Mayapur, West Bengal founded to create a spiritually nourishing school environment.
The recent heavy floods have caused extensive damage to the campus and now the children and teachers are struggling in these very difficult conditions.
Please help us.
Read the entire article here: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=19730

Our heart is capable of both noble and ignoble emotions. How we can cultivate higher emotions and curb lower emotions is demonstrated in the Ramayana through the interactions between the two pairs of inseparable brothers: Rama-Lakshmana who are together in exile, and Bharata-Shatrughna who are together in Ayodhya. Of course, these brothers are divine and are beyond lower emotions. Still, during their pastimes, for intensifying their loving reciprocations, they sometimes exhibit various emotions, some of which might seem like lower emotions. While remembering the transcendental position of such characters, we can also learn from their pastimes how we can channelize our emotions.

Anger triggered by suspicion

When Rama and Lakshmana are living in the forest of Chitrakuta, they hear the sounds of an approaching army. At Rama’s behest, Lakshmana climbs atop a tree to identify the visitors and recognizes Bharata at their forefront. Lakshmana, while serving Rama in the forest, is still angry to see that his brother, who should have been enjoying royal opulence, is instead enduring Spartan austerity in the forest. So when he sees Bharata coming with a huge army, he feels that his suspicion is confirmed: Bharata is in cahoots with his mother and has brought the army to eliminate Rama so that he can get the kingdom for not just fourteen years but for life. Enraged, he declares that he will singlehandedly kill Bharata and the whole army – everyone who dares threaten Rama.

But Rama remains calm and speaks of Bharata’s affection for him, which equals that of Lakshmana. Rama correctly surmises that Bharata, being mortified at his mother’s intrigues, has come to return the kingdom. Underscoring the unwarrantedness of Lakshmana’s anger, Rama asks him whether the forest austerities have made him irritable towards others such as Bharata who were enjoying the royal luxuries that he was missing. If that were the case, Rama assures that he will ask Bharata to exchange places with Lakshmana – Bharata will stay in the forest, while Lakshmana can enjoy Ayodhya’s royal comforts.

Thoroughly embarrassed on being so strongly reproached, Lakshmana falls silent. And his mortification at his misjudgment increases manifold when he sees how fervently Bharata beseeches Rama to take the kingdom and finally carries Rama’s sandals on his head.

Later, after the departure of the visitors from Ayodhya, Lakshmana introspectively asks Rama: “Why am I so short-tempered?” Rama attributes Lakshmana’s temper to his emotionality. Perplexed, Lakshmana asks whether emotions are undesirable. Rama answers in the negative, but cautions that we need to choose the emotions that bring out our higher side, not our lower side.

Anger triggered by cruelty

How to choose emotions thus is illustrated in an interaction between the other two brothers, Bharata and Shatrughna. This incident occurs before they go to the forest to meet Rama. The two brothers are returning to their palace after having performed the funeral rites for their deceased father. Bharata, being the de facto head of state, is accosted by a city official about some administrative work. Shatrughna moves on towards the palace and catches sight of Manthara. This scheming maid of Kaikeyi is the root of the conspiracy that led to the exile of Rama and the death of their father. Seeing her dressed in finery – evidently the rewards for successfully masterminding the conspiracy – Shatrughna feels his blood boil, and he rushes forward to catch her. On seeing Shatrughna and his expression, Manthara turns pale and flees towards Kaikeyi’s palace. But the doorkeeper, who like most residents of Ayodhya is incensed at the conspiracy, grabs Manthara and hands her to Shatrughna, who shakes her violently in fury. The wicked maid shrieks in mortal fear, calling for her mistress. Kaikeyi rushes out and asks Shatrughna to release Manthara. But the infuriated prince pays her no attention – the anger that has been burning within him for days now rushes forth unchecked.

Fearful of her stepson’s uncontrollable wrath, Kaikeyi looks around for help and sees her son, Bharata, approaching. She rushes to him, asking him to tell Shatrughna to stop. Turning coldly away from her, Bharata asks his brother to desist, saying that he too has felt the impulse to do what Shatrughna was doing – and do it not just with the maid, but also his mother. While Kaikeyi hears aghast, Bharata says that he has restrained that impulse by remembering that giving in to it will displease the very person whose cause they wanted to protect: Rama. Struck by this thought, Shatrughna releases Manthara, who flees to Kaikeyi’s arms. And the two brothers walk on towards their palaces, discussing how they can best persuade Rama to return.

Thus, for Bharata and Shatrughna, who they were angry against was not as important as who they were angry for. They countered the lower emotion of anger by holding on to the higher emotion of love for Rama. For all of us too, cultivating such higher emotions is vital for freeing ourselves from our lower emotions.

Indeed, human culture is meant to provide an environment wherein higher emotions can be nourished and lower emotions countered. Unfortunately, contemporary culture is increasingly doing the opposite, as can be seen, for example, in the ad industry.

Freudian triggering of lower emotions

Advertisements are so ubiquitous today that we may not realize for millennia human society lived without them. No doubt, people have always promoted their products, but such promotion was never a whole industry – and certainly not a multi-billion dollar industry. The advertising behemoth took birth soon after the industrial revolution gained steam in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Once goods started becoming mass-produced, promoting them became a big part of the economy and the culture at large. Ads can conceivably help us by informing us about useful products. But that’s not the intent behind most ads nowadays. Till the end of the nineteenth century, ads usually focused on the qualities of the products, thereby appealing to customers’ intelligence. But then came Sigmund Freud with his ideas about human psyche.

One of Freud’s insights was that our rational intelligence is like a small raft atop a vast turbulent ocean whose waves are our irrational emotions. People can be exhorted to do the right thing by appealing to their rationality. But if something triggers their irrational emotions, it can easily overpower their intelligence, as waves can overturn a raft. Being driven by such emotions, people end up doing terrible things, against their own better intelligence.

The bhakti tradition will see here rough parallels with the concept of the three modes of material nature: goodness, passion and ignorance. These modes comprise a framework for analyzing the nature of things, especially in terms of their psychological effects on us. What Freud calls the rational faculty correlates with the higher mode of goodness. This mode, the Bhagavad-gita (18.30) states, illumines us with the intelligence to discern what should be done and what shouldn’t be. What Freud calls the irrational emotions correlates with the lower modes of passion and ignorance. These modes impel us to act on the spur of the moment, neglecting others’ and our own intelligence’s warnings that such actions are counterproductive.

Actually, the irrational emotions don’t exactly destroy the rational intelligence; they subordinate and misappropriate it for their own purposes. Consequently, those under the grip of such emotions often exhibit intelligence, but that intelligence instead of restraining irrational emotions is misdirected by them. Recent history demonstrated this in Nazi Germany’s misusing cutting edge scientific advances in fields such as eugenics to irrationally victimize Jews and others in the Holocaust.

This theme of lower emotions hijacking our rational intelligence is seen in the Bhagavad-gita’s description of intelligence in the modes of passion and ignorance. We might be inclined to assume that intelligence would correlate with the mode of goodness. Our assumption would be correct, but not complete. The lower modes too feature intelligence, but intelligence abused for unintelligent purposes, being driven by irrational emotions.

Significantly, Gita wisdom also describes a stable state of existence beyond both the ocean and the raft: the state of transcendence. Beyond the three material modes is our pure existence as spiritual beings. We as souls have pure emotions centered on selfless love for God and all living beings in relationship with him. But as the light coming from a white bulb becomes colored if that bulb is placed in a colored case, so too the original pure emotions of the soul become distorted due to the coverings of the modes.

When Rama tells Lakshmana to cultivate elevating emotions and avoid degrading emotions, he is essentially telling us to cultivate goodness and transcendence, and avoid passion and ignorance. But the ad industry, using Freud’s ideas, does the opposite – or, more precisely, makes us do the opposite.

Advertisers recognized that people could be more forcefully persuaded to purchase products by appealing to their emotions than to their intelligence. So they started using all their intelligence to design ads that capitalized on people’s irrational emotions.

Torches of freedom light the path to self-injury

Few things illustrate the deluding power of such advertising as graphically as the “Torches of freedom” campaign to make women smoke. This campaign’s high point – or rather low point – was the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929 in America. During that parade, many of the leading female icons were paid to smoke a cigarette custom-made for women – a cigarette that was called the “torch of freedom.” As the women’s liberation movement was then increasingly capturing the female imagination, the idea of brandishing a “torch of freedom” resonated so strongly with their emotions that the rational question how smoking signified freedom was just swept away. Millions of women started smoking, not just in America, but also in much of the Western world. Only decades later were brought to light the harms of smoking, especially for women, all the more for pregnant women. Thus, the “torches of freedom” ended up lighting for millions the road to self-injury.

While most ad campaigns may not be that insidious, still they operate on the same principle of exploiting our emotions. They use human intelligence to trigger human irrationality. Advertisers use their best intelligence based on meticulous research into human psychology to make customers crave and slave for their products. Most ads focus not on how good the product is, but on how good the product will make us feel. Thus, advertising becomes pop psychology, which comes streaming into our living rooms through our television sets. By their clever (cunning?) design, ads catch our emotions and thereby our wallets.

And ads are just one of the many things in today’s society that exploit us by triggering our lower emotions. To protect ourselves from such emotional manipulation, we need to understand how we can activate and strengthen our higher emotions.

Devotion brings out our best

Relationships often help us bring out our higher side. Our desire to please the person whom we love inspires us to act properly, thus expressing our higher emotions. And our desire to not displease our loved one empowers us to avoid acting improperly, thus restraining our lower emotions. Of course, this happens only when that person is of basically good character. Otherwise, when we are in bad association, the desire to please others brings out our lower side, as happened in the Mahabharata with Karna because of his desire to please the evil Duryodhana.

In general, when we commit ourselves to a relationship with a good person, we challenge our lower emotions’ hold on us. To the extent that we avoid committed relationships, to that extent our commitment remains only to one person: me. And since our desires are often shaped by our mind, so commitment to me essentially boils down to commitment to our mind, which frequently drags us down to self-defeating actions.

While any committed relationship can help us restrain our lower emotions, the higher emotions thus awakened aren’t necessarily spiritual. Why? Because we may not be seeing ourselves or our loved ones spiritually: as souls, as spiritual parts of God. And without activating our spiritual side, we severely limit our access to higher emotions. Our highest, purest emotions come from our essential self: the soul. And the soul is the reservoir of pure emotions, for it is, as the Gita (15.07) states, a part of God, who is the supreme reservoir of pure emotions. As parts, we are meant to live in loving harmony with the Whole, God. Bhakti-yoga enables us to lovingly link with him and thereby activate our latent spiritual potential with its gamut of higher emotions.

There’s another reason why, for bringing out our higher emotions, we need not just any committed relationship, but a committed relationship with God. That reason is his omnipotence. No matter how committed we may be to someone and no matter how good that person may be, ultimately that person doesn’t have the power of God. Consider for example, the purifying potency of chanting the names of God. This potency is demonstrated in the Ramayana itself. Its composer, Valmiki, was a bandit who, by chanting the names of Rama, became a saint. Chanting the names of others can’t bring about this kind of transformation – only God’s names can.

A note of caution is warranted here. Bhakti is not about a relationship with God alone at the expense of our relationships with everyone else. The bhakti tradition reveals a vision of God who is not aloof from everyone, but is present in everyone and is the greatest benefactor of everyone. So, when our aspiration to love God is philosophically informed, we strive to love him by spiritually loving those whom he loves, which means everyone. We being finite can’t practically express our love to everyone, but we can at least be sensitive and affectionate towards those with whom we relate regularly. Such an inclusive devotional vision can transmute our various relationships into crucibles for elevating our emotions.

To summarize, committing ourselves to a relationship with God elevates our emotions in three ways:

1. Directing our emotion upwards as happens whenever we love someone.
2. Uncovering the pure emotional power of the soul
3. Accessing the omnipotent grace of God

Thus, while relationships in general can bring out the good within us, a relationship with God can bring out the best within us.

The post Elevating our Emotions (Ramayana Reflections 5) appeared first on The Spiritual Scientist.

Construction is set to begin on a new dayschool gurukula near Sochi, Southern Russia sometime this spring, with plans to open in September 2017. With no other gurukulas currently in operation in Russia, it may be under high demand as the only one of its kind.

ISKCON’S very first literature on Vraja Mandala Parikrama, the book promises its readers a walkthrough of Vraja through its 608 colorful pages and poetically gives one the immersion experience of the sights and the smells of the twelve forests of Vrindavan. It contains 30 chapters each for a day of parikrama with 246 photographs, 107 paintings and 28 precise route maps obtained from Google Earth. 

A standard war strategy for defeating a strong enemy is divide and rule. The Bhagavad-gita (06.06) states that the mind can often act as our enemy. Acting inimically, it targets us with this strategy when we practice bhakti-yoga. 

This lyrics of this song was written by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in his tiny room on board the commercial ship Jaladuta during his first journey to the United States of America in 1965 at the age of 69. Performed by Indradyumna Swami.

“These are very important compositions where Srila Prabhupada has revealed the mood in which he completely depended on Krishna before he visited America,” said Romapada Das, International Coordinator for the 50^th Anniversary.

The insatiable hankering of the modern man has deprived him of spending quality time with himself and his  family and, it has landed him into an island where he finds himself all alone surrounded by the ocean of threats

Hare Krishna Festivals UK: The Hare Krishnas, who are often seen at Glastonbury, on Oxford Street or all over the world, are joining in at Bestival for the first time with their enchanting mantra music that brings joy to the heart.
Read the entire article here: http://goo.gl/IxESUw

Yamuna: One day I made Bengali meals and arranged them on the thalis in a Bengali fashion. Srila Prabhupada sat behind his desk, and Pishima sat on the floor directly opposite Srila Prabhupada. As soon as I brought the thalis in and set them down, Srila Prabhupada started making little comical, teasing remarks about his sister. He said, “You know, she says that it is water. I say it is fat.” I thought, “My goodness. He is talking about her weight. What’s going on?” Since Prabhupada’s voice was light-hearted, Pishima started chuckling. He said, “All this,” he was flapping his arms back and forth, “is fat but she calls it water.” He started talking about the days in their childhood when they flew kites, and he said, “I always used to beat her at kites.” He spoke very brother-sisterly about his little sister, and she was laughing, although she didn’t understand a word. In the course of all this jesting, I was bringing in chapatis. When Srila Prabhupada finished his meal, he piled every katori (the little round bowls that all of the moist preparations are in when serving a thali) one on top of the other from the largest to the smallest, nearly twelve inches high. When I walked into the room, Prabhupada knocked down the whole stack with his finger and said, “Yamuna dasi mayi ki jaya!” I said, “Srila Prabhupada ki jaya!” Pishima said, “Gaura Nitai ki jaya!” Then I said, “Oh, Srila Prabhupada. You ate everything.” Srila Prabhupada said, “Excellent!” This was my first meeting with Pishima, and Prabhupada’s mood was light, sweet, jovial, and humorous. Although she didn’t understand a word of what was going on, Pishima truly loved it. She was very fond of Srila Prabhupada. From the day I met her until the very last day I saw her with Srila Prabhupada in 1976 in Vrindavan, I saw that she worshipped her brother, and that he was obviously very fond of her.
Read more: https://goo.gl/UQhDy5

Hare Krishna! Help Take ISKCONOnline.com to the next level
Gopal Bhatta das and Pancharatna dasa: We’re happy to announce that since our web site ISKCONOnline.com was launched over 8,000 people have visited our site, more than 200 devotees completed our online participation form and over 450 subscribed to our newsletter. Thus we have had a good start towards our primary purpose of “creating an association of interested devotees who will improve the quality, relevance and relatability of ISKCON’s presence on the internet.” Now, we want to take this effort to the next level by engaging a qualified devotee as the ISKCONOnline.com Site Director.
Read the entire article here: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=19727

Bhaktivedanta Research Centre: This is a postcard written by Srimad Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakur to Mahendra Nath Datta. BRC Bengali librarian Bharati Roy has translated it as follows:
“Niskincanasya”.. read this sloka all the time, try to understand its meaning, that is the main thing of Bhajana. You may know that Karma Marga and Prakrtarasanusilana both are against the life of a devotee. We are living a sorrowful life as we cannot do Harinama. You are a veteran Vaisnava, so you may protect us by your Bhajana.
Vaisnavadasanudasa
Dina akincana Sri Bimalaprasad Siddhanta Sarasvati.

https://youtu.be/y4UDWX52_V8

The post This is the trailer for the recent Jaladuta festival appeared first on SivaramaSwami.com.

Hare Krishna! An Unforgettable Experience
Hare Krishna, dear devotees! My name is Radha, I’m 19 years old and I am a student in my final year at Sri Mayapur International School. I want to share with you my incredible experience of book distribution in London this summer. I hope that it will please the senior devotees and reassure them that book distribution is still alive and well. And I hope it will encourage all the devotees of my age to give it a try. Here is how it started: for a long time I had wanted to feel myself like a real, active preaching brahmacarini from Srila Prabhupada’s time.
Read the entire article here: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=19721

The Spiritual Journey (6 min video)
The real loving nature of God is that He gives us all an opportunity to understand Him and return to Him.
How can we develop our attraction and devotion to Him? What is the facility for each one of us to be able to engage our natural tendencies in devotional activity?
Watch it here: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=19724

Hare Krishna! Temples around the world requested to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Prabhupada’s Jaladuta poems
The Global Office of ISKCON’s 50th anniversary has requested temples around the world to try and observe the fiftieth anniversary of two poems that Srila Prabhupada wrote on board the Jaladuta in September 1965. Srila Prabhupada wrote the first poem, ‘Prayer to the Lotus feet of Krishna’ on 13th September 1965 on board the Jaladuta, and the second one, ‘Markine Bhagavata Dharma’ while the Jaladuta was docked at Boston Harbour on September 18th 1965.
Read the entire article here: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=19718

Just one week after the grand opening of an 18,000-square-foot temple in Plainfield, New Jersey, comes the news that a Bhumi Puja ceremony will be held to break the ground for another new ISKCON temple in Parsippany on September 26^th. Brahmana priests headed by Amara Das from Germany will carry out the elaborate fire ceremony on the 3.2 acre site at 170-180 Troy Road, which was acquired back in 2008 for $1.9 million.

Kaulini Devi Dasi, a much-loved disciple of Srila Prabhupada known for her simplicity, surrender and purity, and for her many years of dedicated service at Gita Nagari, passed away on September 3^rd. She was 69. Born and raised in Northern California, her life changed when she received Srila Prabhupada’s Bhagavad-gita in 1972 while on a trip to Mexico.

Written and Produced by Michael J Martin & Gareth Wakeham, Directed by Michael J Martin. Produced by Alfie Ambrose

(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 27 June 2015, New York, USA, Bhagavad-gita 9.33)

I remember in Vrindavan when we were listening to a lecture in our temple, sometimes there were a lot of ants in the temple and not small ones but those big ones with the tweezers on their nose. So when they would come for you, you could see them coming. So everyone would sort of wait till they came close and then flick them back to where they came from because no-one wanted an ant bite. But, the ant would immediately turn around and come straight back; they have a compass. Then we would like try to divert it to our neighbour. So while the class was going on, people were sending ants from one person to the other. In this way, we managed to detour the ant but they were determined to go on their path. They have a will of their own, that means they are individuals and they have a strong desire!

So all living beings have an individual nature. If all living beings have desires then all living beings have a heart and all living beings have bodies. The Supreme Lord also has a heart and he also has desires but some say he has no body! But all living beings have a body and if there is a body in the creation, then these qualities in the creation must also exist in the creator! Therefore the Supreme Lord is a person also. He has his divine energies and at the same time, he is a personality. So those who understand that the Supreme Person is full of love, ultimately to enter into a loving relationship with the Supreme and this is the highest state a living being can achieve.

Love is such a thing that when you are very small, it is only your mother and that goes on for quite some time. The father is sort of there on a second level, second place, sorry to say. But overtime, that can all expand and then there is family – your brother, your sister, friends and then community. Practically, your sense of identity is increasing. But ultimately, the highest state of love is where we see that the whole purpose of the creation has a loving purpose and that behind this world, is the loving Supreme Lord and that we develop our loving relationship with the Supreme Lord.

The post Daily Darshan – September 11th, 2015 appeared first on Mayapur.com.

Lord of The Universe And His Day Out Part 1, A Short Film

All-Attractive Viṣṇu, the powerful and carefree master and the true objective of all sacrifice, was pleased by Pṛthu’s ceremonies and appeared before the emperor along with powerful Indra. Glancing towards Indra, Viṣṇu said, “Here is the one who disrupted your hundredth horse-sacrifice. He seeks your forgiveness, so I think he deserves it.”

“Should I really forgive his immoral deeds?” Pṛthu seemed to wonder.

Viṣṇu encouraged him not to by angry. “Oh god of humanity,” he said, “the best humans, good people with good intellect, don’t hold onto malice towards anyone.”

“How is that possible?” the king would surely wonder. “How can they feel no malice towards those who cause them harm?”

Viṣṇu explained, “They know the difference between their true self and its body.”

“So?”

“People who don’t understand the difference between the self and its body work very hard, and for a very long time, to secure what their bodies desire, but in the end wind up with no profit except their sweat. Such frustrated and irritable people are very easily moved to malice.”

“If the body is not exactly the self, what is it?” Pṛthu would ask.

“The wise know that the body is the tangible result of our self-ignorant desires. This is why the wise are not terribly attached to the pleasures that might be acquired by their body.”

“How does this lack of attachment make them less malicious?” Pṛthu would ask.

“They are not terribly attached to pleasures connected with their bodies,” Viṣṇu reiterated. “So, they are not disturbed and moved to malice if someone or something presents a disruption or obstacle to such things. They are, wisely, not excessively defensive of their household, assets, or lineage.”

“If the body is not the true source of identity,” Pṛthu would ask, “what is?”

“The true source of identity is a singular, pure, self-luminous entity; not limited by any characteristic or quality, but sheltering distinct characteristics and qualities. It spreads everywhere, and its all-witnessing sentience cannot be impeded. Beyond the false-self, it is the supreme self of the self.”

“Does the false self have any relation to the true self?” The emperor would want to know. “Does the limited self have some relation to the Supreme Self?”

“Yes!” Viṣṇu affirmed. “The wise know themselves to be situated within that Supreme Self. The unwise determine their identity by looking towards the qualities of their external bodies, but the wise determine their identity by looking inwards toward the Supreme Self who is the ultimate root of all individuals.”

Inspired by and following in the footsteps of the artists Jackson Pollock and Aelita Andre, Lower Elementary students expressed their artistic talents and had loads of fun! I wish the pictures could capture the sounds of their giggles and laughter as they splashed the paint onto their boards.

Giriraj Swami and Vaisesika dasa read from Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead during the festivities.

“The art of focusing one’s attention on the Supreme and giving one’s love to Him is called Krsna consciousness. We have inaugurated the Krsna consciousness movement so that everyone can satisfy his propensity for loving others simply by directing his love toward Krsna. The whole world is very eager to satisfy the dormant propensity of love for others, but the various invented methods like socialism, communism, altruism, humanitarianism, and nationalism, along with whatever else may be manufactured for the peace and prosperity of the world, are all useless and frustrating because of our gross ignorance of the art of loving Krsna. Generally people think that by advancing the cause of moral principles and religious rites they will be happy. Others may think that happiness can be achieved by economic development, and yet others think that simply by sense gratification they will be happy. But the real fact is that people can be happy only by loving Krsna.”

— Krsna, Preface

Janmastami, Krsna Book Reading

Sri Krsna Janmastami, a most sacred and auspicious day for Vaisnavas, has just been celebrated. It was grand and festive. TKG Academy students, since the beginning of the school year, have been preparing for this special occasion in many ways.

Each class, including students from Kalachandji’s Sunday School, prepared posters, portraying verses from the Brahma Samhita prayers, with which they decorate the Temple hallway.

TKG Academy students also opened the performances on the main stage. Preschool through 1^st grade students sang about Krsna and Balarama going to the forest with Their friends and cows. 2^nd through 9^th grade students chanted the bhajan “Bhajahu re mana” by Govinda Dasa Kaviraja and enacted a dramatic narration of its meaning.

 View the full gallery: Offerings and Abhishek Similar to earlier years, ISKCON Mayapur had a week filled with festivals glorifying Srila Prabhupada on occasion of His Vyasa puja. The bramacharis, other temple staff, international devotees, Bhaktivedanta National School, and Sri Mayapur International School all held their own celebrations. These festivals enabled many devotees to read […]

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