Kishori Yatra Tour Helps Young Girls Realize Their Potential
→ ISKCON News

Twenty-five young girls aged eleven to sixteen embarked on the Kishori Yatra bus tour from June 6th to 29th this summer, taking a life-changing road trip in America that was a major positive influence at an extremely formative period in their lives. With them were a group of positive role models and experienced youth leaders, dubbed “counselors,” all of them second generation ISKCON devotees themselves.

New Namahatta center opened at Aruppukottai 40Km from Madurai South Tamilnadu (Album 108 photos)
→ Dandavats.com

By the mercy of Srila Prabhupada New Namahatta center as "HARE KRISHNA BHAJAN KUTIR" opened on 6th July at Aruppukottai 40Km from Madurai South Tamilnadu. HG Shankadhari Prabhu Temple president Madurai & ISKCON Indan Bureau inaugurated . Program started from Mangala Arthi fallowed by Darshan Arthi , Name board opening, Srimad Bhagavatam lecture and Prasadham, 500 to 600 devotes visited and about 550 plates of prasadham distributed till 3pm. Asia's largest cotton spinning industry Chairman T.R Dhinakaran and Ramco cement factory manager also take part in festival and enjoyed the Keerthan . We mainly focus on school collage youths and village preaching. Read more ›

Cancer Is Curable: An Eye-opening Documentary
→ ISKCON News

According to many doctors and experts the cancer industry is just another a multi-billion-dollar industry that needs disease to stay in business. It is not in their interetst to cure you. An eye-opening full documentary "Cancer is Curable NOW" by Marcus and Sabrina Freudenmann challanges the Big Pharma.

The Secret Behind the Secret
→ ISKCON News

Seven years after its first release and people are still talking about it. ‘The Secret’ that Rhonda Byrne felt she had discovered was the ‘law of attraction’; whatever you think about and focus on, eventually becomes reality in your life.

Tactfully avoid confrontation
→ The Spiritual Scientist

"So far the action taken by city officials, it is not good to disturb them unduly or cause unwanted agitation or anger with such people. They are demons so they will not change. Civil disobedience movement can be led by Lord Caitanya, but we are not so strongly organized and influential to be able to perform successfully such civil disobedience movement. It is good if the newspapers take our side and public opinion is against the authorities viewpoint, but it will be better if we use all goodwill and tact to avoid such violent confrontation in public and simply take another place with required parking space."

Srila Prabhupada Lilamrita 28 December 1971

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2014
→ The Walking Monk

Calgary, Alberta

Learning On The Trail


On the Rotary Mattamy Greenway, at the eastern reaches of Calgary, I took my early trek.  From two locations on the trail, I learned of wilderness struggle.  Firstly, on a slight divergence of the trail, by a batch of trees (where frankly, I released some water) I saw the remains of an ordeal.  It had more to do with a ruffling of feathers.  There, on this tiny forest floor, was a pile of actual feathers, likely what was left of some aerial battle between two birds.  It was not the down of a duck that I was looking at, or a crow; hard to tell really, but it was a scatter of life, nevertheless.  I could only imagine the pain of the feathery victim. 

Further on the trail, in fact very close to the Trans Canada Highway/Highway 1, there lies the relics of a fur animal, at least to me, it was evidence of another scuffle. 

I terminated the trail walk and ended at a newspaper box.   I pulled out a Metro newspaper, sat myself at a park bench, and read the feature article of a local Calgarian pit bull that was euthanized by officials.  He had attacked and killed a poodle.  Chaos was the name of the three year old Staffordshire Bull Terrier.  The article was an account of two dog owners walking their pets, their toothy encounter, and then the subsequent reactions from the owners.  All in all, the theme here was about the struggle within life, and the harshness that pervades in our world. 

Mmm… this gives me a topic to speak on at tonight’s sangha at the home where I’m staying, “Suffering!  Can it be overcome?”

May the Source be with you!

9 KM

Monday, July 21st, 2014
→ The Walking Monk

Vancouver, British Columbia

Decisions


A fairly spontaneous decision was made for me to fly to Vancouver, which I did yesterday.  The purpose?  It was not to participate in a walkathon.  Rather, it was decided that I meet with two monks, Gopal Krishna Goswami, and Hari Vilas (by virtue of service, he is practically a monk).  The three of us, not shunning administrator obligations, but sitting to discuss issues over our devotional community, was our topic of discussion. 

It would be nice to have the easy life of a roaming hermit, and not bother with ‘people’, however, our whole mission involves humans and offering them the more stress free material relieving lifestyle.  ‘People’ will always be on our agenda.  We serve and receive service from them.  Our role is to teach, mentor, coach, encourage.  The three of us had two sessions of meetings, one last evening and one this morning.  Prior to meeting, I naturally had to put in my kilometres, and also, in the planning of the day, work around our morning sadhana which begins at 4:30 AM.  After all, strength lies in sessions that are heart touching, and sadhana, when approached feelingly, opens up the chakra of the heart and prepares for dealing with people issues.

The three of us came out of our meeting room, satisfied with decisions made, knowing well that not all parties will be cent percent satisfied.  Compromise we must live with, otherwise, expect no hope. 

May the Source be with you!

7 KM

Sunday, July 20th, 2014
→ The Walking Monk

Calgary/Vancouver

Moving Up


Usually the prairie is dry, yet this morning it was moist.  Some drizzle sprayed the sky during a portion of a 9 KM hike at Calgary’s east end.  It was my time to chant until I came to the home of Gaura Chandra when it was time to chat. 

Chat I did, and also at the Radha Madhava Cultural Centre, when reuniting with our bus tour group.  I spoke about the advantages of commitment, especially in regard to vows made by young Shyama Priya.  She is only 12, but made a firm conviction for the basic tenets of Vaishnava culture.  She put her values out for the ears of our community – no intoxication, no gambling, no meat eating and no casual sex.  These are tall orders to fulfill, but she has a good trying chance given her upbringing.  It is admirable that she takes this firm stance.  She also commits to mantra meditation for approximately 2 hours every day. 

Vows, when taken seriously, give power.  Vows that are taken casually, weaken.  No vows or no commitment means ‘no life’. 

I applaud Shyama Priya.  Her new name Shyamesvari. 

May the Source always be with her!

9 KM

One size does not fit all!
→ KKSBlog

(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 08 April 2009, Durban, South Africa, Lecture)

White_T_ShirtWhenever we discuss kanistha, madhyama and uttama, it starts to feel like we are beginning to measure vaisnavas with a measuring tape! As soon as you start measuring vaisnavas with a measuring tape, there is a great risk to minimize the vaisnavas because a vaisnava is so difficult to measure. No one fits into a box; everyone has done something extraordinary for Krsna! Therefore who fits into any box – kanistha, madhyama, uttama – difficult! It gets too complicated; too much measurement!

Let us just rather appreciate the service vaisnavas have done and are doing, and let us just overlook the faults even if there is some tendency, we just look at the service and we glorify the vaisnavas.

Still on the other side, we do care because we are not naively accepting just anyone as pure devotee. To accept someone as a pure devotee, on the topmost platform, is a very serious matter and cannot be done on the basis of sentiment. Therefore it is good to understand these categories (of advancement of devotees) but we are not going to hand out T-shirts: kanistha, madhyama and uttama T-shirts! That will be a little too extreme rather we are appreciating all the vaisnavas for their exalted qualities. By counting the glories of the vaisnavas, we will see many exalted vaisnavas…

 

Graffiti
→ Seed of Devotion


    (photo by thingsnobodycaresabout.com)

I walk past the gutters
littered with trash
and the walls scrawled
with shapeless letters.
Music with no melody,
only beats and mutters,
blares from speakers.
Lined, unsmiling faces
and crossed arms
greet me on the platform.
The train arrives with
a blast and the rhythmic
ga-gumph,
ga-guuumph,
ga-guuuuuuumph...
The doors open with a hiss.
The floor rumbles beneath me,
we pass building
after building
scarified with
more
and more graffiti
that all looks the
same same same.
Graffiti scratches surround me
on the window and seat,
on the walls.
A man across the aisle
misses his stop, curses loudly.

I arrive at the Bhakti Center for a festival
drained
by the City.
Drained by the way
We
and I
graffiti our lives
with chitter and chatter
and curses.

I'm on the schedule to
sing kirtan in 15 minutes.
I heave a sigh and
head to the templeroom.
I am washed with the scent
of incense and
the holy name.
I thought that I had needed
to sleep
but after a half an hour
of singing
I just want to stay here
right here
in front of God
for the next seven days
and graffiti my heart
with the holy name.


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Devotees on Weekly star, newspaper front page in Nigeria
→ Dandavats.com

His Holiness Kavicandra Swami has appeared on a front page newspaper in Nigeria, advising Nigerians to be God conscious. He gave the advice recently in the temple when Journalists visited him to speak on the current crisis facing Nigeria. His Holiness said, unless society turned to Krishna by giving everything to Krishna, society will never be in peace. Swami noted that nothing happens independently but by proper arrangement of Krishna. Read more ›

The Real Secret
→ NY Times & Bhagavad Gita Sanga/ Sankirtana Das


In Conjunction with Sutapa prabhu's post - http://sutapamonk.blogspot.com/2014/07/spirit-secret.html  - about The Secret, just want to share an article I wrote back in 2007. entitled Listen, Do You Wanna Know A Secret


Several months back the Times ran an ad for a DVD of the book The Secret. The Secret is the newest sensation and darling of the New Agers. It's beyond the New Age. I'm sure the Neocons are reading it behind closed doors. It's a hot seller with the Walmart crowd. Oprah, on her show, made a big deal about it.

I had an occasion to see The Secret video last year. I can only describe it as a testimonial to materialism. The height of Me-ism. At one point on the video there’s a women standing in front of a jewelry store longingly looking at a necklace displayed in the window. The next minute she’s wearing the necklace. There’s another scene where a kid wants a bike and then you see him happily riding the bicycle. This goes on to a woman being attracted to a man and later she’s walking with him hand in hand.

The Secret views the earth as just one big Kamadhenu cow ready and eager to supply everyone’s desire, as opposed to the paradigm of The Sri Isopanishad which tells us that everything in the world is controlled and owned by the Supreme Lord and that we should only accept what we really need for ourselves and not take anything unnecessarily, knowing well to whom it belongs. There is a delicate balance in nature and we should fulfill our needs and wants with the utmost care. Native American wisdom tells us that we must take into consideration the impact of our actions on the next seven generations.

But The Secret, endorsed by the "good guys," would have us believe that the earth can completely satisfy our every desire and that we can have a fairy tale life wherein all wishes are fulfilled (that may have been the case in the Satya-yuga). The ad in the paper reads that The Secret can give you "...unlimited joy, health, money, relationships, love, youth, everything you ever wanted." Yes. It's all yours!!!You have just hit the jackpot, won the lottery, beat out everyone on The Idol, been invited on Oprah, postponed death indefinitely, moved into a new mansion and made a million new close friends. (This sounds better than all the snake oil remedies the quack doctors used to sell in the wild west.)

In these times, however, is it responsible to have a mindset and live a lifestyle advocated by the Secret? This type of unrestricted consumerism is the very mentality that has put us in the precarious situation we’re in today. Is the The Secret going to stop the ice caps from melting or bring back the ozone layer? Is it going to stop people from getting blown up? Is it going to stop disease and death? The Secret doesn’t mention that ultimately we cannot control what happens to us. We can only control our attitude and our intentions. As the ancients, to live peacefully, we must learn self control, to conquer our greed and anger, to respect all life and the environment we live in, and to offer ourselves in service to the Creator of all things.

One of the appeals of a secret is that people like to be in on something that’s exclusive. The Secret is special, and they are special and their knowing the Secret gives them a special advantage over everybody else. Of course, everybody else is thinking the same thing. Basically, the secret of The Secret is the law of attraction, when you think positive thoughts you get positive results. And when you know this “secret” you can have it all. And to prove that The Secret is bona fide, the narrator in the video (DVD) summons up some of the big movers in history like Jesus, Buddha, Lao-tzu, Confucius, Socrates, Shakespeare, Newton. They all knew The Secret, and that’s what made them so famous, successful and spiritual. I wonder why they didn’t mention Gengis Khan or Rocky Balboa.

Because of its popularity, I think devotees have a great opportunity to offer people an insight into the real Secret (In marketing this is called positioning - that you position your product with, or against, a product that is popular). Real knowledge is not on how to acquire material things and get a beautiful body, but how to distinguish between matter and spirit.

“This knowledge is the king of education, the most secret of all secrets. It is the purest knowledge, and because it gives direct perception of the self by realization, it is the perfection of religion. It is everlasting and it is joyfully performed.” Bhagavad Gita 9:2

Award winning book by Sankirtana das -  www.Mahabharata-Project.com


Devotees perform Friday Harinama in Tel Aviv, Israel, to stop the war (Album 51 photos)
→ Dandavats.com

O Supreme Personality of Godhead, when someone desires to chant Your holy name, sins tremble in fear, the glory of material illusion faints unconscious, Yamaraja's scribe Citragupta becomes happy and gazes at the chanter's toenails with awe and reverence, and Lord Brahma prepares madhu-parka with which to worship him. O Lord, what more can we say than this?—author unknown (Padyavali 4) Read more ›

Ratha Yatra in Kherson, southern Ukraine (Album 30 photos)
→ Dandavats.com

“Chanting is the greatest act of piety and the supreme refuge. Even the words of the Vedas do not possess sufficient power to its magnitude. Chanting is the highest path to liberation, peace and eternal life. It is the pinnacle of devotion, the heart's joyous proclivity and attraction and the best form of remembrance of the Supreme Lord. The holy name has appeared solely for the benefit of the living entities as their Lord and master, their supreme worshipable object and their spiritual guide and mentor. Read more ›

Spirit Secret
→ Tattva - See inside out

Seven years after its first release and people are still talking about it. ‘The Secret’ that Rhonda Byrne felt she had discovered was the ‘law of attraction’; whatever you think about and focus on, eventually becomes reality in your life. The universe, she says, is essentially energy, and all energy vibrates at different frequencies. Since each person also vibrates at a certain frequency, they attract the same within the larger energy field. Thus, we attract objects, fortunes, people and situations that are of a similar ‘vibration’ to ourselves.

It’s a mouthwatering concept – the possibility of attracting anything you desire. While Eastern teachers would agree with the general notion of designing our destiny, there is more to the story. Philosophical exploration and practical observation clearly shows that forces beyond our control are also influencing our fortunes. It’s called karma. We may desire different things, but without the karmic credit, those things will remain elusive. Unfortunately, the secret is not as simple as it sounds.

The Bhagavad-gita, however, reveals a more profound secret to life. While Rhonda’s book is about attracting, the classic Sanskrit text encourages one to first establish what is worthy of being attracted. Most people hastily draw up their shopping lists of life without significantly considering this point. Our basic problem is that we are attracted by the wrong things; things that won’t bring us what we are ultimately looking for. When we reconfigure our desires, turn our attention towards the right things, spiritual things, those things which allow us to connect with our very essence, then everything falls into place perfectly. This is the secret behind the secret.