New Personal website Jayadvaita Swami
→ KKSBlog

jayadvaita-swami-smiling

The renewed website of HH Jayadvaita Swami has been launched today, the 3rd of March 2014. Jayadvaita swami has been writing extensively for the Back to Godhead magazine, published and co-edited several books and is in charge of editing the BBT books of Srila Prabhupada and other contemporary devotees.

His website has been refreshed with a new layout and navigation menu. You can now easily find interesting articles about reincarnation, 9/11 and even about health issues. you can comment on articles and even subscribe to receive new articles by email when they are published. So you will not miss anything.

Visit : www.jswami.info

Here are some jewels of articles

 

 

 

 

New Vrindaban Celebrates Gaura Purnima 2014
→ New Vrindaban Brijabasi Spirit

Gaura Purnima is coming up in less than two weeks and everyone is invited!

Lord Caitanya and His Sankirtan Party

Lord Caitanya and His Sankirtan Party

Here is the schedule, below, for the celebrations on Sunday March 16, 2014:

5:00 AM                 MANGAL  ARATI
5:30 AM                 NRSIMHA PRAYERS
5:45 AM                 TULASI PRAYERS
6:00 AM                 JAPA
7:30 AM                 GURU PUJA
8:00 AM                 GREETING THE DEITIES IN THEIR NEW  GAURA PURNIMA OUTFIT
8:20 AM                 SRIMAD BHAGAVATAM CLASS
11:00 AM               GOVARDHAN PARIKRAMA ( weather permitting)
1:00 PM                 ARATI
1:30 PM                 CLASS
2:15 PM                 Lunch  Prasadam (for those  who are not fasting)
5:00 PM                ABHISHEKA ON THE ALTAR
6:00 PM                 LECTURE
7:00 PM                ARATI
7:40 PM                 MAHA KIRTAN
8:00 PM                 PRASADAM FEAST

Your preparations for the Lord are welcome.  Please bring them by 5:45 PM to Sri Sri Radha Vrindaban Chandra’s pujari room.

If any second initiated devotees are interested in helping cook in the deity kitchen on Gaura Purnima day, please contact Abhinanda das either on facebook or email:

FB: Abhinanda Das               E-MAIL: abhinanda_bcs@yahoo.co.in

Much Gaura Purnima service is available, such as in the devotee kitchen (all morning), prasadam transfer (12:30 PM), cleaning the prasadam hall after the festival.

Prabhupada Letters :: Anthology 2014-03-03 15:55:00 →

1974 March 3: "We will present our program exactly in the line of Lord Caitanya, by kirtana, prasadam distribution and speaking from Bhagavad-gita. We cannot deviate even an inch in order to attract the followers of the ecology philosophy or any other materialistic, utopian movement. Our ideal Vedic community will attract everyone on its own merit."
Prabhupada Letters :: 1974

Sri Panchatattva in Mayapur never seen so happy! Maha Abhisheka 2014 (Album 130 photos)
→ Dandavats.com

In the Pancaratra scriptures there is a saying that in the ultimate analysis devotion is the only element which might cause the Lord to appear. That’s how the small Panca-tattva came, due to the great desire and devotion of His devotees. Then, as long as the devotee wishes to serve Him, the Lord reciprocates in the same way. Regarding the big Panca-tattva Deities, a whole book has been written on how They were manifested, first in South India, and then installed in Sri Mayapur dhama. Read more ›

Ecstatic Pancha-Tattva Maha-Abhiseka ceremony in Mayapur with more than 10.000 devotees present! (Album 19 photos)
→ Dandavats.com

On 3rd March, 2014, the worldwide vaisanva community gathered at Mayapur to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Sri Panca Tattva Installation in Mayapur. Around 6000 devotees were already in Mayapur, taking part in the kirtan mela. Thousands more devotees arrived yesterday and today from all over the world. A Maha Abhiseka was performed to Sri Panca Tattva. This is the mercy of Their Lordship Sri Panca-Tattva, who have manifested at Mayapur in Their magnificent 7ft deity form. Once again, They are gathering devotees together so they can relish the pastimes of the Lord in the association of His dear devotees. Read more ›

Planned food safety rules rile organic farmers
→ View From a New Vrindaban Ridge

la-la-na-food-safety-jpg-20140221

From the LA Times

HUSTONTOWN, Pa. — Jim Crawford was rushing to load crates of freshly picked organic tomatoes onto trucks heading for an urban farmers market when he noticed the federal agent.

A tense conversation followed as the visitor to his farm — an inspector from the Food and Drug Administration — warned him that some organic-growing techniques he had honed over four decades could soon be outlawed.

“This is my badge. These are the fines. This is what is hanging over your head, and we want you to know that,” Crawford says the official told him.

Crawford’s popular farm may seem a curious place for the FDA to move ahead with a long-planned federal assault on deadly food poisoning. To Crawford’s knowledge, none of the kohlrabi, fennel, sugar snap peas or other crops from his New Morning Farm have ever sickened anyone. But he is not the only organic grower to suddenly discover federal inspectors on his land.

In 2010, after a years-long campaign, food-safety activists persuaded Congress to give the FDA authority to regulate farm practices. The next year, an outbreak of food poisoning that killed 33 people who ate tainted cantaloupes put pressure on the FDA to be aggressive.

Now, farmers are discovering that the FDA’s proposed rules would curtail many techniques that are common among organic growers, including spreading house-made fertilizers, tilling cropland with grazing animals, and irrigating from open creeks.

Suddenly, from small family operations nestled in the foothills of Appalachia to the sophisticated organic-grower networks that serve Los Angeles and San Francisco, the farms that celebrity chefs and food-conscious consumers jostle to buy from are facing an unexpected adversary.

They’re fighting back. Even though full enforcement of the rules is still years away, they are warning customers that some farms would have to close.

“They are going to drive farms out of business,” said Dave Runsten, policy director for Community Alliance with Family Farmers in Davis, Calif.

“The consumer groups behind this don’t understand farming,” Runsten says. “They talk out of both sides of their mouth. They demand these one-size-fits-all regulations, then say, ‘I don’t want to hurt those cute little farmers at the farmers market. I shop at the farmers market.’ It is frustrating.”

Many farmers who take part in the locally grown food movement argue that contamination is a problem of industrial-sized farms and that some of the practices the FDA might ban actually make consumers safer.

Food safety advocates have urged regulators to hang tough. “We don’t believe large facilities are the only place where outbreaks are happening,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington. Farm-to-fork growers, she said, need to accept that emerging strains of E. coli and other bacteria can just as easily seep into the produce sold at a farmers market as into the batches of salad bagged at giant processing plants, and they need to tweak their methods to protect against it.


Filed under: Cows and Environment

My Filtered Bio, Briefly
→ View From a New Vrindaban Ridge

I am on the Board of Directors for ECOV  and was recently requested to give a brief bio.

According to our website”ECOV is a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to cow protection, local production of food, sustainable housing, alternative energy production and energy conservation. Cow protection includes not sending cows to the slaughter house and letting them live out their lives until a natural death. We are also working towards having active teams of oxen, planting 1000 fruit and nut trees and building earth sheltered low impact housing using recycled or locally produced materials. “

So applying the filter of what would be relevant to that here goes.

I was raised on a farm. My father put me on a tractor at age 11 in the flat and long fields of North Dakota. By the time I came to New Vrindaban at age  24 I had had my fill of industrial agriculture and wanted to get into a simple living scenario.  In the beginning  I trained a team of oxen, Bala and Deva, and worked the community vegetable gardens.

After a year in 1974 I was approached by the community leaders and asked to take over the field side of agriculture in New Vrindaban. As they wanted to free up labor to work at the Palace I was asked to use tractors and assured it was a temporary situation and we would go back to oxen later. It is now 40 years later and I am still trying to get back there thus supporting efforts to train ox teamsters and oxen and build an ox barn.

In the meantime I have had various services including Purchasing when we had 600 people here and were doing major construction projects many of which  you see  today.  For a couple of year I ran the Finance department of New Vrindaban. I  was also involved in various businesses New Vrindaban did to help support the community, including spending 3 years over a ten year period in New York City.

When I came back from NYC the final time I noted there was zero vegetables being grown in NV and have dedicated a lot of energy to reintroducing growing into NV culture.

I have 5 children and 3 grandchildren and still live in New Vrindaban where I garden, burn wood for heat, support my wife’s crafted gourd business,  and try to enable Srila Prabhupada’s vision for NV of  living simply dependent on the land and the cow.

I have also been keeping a blog  for 8 years that may   give some insight.


Filed under: Cows and Environment

A selfless desire
→ KKSBlog

(Kadamba Kanana Swami, 13 January 2014, Mayapur, India, Lecture: Kirtan Academy 2)

Naturally, every devotee desires to see Krsna and the desire to see Krsna is not a fruitive one. You might say, “Well, the top most level of pure devotion was to be free from all selfish desire so isn’t it selfish when we are desiring to see Krsna. Isn’t it about our desire instead of the higher principle of satisfying Krsna’s desire?”

shri_radha_krishnaYes, but still every devotee in his heart-of-hearts desires to be with Krsna, desires to see Krsna because that is how we are designed, we are made like that. We are pleasure seeking – this we cannot stop. The constitutional position of the living being is described in the Vedanta Sutra (1.1.12) as ānandamayo ‘bhyāsāt, or being pleasure seeking.

So, this element of being pleasure seeking is something that cannot be taken away out of our nature therefore any process that denies us that is an artificial process and cannot be maintained. Therefore, we see that impersonalism and Buddhism are two processes that are based on negation, processes that are based on denial of desire, denial of pleasure. In these two processes, one has to basically write-off the whole material world whereas in Bhagavatam, we find that the beauty in this world can be taken as the smile of Krsna.

A smile can be taken as “welcome”. So the beauty in this world is the welcoming smile of Krsna. This is nice so then we don’t have to develop this mood where we write-off the material world altogether; that if we see anything beautiful in this world that can’t appreciate it. We can appreciate it and see that Krsna is behind it all. If we see some beautiful birds, not that we desire to become like that, but we can see that there is beauty in this world because it is reflecting the even greater beauty of the spiritual world. And that all the aesthetics of this world are inviting us to the higher world of beauty and aesthetics…

 

The ABC Of Japa
→ Japa Group

Always have respect for the Holy Names, as you would respect the Supreme Lord Himself
Be careful to avoid offenses in chanting the Holy Names, especially the offense of inattention
Chant a fixed number of rounds each day, and always aim to increase that number

Disappearance of Srila Jagannatha Dasa Babaji, Srila Tamal Krishna Goswami, and Srimati Manjari Dasi, March 1, New Dvaraka, Los Angeles
Giriraj Swami

JdBM108“As Srila Prabhupada often said, ‘There is nothing to be lamented.’ Even ordinary people don’t die—the soul continues; but in the case of Vaisnavas, not only does the soul continue to live but their devotional service also continues. When we were with Srila Prabhupada in Surat on his guru maharaja’s disappearance day, he said that on the spiritual, absolute, platform there is no difference between appearance and disappearance; just like the sunrise and the sunset—both are beautiful. But he also said that when a Vaishnava leaves we have mixed feeling of both happiness and distress. We are happy because we know that the Vaishnava has gone to serve Krishna—and I am quite confident that Manjari dasi has gone to her gurudeva and Krishna—but we also feel some sadness because we will miss the devotee’s association. But this is all Srila Prabhupada’s mercy, Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s mercy and Lord Nityananda’s mercy: so many souls are having glorious, auspicious departures.”

Disappearance Talk