Websites from the ISKCON Universe
Srila Prabhupada would say: “don’t waste your valuable life”, or: “don’t waste your time”, or: “don’t waste a farthing” or: “simply don’t waste.”
Can you believe we live in an age where we waste 40% of good food, when that food could be diverted from landfills, cooked as an offering to Krishna and distributed profusely to the poor souls of Kali yuga—everyone.
Feed the 5,000 is a campaign put together by my friend Tristram Stuart, where we go to cities around the UK or Europe (Amsterdam next week.) and put on this festival of waste awareness.
1.One third of all food grown is wasted.
2.The environmental impact of avoidable household food waste in the UK is 72 million tonnes of COze.
3.Britain’s supermarkets generate 300,000 tonnes of food waste every year.
4.40% of UK fruit and vegetables are rejected even before they reach the shops as they don’t match supermarket’s cosmetic standards, such as a straight banana,or a carrot with a bend, an apple that is too big or small……..
All of Krishna’s resources should be offered back to Him.
“When there is a epidemic disease, an antiseptic vaccine protects a person from the attack of such an epidemic.Similarly, food offered to Lord Visnu and then taken by us makes us sufficiently resistant to material affection, and one who is accustomed to this practise is called a devotee of the Lord.” Bhagavad Gita 3.14 purport 1972.
5,000 people receive Krishna prasad, within 2 hours.
Enjoy the movie:
your servant Parasuram Das
What is a Farthing?
Srila Prabhupada uses this word so, so often. To know what this word means you would have to have lived in Ireland or the UK, and you would have to be older than 50 years old. So while travelling yesterday with HG Giribaradhari prabhu, we decided to reveal this hidden knowledge to the world, especially our American friends.
Here goes, a farthing is a quarter of a penny, but not an ordinary penny, there were 240 pennies in a pound, really !!! It works out as almost one tenth of a penny. Srila Prabhupada did not want us to waste even that much money.
In old money
12 pennies one shilling.
20 shillings £1
240 pennies in £1
480 half pennies in £1
960 farthings in £1
Letter to Rupanuga prabhu:
“Money collected for feeding people in India should be collected under the name ‘ISKCON Food Relief.’ Not any other name. And every farthing of that money must be sent to India, or better yet, buy food grains there and ship them here and we will distribute. But every farthing collected for that purpose must be used for that purpose. I have already sent one letter to Ramesvara explaining these points.”
Sriman George Harrison
c.o Apple Record Co.
London
England
My Dear George,
Please accept my blessings. I am so much obliged to you for your valued cooperation in spreading my movement of Krsna Consciousness throughout the whole world. I beg to acknowledge receipt herewith of your contribution of $19,000 (nineteen thousand dollars) for publication of my book, Krsna, now going to the press within the week.
Please note that every farthing of this money will be employed in the service of the Lord……..
I hope this has enlightened everyone on this burning issue of the farthing mystery, please note I have not cracked any frivolous jokes with a word similar to farthing as we are sober devotees, here in the UK.
your servant Parasuram Das
2013-05-29 – Srimad Bhagavatam – 10.20.27-28 – Happiness Lies in Connecting with Krishna
“Indradyumna Swami spoke on the bhakti movement of Lord Chaitanya at Bhakti Yoga Shala in Los Angeles. After the talk, as the kirtana built and the ecstasy rose and almost everyone in the room was dancing, I thought, “Maharaja is not an ordinary person; I should take full advantage of every moment I have with him—and other such great souls—to chant and hear the holy names and glories of Sri Krishna.” And I thought of a verse by Srila Prabodhananda Sarasvati:
so ‘py ascaryamayah prabhur nananayor yan nabhavad gocaro
yan nasvadi hareh padambuja rasas tad yad gatim tad gatam
etavan mama tavad astu jagatam ye nye py alankurvate
sri caitanya pade nikhata manasas tair yat prasangot savah
‘Because the wonderful Lord never came before my eyes, and because I never tasted the nectar of service to His lotus feet, I simply pray to attain the jubilant festival of the association of those great souls now decorating this world whose hearts are fixed at Lord Caitanya’s lotus feet’ (Sri Caitanya-candramrta, Chapter 6, text 50).” — Giriraj Swami
Hare Krishna.
Their is a great joy in school visits especially when the teaching staff get as involved in questions as the students; indeed during my last school visit what was supposed to be a single lesson class turned into a double lesson thus was the enthusiasm.
So I was happy when out shopping a teacher stopped me and asked if she could ask a question that she felt she couldn’t whilst in class; sure.
She explained how she had read somewhere that we practised celibacy and if that was true do we not miss sex? An unusual question but then during school visits unusual questions are always their. Pondering I answered in this way: “you could have sex every day of your life but it will never give the satisfaction one day as a celibate bramachari brings”
She looked startled at this answer and so we discussed it further, in terms of a relationship an interesting discussion. At the end she concluded that indeed the notion makes sense given the facts.
It made me think, in media and even more so advice columns there is a notion that any relationship cannot survive without a healthy and regular sex life; and indeed problems occur if you deny yourself sexual pleasure.
So much emphasis is put on sex life, but less on developing loving relationships beyond the physical were the aim is to help each other, develop respect and increase spiritual understanding.
Sex life leads ultimately to frustration; the body grows old the ability to enjoy diminishes and indeed our attractiveness to members of the opposite sex also goes; we are left with fading memories, desires of what could have been.
Spiritual life and relationship’s based on real love not physical love leads to a greater fulfilment there is no loss, no pressure. It keeps the mind focused on what is most important the individual rather than our cardinal needs. And as we see many in relationships that last more than a few years say that they view their partner as a close friend someone they can share and enjoy life’s ups and downs with.
Ultimately however the aim of any relationship is to help us grow spiritually and to eventually return back home but then I guess this is how fantastic maya is she bewilders our minds and the easiest way is through lusty desires which comes out in our desire for sex life. And thus binding us to this material platform of life.
2013-05-30 – Srimad Bhagavatam – 10.20.29-31 – Contentment is the Key for Spiritual Happiness
To celebrate finishing the presentation of the Second Chapter of the Second Canto – here is an excerpt, one of my favorite śloka from this chapter
35
Parīkṣit: These yogīs you described, how do they love the All-Attractive?
Śuka: They experience All-Attractive Hari by his qualities present within the core of all living beings.
Parīkṣit: What qualities?
Śuka: The qualities of consciousness. Yogīs know that they are conscious – they can see, experience, and comprehend. Everything they see, experience and comprehend also has this divine quality, consciousness. Thus they inferentially experience the All-Attractive divine everywhere.
2013 06 06 Srimad Bhagavatam 10 20 39 40 Steps to remove False Ego Dayal Chandra Prabhu
Hari’s Vegetarian Restaurant is the new restaurant that was opened by the Sydney Temple around 3 months ago. It is located in the Broadway area of Sydney, about a block from the University of Technology Sydney and half a kilometre from Sydney University.
Needless to say, the area is mainly inhabited by students who attend these two colleges. The restaurant operates seven days a week and even though it has only been open a short time it is growing very quickly in popularity.
It is overseen by Sudarshan Prabhu who lives at the temple and staffed by devotee cooks such as, Jitendriya, Karunamoya, Govinda and Mohit. Other devotees also come and help out with various services that are needed. The menu is a tantalising fusion of western and Indian type of vegetarian foods, all offered to the Supreme Lord.
A lost medieval city that thrived on a mist-shrouded Cambodian mountain 1,200 years ago has been discovered by archaeologists using revolutionary airborne laser technology, a report said.
In what it called a world exclusive, the Sydney Morning Herald said the city, Mahendraparvata, included temples hidden by jungle for centuries, many of which have not been looted.
A journalist and photographer from the newspaper accompanied the “Indiana Jones-style” expedition, led by a French-born archaeologist, through landmine-strewn jungle in the Siem Reap region where Angkor Wat, the largest Hindi temple complex in the world, is located.
The expedition used an instrument called Lidar — light detection and ranging data — which was strapped to a helicopter that criss-crossed a mountain north of Angkor Wat for seven days, providing data that matched years of ground research by archaeologists.
It effectively peeled away the jungle canopy using billions of laser pulses, allowing archaeologists to see structures that were in perfect squares, completing a map of the city which years of painstaking ground research had been unable to achieve, the report said.
It helped reveal the city that reportedly founded the Angkor Empire in 802 AD, uncovering more than two dozen previously unrecorded temples and evidence of ancient canals, dykes and roads using satellite navigation coordinates gathered from the instrument’s data.
Jean-Baptiste Chevance, director of the Archaeology and Development Foundation in London who led the expedition, told the newspaper it was known from ancient scriptures that a great warrior, Jayavarman II, had a mountain capital, “but we didn’t know how all the dots fitted, exactly how it all came together”.
“We now know from the new data the city was for sure connected by roads, canals and dykes,” he said.
The discovery is set to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
Damian Evans, director of the University of Sydney’s archaeological research centre in Cambodia, which played a key part in developing the Lidar technology, said there might be important implications for today’s society.
“We see from the imagery that the landscape was completely devoid of vegetation,” Evans, a co-expedition leader, said.
“One theory we are looking at is that the severe environmental impact of deforestation and the dependence on water management led to the demise of the civilisation … perhaps it became too successful to the point of becoming unmanageable.”
The Herald said the trek to the ruins involved traversing rutted goat tracks and knee-deep bogs after travelling high into the mountains on motorbikes.
Everyone involved was sworn to secrecy until the findings were peer-reviewed.
Evans said it was not known how large Mahendraparvata was because the search had so far only covered a limited area, with more funds needed to broaden it out.
“Maybe what we see was not the central part of the city, so there is a lot of work to be done to discover the extent of this civilisation,” he said.
“We need to preserve the area because it’s the origin of our culture,” secretary of state at Cambodia’s Ministry of Culture, Chuch Phoeun, told AFP.
Angkor Wat was at one time the largest pre-industrial city in the world, and is considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.
It was constructed from the early to mid 1100s by King Suryavarman II at the height of the Khmer Empire’s political and military power.
(this blog is recorded on the full page: quick time player needed; works best with Firefox or Explorer)
While we often hear Shrila Prabhupada’s statement that “our relationships should be based on love and trust,” we don’t often expand on how this can be created and maintained. One process I have found helpful is something we teach in our relationship seminars, namely the practice of checking the balance in the “Emotional Bank Account” that we have with another person—do we have a surplus of positive emotions, or are we overdrawn, in the red?
This is a metaphor that Stephen Covey [The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People] first came up with to describe "the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship." This statement really piqued my curiosity and interest in his work, and after scrutiny, dovetails nicely as a support to putting into practice Prabhupada’s aphorism. Just as we have bank accounts to keep our money in, we also have “bank accounts” to store our “emotional capital” or the energy that sustains or strains (if it becomes depleted) relationships.
We could also consider this capital like a trust meter, and trust is the basis of reciprocal loving dealings. Very few people love unconditionally, but most of us require more positive interactions (deposits), than negative ones (withdrawals), to stay, or be happy, in a relationship.
(this blog is recorded on the full page: quick time player needed; works best with Firefox or Explorer)
While we often hear Shrila Prabhupada’s statement that “our relationships should be based on love and trust,” we don’t often expand on how this can be created and maintained. One process I have found helpful is something we teach in our relationship seminars, namely the practice of checking the balance in the “Emotional Bank Account” that we have with another person—do we have a surplus of positive emotions, or are we overdrawn, in the red?
This is a metaphor that Stephen Covey [The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People] first came up with to describe "the amount of trust that’s been built up in a relationship." This statement really piqued my curiosity and interest in his work, and after scrutiny, dovetails nicely as a support to putting into practice Prabhupada’s aphorism. Just as we have bank accounts to keep our money in, we also have “bank accounts” to store our “emotional capital” or the energy that sustains or strains (if it becomes depleted) relationships.
We could also consider this capital like a trust meter, and trust is the basis of reciprocal loving dealings. Very few people love unconditionally, but most of us require more positive interactions (deposits), than negative ones (withdrawals), to stay, or be happy, in a relationship.
Nrsimha Chaturdashi 2013 – Sandhya Arati