Gurus falling from the sky: FB Memories May 1

So I don't believe in gurus /
who fall whole from the sky. /
Gurus are forged in the furnace /
like every other finished thing. //

5 years ago

āyur harati vai puṁsām udyann astaṁ ca yann asau
tasyarte yat-kṣaṇo nīta uttama-śloka-vārtayā

With its every rising and setting, the sun diminishes everyone's life span, except for those who take even a moment to hear about the most glorious Bhagavān. (2.3.17)

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5 years ago

Objections to the merger of Mathura and Vrindavan into one giant municipality. The fear is that Vrindavan's unique character will be swamped in the larger municipality and that butcher shops, liquor shops and other such external influences will only increased if this goes ahead. This is purely a bureaucratic decision based in allotting government moneys for development. Enough already.

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7 years ago

A myth is what never happened but is always true.
What never happened is that there was "Nothing But Being"
and Nothing was happy, because just being is joy.
But Nothing became conscious of its being
and said, "Let me become, for there is more joy in becoming."
And the first thing it became, the first Twoness
was man and woman locked in embrace.
The first Idea, the Adi-rasa, became Radha and the Adi Purusha
And from that bliss came all the worlds, material and spiritual.

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7 years ago

Wherever the Lover and Beloved enter into popular consciousness,
that is a manifestation of the Archetype.
But archetypes exist on a scale
from fullness (pūrṇa) to mediocrity (tuccha).
This is the scale in which prema stands at one end
and kama at the other.
Krishna is not God: He is the fullness of Love's Object.
Radha is not Goddess: She is the fullness of Love's Feeling.
The Yugala is their Union. Their Union is Prema.

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9 years ago

vṛndāraṇye jaran jīvaḥ kaścit prāha manaḥ prati |
mriyase sāmprataṁ mūḍha gūḍhām etāṁ sudhāṁ piba ||

In Vrindavan, some aging living entity said to his mind,
"Now you are dying, you fool,
so drink this profound nectar of immortality." (SKD 1.4)

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9 years ago

Gurus falling from the sky 

I reflected on Abhaya's
one bleak moment of truth,
when he quoted the Bhagavata line:

"On one upon whom Hari's mercy doth fall,
from him he takes wife, wealth, life and all."

So I don't believe in gurus
who fall whole from the sky.
Gurus are forged in the furnace
like every other finished thing.

Abhaya here refers to Prabhupada by his pre-sannyas name. The Sanskrit verse is BhP 10.88.8--

yasyāham anugṛhṇāmi hariṣye tad-dhanaṁ śanaiḥ
tato'dhanaṁ tyajanty asya sva-janā duḥkha-duḥkhitam

"Yes, truly; Gurus are the result of having been repeatedly forged in the fire of samādhi and quenched in abhiṣeká (and all that is inferred by this process, i.e., bellows of the lungs, melting pot of हिरण्यगर्भ (hiraṇya-garbha) etc., etc.)"

This was written by my friend and permanent angel of my blog, always responding to me and me so infrequently to him. Not exactly my cup of tea--his approach to spiritual matters being very much a yogi, and pretty advanced I would say, so not one to underestimate by any means.

At any rate the poem--what does it mean? The central point is the verse in the middle.

I had the good fortune to discover and make known the poems and articles Prabhupada had written between the time of leaving home to that prior to leaving India for America In one of his very personal poems "Vrindavan Bhajan" he describes his situation and that in Vrindavan as he saw it The above verse was a reference to his personal life in the family and how after losing his business he had faced rather bitter quarrels in the family. the necessity to be constantly involved with material and mundane affairs and has only one alternative and that is to leave.

That is a crunching experience for anyone, but it set fire to Prabhupada's devotional life. And as I recall that poem. he whales into the Gaudiya Math for not stepping up to counteract the forces of Kali, the impure religion, a medieval form of Vaishnavism that could no longer justify its existence in a world that was distancing itself from dharma at every step.

And he went through quite a bit after that also. But the halo of mythological being had already descended on him. India was still in the mood for spiritual heroes like Vivekananda. The myth had already been written by Yogananda and the first crop of Indian yogis big with upper middle-class women. Anyway he was a myth the moment he stepped on the Jaladuta, but he was a myth even before us in the kind of life that he led and how he was transformed by his own heart-wrenching experience of having failed as a devotee in his family life and feeling very much possessed by his own Guru's entire self-giving to the mission. So that was the fire in which he was forged to become a mythical creature--an archetype. Can you be like Prabhupada? In one way or another we at one time or another aspired to be like him. to dedicate ourselves so totally to a divine cause, that of Prema Bhakti. But his goal was not really to adapt bhakti to the modern west in order to attract pupils, but to adapt his pupils to see his ideal Vaishnava world where simple living and high thinking is the order and the glitter of Maya is meaningless.

So now there are two kinds of diksha guru--functional or bureaucratic and charismatic. The first is usually someone who sees the law and has a legalistic predisposition and a mastery in organization capacity. Charismatic is someone who creates the electronic charge that transforms one into the charismatic world.

Worldly systems require bureaucrats.

Amongst them some might have charisma that affects the legalistic framework in a way that is beneficial to their followers. And to the degree that idealism still trumps personal ambition, the question of charisma--the reflected charisma of the founder acharya. This insures the institution's continued existence.

But of course the ideal always clashes with reality so there is a natural devolution of the original circumstances in which the movement was born and those that now affect the growing organization.

And the pesky charismatics tend to promote individualism and kindness and individual experience and thus earn an insidious but well-merited power to persuade others. Some of these also have a strong bureaucratic tendencies--and such people can be the most dangerous because they are the most likely to become autocratic. Prabhupada's autocracy was the stuff of which legends are made, his absolute domination of the minds of his energetic young followers.

So you can see how a perfect mythical human being with a perfect mythical story naturally becomes myth. And that gives a great driving force to the individuals who run the institutions that such a person creates and inspires. In other words a strong guru archetype.

So what is the essence of the archetypeness of the guru as expressed in this story of Prabhupada and his renunciation of home after being mercifully detached from it by Krishna's grace?

It lies in the absoluteness of complete conviction, the almost perfect encapsulation of a dharma-vīra, who shows heroism in the service of a cause. Or even a yuddha-vīra. conscious of being a leader in the war against Maya.

So now who has been forged in those same fires?

The thing about Prabhupada was that he was not a bureaucrat though he knew how to organize a bureaucracy. He was fundamentally a charismatic who opposed the "medieval" thinking that overcame the sadhus who took to bhajan in the ways they always had, and then extended that opposition to his own confreres in the Gaudiya Math, accusing them of retreating into that kind of survival mode where they go begging in the name of running some little temple here or there. collecting for the annual utsava or whatever, and not really seeing the world outside as it was changing and the potential that lay in it had for getting the message out there. I think like most post-Vivekananda Hindus of Bengal, had no great feeling for the greater part of these old-time sadhus, so though their traditions might hold some great bhajananandis like Jagannath Das or Gaur Kishor Das, they are not inclined to promote or favor that approach. But neither were they really thinking of the potential to spread bhakti to the world. But the irony of it is really that the vision was the most conservative of all. It asked whether "progress" really was progress, whether what was lost is not more precious than what is being gained?

So this is the great paradox: he created an institution that embodies many of the elements that are a part of "Kali" in order to fight Kali. This is risky game, but the job is to create the best proximate thing to Vrindavan that you can.

And that applies both in the case of the sadhaka deha as well as the siddha-deha.

And the sādhaka-deha is embodied forever in the archetypal forms of the Six Goswamis. No one can be truly a Gaudiya if he does not in some way at some time aspire to living the life of the archetypal residents of Vrindavan Dham.

That in fact is what he wanted to reproduce... that kind of lifestyle. In many ways the very lifestyle he is fighting against.

So here is a case of the injunction being superseded by the image. And to some extant this disparity is always going to hurt ISKCON.