Embracing the Crazy (FB Memories April 26)
I was walking back home in the evening through Kishore Pura, and this fellow rolls up on his motorcycle. He is covered in flashing electronic signs that say Radhe Radhe and peacock feathers everywhere, flower garlands both real and in paper. He quickly attracted a crowd of children and had them all shouting Radhe ! Radhe!
After all, I keep reading these things by ancient bhaktas about how you have to be crazy to live the life of a devotee in Vrindavan. And in the modern context, it is kaimutika nyāya, to want to live such a life in India, especially after having been in the grand-old scientific and technologically and wealthy and sexually liberated world champion West.
But then I see that a lot of science these days is about breaking down everyone's sense of reality into something a little more mystical. The whole, when you REALLY look at it, is really NOTHING there.
Or at least, what you see IS the creation of the mind.
What today's world has given me is the chance to make a radical conversion from one world view to another. That is what Prabhupada did to me.
I have been reading a chapter of Chaitanya Charitamrita a day. So it is interesting to see how much emphasis Kaviraj Goswami puts on the cāturvyūha and the manifestations of different forms of God and their functions, including that of Guru. In terms of gothic, it is right up there with Mahayana Buddhism and its legions of forces.
It is really quite a fascinating chunk of stuff he thinks it is important you know in order for him to set the scene for Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's lila and tattva. To create a context for him. To put Chaitanya in his proper perspective, you need the proper world view, or sambandha.
This is about a God who is everywhere, in everything, acting and manifesting himself fully, less fully, or imperceptibly to those who are blind.
And in order to see that God, and then to show him, you must create a world view and instill it. It is propaganda. In fact, it is counter-propaganda.
They used to tell us we were being brainwashed and were brainwashing others. Prabhupada's answer was brilliant: "Their brains NEED washing." Because they have already been brainwashed, or to put it more coursely, they have been brain shitted all over. So Prabhupada made us imagine a whole chunk of imaginary India. And whether it is here in India, or only in the minds of his disciples, it is a fascinating world that is best treated with a little humility.
I feel rather strongly that for myself at least to bury myself in the worlds of India is a necessity in order to understand this bhakti path of self-realization.
It is a complex affair but you can really only peel away your myriad unwanted selves through a process of replacement therapy. You can only see yourself in a mirror. So which mirror do you choose?
With the greatest innocence I fell in love with Vrindavan so many years ago. And for good or evil, I understand myself and life and its goals much more clearly here. I can compare myself internally to what I was and where life was leading me, to where Western society was going, what was in people's minds, and to myself in that context, living the "alternate reality" life of a good son to my material father.
But it turned out to be impossible. It turned out that India was not my "alternate reality" but Canada was. It kept being reminded that my real work was not being done and that I was simply wasting my time pretending to be something that I did not even really know what it was. I was still trying to be someone else's imagining of me.
Well then that darned Mahaprabhu went and did what he told me he would, way back when, he would pick me up by the scruff of the neck and bring me to Vrindavan. I had asked him to please do that many, many years ago, and he went and did it.
In Chaitanya Charitamrita, that is the first real story that Kaviraj Goswami tells from his world, that of how he came to Vrindavan. He had a dream of Nityananda who told him, "Go to Vrindavan and all things will be granted unto you."
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