Reflections on a misspent life

Ramesh Baba inaugurating the improvements at Seva Kunj. See below.

Krishna bhakti has been at the center of my life since 1970. Even so, it is easy for a devotee to feel isolated and alienated in today's ever-more frantic world. One person responded to this rather lighthearted post  by saying that I was doomed. (He actually said "DOOMED.") My point was that one must persist and indeed become  more sophisticated in one's understanding. It is about the faith and the persistency of doubt. Facebook Memories from June 24

2015 Reflections on a misspent life 

So, you are 65 and you wasted your whole life being a Krishna devotee, and now here you are stuck with this stupid religion and you got nowhere to go. So what to do? Well, you came this far, you might as well just keep moving in the direction of Love.

[This last year (2021-2022) has been a real game changer in many ways. That comment must have been made after some kind of encounter with some strongly atheistic relatives or friends.

But as I was just saying recently, becoming a Hare Krishna is a really stoned thing to do. It isn't normal really. It is a hippie's choice and who lived the hippie life to the very end? Turning on, tuning in and dropping out. For me there was an almost perfectly straight line from an acid trip I took in the summer of 1970 and shaving my head to become a devotee later in the same year.

It is seven years later and I hope that I am seven years stronger and richer in my understanding and experience of life, as I, an individual, have lived .

Even if I viewed Krishna bhakti and all its attendants purely as a hobby, and in some ways it has been, it has been the aesthetic joy of my life. It has never ceased to enrich my intellect and my search for the soul of being.

But in fact I do take it seriously. It would not have been such a great pleasure to me if I had not made it my everything, my refuge, my shelter.

My real point, though, was that commitment to a path of spiritual life is not something that you can really say after five years or ten years or twenty or forty years of commitment that something extraordinary is supposed to happen. Something happening is just followed by more things not happening, only now you have the memory that it sometimes does. Then through the persistence over time, fundamental changes have taken place that you could not have imagined in the beginning.


2015

Just back from Seva Kunj where there was a program put on by The Braj Foundation. Ramesh Baba was there and lots of rich donors. Ramesh Baba gave a very nice talk. You can feel his power when he chants Jai Radhe. He engaged in a bit of a debate with the Seva Kunj Goswamis about Vrindavan vs. Barsana, which Ramesh Baba defended Barsana very ably.








Comments

Prem Prakash said…
"For me there was an almost perfectly straight line from an acid trip I took in the summer of 1970 and shaving my head to become a devotee later in the same year."

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Sunday, 03 July, 2022
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