Let us, then, be up and doing
Facebook memories from June 25: A fairly heavy day with lots of comments: Many of the items are on the blog. The headline article is from Longfellow's poem that inspired Bhaktivinoda. Another post from 2011 about a revised and educated faith that comes after a life of engaging with doubt.
2020
I finally got my copy of this latest issue of Vrindavan Today. I want to congratulate Jagannath Poddarji, the editor now almost single-handedly running Vrindavan Today, for the best print edition yet.There is tons of interesting stuff for lovers of Indian sadhu culture, since we had our mini-Kumbha here in Vrindavan, as well as other regular stories about history, environment and people and places in Vraja.
JP has been doing this with little outside help, but I can see that his persistence is resulting in widening interest, just by virtue of the fact that people do want to be seen in it. It has a classy look and there has been much improvement in layout and so on. At any rate, I feel overjoyed to see that the physical magazine has improved so much. It makes me want to get more involved again...
The on-line website still hasn't come completely to the end of all the different miseries that have afflicted it from the time we took it over, but it is getting better. Again, this was the result of JP's assiduity and fearlessness and persistence, in getting through all the difficulties, getting things legal, getting things fully under his own control so that troubles don't arise from such issues, which we now learn are rife.
We have had trouble keeping a steady author and translator to work at VT, but JP's own dedication will bear fruit, of that I am sure. Because I think that he will inspire others to follow his mood. JP is now a true veteran of Vrindavan seva. He has been running Friends oF Vrindavan for decades. Now that FOV has a more limited role, since the municipality finally seems to be paying more attention to public sanitation. So his role is changing somewhat, but he has been a community leader of Vrindavan environmentalism and heritage conservation that his stature as a leader can only grow.
But Vrindavan Today is showing us JP's true character--someone who fiercely loves Vrindavan and wants to share that love with the world. Whatever you think of Vrindavan, it is the craziest place in the world when you do think about it, but it is a real place, a creation of the human spirit unlike any other. And such creations can only stay alive if they are loved with such intensity. Jai Sri Radhe!
2018 The Psalm of Life
When Bhaktivinoda Thakur's first wife died in 1863, he writes that this poem by Longfellow helped him. "I endured this grief like a warrior according to the Psalm of Life." I think that anyone reading this and knowing the Thakur's poem to Haridas Thakur will recognize some similarities in style and even substance.
A Psalm of Life
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Actually Bhaktivinoda Thakur was a really amazing person. Tremendous talent, brilliant mind. He was writing English poetry in a very sophisticated classical style, He wrote his Poriade in two parts and published it, and proudly gave it to whomever he met, like Raj Mehtab of Burdwan, and Duff Saheb. He was only 17.
His reading was pretty amazing. He pretty much went through everything that was available. It does not seem that British India was very far behind developments in English thought and literature of the time,
It is strange in a way that he did not go the way of all the people who surrounded him -- Keshub Chandra Sen, Dwijendranath Tagore, Satyendranath Tagore, Nabagopal Mitra, etc., etc. -- and become a figure remembered by Bengalis to this day. Bhaktivinoda Thakur is practically unknown. Well today I saw a list of the 20 most influential Bengalis of all time. It includes both East and West Bengal, so Mujibur Rahman was number one. Rabindranath number, Vivekananda was way down, so you can see what happens when you mix the two Bengals.
Mahaprabhu? Nah. But Lalan Shah was on there, so that is pretty interesting from a certain point of view.
Anyhow, Bhaktivinoda Thakur wouldn't even get a sniff of remembrance. And a big part of that is just luck. He had a lot of bad luck through to the age of around 20 when things started to turn around for him, but not in the capital, out in the boondocks of Orissa, or Southwest Bengal as it was known at the time.
So this was really an important formative period in his life, which is when he actually started to turn to Vaishnavism. His grandfather who was kind of a Tantric siddha, predicted that he would become a great Vaishnava.
2011
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Actually Bhaktivinoda Thakur was a really amazing person. Tremendous talent, brilliant mind. He was writing English poetry in a very sophisticated classical style, He wrote his Poriade in two parts and published it, and proudly gave it to whomever he met, like Raj Mehtab of Burdwan, and Duff Saheb. He was only 17.
His reading was pretty amazing. He pretty much went through everything that was available. It does not seem that British India was very far behind developments in English thought and literature of the time,
It is strange in a way that he did not go the way of all the people who surrounded him -- Keshub Chandra Sen, Dwijendranath Tagore, Satyendranath Tagore, Nabagopal Mitra, etc., etc. -- and become a figure remembered by Bengalis to this day. Bhaktivinoda Thakur is practically unknown. Well today I saw a list of the 20 most influential Bengalis of all time. It includes both East and West Bengal, so Mujibur Rahman was number one. Rabindranath number, Vivekananda was way down, so you can see what happens when you mix the two Bengals.
Mahaprabhu? Nah. But Lalan Shah was on there, so that is pretty interesting from a certain point of view.
Anyhow, Bhaktivinoda Thakur wouldn't even get a sniff of remembrance. And a big part of that is just luck. He had a lot of bad luck through to the age of around 20 when things started to turn around for him, but not in the capital, out in the boondocks of Orissa, or Southwest Bengal as it was known at the time.
So this was really an important formative period in his life, which is when he actually started to turn to Vaishnavism. His grandfather who was kind of a Tantric siddha, predicted that he would become a great Vaishnava.
2011
I think I wrote this, but I can't say where. It might be Subal Das (Steve Bohlert). At any rate I know that it is something that I discussed with Steve after I read his book on Universalist Radha Krishnaism.
"Those who accept the challenge of doubt and investigate religion and their own religious experiences as an objective phenomena in all their aspects—mythological, theological, philosophical, anthropological, psychological, sociological, etc.—often find that their faith takes on a new enlivened form, if their samskara (the faith based on the original religious experience) is strong enough. One then interacts with God through his symbolic manifestations with much the same innocence and love that he or she did when they were entirely new and presented themselves in all their original mystic splendor. In that state, he makes genuine further progress internally."
Steve had done a lot of time reading Christian theology and many of his teachers were Christians, this is after he left ISKCON after a pretty committed career in which he took many independent leadership positions. But he had difficulty with the cult mentality and went back to his hippy samskara before finally rounding out his religious education as a Universalist Unitarian minister.
But perhaps because he had explored Krishna bhakti outside the ISKCON context he was able to perceive their beauty through all the fog of propaganda and it revived in him a faith in raganuga bhakti. But he still had the apparatus of intellectual Christianity in the 20th century -- all the Tillich you can swallow and then a whole bunch more. So of course he tried to use his educated literate brain to explain and indeed defend the goal of prema bhakti.
I experienced somethings similar when doing my university education at McGill, also after a long stint as a practitioner. What struck me as interesting at the time was that Christians have been dealing with the modernist (and now post-modernist) critiques of religion for a longer time than other world religions. Although Bhaktivinoda Thakur was up to date with current trends in the period of ferment known as the Bengal Renaissance, for the most part, after Siddhanta Saraswati, Vaishnavism has been disengaged from these kinds of questions, choosing to follow a fundamentalist and literalist approach.
The post I put up the other day about being 65 (a memory from 7 years ago) in which I called the Krishna religion some name and what the hell do I do now? After all these years do I still believe? And if I do, why? And before you know it you are doubting the very source, the very soul of your existence.
One old devotee (older than me) senior Prabhupada loyalist, said whoever wrote that is doomed. I assume he meant me. But what we vicāra pradhāna old timers recognize that he hasn't really progressed beyond a particular kind of believing--the time of innocent beginnings, the time of conversion. The fresh-faced innocence of baby belief, before it had been strengthened by a thousand encounters with doubt of every kind.
I call it progressing beyond literal belief. There is a Radha Krishna that arises even more alive and effulgent once you stop looking at them like you're watching a children's cartoon. There is no difference between Krishna and His meaning I think is what I am getting at. If you get His meaning in the midst of this mythological banyan tree, you get Him.
The strength of the early samskara matters tremendously, so there is no harm in it. The suppression of doubt can however do more damage than healthy engagement. satyam eva jayate. There's an Upanishadic mantra that is worth remembering. The truth shall set you free. And the truth is more profound than anything you can possibly imagine.
Without wonder there is no rasa. That is what gets lost when one knows the answers beforehand. Without examining doubts objectively and only casting judgment on them afterward.
Jai Radhe
"Those who accept the challenge of doubt and investigate religion and their own religious experiences as an objective phenomena in all their aspects—mythological, theological, philosophical, anthropological, psychological, sociological, etc.—often find that their faith takes on a new enlivened form, if their samskara (the faith based on the original religious experience) is strong enough. One then interacts with God through his symbolic manifestations with much the same innocence and love that he or she did when they were entirely new and presented themselves in all their original mystic splendor. In that state, he makes genuine further progress internally."
Steve had done a lot of time reading Christian theology and many of his teachers were Christians, this is after he left ISKCON after a pretty committed career in which he took many independent leadership positions. But he had difficulty with the cult mentality and went back to his hippy samskara before finally rounding out his religious education as a Universalist Unitarian minister.
But perhaps because he had explored Krishna bhakti outside the ISKCON context he was able to perceive their beauty through all the fog of propaganda and it revived in him a faith in raganuga bhakti. But he still had the apparatus of intellectual Christianity in the 20th century -- all the Tillich you can swallow and then a whole bunch more. So of course he tried to use his educated literate brain to explain and indeed defend the goal of prema bhakti.
I experienced somethings similar when doing my university education at McGill, also after a long stint as a practitioner. What struck me as interesting at the time was that Christians have been dealing with the modernist (and now post-modernist) critiques of religion for a longer time than other world religions. Although Bhaktivinoda Thakur was up to date with current trends in the period of ferment known as the Bengal Renaissance, for the most part, after Siddhanta Saraswati, Vaishnavism has been disengaged from these kinds of questions, choosing to follow a fundamentalist and literalist approach.
The post I put up the other day about being 65 (a memory from 7 years ago) in which I called the Krishna religion some name and what the hell do I do now? After all these years do I still believe? And if I do, why? And before you know it you are doubting the very source, the very soul of your existence.
One old devotee (older than me) senior Prabhupada loyalist, said whoever wrote that is doomed. I assume he meant me. But what we vicāra pradhāna old timers recognize that he hasn't really progressed beyond a particular kind of believing--the time of innocent beginnings, the time of conversion. The fresh-faced innocence of baby belief, before it had been strengthened by a thousand encounters with doubt of every kind.
I call it progressing beyond literal belief. There is a Radha Krishna that arises even more alive and effulgent once you stop looking at them like you're watching a children's cartoon. There is no difference between Krishna and His meaning I think is what I am getting at. If you get His meaning in the midst of this mythological banyan tree, you get Him.
The strength of the early samskara matters tremendously, so there is no harm in it. The suppression of doubt can however do more damage than healthy engagement. satyam eva jayate. There's an Upanishadic mantra that is worth remembering. The truth shall set you free. And the truth is more profound than anything you can possibly imagine.
Without wonder there is no rasa. That is what gets lost when one knows the answers beforehand. Without examining doubts objectively and only casting judgment on them afterward.
Jai Radhe
Comments
Have you noticed how many of our peers have lost their sense of innocent joy? They have lots of answers but, seemingly, few questions to probe.