HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE HARE RAMA HARE RAMA RAMA RAMA HARE HARE 5 страница
Anyway, so be it! Even if it were true that the Hare Krishna movement is dead and so forth, still, I would never give up my deepest gratitude toward His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and his many sincere servitors who, though bearing diverse levels of spiritual qualification and empowerment, benevolently went out of their way to help extend all those life-line literatures to the lives of fallen conditioned souls like me. If the words of our acarya diminish one’s faith in Krishna consciousness, then pray tell how, by reading his Bhaktivedanta purports, thousands of people like myself continue to come forward to join the Krishna consciousness movement and become attached to the pursuit of Krishna-prema?
My dear Shri Shri Radhe-Shyama! I know I’m not qualified. I know I’m an offender. On that account, I may rightly be ever deprived of the wish-fulfilling service of Your lotus feet in Your most charming land of Vraja. Still, I declare and declare emphatically that I shall never relinquish my enthusiasm for hearing the incomparably brilliant exaltations of Your glorious names, forms, qualities, and pastimes from the pages of all those beautiful books of the followers of Lord Gauranga!
Ha Radhe-Shyama! Are You kindhearted or what? If You want to stick me this way and that with all the apparently dogmatic, arbitrary, unintelligible, virtually impracticable rules and regulations of the smriti-shastras, then surely there is no hope for my redemption.
Yet even if in Your view I should have to be born and reborn in hell for the rest of eternity, I shall never ever give up hoping against hope that one day some unlimitedly compassionate person will take pity on me and, though I be not at all deserving or fit, benignantly fulfill my impossible dream to attain but a dust particle of direct engagement in the service of Your eternal associates.
My dear Radhe-Shyama! Even though I am certainly a reprehensible reprobate, devoid of any trace of good qualities and deserving to be punished in every way, please hear the earnest plea of my heart’s deepest desperation. Please don’t laugh at me, scorn me, or doubt me in any way. Even if I will never be allowed to relish a single drop of the ocean of nectarean mellows of pure unalloyed prema for Your lotus feet, please let me perpetually or even just in some lifetime or another live and die in the dust of Vraja-bhumi, hoping against hope to some day in the course of eternity attain You.
My dear most fortunate and beneficent Shrimati Radharani! Please allow me to take my birth millions and billions of times in Vraja-bhumi in any species of life, even as a worm in the stool of a pig, rather than banishing me to become a queen of Dvaraka or an associate of Laksmi in Vaikuntha.
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Even if I will not be permitted to eternally reside at Shri Vrindavana-dhama, please let my heart live here always.
He Radhe-Shyama! Please do not forsake me! Please forgive me for my many obvious faults and shortcomings and somehow or other compassionately find the ways and means to take my withering soul to Your lotus feet. Otherwise, what hope is there for such a helplessly fallen and blameworthy creature as myself?
To hell with trying to secure a comfortable situation within this temporary world of shadowy afflictions!
To hell with hoping for heavenly delights on earth, elevation to svarga-loka, or residence on any of the highest planets within this cosmos!
To hell with the achievement of mystic perfections!
To hell with all our exuberant eating, sleeping, mating, and defending on the plea of keeping body and soul together for the performance of sacrifice! To hell with the attempt to curtail our generally excessive eating, sleeping, mating, and defending, with the aim of practicing the principles of practical renunciation!
To hell with undergoing severe penances and austerities for the sake of self-realization and God consciousness!
To hell with the achievement of the five kinds of liberation!
To hell with the attainment of Vaikuntha-loka in the eternal kingdom of God!
To hell with having been born on Earth as some kind of dull-headed humanoid in this most glorious Age of Kali in which Lord Caitanya has appeared to make self-realization easy by inaugurating the sankirtana movement of the Holy Name!
To hell with conceitedly boasting of our descent from a most venerable disciplic succession of eternally perfect Gaudiya Vaishnava Acaryas!
To hell with our enjoying the prestige of sitting at the feet of such a topmost rasika Vaishnava as His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, or any other for that matter!
To hell with strictly following the principles of varnashrama-dharma! That is for the kanistha-adhikaris having meager pure devotional shraddha.
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To hell with playing “Mommy” and “Daddy” in the material world!
To hell with our having opened hundreds of temples, restaurants, and farm communities with the aim of delivering all the fallen conditioned souls in the universe from the cycle of repeated birth and death!
To hell with animal husbandry!
To hell with following from A to Z all the damn rules and regulations of the International Society for Rules and Regulations!
To hell with trying to become a Hare Krishna clone!
To hell with our having “advanced” through the fires of years upon years of ordeal in the almost intolerable association of blundering neophytes!
To hell with attempting to express our love for guru and Krishna in terms of endlessly bearing the brunt of relentless institutional strife! To hell with toeing the party line!
To hell with the institutionalism of the institutionalists! To hell with religio-institutional corporatocracy!
To hell with trying to reconcile ourselves to the neoteric drift of a movement’s henpecked leadership!
To hell with being a Hare Krishna yes-man! To hell with all the superficial role-modeling!
To hell with our profiling as advanced devotees when we know damn well we’re not!
To hell with grappling for socio-religious eminence!
To hell with the institutional rubberstamping of
sampradayic supermen!
To hell with the “necessary evil” of (poorly) organized religion!
To hell with all the meetings, resolutions, revolutions, dissolutions, and no solutions ad-infinitum!
To hell with the ever-abounding, all-entangling crisis (mis)management syndrome! What could be expected of an institution that currently runs rather like a decapitated donkey? To hell with our having supposedly heard and regurgitated hundreds and thousands of Bhagavatam classes, dutifully attended thousands and millions of mangala-aratrika and guru- puja kirtanas, and perfunctorily chanted millions and billions of
rounds of maha-mantra-japa! Shnick, Shnick, Raam, Raam!
To hell with all our vehemently preaching about preaching about preaching about how we’re supposed to preach about preaching about preaching about how we’re supposed to preach! What are we “preachers” supposed to be preach- preachidy-preaching about? To what extent have we actually understood?
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To hell with the profiteering of the cash-covetous, business-brained mongers of transcendental knowledge!
To hell with the Hindu-bindu Society for Currency (oops! I mean Krishna) Consciousness! I say to hell with milking the Hindu cash cow!
To hell with the cost-effective, vogue-wise Hare Krishna phobia!
To hell with the painfully put-on sankirtana smile! To hell with it! Like infatuated children, avidly engrossed in the perpetual pastime of competitively collecting rare and unusual coinage, we accumulate the hundreds and thousands of unqualified neophyte disciples under the pretext of perpetuating the sampradaya. I say, to hell with it!
To hell with, on the plea of concern for others, becoming so blunderingly bogged down with all the petty little problems of the hundreds and thousands of corporeally attached shisya- praya “disciples” that one fails to oneself find the time and space required to complete even the minimum nama-bhajana expected of a new bhakta; what then of achieving the advanced internal devotional realizations needed to become, for the benefit of one’s disciples, anything better than a half-baked cookie!
To hell with the undignified, artfully employed, hard- nosed, cunningly politic, cold-shouldering, dog-eat-dog bureaucratic religio-administrative spin control! Has anyone ever achieved prema by this approach?
To hell with being a pawn on the chessboard of any mortal being’s religio-institutional managerialism!
To hell with coyly compromising the truth to kowtow to the cacophonous misconclusions of dull-headed under- enlightened ecclesiastics of religio-executive clout!
To hell with all the rubbish, time-wasting, power- politicking religio-institutional / inter-institutional hostilities! Are there not yet innumerable grumblers, intent on being inexorably encumbered by such endless, trivial affairs?
To hell with the materially concocted hallucination of having so-called friends and enemies amongst the Vaishnavas!
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To hell with the perfidiously inflicted, heartlessly top- heavy centralized manipulation of manpower and money! On the threadbare plea of “spreading love of Godhead,” do such scheming preoccupations now indispensably supersede our life’s mission of becoming mad after Krishna?
To hell with scrambling to savor varieties of mundane rasa
on the pretext of fostering socially feasible spiritual enrichment! To hell with the fools who conscientiously avoid hearing,
chanting, and remembering the Lord’s rasa-lila and other madhuurya pastimes with the gopis. They will never attain perfection. If I chance to encounter the likes of such imposter Vaishnavas, I will close my ears to their philosophical absurdities, refuse to see their faces, and scorn the dismal air about their corpse-like material bodies.
To hell with fashionably passing off sub-religious quasi- Krishna-conscious eclecticism as harmonious devotional practice!
To hell with the deliberate dumbing down of the Krishna consciousness movement!
To hell with pandering to the psycho-physical indulgences of the movement’s lowest common denominator!
To hell with the deaf ears of the conceited, self- complacent, ivory-towered religio-administrative elitists!
To hell with spineless, self-serving ecclesiastico-political correctitude!
To hell with our having distributed billions and trillions of transcendental literatures all over the world in scores of languages to give everyone else a chance to become fully Krishna conscious!
I say to hell with it all!
Much of the afore-denounced may be wonderful, meritorious or (de)pressingly important on one level or another, but if in the end, after all is said and done, we ourselves, as individuals could not effectively grasp, take to heart, factually realize, and blissfully relish the deepest essential living import of the Gaudiya Vaishnava siddhanta (learning to love Vrajendra- nandana Shyama by carefully pursuing the bhavas of the supra- exemplary damsels of Vraja), what would we have really gained from the whole affair? Truly speaking, what would be the sense or significance of any other allegedly laudable undertaking or feat? Are we merely amassing sukriti (or duskriti) for another valiant try in some future birth, or what? – an inconversant step in hopefully the right direction? Do we really know what we are doing? Do we want Krishna-prema or not? Kindly do not hastily suspect these questions to be in any way inconsequential. Okay, Krishna consciousness is a gradual process – as gradual as we make it. It really doesn’t have to be that gradual, though. Candidly speaking, charity really begins at home. It’s true that the highest realization is to take all risk, to go out of one’s way to save the world. That is our mission, for sure. Even so, still higher than that, ultimately, the very highest realization, the profoundest mission, is to save oneself. First make yourself spiritually fit. Doctor, heal thyself! First chant and dance in ecstasy like a madman, then worry about saving the rest of the world.
Higher than becoming guru is to become an accomplished, fully self-realized disciple, and that hardly implies that one should pompously pose as a king with no clothes to passionately impress the little neophytes with how much one might have superficially garnered from the lines of letters on the pages of piles of books. A mesmerizing, ostentatious cerebral miscellany indeed! Nowhere is it mentioned in any shastra that neophytes and intermediate devotees achieve prema by initiating hundreds and thousands of disciples. It is really best not to accept any disciples at all. Better by far we humbly endeavor to chant shuddha-nama via the intent prosecution of yuga-dharma nama- sankirtana with a view to achieve ultimate raga-maya perfection at the feet of Shri Guru. Then we may hope to become truly empowered instruments in the hands of the predecessor Acaryas.
He Radhe-Shyama! Please allow me at this point to elaborate on this proposition for the careful deliberation of the revered readers, to whom I offer my koti koti dandavat- pranamas.
We should bear in mind that Shri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, in personally demonstrating the exemplary course of pure devotional conduct to edify the people of this dismal domain, adopted two programs of vital concern, which are in fact, to a large extent, intrinsically inter-supportive of each other. The three internal purposes of His advent, primarily corresponding to the tripad-vibhuuti-cid-jagat (internal, spiritual, all-sentient world comprising three fourths the kingdom of God), were essentially a matter of His pursuing the internal rasika relishment of pure devotional bhavas. The one external purpose of inaugurating the movement of mass sankirtana for the deliverance of materially conditioned jivas should be seen as relevant, or consequential, to His appearance in this ekapad- vibhuti-acit-jagat (dull material world covering only one fourth of God’s kingdom). It is a fact that His propagation of the Holy Name enhanced, in certain respects, His direct relishment of Radha’s intensified happiness in the form of Her overflowing benevolence toward others in view of Krishna’s expanded bliss. Nevertheless, it should be noted with profit that the internal absorption was primarily effective whereas the external parallel was a subsequent effect rooted in His aspiration to taste the ever-expanding sweetness of Krishna-prema.
Radha is the complete whole personification of Krishna’s compassionate nature expanded into innumerable personified counterpart aspects of the same intrinsic supra-mundane potency. As the experiential value of ten-million fold must necessarily be established on the basis of the experiential value of one, so without the premise of Radha’s actual experience of personally meeting with Krishna, the assertion of Her ten- million-fold happiness in making arrangements for the other expanded aspects of Herself to meet with Him remains only so much meaningless verbiage. Similarly, it is said that anyone can have the experience of ten-million-fold the happiness of personally meeting and embracing Krishna by preaching the sankirtana movement to convince other conditioned souls to take steps toward Him. Even so, it would behoove a thoughtful devotee to initially come to the position of personally experiencing Krishna, embracing Krishna in unalloyed prema – face to face, eye to eye, cheek to cheek, hand to hand, chest to chest, etc., etc. Obviously, without gaining the actual direct experience, one could hardly realize in a practical sense whether one would be in fact subjectively sustaining ten-million- fold ananda or not. One might question whether one is being “transcendentally” conned by an inducting missionary hype or what! If most neophyte book distributors and “preachers” were to consider the idea on the basis of the relatively paltry slight rapture they experience on the preaching field, they might conclude that if the experience of meeting Krishna would be one ten-millionth of the experience they undergo in the course of their preaching struggle, meeting Krishna could hardly be a very happy affair! So why bother to advance one’s purva-raga, anxiously hoping against hope to some day actually meet Him face to face and eye to eye? Moreover, if they were factually tasting the ten-million-fold happiness they were purported to be able to taste, then why do so many of them fall away to re-chew the pre-chewed gross and subtle sense gratification for want of achieving a higher taste? We see, but we don’t see. If one actually saw Krishna, one would faint! If one actually saw Radharani, one would die!
One might pause for a moment and question to what extent a practitioner could have actually seen, experienced, tasted, “realized,” or even basically understood for that matter what is Krishna, what is Krishna consciousness. For the most part, a sadhaka cannot do any more than conjecture or imagine what it means to be fully Krishna conscious. We should doubtlessly acknowledge that the Lord quickly recognizes anyone who teaches the secrets of the science of Krishna consciousness for the benefit of the fallen conditioned souls. Still, to be sure, it would not be inappropriate at this point to aver that only a topmost devotee can really preach with the requisite purity, potency, and background of full-fledged shuddha-sattvika realization to effectually revolutionize or spiritually enkindle the heart of anyone. Only a maha-bhagavata invested with the (hladini) potency to do so is fit to bestow shuddha-nama, which alone can be said to be, in the real sense, identical with nami, Krishna Himself, subsumptive of all His internal spiritual potencies. Others, occupied with missionary movements (antics), may by hook or by crook generate a curiosity, persuade via various inveigling modus operandi, or sympathetically encourage by pointing the way; something is better than nothing, for sure. Still, merely going through the motions (Hare Krishna movements), as it were, and actually getting the whole job done may prove to be conspicuously dissimilar at the upshot. In other words, the degree of a devotee’s genuine experience of Krishna’s sweetness, as proportionately revealed by Krishna Himself in response to one’s evolving premika sweetheartedness toward Him, assumes the fundamental measure of one’s adhikara to perform empowered sankirtana.
Those who think themselves to be Vaishnavas, as well as individuals who regard themselves as guru of Vaishnavas, looking forward to receiving honor and respect; vying for fame, recognition, and reputation; equating the rapacious, quantitative accumulation of disciples with sampradayic worth; uppishly considering themselves to be superior to others though incapable of genuinely crying for the Lord’s special causeless mercy, all the while forgetful of or oblivious to, nay, totally apathetic toward their internal sac-cid-ananda spiritual identity (vraja-svarupa), yet anxious to satisfy their greed for prestige and material gain by accessing religio-institutional power and position for securing diverse gross and subtle personal and extended sense indulgences or ego-inflations; remaining enslaved by mental concoction while keeping Krishna in the front, can never chant the actual Holy Name of the Lord. Nor can they qualify their fawning followers to hear the Holy Name, which alone can award the highest happiness. Though the syllables of the Holy Name be ostensibly articulated, the aparadha-nama or abhasa-nama kirtana of the egotistical can never directly help any jiva attain the final beatific prayojana, i.e., pure unalloyed vraja-prema. Krishna, as a person, can on the basis of His own personal feelings like someone or not like someone according to His own sweet will. No one, even adhering to or outwardly espousing strict regulative devotional proprieties, can compel Him to selectively use one’s fleshy tongue as an instrument in the service of His divine sound avatara merely by paying lip-service to the vulgar similitude of Hari-nama or ingeniously mouthing off sampradayic rhetorical jargon to the extent that one prides oneself to ably parrot something of the Krishna consciousness philosophy. First deserve, then desire! How can we expect to fully enlighten others about the secrets of high-level Krishna consciousness, to, when required, lead or instruct them to their supreme perfection, if we ourselves have not deeply penetrated the esoteric truths and devotional conclusions via our own personal introspective application of the tenets of antaranga-bhakti- bhajana, humbly following in the footsteps of the previous Acaryas? If one, being uninformed, inexperienced, or disinclined, is incapable of even theoretically discussing the constituent principles of raga-margabhidheya, or if one fancifully fabricates dubious, superstitious, or presumptive aberrations thereof, then how far could the disciples expect to advance under such unsatisfactory neophyte guidance fraught with utter spiritual ineptitude?
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