The Great Departure.

Dear devotees, please accept my obeisances;

All glories to Shrila Prabhupada and Shri Shri Radha Govinda Deva.

Jaya Shri Shri Nityananda Gauranga!

Jaya Shri Jagannath, Shri Baladeva, Subhadra Maharani Shrimati!

I hope to find you in good health and spiritually inspired.

Some days ago my dear disciple - Omkrishna Mataji - left the body and this mortal world and headed for the supreme eternal abode of Shri Krishna.

The two sons, daughters in law and grandchildren attended to her all the time in high spiritual consciousness, lovingly and with devotion.

Besides being herself a sincere devotee, Omkrishna Mataji had the great blessing in this life to live in a family of special devotees, all of them very dear to me.

One of her sons was next to her at the very moment she passed away, and has accompanied and sustained her by chanting uninterruptedly the Holy Names.

My most fervent prayers go to this disciple so dear to me, who was always cheerful, playful and joyful, who was so moved every time we met, and I’m also asking you to pray for her too.

I pray she can soon play happily in the company of Lord Krishna and His eternal companions and friends.

With deep emotion,

Matsyavatara dasa

Pilgrimage: a Journey of Search and Discovery.

Part II

It is not by chance that Masters of Bhakti speak of an inseparable unity which is necessary for our evolution: Bhagavata sacred work and Bhagavata person, both of them are able to transfer the knowledge and the consciousness of  the Divine, Bhagavan.

If our visit to a sacred place is made with these predispositions, it may become an experience of great meaning that allows us to get in touch with timeless memories that bring us in other elevated dimensions of consciousness, and allow us to hear and accept the messages conveyed to mankind from another dimensions.

At times life faces us with very difficult situations so that we have to be ready and able to make our pilgrimage even in a hospital's room after the announcement of a terrible medical report, in front of the lifeless body of a dear person, suffering a devastating moral pain because of the betrayal of the person we most loved; or in a prison's cell where we had been locked in spite of our innocence, destroyed  by defamation. In these circumstances we need to start our journey even sooner, loading ourselves with inspiration and starting our inner journey to find a safe place, a shelter, an oasis in which to connect with our spiritual eternal self, which is unchangeable, together with God who is the giver of Knowledge, Love and Mercy. More than ever in these situations, in order to withstand sufferance, we have to fight against time in order to reach the space in the centre of our heart, where, the Upanishads say, time and space ultimately do not exist. That dimension is pure Transcendence. It is the place where all our desires are fulfilled. But the human being, deviated by the unreal world of vanishing impressions,  has lost the route to find it, because that dimension is invisible to the senses and to the physical eyes, the voice of that place speaks to the soul and the ears are not meant to hear it. For this reason Krishna says to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-gita: “In order to see me the way I am, I give you spiritual senses”. Why does Krishna offer to Arjuna such a great opportunity? Because Arjuna asked Him with a humble manner, because he desired it with intensity, because he wanted to get in touch with Krishna in his original and intimate divine nature.

Only with a burning desire to perceive a spiritual dimension and connect with God, a person may receive the divine strength to achieve it, to make the journey that from the realm of death will take us to immortality, from darkness to light, from sufferance to beatitude. A pilgrimage is that journey, it is rejoining.

How long does that journey last? Patanjali in the Yoga-sutras explains that the distance depends mainly on two factors: continuity and intensity of desire, and the required effort. In order to reach our target soon, we need to keep our course steady, with constant determination, and to increase the speed of motion by rising the intensity of the desire. Dante in the Divine Comedy accomplishes that journey too. At one point he describes his emotion as “feeling a pull from the sky while being still alive”. Once we loosen our conditionings and get rid of  bad habits, ascending is fast.

A pilgrimage  is that  ascension, it is an upward shift, it means heading toward holiness, and the spirit we hold while facing the journey is crucial. If we have the right attitude, that feeling of serenity we  have been looking for, the one that we thought we would experiment only once we reached our destination - instead it arrives step by step during our pilgrimage: then we find it in the predetermined place we have chosen and elected as our home, the heart.

Life will become then, day after day, a wonderful journey of research and discovery.

Pilgrimage: a Journey of Search and Discovery.

Part I

A pilgrimage is a journey in search of the Divine inside and outside us.

It does not take place within a physical space, rather it occurs in one's mind and consciousness. Its most intimate purpose is a deep purification of the heart, of the intellect, of the memory, and of our being in its wholeness. If we live the Pilgrimage deeply and authentically, it may represent a turning point, a special experience, that, due to an extraordinary combination of elements, favouring the purification of consciousness, may allow us a sudden advancement, which possibly we would have not been able to achieve even through a number of  previous lives.

According to the Indovedic literature, the spiritual vitality of the pilgrimage location is related to the daily renovation of its sanctity by the holy people living there.

In the Shrimad Bhagavatam this concept is explained very clearly: they believe that holy people themselves are pilgrimage places. In the first canto of this wonderful masterpiece,  King Yudhisthira says to the great sage Vidura:

“Noble soul, the devotee who have the qualities of Your Divine Grace are themselves regarded as pilgrimage places. As you bring God in your heart wherever you go, the places you visit become holy places” (I.13.10)

When we enter a sacred place, in Sanskrit called tirtha, we meet the Divine (murti) and awaken people, sadhu, and this way, if we incline ourselves  properly, we can be pervaded by a great spiritual power, the same energy that permeates those places, behaviours and gestures of ancient sacred value.  This spiritual energy, which, in holy places, is brilliant and vibrating, can strengthen us in order to improve our personality and our changes in life, that, otherwise, we would have  never accomplished for lack of will and courage. Like a magnet that energy and spiritual strength attracts our  deepest thoughts and feelings, our ideal aspirations,  and brings us along a path of wonderful search for rediscovering ourselves, the origins of our life, and our highest realization.

First of all the pilgrimage place is an instrument to acquire virtue and knowledge, not a “horizontal” knowledge, limited to the things of this world, but a “vertical” knowledge that rises up to the highest pinnacles of awareness. For this reason we consider a pilgrimage like a journey between the earth and the sky: from the earth it takes us to the sky and from the sky it brings us back to earth, transferring in our daily life the intuitions, the comprehensions, and the realizations that we have experienced, welcomed, and harboured during the Journey.

All the efforts and inconveniences connected to travelling are part of the path of elevation. They should not to be seen as obstacles, rather they are extraordinary opportunities to overcome our limits, to dispose of  illusions and attachments. When we travel, it is easier to understand that none of the things outside of us belong to us. Who can claim to own wealth? Can we have power over youth or health? For how long? Those resources are given to us for a brief length of time and their quality and evolving utility depends on how we use them. Who can say “I possess a body”?  In truth, we are not even the owners of our body, and if we want to keep it forever, we would not be able to do it: it would be impossible. Sooner o later it will be taken away from us regardless of our will. We do not own whatever is outside us, we can only take care of it temporarily. However the soul and its powers belong to us, and they are inalienable and immensely great: the knowledge of the truth, the joy of the self, the nature of eternity. The essence of  life is to regain awareness of those intrinsic qualities we have lost, choked by the conditionings, and the contaminations of our character. During the Journey each one of us has the rare opportunity to achieve the discovery of the soul’s treasures.

Furthermore the journey exhorts us for a continuous effort of discerning, to separate virtuosity from vice, reality from illusion, sacredness from profane, the inner world from the outside world, aimed to avoid the mistake of exchanging the pure from the impure and vice versa. Holy places are not meant to be seen with your own eyes, we need to predispose ourselves with an elevated consciousness and visit them with the company of people who live and search santity, otherwise we run the risk to limit our vision at the physical level, and to be confused by external appearances.

The sacred place is a state of mind, not a physical reality. It is the reality of the soul where there is genuine love, control over impulses, caring for each other, awareness of the presence of God. During our pilgrimage in sacred places we may come across holy scenes, moments of eternal sacredness, but also situations of degradation and low civilization, exactly like one person may harbour elevated expressions of geniality and kindness together with abysses of degradation. This is why it is fundamental to develop and keep a clear vision about brightness and darkness, without letting slip from memory what is holy just because we saw what is not holy, taking a distance from the degradation only because it is often placed next to what is sacred.

For this reason, in order to feel the spirit of a holy place with this high sense of discernment, it is fundamental to be in company of people motivated like us, sharing the same purposes, and even better - with people who are already able to perceive the essence separated from what is redundant and superficial, via the teachings of the sacred scriptures.

The Treasure of the Holy Name

Bhaktivedanta Ashrama, July, 1, 2010 This morning Shrila Gurudeva has given a very beautiful speech on the importance of chanting the Holy Names. We realize ever more that the Holy Name is a Treasure. It is the secret to happiness. “We obtain the highest level of consciousness while chanting the Mahamantra, while our conscience is completely taken by Radha and Krishna’s divine entertainments. Before we can reach these levels, we have to reach some intermediate levels, one of which is remaining fixed in concentration on the reciting and listening of the Holy Names. Through such prolonged concentration we can progressively reach a meditative level while at the same time, the external world begins to fade and the conscience escapes from the illusory strength of the objects of the senses. Serenity, satisfaction, gladness and joy increase and become a constant presence in our lives. We then enter that dimension of the living being where peace is the main state, where the worldly turbulence represented by the duality which generates continuous mood changes diminishes until it becomes null. This exhaustion does not remove joy but does exactly the opposite: it allows joy and inner satisfaction to fully manifest itself with all their force and consequent benefits. Rasa reveal themselves to the conscience. These are the sentiments of the soul that cannot be perceived while a person is subject to the dualities of life. These dualities enter and burst in our conscience when we give them attention and importance. This explanation may appear simple, but indeed the reason for all that happens is funded on a simple truth that is not simpleton, but a clear comprehension of reality. It is not an asura, a perfidious or evil man who injects elements of disturbance in our conscience. We are the ones who inject them, even though most of the times we do it subconsciously. In the end, each one of us is the cause of our bad fortune and our own persecutor. Only we are responsible of the poison that we allow to enter our conscience. After saying this, it is also true that the inner wealth that each one of us has was acquired by our own merit right when we have chosen to connect our spiritual essence to God who is the Origin of all Wellbeing and the Eternal Source of Grace and Mercy. If there are luminous elements in our conscience, we are the ones who introduced them by giving them our attention and taking them to the inner world and by turning ever more toward the Eternal and toward the non-dual world. In his works, Plato speaks of tensions between soul and body. The soul wants to free itself from the body but the body detains it through the psyche. Even Krishna in Bhagavad-Gita XV.7 explains that conditioners hide in our psyche and that we must research for the causes of our personality disturbances and for what leads us to believe that the duality of the world is attractive and that we can even find into illusion the solution of our problems and the joy we are aspiring to. Dreaming of getting happiness from the objects of the senses conceived as to be an end to themselves, ties ever more the body to the soul, multiplies the conditioners and by acting in this manner, the individual fouls himself into believing that happiness must be search out of himself. This is how life passes and exhausts itself by trying to reach that apple that is high up on the tree of desires because we believe it to be the sweetest, however, once we have reached it, picked it and eaten it, we soon thereafter discover that it doesn’t have any flavor and all of a sudden we realize the uselessness of all of our efforts. Even those who have reached high positions in the world, such as prestige, money, power and whatever else, at the end do not find a real and lasting satisfaction. Similarly, even he, who would drink not only a glass but an entire bottle of sea water, couldn’t indeed get rid of thirst, instead, the more sea water he drinks, the more he gets thirsty. We must escape from vanity and research for what can really give us joy. Materialistic people are in love with the immanent aspect of God but, because they do not connect it to His Origin they remain conditioned by the energies of Nature and lose the chance of benefitting from it without remaining tied to it. Spiritualists instead are charmed by the transcendent aspect of God and at the same time they appreciate even his immanent manifestation, but on contrary from the others, when they approach this manifestation they do it not for egoistical enjoyment but with a spirit of service toward the Creator who generated it. He who doesn’t lust after the matter but instead considers it an instrument that can be used for his evolution, will be immune from the conditioner generated by the objects of the senses which in return will lose all their negative potentiality. Shrila Prabhupada explains to us this subject with the following paragon: “ It is like being bit by a snake without his teeth. It would not hurt us because he needs his teeth to inject his poison. The same is for the devotee who works at the service of God and desires to participate in the divine lila even if he lives in the bodily prison. He is however free from conditioners of Nature and this is why he is described in the scripture as jivan mukta: free while still in life. He utilizes his body as a precious instrument to make evolutionary experience and help many people to reconnect with their spiritual essence and to God. To reach this elevated level, there is no practice more effective than meditation on the Holy Names, which becomes particularly powerful if undertaken in the Brahma-muhirta hours, between 4 and 8 in the morning and it offers us the opportunity to realize spiritual dimension. Obviously this result is not achieved by everyone even though many have the chance to obtain it. What hamper such an achievement are the conditioners that have penetrated ones conscience. This is the reason why it is so fundamental, as Caitanya Mahaprabhu explains the practice of ceto darpana marianam, cleanliness of the mind primary by listening to the sadhu who enforce within us the consciousness of the importance of meditation. To favor concentration and meditative practice, we must avoid giving in to distractions. The observance of the four regulatory principles is indispensible to avoid the most vicious distractions. The purpose to achieve is reaching that level of listening of the Holy Names that is not mechanical but felt deep inside. It is at that point that a fast purification is possible. This purification prevents mood swings and lowering of the conscience and leads to an enlightened consciousness. Then the journey becomes really charming, joyful and ecstatic, however, we will reach the goal through intermediate levels of progressive enlightening. One of the major dangers in meditation is falling asleep, that conscience state which is sleeping, drowsy under the effect of tamo-guna, in which one is not lucid nor fully conscious of what he is doing. The effect of rajas is not less harmful because it produces vikshipta or distraction which is the exact contrary of meditation. From a number of lives our conscience is used to carelessly accept everything that comes to us through our senses with the result that this confuse state does not appear to most people as something to avoid but instead a normality. The Acarya and the holy texts allow us to become conscious of this wrong cognition and offer us instruments to improve our conscience level. It is up to us to use them. Chanting the Holy names during the Brahma muhurta hours and trying to concentrate our conscience on the listening to these powerful spiritual vibrations leads to innumerable benefits even to those, having to fight a wild mind, are not yet capable to meditate on the qualities of the Lord, on His Divine Adventures (lila) and on His Divine Forms (rupa). The so called well thinkers, permanently serving pure rationality, could blame this practice by deeming it an imposition, but this practice of containment is indispensible to rediscover our original nature, the face of the Self beyond the masks of ego. Then when we become lords of our psychic home, it will no longer be necessary to fight our rebellious mind because we have reached inner peace, which is not related to the death of the psyche but to the optimum functioning and natural harmonization of the psyche with the soul. He who doesn’t have a good sadhana will be compelled to remain at a superficial level of meditation and his conscience will continue to fill itself with elements not fit for spiritual realization. It is for this reason that sadhana is a sine qua condition to reach spiritual realization. Pay attention: do not fall in the trap of cutting corners and believe too early that you are free or spontaneously in love with God because the contents of conditioners still present on the bottom of your conscience could become lethal. The scriptures explain the importance of never neglecting sadhana because it is a Divine gift that we have received because of the mercy of the Acarya. In sadhana, chanting the Holy Names is a priority. Before dedicating ourselves to you social responsibilities or to the holy seva duties, it is essential to begin the day with Harinama Japa. In devotional service everything is Vaikuntha, but in the Kali yuga the practice of chanting the Holy Name is superior to any other instrument of purification of the conscience. Practice it by trying to pay attention to the quality of your reciting other than engage yourselves for a sufficient long time period. Attentively observe what happens and what sounds inside yourselves, invocate the Divine Mercy and ever more you will discover yourselves to be able to improve you state of conscience.”