Remembering Shrila Prabhupada

PART I

In the sacred occasion of the departure of Bhaktivedanta Swami Shrila Prabhupada, we pray Shri Krishna to empower us with strength so that we could carry in our hearts the example of His extraordinary life, character, deeds and works forever. Those who were able to witness His life and teachings, had the greatest luck to testify the changes in their lives and in the lives of so many people.

These transformations are the great events from which we can draw an inexhaustible inspiration: Shrila Prabhupada gave us the opportunity to live in the spiritual awareness. The path traced by Him is followed by hundreds of thousands of people, and the most favored are those who welcomed Him in the heart, dedicating their service to the realization of His dream, that is make available the love of God to as many people as possible regardless of race, creed, culture, social position, politics or religion.

36 years ago Shrila Prabhupada left His physical body and this material world to return to where He came from, the spiritual universe. We pray Bhagavan Shri Krishna to give us the purity to be able to celebrate His glories properly. By celebrating His glories we become aware of his greatness, and becoming aware of the greatness of a pure devotee of the Lord, we can experience the greatness of God. In this way, practicing the nine paths of Bhakti, we can realize our divine nature and become purified from the distortions of psychic structure and its conditionings.

We take this special opportunity to increase our sincere attachment to the lotus feet of Shrila Prabhupada, to humbly serve His teachings and His way of life so as to bring us closer to Him and to Shri Krishna through the nine paths of love mentioned before.

Shrila Prabhupada allowed hundreds of thousands of people to transform their lives by changing their vision, allowing them to get rid of the identification with the material structure that covers their eternal Self. Shrila Prabhupada gave the possibility to understand the difference between the spiritual Self, the body and the mind and to realize the divine potential of each person regardless of age, gender, social status and culture. The term Acarya means exemplary. Through His example and model of life, Shrila Prabhupada made the teachings of the Shastras feasible.

A person can take the Bhagavad-gita, read some sublime passages and reflect: "How nice it would be to live like that, but who is able to? I would not be capable of doing that for sure." We need a model, an example, there must be someone who lives the teachings of the Bhagavad-gita constantly, faithfully, coherently, and joyfully. The sacred work becomes a person, and the highest aspirations become applicable in our lives. It is exactly what happened to all of us. Why? Because Shrila Prabhupada experienced Bhakti so intensely and joyfully, no matter what life presented to Him in terms of ordeals, difficulties and obstacles to overcome. His relying on Krishna at all times without ever becoming fatalistic allowed this great Acarya to live in this world in pure spiritual consciousness. Faith is not a fatalism, it is an evolutionary creativity for searching the best solution for the existential problems; if we direct our efforts towards the spiritual evolution with commitment and faith, such solution will appear as Paramatma in the heart, as well as through the expert guidance of the Spiritual Master in the outer world.

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.