Published on September 30, 2007
in General.
Two summers ago when I went to Finland to visit my family for the first time after moving to the monastery, my 11-year-old cousin didn’t know what to think of me. I was different now, a stranger. After a long while she came to me, and looking suspiciously at me from under her lowered eyebrows, she asked:
Do you believe in God?
I knew her mom has similar antagonistic attitudes towards religion as my parents, so I was well aware of where she was coming from. I tried to explain how I don’t believe in some old bearded guy sitting on a cloud and how most people have a very naive understanding of God, but how much philosophy could I give to a pre-teenager? She looked at me kind of pitifully and added: I don’t believe in it. I think it’s dumb.
The word God has such a rock sack of bad connotations on its shoulders. I still feel uncomfortable saying that I believe in God. I don’t use the word when I write my blogs. It’s so loaded with all kinds of extensions, like conservative ethical and political views, stagnant and blind approach to reality and self-denying, superstitious existence, to name a few. I just can’t relate with that. “God” reminds me of some distant impersonal order-carrier and a punisher who rewards our material desires if we are nice and hales us with fire and brimstone if we sin. And when we finally enter the kingdom of God after being a good boy and suppressing our desires, then we’ll be free to enjoy heavenly pleasures without repercussions, forever. And this God guy is somewhere there in the background, providing for our happy life. Where’s the spirituality in this? Where’s the unmotivated sacrifice and surrender?
God becomes our pizza taxi.
The one thing that really caught my attention in the eastern spiritual traditions was the aspiration and realization of unity with reality. We are essentially consciousness and so is existence. But at the same time complete loss of identity and merging into reality went against my intuition of what existence is about. This dilemma of unity and individuality was perfectly harmonized when I found Gaudiya Vaishnavism. Its main philosophical principle is called ‘inconceivable simultaneous oneness and difference’. It relieved me of the simplistic and unsatisfying idea that God is separate and far from us, and at the same time it allowed an identity.
It’s such an incredible, far out idea that reality is a person. Think about it. What makes you see reality ultimately as material, and that consciousness is just a byproduct of random mixing of matter?
It’s because that’s how the everyday common sense perceives existence. But could it be that we are just blind and ignorant to what’s really going on? Why do you trust your insignificant, faulty senses so much? Because that’s all you got?
You may say that it’s a natural tendency of the human consciousness to reflect his own awareness into impersonal, dead things, and the whole concept of good is just an extension of this. The whole God concept is a perfect psychological, philosophical and political grudge for people who can’t face reality as it is. But why couldn’t it be the other way around, that we have the ability to be conscious because we are a part of the reality that is aware? If we look at personality from this angle, it’s not naive at all to think that there is an absolute identity. If that’s what you mean when you ask if I believe in God, then I do. But if you mean those simplistic fabrications of materially conditioned minds that turn reality into a grumpy, bigoted old guy, I’ll be the biggest atheist you’ll find. I think it’s dumb, too.
Published on September 21, 2007
in General.
Home is where the heart is
I went to the San Francisco international airport a couple of days ago to pick up two guests. I was sitting on the floor in one corner of the domestic flights arrival lounge, waiting for my friends and watching people. I used to do it a lot when I wasn’t a monk, sit on a bench on a busy street or at the train station and observe.
Staying months on an end in a forest will make it a weird experience to be around a lot of people, what to speak of adding a strong spiritual practice into the equation. I was witnessing from the corner how the world spontaneously moves, and being fascinated by it.
What is driving us? Where are all these people going and why? What is it that pulls us to certain directions, situations, decisions?
It seemed kind of like a motorized wax cabinet to me ( and I don’t mean to say this in a derogatory way). I see life so differently now, and what for most people is a person’s real nature and characteristics is just the outer shell in my mind. All these people acting according to the physical and psychological makeup their previous karma has given them, and they completely identify with it. I felt like I was in a costume party (no music or free drinks, though) Hi, I’m a Korean businessman, I’m a West-Virginian goth girl, I’m a Swedish skater, I’m a Californian non-profit worker, I’m a Dutch farmer, I’m a single mom from Prague.
I’m a Finnish Hindu monk. That’s true too, and for most people that’s just another material identity. But my belief is that this particular wax cabinet figure is meant to take me above all material designations. Sure, you can be a Finnish hindu monk and be just as wrapped up in a material sense of identity than anybody else, but that’s just if you refuse to accept what being a Gaudiya Vaishnava, or any real spiritual practitioner, really means.
It’s so simple. Desire drives us. Desire to be loved, to feel connected, to feel home-comfort. But you won’t find that from a travel guide. You won’t find the full face of it from anything external, no matter how many stamps you have in your passport. Real love won’t further entangle us in this mess of material existence and make us feverishly move. Home is a lot closer than we think.
Published on September 13, 2007
in General.
Some people are practically disgusted by the fact that I left everything and everyone and just ran after some “abstract” ideal. They think I’m selfish.
But consider this: how much can a prisoner on death row appreciate the last enjoyments before being executed? How much can he enjoy the things that were his life and soul when he knows what’s waiting for him? What satisfaction do his favorite brand of cigarettes hold for him, or wine and cheese, music, clothes, porn, movies or anything imaginable?
If you wake up to the fact that all of us are indeed living on death row, just filling the gap between the present and death, you’ll not be able to really live in this world happily. I remember when that realization hit me the first time. I was maybe 8 years old and we were on our annual skiing vacation in Lapland. I was lying in my bed and I suddenly realized that death will be just as real a moment as is the here and now, there’s only a chunk of time in between that will be gone in no time. I was staring at the dark ceiling and the bed started feeling like a coffin. I’ve never felt such pure, unadulterated horror in my whole life. I got up, gasping for breath and when to another room where my parents were spending the evening with other families, playing boardgames, drinking a little wine, laughing and enjoying themselves, and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I crawled back to my coffin and closed my wet eyes.
From a spiritual perspective these kind of experiences are a great thing because they give you an impetus to strive to get closer to what you really are.
Our true identity is eternal and we know it intuitively, but our material identity is under constant attack because change is inevitable in this world. We can’t separate the experience of existence from our material identity, and that makes us scared, because we think we might be destroyed at any time. The struggle for existence is just a fallacy. The only existence we have to struggle for is a false one.
And this is of course only the negative side of the impetus to dedicate one’s life to spirituality. I’m not a morbid or an unhappy person at all, and the positive impetus is really what real spiritual practice should be constituted of.
Also, it’s an easy argument for the skeptics to say that religion is based on fear of death, that it’s a psychological necessity for people who can’t deal with the facts of life. That may be the case if someone’s spirituality is based only on negative impetus, but there are a variety of motivating factors to get involved in this, and the fact that material life is quite unfulfiling in the long run is only a portion of the whole motivation, that may be helpful especially in the beginning when a person doesn’t have so much attraction or taste for the real substance of spiritual life.
Published on September 6, 2007
in General.
A couple of weeks ago, when I was doing some house painting, I started thinking about the 80’s movie Karate Kid. Now, I hear you thinking, “What kind of a mink is this guy?” but let me explain.
Daniel got his butt kicked by the tuffguy Karate bikers Cobra Kai and he wanted to learn Karate to be able to defend himself and impress the Cobra Kai leader’s ex-girlfriend.
Daniel tried to learn Karate from a book on his own at first, but then he met Mr. Miyagi, a small-figured, very unassuming old Japanese gardener. Mr. Miyagi agreed to teach Daniel Karate if Daniel would work in his Japanese garden in exchange. First Daniel had to paint a wall. Mr. Miyagi worked him hard and was pedantic about how to go about painting. The next day Daniel had to sand Miyagi’s whole deck with two pads. Daniel wasn’t really into the service at hand, but he was willing to work long days because he was waiting for the fruits of his work, the Karate lessons. The next day Daniel appeared at Mr. Miyagi’s house again, and again asked if they’d start practicing Karate but Mr. Miyagi made Daniel wax his dozen hot rods, again insisting on going about it with a very precise and particular style, and after that he had to drive nails with a hammer a whole day. Finally Daniel got so frustrated that he started shouting at his guru, saying that he’s just wasting his time and he’ll never learn Karate in time for the big tournament where he was supposed to beat up Kobra Kai. Then Mr. Miyagi said: “Do the waxing of the car” and the old man tried to throw a punch at Daniel. Daniel did the movement he had repeated thousands of times while waxing the car with a round movement, and the movement turned out to be a Karate defense. Miyagi went through all the different menial tasks and they all turned to be defense movements or kicks.
The reason why this came to my mind while doing service was because that’s what service is about as well. We do things that seem completely ordinary, like painting houses, gardening, construction, cooking etc. but if we do it under right guidance with a right goal in mind, we will automatically advance spiritually. And if the motive and ideal aren’t in place, we won’t learn. It’s not like all farmers will become spiritual or all gardeners Karate masters just because they repeat certain things.
It’s easy to think like Daniel-san, that “what does pot-washing have to do with loving Godhead?” but as the domestic tasks taught LaRusso Karate, service is a practice in sincerity and purity, repetition in order to develop a right kind of attitude that will attract the absolute. And as the work itself became Karate, the same way service itself is spiritual, although in the beginning we do it just to get a result from it, and approach our guru mostly with a motive that is mixed with selfish interests.
If we stick to the instructions of our Mr. Miyagi and push through, when our final match comes at the time of death, we will be able to kick the butts of the Cobra Kai of selfish desire and obtain real feeling for the truth. And even if we get the trophy and the girl that we set out to achieve in the beginning of our practice, it doesn’t mean anything in the end anymore, because through coming in contact with a person who has a broader vision of life we were able to transform.
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