braindeadbhakti.com

The other day I left the forest with Mayapur, one of the new monk trainees. The bumper was directed towards highway 101 South which would take us to Santa Rosa. We needed some more boards for the deck we are building around the temple.
Mayapur was reading verses from the Bhagavad-gita as we were gliding down the curvy roads, and we talked about some points in the commentary and tried to learn verses by heart. I love these kind of spontaneous study situations. These books and the state of mind it has spawned from are just bottomless. The further I go in this thing the more it opens up and the more it makes me realize how much we are missing out in our everyday lives.

It’s not so weird for me anymore to go back among civilization, but it was funny to observe Mayapur’s reactions. He was out in the city first time in the three months he’s been here. We really do live in our own world up on the mountains and it affords an incredible possibility to be as focused on spiritual matters and thoughts as possible.

Cities are undoubtedly really fascinating for the mind and senses. Everything is designed to make a strong impression on us. I’ve really learned to be in awe of the advances that humanity has taken. Once you have taken some distance to the western way of life and you enter cities kind of as an alien, from one angle it’s really fascinating. This time in Santa Rosa my main feeling about it was that everything takes so much effort and energy to produce. The asphalt under our truck, the light bulbs of the neon signs, the bolts in the park bench legs. All the small things that we never think twice.
I remember floating over London in the night time on a United flight last year. As the sea of lights was spreading to every direction below me under the pitch black sky, I breathed deep just from thinking about the amount of energy, thought and organization it takes to keep such a huge community going. Every detail, every single parking meter and dirty floor has to be attended to by someone.

Cities are awe inspiring from one point of view, but if you are attached to the glimmer and glamor, it becomes problematic. We waste our energy into things that feel nice for a while but wear out fast. The disposable culture has surely invaded our value system and sub-consciousness. The need for quick fixes and constant pleasure spikes in the otherwise flat life-diagram seems to be going into ever more extreme measures. Materialism really seems to be a self-devouring project. The more you want to enjoy the more you will hurt yourself. The more sensual input you get, the number you’ll become. The more high you get on Saturday night, the worse downers you’ll have on Sunday.

We got the boards, picked up some potatoes from CostCo. and got back on the road. Mayapur said that he felt like he didn’t belong to this place and I had to agree.

One of my good friends from Finland called me the other day and after we had talked about stuff for a while, I asked him what he thought of my blog. He was silent for a second and then, in a very Finnishque (who said I can’t invent my own words?), diplomatic way said that sometimes they seem a little preachy. He said that they often begin in a nice way but then all of a sudden in the end there’s the “finger waving part” where I lay down the truth of the matter in a kind of, I guess, patronizing way.

It’s funny how people seem to be put off by certainty. He’s following the same tradition that I am, so my writings don’t turn him off, but I guess he was talking form a so-called normal person’s perspective. I’ve doubted myself my whole life practically and that has enabled me to relate to so many people because I haven’t had a strong sense of self, so I’ve just merged with whoever I’ve been in contact with. But my life has certainly changed, I’ve finally taken this step to say that I really feel I’m doing the right thing with my life and that there are goods and bads, truths and untruths, reality and illusion in our existence. I just don’t have faith in post-modernism, or post-post-modernism and its values anymore. That kind of ultra-relativity just makes me sick to my stomach, although I’m a product of it. Or rather, I was a miserable offspring of that family but I ran and now I’m a happy orphan.

It’s also good to remember, though, that there’s a difference between certainty and intellectual cowardice. I’m not afraid to think. I just have this underlying, unexplainable certainty that the worldview of the bhakti tradition is a true one. It may not be that every story or word in our scriptures is true word-for-word but the approach to reality that this tradition gives is just so charming and it simply makes sense to me. It’s beyond belief. It’s a conviction.

Also, this whole blogging is very much for my own purification, an effort to clarify things in my own head. And it works. I pick a subject I want to write about and then I keep thinking a little about it throughout the day, how to explain it, and I’m trying to honestly evaluate how much I understand about the subject myself. It’s like a hermeneutic circle. It keeps growing by itself. Someone reacts to something I write and that grows on the subject and makes me understand something more about it.

I just write what I’m thinking about and I’m trying to connect my thoughts into some things that happened in my life. This tradition, the philosophy, the lifestyle and its underlying feeling is pretty much all I (at least try to) think about. That’s my perspective on life. It would be easy to say that I’m compromising my intellectual integrity (what a fancy term) by sticking to a ready-made world explanation and that it hinders free thinking, but I have a strong conviction that the wisdom contained in this tradition has not come about only from people’s mental activities in the context of Indian culture and civilization. It’s much deeper and contains eternal truths that just have to be discovered. It’s not that anybody invents any ideas or concepts anyway. This is just an abstract form of excavation.

Keep digging.