braindeadbhakti.com

Once, when I had lived in the monastery for a year or so, I was walking from the main house to my yurt and all of a sudden I heard this familiar sound “bebeep, bebeep”. Automatically my hand went to my pocket to reach for a cell phone. I stopped to laugh at myself. I don’t have pockets anymore, what to speak of a cell phone. The sound came from a mole chaser in the garden.

Living as a brahmacari (a monk student) makes you think about wealth in a different way.
We don’t own anything. Everything we use, like the computer I’m writing this with, is not really mine, the car I drive is not mine. I can’t go out and buy a soda or whatever I feel like having at that moment. We are trained into giving up the notion of ownership and we are taught to adopt a mood of service and dedication instead of a mood of staking out things in our name that really don’t belong to us. I guess a monk’s life seems so off-putting and unwanted because we renounce the things that make people happy. But we want to be rich too. Everybody wants to be rich. Wealth just means different things to different people.

I’m planning on writing more about wealth later.

Blogging is supposed to be a reflection of your life, not the other way around. Very simple.
But lately I’ve caught myself thinking about philosophical concepts, analogies, word plays and such so much, that it has distracted me from my worship and meditation every once in a while. Isn’t it funny that philosophical thought can actually check you from approaching the truth? But it’s a fact. Actually one implication of my blog url is just that. A real spiritual experience is completely beyond our mental and intellectual comprehension (at least that’s what the wise men say).

On one hand, explaining the philosophy and sharing your feeling about Gaudiya Vaishnavism is also considered service, so I should have nothing to worry, right? Wrong. Maybe the most distinguishing characteristic of a beginning practitioner’s life is a constant refocusing. It’s like trying to take a sharp picture of an object that you’re moving towards. Every time you come closer, your focus fails. Similarly, I’m constantly alert and trying to make sure that I’m doing things with right motivations, that I’m not doing “service” just to do something I like. It’s not so much the actions themselves that we do that either draw us closer to Godhead or push us further, but the consciousness we do them in.

So, lately I’ve been observing myself in relation to this blogging and it’s a fact that I get satisfaction from fiddling with concepts and thoughts and trying to relate my devotional experiences to other people in a sensible way. My karmic identity has a natural tendency for introspection and writing. But we have to be brutally honest with ourselves if we really want to come closer to the absolute. That reality knows everything, so we’re only cheating at solitaire if we try to pull out the extra ace from the sleeve when nobody is watching.
The fact of the matter is that if cleaning toilets or breaking rocks with a pick axe is more conducive to bhakti than writing a pseudo-intellectual blog, then I have to do that. It’s all about cultivating an identity that’s attached only to giving and serving, and not even to the way in which to give.

So does this mean I’ll erase my blog site and head towards the bathhouse? No. I don’t feel like my blogging is harmful. I just have to be careful. In fact, it has helped me understand my tradition better, because I don’t have to think about it as much from new angles if I’m just sitting in the woods with a bunch of other “converts”.