braindeadbhakti.com

One of my old friends from the Finnish hardcore scene wrote me the other day.
She said she had been thinking about my decision to drop everything and move to the monastery and she admitted she thought at fist it was practically insane, but now she started thinking about the life of the so-callled normal people and admitted that that’s pretty insane too.
The drugs, the fashions, the mass culture, the mainstream . . .

She also wrote that monastic life sounds rigid and boring, recognizing at the same time she might be wrong. After all we are all shackled with some sort of chains and rules.

It’s funny, I don’t even think of this lifestyle as rigid anymore (BRAINWASHED!!). And it’s definitely  not boring, we are constantly doing something and trying to better ourselves, go forward in our personal understanding and struggles. It’s actually a very progressive lifestyle in that sense. I’ve never been as active or alert as I’m now. There are endless possibilities to go deeper into the nature of reality, to understand more about life. The whole idea of a monastery is that the impetus to be distracted from those aspirations is stripped to a minimum. When your senses are not constantly bombarded with some kind of stimulus, you automatically go inward (unless you go insane before that). Why are libraries quiet? Because it’s conducive for thinking.

After I had lived here for a while, I started getting this feeling of discovering a new dimension or something. It felt like there was another option to take your life towards that is mostly dismissed, but I had taken a shot and it started to prove to be real. It was such an amazing, reassuring feeling. I didn’t find any real satisfaction in life based on the senses and the skin-deep understanding of existence. There is more to this, I have no doubts about that, but from a material point of view spiritual life is a scary road to take and the outcome seems totally uncertain.

One saint in our line used to like to say that first when you dedicate your life to the path, it seems like everything is lost and there’s no gain. After a while it starts seeming like there’s some gain and some loss. But in the end one realizes that there was absolutely no loss, and all possible gain. I’ve had some experience of this. The things I left behind seemed like such huge things for me: everything I had, everyhing I was. But since I let them go, I realized there is so much more to life than those so-called concrete things and relationships we define our identities by. Life is  much more exciting and broader and deeper than our materially conditioned narrow vision allows us to think. I’m telling ya!

Ive been quiet for a long time. It’s been very busy here. In late March we finally had an opening celebration for the temple we have been building. After almost two years of continuous work we finally cut the red ribbon and let the masses in (pompous enough?).

It has been a long journey to have the temple opened. We started over two years ago by having some big trees cut down from our property, that were becoming dangerous because of rot. We hired a local lumber jack, and a local miller, a high class architect whose dream had been to design a monastery so he did it cheap, and so we started the project. Other than the timber frame, the whole temple is built by the monks. One of the older monks knew some construction, so he started teaching me stuff and we started on it, just the two of us. I had never been into this kind of stuff and there definitely was a learning curve, but eventually I learned a bunch of things. After a year a couple of more young guys moved in and we taught them to do construction too. It has been pretty magical how everything came together. We had hardly any money or the know-how when we started but after two years there’s a 1500 square foot space for worship on our property. It brings to mind a saying of Napoleon, “Impossible is a word in a fool’s dictionary”.

Traditionally you wouldn’t think that when you move to a monastery, you’ll end up doing construction. But it has been a labor of love. Everything can be utilized in learning to appreciate and serve reality or absolute, and building a temple is certainly a good way of learning that. We have put thousands of work hours into it, tens of thousands of nails ans screws, blood and sweat, and now we can offer it like a big sacrifice.

Although devotional action may seem totally ordinary, it’s always different, the main reason being that it’s not done to fulfill your own aspirations or desires but it’s done as service to the absolute, and that kind of action has a purifying effect. Instead of stealing from the environment and claiming things to be ours, we try to act in a way as to recognize that nothing really belongs to us and that we are part of a huge perfectly functioning whole. Knowing one’s real position brings peace, that’s how I feel. And not only knowing, but learning to act accordingly brings that realization on a practical level. What a beautiful way of existing, working for the “big picture” and doing away with exploitation once and for all!