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I got back to our monastery Audarya in California a couple of months ago. Costa Rica was quite an adventure, a lot happened in four months. Anyway, this entry is not about that, but about my trip back to the States. Here’s what I wrote at George W. Bush International in Texas during my layover on a beautiful day in September 2008:

Flight CO846 from Costa Rica to San Francisco. I was observing an elderly flight attendant as she was serving out the breakfast plates for the travelers. She tried to smile but it seemed to me like her stomach turned every time she raised the ends of her lips. She seemed disgusted with her job, with people, with those trays and endlessly uttering questions like, “Anything more to drink?”, or “How many persons are in your party?”.
She was serving the passengers, they were enjoying the free drinks and crappy Hollywood comedies. She was biting her lip and trying to forget her aching legs and back by the force of thoughts of the next pay and how she would spend it.
I was thinking of how most of the time we only accept doing service to others because we get some power to enjoy from that. Most work is some form of service. You work for the factory owner; you beep the customers’ groceries at the cashier; you serve your art director’s vision in a design agency; you clean up after people who have more money than you; you drive drunk people around the night-lit cities with a little yellow light on the roof. . . A big part of our waking time is spent working, and we do it all to get money. If you break it down, money really is a form of power. It’s an agreement of society for a concrete symbol of power. You serve(=work) for some time and save money, and then you can have the upper hand for as long as your financial batteries have some juice in them. And then it’s back to the factory again.

Service is seen as something obligatory that we have to do to gain some power to do what we really want to do. Money/power enables us to have leisure, luxury, enjoyment, dominion, freedom.
From this perspective being a servant is the most unwanted thing in the world. It means you’re trapped to fulfilling others’ dreams and desires instead of your own. Being just a servant is the most meaningless, lowest, pitiful position one could imagine.

As these thoughts were bouncing around in my head while secretly observing the flight attendant, I was chuckling to myself. My whole life is about service. I’m a low-life according to a worldly standard! I’m supposed to be miserable and unfulfilled according to how power and happiness are linked together in this world, but I’m anything else but unhappy. What’s wrong with me?

A little over a week ago there was a lightning storm here (which happens almost every night now that the rainy season is advancing). One of the lightnings apparently hit the creek where our microhydro turbine is and the electric surge traveled in the cables to our inverter, which shut down. After about 10 minutes to the blackout Mayapur went to turn the invereter on, and it hit big spark and said “boom”.
So we were out of electricity. Not too bad, though, considering the climate. We read and did mantra meditation in the candle lit cabin in the evenings and mornings, and it reminded me of my family’s summer cottage in my childhood days. There was no electricity and in the evenings my dad would tell us some quite entertaining bedtime stories of his own invention, in the candle light. Now my bedtime stories are the events of Caitanya-caritamrta, quite entertaining as well.
The only real bummer was that the fridge didn’t work. We would just use up what ever milk we got the same day (by the evening it would turn into yogurt by itself) and didn’t buy anything that would get spoiled easily.
A self-sufficient lifestyle requires a real jack-of-all-trades attitude, which I don’t naturally possess at all. But when you get three electrical parts from the US that you have to replace in the inverter or otherwise you won’t have electricity for months, there are no options other than to figure things out. We did eventually fix the inverter, although there were all sorts of complications from heavy rainstorms to bad test batteries, and as we finally got the thing working long after the sun had finsihed her duty for the day, and in relief got to the cabin, ready to crash after an exhausting day, we find out that there’s no water…
We fixed that too this morning, but that’s another story.

I’ve spent a month and a half here in Costa Rica, plans changed and I’m staying here with Mayapurcandra (see the wrestling pic), setting the place up and overseeing the construction of cabins. We have a local caonstruction crew here, a lot of young guys, and it’s so funny how they try to be westeners and I can see how in their generation they are breaking out of the age old traditions, and here we are, a bnch of westerners, trying to live a more rural, simpler life, milking cows and riding horses, whilst their youth are buying iPods, spending their little savings in Burger King and watching The Simpsons on Saturdays.

We bought a cow as well and planted a variety of fruit trees, rice, beans and corn. I love this lifestyle. It might be a lot of work, but what else would I do with my “freetime”? Watch The Simpsons on Saturdays and spend my little savings in Burger King?

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!