braindeadbhakti.com

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!

I have a friend who is really good at what he is doing.
He tapped on to a market that never dries out.
He makes house calls all around the world, day and night
and he works non-profit.

He is a brilliant teacher
but unfortunately most people think he’s a cold-hearted thief.
Nonetheless everyone will end up being his customer.

There are only a handful of people who don’t need his services
because they know already what he is teaching
but he goes to them anyway so that others wouldn’t become envious of them.

He has created a strong brand for himself but his only weakness lies in appearances.
He doesn’t realize that his black robe
and the scythe he carries make most of his customers a little nervous.

My old friend, whom I’ve known since we went to school together at age seven and used to play in bands with for more than 10 years, wrote me a letter a while back. He was telling his views on finding oneself and on following spiritual authorities. I’ve wanted to write a blog about authorities and gurus for a while and this letter gave me some extra inspiration.

He started off by writing that he liked some of the poems on my blog but that the other entries he really didn’t have any interest in and couldn’t even finish reading them. He told how he had gone to this one yoga retreat where the instructor turned out to be some kind of a egotistic self-appointed guru and my friend was totally disgusted by the scene and he said that only made him take another step into “an opposite direction than where you’re going” and his intuition about all the secrets of life being inside us already, grew stronger (meaning that we don’t need an outside guide in order to find ourselves). He said that we can learn a lot from other people but when it comes down to it he can only follow his own compass, otherwise he will get lost.

In concluding, he said that there are many ways of finding yourself, not just by following others. For me it’s bhakti, for other people it’s other things.

Here’s my public reply.

Dear T

Thanks for writing me about this, I take it as an exercise in clarifying my thoughts on the subject of spiritual guidance and the question whether there are “better” or “worse” ways of self-realization, of learning to know yourself.

It stroke me that although we are apparently talking about the same thing, we are really not, because our background assumptions of what life and our identity is like, are so different. Maybe it’s true if you see yourself only as a circumstantial, psychological and physiological entity that only you can know yourself and that you can’t arrive at real self-knowledge and a satisfying life by following “others”.
But if you have lost your faith in the material sense of identity (as I have) and the world view that that perspective affords through the intellect, mind and senses, it’s practically insane to suggest that you can sort it all out and go above it without the guidance of a person who has gone through the same and has actually popped above illusion.

As you brought up in your description of the bogus-yoga teacher, sure, there are a lot of fake gurus whose motives are mixed with material aspirations, like recognition etc. California especially is like a mecca of all kinds of spiritual cheaters (reference: Share Guide). But who says your “inner compass” can’t lead you wrong? Actually, the way I see it is that the inner compass is going to lead you astray no matter what, because the whole material existence is that of illusion and ignorance. I strongly believe that the materially attached mind is a faulty means by its very nature to find any clarity. That’s why we suffer so much. You can become psychologically balanced in this life through self-searching, but from my point of view that’s not real self-knowing.

In your letter there was a strong sense that all the secrets of life are within us and that you don’t need  teachers to access them. But in my opinion that’s a faulty assumption. You seem to see a spiritual guide as some kind of an outside force, but  when I met my teacher, my feeling was that my heart had taken a human form. In other words, he embodies the kind of feeling and approach towards reality that I was desperately looking for. He had the same feeling when he met his teacher, and his teacher had the same feeling when he met his teacher.
I agree, all the secrets are within us, but if you think you can understand them on your own, I think you fail to understand clearly how utterly in illusion and enslaved by our false identity we are in our present state.
I’ve had this intuition for a long time that the nature of reality is ultimately trans-rational , so no matter how much you think about it and demand intellectual autonomy, you’ll really go nowhere in practically realizing who you are. And this is why I disagree with your opinion that there are different ways of arriving at self-knowing. My conviction is that you have to have a transcendental means to arrive at self-knowing, because the self is spiritual. You can’t eat soup with a fork.

It’s true though, that not everybody needs a guru. If you have faith in life as we know it and in your own power to make your life permanently happy, it’s not a good idea to seek spiritual guidance. I don’t want to hit people on the head with my convictions and try to convince them to act against their beliefs. What I’ve written is my personal conviction and it has given me so unbelievably much in my life, that I can’t just agree with everybody.

What do you say if we talk about this again in, say, 35 years and compare our notes and see what we’ve learned? Don’t erase my email from your address book.

Yours truly,
Gurunistha