Ever New and Fresh

Why must we be bound by the past? I don’t believe the descrip­tions in scrip­ture are lit­eral. It’s all sym­bolic. You can’t con­tain God/Goddess in a book, statue, nature, mantra or any­thing else. They’re all sym­bols point­ing to the Divine.

In my search­ing, I have found no more attrac­tive descrip­tion of the spir­i­tual world than Goloka Vrind­a­ban. It’s where I want to be. I have my own ver­sion of it as I’ve adapted it in my own mind. I feel like I’m in a good space now and want to share with oth­ers how to get there too. I want to attract per­sons to this because it’s so beau­ti­ful. Yet the heav­ily encul­tur­ated Indian pre­sen­ta­tions present obsta­cles for me and other West­ern­ers in the enjoy­ment of rasa. So many of the plants, foods, etc. can’t even be trans­lated because there’s no Eng­lish equiv­a­lent. Of course, it’s cul­tur­ally con­di­tioned. Every thing we expe­ri­ence is.

Radha Krishna, the Divine Cou­ple, rep­re­sents the epit­ome of real­iza­tion of the Eter­nal Ground of All Being. They are rep­re­sented dif­fer­ently as the Lord and Lady, Aum, yin-yang, etc. I believe it is pos­si­ble to sep­a­rate the divine essence, the Arche­type, the sym­bols, etc. and trans­plant them to the West. I want to main­tain the erotic pas­times and pure love of the Divine Cou­ple for each other and for all beings. It’s what attracted me to this path from the beginning.

I feel and believe I was an Indian devo­tee renun­ci­ate in my pre­vi­ous life. I spent my first Sat­urn cycle relearn­ing what I knew in my pre­vi­ous life (ISKCON san­nyasi, Lalita Prasad Thakur & three years in India). I spent the sec­ond Sat­urn cycle readapt­ing to the West, see­ing what stuck from the past, explor­ing lifestyles and var­i­ous spir­i­tual paths. I have just begun my third Sat­urn cycle which is a time to syn­the­size and bring together East and West. That is why I have renamed my auto­bi­og­ra­phy Full Cir­cle: A Spir­i­tual Jour­ney and am con­tin­u­ing it up to the present.

I am ready to bring East and West together to form a new whole. Some­thing new is being born, but it must be born from the old and not some con­cocted half-baked endeavor. This indig­iniza­tion of Radha Krishna devo­tion must be done by those of us who are first and sec­ond (third?) gen­er­a­tion West­ern devo­tees. Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur would see this as progress.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 11:02 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.