Essential Teachings

God-dess refers to the Divine Cou­ple, Radha Krishna, God­dess and God, Energy and Ener­getic, the Ground of all Being, the Cause of all causes.

They are made known through Sri Krishna Chai­tanya and his fol­low­ers, var­i­ous other devo­tional sects, our innate know­ing and wis­dom, and in fact, they are the sub­ject of the teach­ings of the ages.

While rec­og­niz­ing the truth in all authen­tic spir­i­tual paths, we choose to focus on cre­at­ing an indige­nous, West­ern expres­sion of devo­tion to God-dess using the teach­ings of Bhak­tivin­ode Thakur as a basis, along with inter­faith stud­ies and post-modern, crit­i­cal ana­lyt­i­cal meth­ods of inter­pre­ta­tion, as Bhak­tivin­ode did also.

This path is a liv­ing, evolv­ing process of God-dess real­iza­tion rooted in tra­di­tional, Indian devo­tion, yet updated to pre­serve the essen­tials and dis­card unnec­es­sary cul­tural prac­tices that only serve to alien­ate prac­ti­tion­ers from their con­tem­po­rary society.

We prac­tice a spon­ta­neous, nat­ural style of devo­tion that offers a reli­gion of lib­erty, truth and love. It com­bines the path of the heart, devo­tional love, with intel­lec­tual hon­esty and open­ness. Our faith is not based on a rigid set of beliefs, but rather being open to God-dess’ leading.

We learn to live as spir­i­tual beings here on earth, one with the earth and life, the God-dess in all. While here, we embrace a lifestyle of sim­ple liv­ing and high think­ing, offer­ing all to God-dess as a liv­ing sac­ri­fice of love. We become ves­sels of divine love bring­ing rec­on­cil­i­a­tion to all. While we act in accord with eter­nal spir­i­tual val­ues, we live in the present as fully par­tic­i­pat­ing mem­bers of global soci­ety work­ing for the well-being of all, each accord­ing to our capacity.

We work in coali­tion with those of like mind to address issues of peace, jus­tice and the integrity of the envi­ron­ment. We seek to find com­mon ground rather than dif­fer­ences. May love unite us all as we man­i­fest the rule of God-dess here on earth.

Yet of course, all of this is tran­si­tory and involves a good deal of suf­fer­ing even in the best of times. There­fore, we are just pass­ing through this mate­r­ial plane on the way to an indi­vid­ual, eter­nal spir­i­tual exis­tence where we end the cycle of repeated birth and death and enter a world beyond time and space. This is the abode of God-dess and their eter­nally lib­er­ated associates.

It is not so much a mat­ter of earn­ing our way there, but rather, being open to the love and grace of God-dess which is freely given. All they ask in return is our love. It is a mat­ter of being in a lov­ing rela­tion­ship with God-dess. There is no one way this love devel­ops. We are each unique and have our own way to God-dess as God-dess also approaches us.

In this way, our vision of the spir­i­tual world becomes clear, our thoughts and desires are trans­ferred from here to there, and at the inevitable time of death, we will let go our grip on this life and enter into the next as if walk­ing through a doorway.

We are con­cerned with our ulti­mate best inter­ests in this life and the next. Eter­nity is now, and this life nat­u­rally flows into the next based on our actions and desires. Our goal is that the next life is the final real­iza­tion of our true nature in lov­ing rela­tion­ship to God-dess.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 08:38 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.