Yesterday I posted a piece on the “retired sannyasi” idea. There was some GREAT discussion and that’s wonderful. I’m glad I can help provide such a forum.

I also think it’s great that there is a lot of support for Satsvarupa. Our first reaction when we hear about a devotee falling down should be to help them.

But overall, I’m fairly unthrilled about this “retired sannyasi” concept.

There are guidelines for being a sannyasi. These guidelines exist from the first day of sannyasa initiation until death (or until stepping down, I suppose). The guidelines are there in sastra and we have Srila Prabhupada’s example. Those guidelines are strict. They should be strict.

If a devotee thinks that those sastric guidelines are too strict for him to follow, that’s perfectly alright. I’ve got no problem with that. Simply don’t be a sannyasi. If you don’t think you can hack it, don’t become one. And if you do become one and find you can’t hack it, either become qualified or change ashramas.

This wishy washy in between stuff waters down the philosophy and makes us look silly. The obligatory cover-ups make us look cult-like. Actually, it flat out makes us a cult.

Our first priority with every devotee should be to cultivate their bhakti. That has zero to do with being in a certain ashrama. Actually, with the glorification that comes with being a sannyasi, maybe it would be better to be honest and leave that ashrama than to stay on presenting yourself as a self-realized soul fit to bring thousands back to Godhead.

This Satsvarupa ordeal is setting a dangerous precedence. There are now an official ISKCON positions called “retired sannyasi” and “retired diksa guru.” This is freaky and bizarre and ridiculously unnecessary. If ISKCON chooses to go down this road, it will find itself farther and farther away from how it was initially established by Srila Prabhupada.

Do we want this?

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In other news…

I’m taking off for a bit. Closing the store for a few days and heading to West Virginia. I’ll be there from Dec 31 to January 7ish.

I’ve always wanted to close the store to go on vacation. And since I’m soon rid of the store, I figure that I better hop to it, right?

There will be posts every day, including Ekadasi (Thursday) and Saturday’s tape. Needless to say, correspondence will be few and far between. Hope that’s ok.

So here I go!

This is sort of about Satsvarupa’s most recent letter about his fall down and about GBC’s punishments for that fall down. They claim that “Satsvarupa dasa Goswami (SDG) will assume the status of retired sannyasi and retired disksa guru.” If you’re not familiar with it, go here.

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I have a friend who is a retired professor. He used to be a professor, but not anymore. He’s retired.

I guess this can apply to a retired diksa guru. He used to be a guru, but not anymore. He’s … retired. On second thought, that does sound weird. But I can at least wrap my head around it.

And while there are a bunch of ex-diksa gurus, as far as I know, only one retired diksa guru (SDG). I think there must be some important difference going on there, I’m just not sure what it is.

An ex-diksa guru’s disciples take shelter of another guru (or more than likely just leave). But a retired diksa guru’s disciples are still his disciples. They can take shelter of him as guru, even though he isn’t qualified to make more disciples. Sort of guru-lite, I guess.

This was all a little confusing until I tried to figure out what a “retired sannyasi” was. Then it got downright surreal.

Applying the same logic of “I used to be a sannyasi, but now I’m not… I’m retired” seems like it would work. There are many ex-sanyasis in ISKCON. But with SDG, he seems to still be a sannyasi (and thus not an ex-sannyasi). I guess I’m not really sure why or how or what they’re even trying to get at here.

What exactly does a “retired sannyasi” do? How does that work? Wouldn’t that just be… a householder… sort of? Typically, when a sannyasi falls down (and admits it), he either totally leaves Krishna consciousness, or (hopefully) sticks around, puts on white, gets married and becomes a normal and often fairly likable devotee.

But what the heck is going on here?

Is a retired sannyasi different from an ex-sannyasi? How? And more importantly, why? Is a retired sannyasi still to be called “maharaja”? Or do we call him “prabhu”? Do we bow down to him or just offer him the respects afforded any vaisnava? And if we are supposed to treat him like a sannyasi, what’s the point of being retired?

And another thing… concerning Satsvarupa das… Goswami/Prabhu (depending on the answers to my questions), what does this do to the validity of Srila Prabhupada Lilamrta? Will ISKCON still be recognizing this work as bona fide?

I remember when the devotee who wrote The Seventh Goswami (Biography on Bhaktivinoda Thakura) fell down (or left ISKCON, I can’t remember which). Immediately, we were urged to not read that book, even though, prior to the fall down/leaving, we were encouraged to read it. So, are we going to be urged not to read Lilamrta? Or is this fall down somehow not as bad as other fall downs?

I’m not trying to be snarky, these really are honest questions. I think some guidelines on what to do when popular devotees fall down is in order. Since Satsvarupa admits to behavior not fitting of a sannyasi since 1978, does this nix nearly all of his bibliography? Are we still allowed to read it? Should it still be considered bona fide?

And lastly, will someone please tell me how we are supposed to know when someone is pure. Yes, I know, sastra will tell us, Krishna will tell us. But we mostly what we do is rely upon the GBC to help us. And, no offense, but… their track record isn’t all that great in this respect. So, what should I do?

Oh, and just a statement. In Krishna consciousness, we have a lot of rules. Most of us don’t follow all of them. Is there any way we could just be honest about that for once? I think we’d all be a lot happier.

I’m, of course, way too young to have been a part of the Radha Damodara Traveling Sankirtan Party. And honestly, I don’t know much about it – mostly just from Srila Prabhupada Memories DVDs and the random story here and there.

There’s also a huge book about it.

Nevertheless, I’ve got a tape full of RDTSKP just for you!

KT-10 Radha Damodara Traveling Sakirtana Party Kirtans
w/ Vishnujana Swami

And again, thanks to Brian, I’ve got scans of the original tapes to share with you. Haribol!

This is the track list, which is quite different from the original tape (pictured above). This is from the BBT rerelease of the tape (as all of mine are).

1) Govinda Jaya Jaya
2) Sadha Bhakata
3) Gaur Nityananda Bol
4) Kabe Habe Bolo Sabi Nam
5) Gopinath
6) Manasa Deha Geha
7) Sri Rupa Manjan
8) Jai Sachinandana
9) Han Haraye Namah
10) Kirtan

This is some good stuff. What kirtans should sound like.

Click here to download.

This was the introduction to the 1968 Collier Edition of the Bhagavad-gita: As It Is by Srila Prabhupada. Madhava Gosh made mention of this yesterday, so here it is!

The word Gita means “Song.” Just as in the Bible the Song of Solomon has traditionally been known as “The Song of Songs” because it was interpreted to symbolize the ultimate union of Israel with God (in terms of human married love), so The Bhagavad Gita is, for Hinduism, the great and unsurpassed Song that finds the secret of human life in the unquestioning surrender to and awareness of Krishna.

While The Vedas provide Hinduism with its basic ideas of cult and sacrifice and The Upanishads develop its metaphysic of contemplation, The Bhagavad Gita can be seen as the great treatise on the “Active Life.” But it is really something more, for it tends to fuse worship, action and contemplation in a fulfillment of daily duty which transcends all three by virtue of a higher consciousness: a consciousness of acting passively, of being an obedient instrument of a transcendent will. The Vedas, The Upanishads, and The Gita can be seen as the main literary supports for the great religious civilization of India, the oldest surviving culture in the world. The fact that The Gita remains utterly vital today can be judged by the way such great reformers as Mohandas Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave both spontaneously based their lives and actions on it, and indeed commented on it in detail for their disciples. The present translation and commentary is another manifestation of the permanent living importance of The Gita. Swami Bhaktivedanta brings to the West a salutary reminder that our highly activistic and one-sided culture is faced with a crisis that may end in self-destruction because it lacks the inner depth of an authentic metaphysical consciousness. Without such depth, our moral and political protestations are just so much verbiage. If, in the West, God can no longer be experienced as other than “dead,” it is because of an inner split and self-alienation which have characterized the Western mind in its single-minded dedication to only half of life: that which is exterior, objective, and quantitative. The “death of God” and the consequent death of genuine moral sense, respect for life, for humanity, for value, has expressed the death of an inner subjective quality of life: a quality which in the traditional religions was experienced in terms of God-consciousness. Not concentration on an idea or concept of God, still less on an image of God, but a sense of presence, of an ultimate ground of reality and meaning, from which life and love could spontaneously flower.

Realization of the Supreme “Player” whose “Play” (Lila) is manifested in the million-formed, inexhaustible richness of beings and events, is what gives us the key to the meaning of life. Once we live in awareness of the cosmic dance and move in time with the Dancer, our life attains its true dimension. It is at once more serious and less serious than the life of one who does not sense this inner cosmic dynamism. To live without this illuminated consciousness is to live as a beast of burden, carrying one’s life with tragic seriousness as a huge, incomprehensible weight (see Camus’ interpretation of the Myth of Sisyphus). The weight of the burden is the seriousness with which one takes one’s own individual and separate self. To live with the true consciousness of life centered in Another is to lose one’s self-important seriousness and thus to live life as “play” in union with a Cosmic Player. It is He alone that one takes seriously. But to take Him seriously is to find joy and spontaneity in everything, for everything is gift and grace. In other words, to live selfishly is to bear life as an intolerable burden. To live selflessly is to live in joy, realizing by experience that life itself is love and gift. To be a lover and a giver is to be a channel through which the Supreme Giver manifests His love in the world.

But The Gita presents a problem to some who read it in the present context of violence and war which mark the crisis of the West. The Gita appears to accept and to justify war. Arjuna is exhorted to submit his will to Krishna by going to war against his enemies, who are also his own kin, because war is his duty as a Prince and warrior. Here we are uneasily reminded of the fact that in Hinduism as well as in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, there is a concept of a “Holy War” which is “willed by God” and we are furthermore reminded of the fact that, historically, this concept has been secularized and inflated beyond measure. It has now “escalated” to the point where slaughter, violence, revolution, the annihilation of enemies, the extermination of entire populations and even genocide have become a way of life. There is hardly a nation on earth today that is not to some extent committed to a philosophy or to a mystique of violence. One way or other, whether on the left or on the right, whether in defense of a bloated establishment or of an improvised guerrilla government in the jungle, whether in terms of a police state or in terms of a ghetto revolution, the human race is polarizing itself into camps armed with everything from Molotov cocktails to the most sophisticated technological instruments of death. At such a time, the doctrine that “war is the will of God” can be disastrous if it is not handled with extreme care. For everyone seems in practice to be thinking along some such lines, with the exception of a few sensitive and well-meaning souls (mostly the kind of people who will read this book).

The Gita is not a justification of war, nor does it propound a war-making mystique. War is accepted in the context of a particular kind of ancient culture in which it could be and was subject to all kinds of limitations. (It is instructive to compare the severe religious limitations on war in the Christian Middle Ages with the subsequent development of war by nation states in modern times-backed of course by the religious establishment. ) Arjuna has an instinctive repugnance for war, and that is the chief reason why war is chosen as the example of the most repellent kind of duty. The Gita is saying that even in what appears to be most “unspiritual” one can act with pure intentions and thus be guided by Krishna consciousness. This consciousness itself will impose the most strict limitations on one’s use of violence because that use will not be directed by one’s own selfish interests, still less by cruelty, sadism, and mere blood lust.

The discoveries of Freud and others in modern times have, of course, alerted us to the fact that there are certain imperatives of culture and of conscience which appear pure on the surface and are in fact bestial in their roots. The greatest inhumanities have been perpetrated in the name of “humanity,” “civilization,” “progress,” “freedom,” “my country,” and of course “God.” This reminds us that in the cultivation of an inner spiritual consciousness there is a perpetual danger of self-deception, narcissism, self-righteous evasion of truth. In other words the standard temptation of religious and spiritually minded people is to cultivate an inner sense of rightness or of peace, and make this subjective feeling the final test of everything. As long as this feeling of rightness remains with them, they will do anything under the sun. But this inner feeling (as Auschwitz and the Eichmann case have shown) can coexist with the ultimate in human corruption.

The hazard of the spiritual quest is of course that its genuineness cannot be left to our own isolated subjective judgment alone. The fact that I am turned on doesn’t prove anything whatever. (Nor does the fact that I am turned off.) We do not simply create our own lives on our own terms. Any attempt to do so is ultimately an affirmation of our individual self as ultimate and supreme. This is a self-idolatry which is diametrically opposed to “Krishna consciousness” or to any other authentic form of religious or metaphysical consciousness.

The Gita sees that the basic problem of man is his endemic refusal to live by a will other than his own. For in striving to live entirely by his own individual will, instead of becoming free, man is enslaved by forces even more exterior and more delusory than his own transient fancies. He projects himself out of the present into the future. He tries to make for himself a future that accords with his own fantasy, and thereby escape from a present reality which he does not fully accept. And yet, when he moves into the future he wanted to create for himself, it becomes a present that is once again repugnant to him. And yet this is precisely what he has “made” for himself-it is his own karma. In accepting the present in all its reality as something to be dealt with precisely as it is, man comes to grips at once with his karma and with a providential will which, ultimately, is more his own than what he currently experiences, on a superficial level, as “his own will.” It is in surrendering a false and illusory liberty on the superficial level that man unites himself with the inner ground of reality and freedom in himself which is the will of God, of Krishna, of Providence, of Tao. These concepts do not all exactly coincide, but they have much in common. It is by remaining open to an infinite number of unexpected possibilities which transcend his own imagination and capacity to plan that man really fulfills his own need for freedom. The Gita, like the Gospels, teaches us to live in awareness of an inner truth that exceeds the grasp of our thought and cannot be subject to our own control. In following mere appetite for power, we are slaves of our own appetite. In obedience to that inner truth we are at last free.

My Scoot 66 trip is planned from May 4 to June 14 (give or take). I’m a bit worried that temperatures might be too cold.

Let’s take some example.

On the night of May 4, I should be at Harrison Lake State Park, Ohio. The average high is 67F. Not too bad. But the average low (which would be at night) is 45F. That’s a bit chilly (though I should be used to that by now).

Moving ahead a week, I should be in Tulsa, OK. 78F is the high, which is beautiful riding weather. 57F is the low. Not too bad, I guess.

How about Flagstaff, AZ. The high is 69F on May 21. The low is 35F. Moving the trip a month later, it bumps the low up to 43F. Still not all that hot.

Of course, two or three days later, in Needles, CA, I’m looking at average highs of 97F with the average low of 69F. Yep. The low in Needles is the same as the high in Flagstaff.

The return trip, however, is where things will get a bit frosty. By the time I get to Donner Pass, the average high will have climbed to 68F with the low being 35F.

I’ll roll into Bozeman, MT around June 5. Oddly, the low will be 42F. Not too bad, it’s clearly getting closer to summer. The high is 71F.

By the time I get back to Wheeling, the near-summer temps will be creeping up the thermometer. But some nippy mornings will great me along the way.

One of my fears is 40F and rain all day. That will suck.

Rain is another issue. May is rainy, especially on the east coast. I honestly don’t mind riding in the rain if it’s above 60F. Below that, it gets really old really fast.

Traveling in colder temperatures also means that I need to pack more riding clothes in order to keep warm. That takes up more space. Though, as I have it planned out now, I have a whole bag devoted to warmer riding clothes (the right saddlebag, if you were wondering). In that will live my windproof gloves, windproof jacket, rain gear and thermals.

This could get interesting. I’m going to need a warmer bag.

Oh, and the reason I’m not doing this in June-July is two-fold. First, it’s financial. I don’t think I can afford to be unemployed for an extra month. And two, I would like to be finished traveling by the start of summer. There are also a few other trips I’ll be taking in July.

Hi everybody.
I hope you had a merry merry. Mine was fine. Just a day in with the family. Santa was kind, but not over-burdening.

The best thing about Christmas is that it’s over. Ok, not quite true. But it is over and I finally have a chance to catch my breath, catch up on correspondence and hopefully not catch a cold.

In this month and a half between now and vacating the store, I have quite a lot to do. It’s pretty overwhelming, to be honest. Stressful and the like.

Some things are for the immediate – like restocking the store. Other things are for a bit in the future, like mapping out Scoot 66 and outfitting the scooter for a 7,000 mile run.

The outfitting will involve figuring out just what I need for 40 or so days on the road. Having been on the road for nearly that long before, I have some idea, but having never done it on a scooter, a lot of this is new.

In a car, you can just pile things in there. On a scooter, you need to think like a backpacker. I can carry a little more than a backpacker, but only a very little more.

I’m debating on whether I should bore you dear readers with my scooter outfitting antics. For instance, who really cares if I’m installing a cigarette lighter on the Vespa (to recharge a cell phone)? Does anyone really want to hear about the bag I got for my seat?

And what of the mapping? Normally, mapping is as easy as plugging two locations into google maps and pushing a button. But with Route 66, it’s a bit different. Route 66 doesn’t actually exist anymore. There’s no longer a US Route called “66″. The roads and highways themselves exist (mostly), but they’ve been renamed or incorporated with other roads. Not only that, there are many different alignments that US Route 66 went through.

My job is to pick the alignment I like best, figure out where it was and go there. It’s basically research while riding. Yeah, there are several books that I’m using to help, but they often disagree about what was and wasn’t actually Route 66.

Once I sort all that out, I have to type turn-by-turn directions for each day and print them on tiny cards that I can tape to my handlebars and headset. And then I have to print out the maps that I made.

One of the biggest challenges is figuring out when to stop. There are only two reasons to schedule a day off. The first is laundry. I suppose I could do laundry before leaving in the morning, so it’s not a huge big deal. I’ll have to do laundry four or five times on the road.

The other reason is maintenance. The rear tire needs to be changed ever 3,000 or so miles, the front every 6,000 – 9,000 (depending on a lot of things). The oil needs to be changed every 3,000 miles. The belt (for the transmission) needs to be changed every 6,000. I’ve got to figure out where to do both of these things. The best bet is to just take it to a scooter shop. They may feel sorry for me and do it for cheap.

I’ll probably do this in Albuquerque, NM for the oil change and rear tire. And then again in Salt Lake City for the oil change, both tires and belt. That should get me home. In order to make this happen, I pretty much need to know exactly when I’ll be in Albuquerque and SLC. Both of these places are well under the 3,000 mile mark, but better safe than sorry.

I guess this doesn’t seem all that stressful. But believe me, it is.

How much I’ll update everyone about this, I don’t know.