I hate winter

Winter means wearing a ton of clothes.
Winter means attachment to your bed.
Winter means sneezes and coughs.
Winter means grey mornings, dry days and cold nights.
Winter means heaters.
Winter means dry, itchy skin.
Winter means …

This weekend my spiritual master, His Holiness Partha Sarathi das Goswami Maharaja, stayed at my sister’s place. This meant an opportunity for me and my other siblings to perform some personal service to Gurumaharaja. But as luck would have it I came down with the flu and so I now have a personal grudge against winter.

I still got to serve but my service lacked enthusiasm and I missed out on one of the programs. I am so lucky to have these opportunities, if I don’t take proper advantage of it that would be a great misfortune and offence.

mukam karoti vachalam
pangum langhayate girim
yat-kripa tam aham vande
shri-gurum dina-taranam

"I offer my respectful obeisances unto my spiritual master, the deliverer of the fallen souls. His mercy turns the dumb into eloquent speakers and enables the lame to cross mountains."

I experience a fraction of this verse. How can a mellecha such as I be able to serve in this divine movement even up to the stage of intimate deity service. I can not be called a brahmana, I can even be called a civilised human being yet with the mercy of guru I am here.

I pray to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Sri Krishna, the original cause of all that be that He may spare some divine energy for me to be able to become in tune with Gurudev. To become one with Maharaja’s mood. Asking for this is practically impossible but: “His mercy turns the dumb into eloquent speakers and enables the lame to cross mountains”

All glories to Srila Gurudev!

Man, what a weekend!

Saturday was nirjal ekadasi – that means no water or food for the entire day. Impossible? Not at all – with Krishna’s mercy it turned out to be a very cool day. In Srimad Bhagvatam class Gaura Shakti Prabhu made a good point. First the devotee rises early in the morning each day and tries to remember Krishna at that time and then every second week on ekadasi the devotee tries to remember Krishna for the that whole day, then in the month of Kartik the devotee tries to remember Krishna for that whole month and then during the months of Caturmas the devotee tries to remember Krishna for that whole time – like this we learn to remember Krishna all the time!

Anyway I didn’t have much time to focus on reading and extra chanting - we were to busy serving. With the BTG marathon a week away and the first ever Randburg Ratha Yatra a day away we had lots of blissful service to do.

On Monday evening news I heard the President gave a talk urging the youth of South Africa to once again come forward and lead the nation (as was done in the past). It was youth day (more importantly a public holiday! ;o) ) when I heard that I thought, “Man, you should have been at today's Ratha Yatra festival!" The whole festival was planned and carried out by the Krishna Balarama youth group of Randburg. I offer my dandavats at these youths lotus feet for offering Srila Prabhupada such wonderful service. The festival was incredible! I assisted at the book table and that was enough testaments to the success of attracting new people to Krishna consciousness. The books were flying of the table with no effort from us. Amazing!

Recently I had this realisation. I am most happy serving Krishna and so actually service is enough there is no need to desire anything extra like recognition for what you are doing – just to serve is enough. It really is truly, blissfully blissful! Isn’t that what we want? Bliss? Service at the lotus feet of the spiritual leaders and Gaura Nitai is bliss. What more do you want?

Unity of Spirit!

Bhakti Nrsinga Maharaja at Rosebank Namahatta held at my sister Kandarpa Manjari’s place, check it out:

Ideology

There was a cartoon in the newspaper where our president, Thabo Mbeki is standing next to a monster with the text “Who created this monster?” The implication being that the president has created this difficult monstrous times that we living in.

There are so many ideologies out there some or most of them take us further away from God in subtle way. For example even when Srila Prabhupada was young and he met Srila Bhaktisiddanta Maharaja for the first time, Maharaja asked Srila Prabhupada to preach but Srila Prabhupada said that first we need to become free of British rule. So that was the ideology that was put forth.

And now with the Xenophobia attacks (that our president has been blamed for) there is an ideology that this is South African land and this is all deviating from the real purpose of life. Srila Bhaktisiddanta Maharaja told Srila Prabhupada that politicians may change but politics will remain. Krishna consciousness can not wait.

So KC goes beyond black and white; my land and your land. KC is the “unity of spirit” the more we are not on the bodily platform the more united we can become.

Maharaja also spoke about passion. The word ‘passion’ comes from Latin and from the time of Christ. It means suffering (interesting) that is why there have that movie “Passion of Christ” it is actually the suffering of Christ. People are passionately moving around doing so many things but it is only a source of suffering. The opposite of passion or of suffering is to have compassion. The world is suffering due to the lack of this compassion.