{"id":4609,"date":"2007-10-23T11:01:41","date_gmt":"2007-10-23T10:01:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/?p=4609"},"modified":"2007-10-23T12:09:04","modified_gmt":"2007-10-23T11:09:04","slug":"beating-hearts-reflections-on-the-devotee-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/?p=4609","title":{"rendered":"BEATING HEARTS: Reflections on the Devotee Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Yogesvara dasa<\/strong><\/p>\n

For a documentary on yoga in America, my partner and I recently interviewed renowned cardiologist Mehmet Oz. \u201cIf you come to me with a heart condition,\u201d he said, \u201cand you expect me to cure you, but then after the operation you go back to your old habits or you don\u2019t exercise or you don\u2019t do yoga, then all that I\u2019ve done is palliate your problem. You\u2019ll be back with the same problem again, expecting me to fix it. The bottom line is that if your heart doesn\u2019t have a reason to go on beating, it won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

How many times in recent years have I met up with old friends who seem to have \u201clost heart,\u201d whose enthusiasm for devotional life has waned? Too often. For those of us who began our lives in Krishna consciousness thirty years ago or more, keeping the fires burning can be a real challenge. Maintaining faith is less of an issue: Anyone who had the honor of meeting Prabhupada knows what I\u2019m talking about. We\u2019ve seen the Promised Land. But maintaining enthusiasm for actively growing his mission, giving the heart \u201ca reason to go on beating\u201d as Mehmet so eloquently puts it\u2014that\u2019s the tough part.<\/p>\n

And it seems to be as much of a challenge for men and women who work inside the Krishna Consciousness institution as it is for those of us who live outside temple communities. Sometimes the challenges seem so overwhelming, it is tempting to just throw up your arms and say, \u201cI\u2019m out of ideas. Somebody else has to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

After Prabhupada\u2019s departure, it became pretty clear that his request to preserve what he had built was not a call to put everything in mothballs. He was asking us to recognize ISKCON as a living, breathing entity and to take responsibility for keeping the community alive\u2014to keep his movement “moving,” healthy, and growing. \u201cPreserve\u201d did not mean become librarians or collectors of devotional artifacts. Preserve meant preserving a rate of growth. It meant looking both at our tradition and at the world around us and figuring out how to make the two fit together.<\/p>\n

There was a study conducted a few years ago at UCLA that compared the aging of the human body and the aging of an organization. The body ages whether one is spiritual or not, and so does an organization no matter if it exists to spread Krishna consciousness or sell widgets. Young entities (bodies and institutions) are vulnerable but flexible, uncoordinated but capable of rapid growth. Older entities (like some of my devotee buddies) are less flexible, more resistant to change, i.e. more bureaucratic and lacking creative energy.<\/p>\n

And that brings us back to finding reasons for keeping the heart beating. The hardest part for those of us committed to becoming Krishna conscious may well be overcoming a sense of despair over having tried to make things better before and not succeeding. There are a lot of broken hearts out there, and they deserve to be recognized and heard. When the Spiritual Strategic Planning Team (an initiative of my dear friend Gopal Bhatta) invited people to attend a gathering and share ideas for moving Krishna consciousness forward in North America, many wrote back saying, \u201cWhat\u2019s the point? We\u2019ve tried this before. I can\u2019t afford the time. Who needs another committee?\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, on one level that\u2019s an understandable reply. This isn\u2019t the Sixties anymore. People work harder for their money, have less free time, are less idealistic, and they want to see evidence that if they get involved with a group there will be quantifiable benefits. On another level, it is a reply that camouflages a much deeper concern, namely a fear of once again facing an insensitivity that characterized ISKCON\u2019s early years.<\/p>\n

Here is a word that is often undervalued: personal. Of the many gifts Srila Prabhupada bequeathed to us, the greatest is that he revealed the personal face of God. He revealed the personhood of the Supreme Lord and of the soul. That personhood has to be demonstrated. For myself, I know I would not be practicing Krishna Consciousness had it not been for the personal care and attention I received as a 19-year-old visiting the London temple in 1969. I owe my devotional life to Umapati Swami, to Gurudas and Yamuna, to Shyamsundar and Malati, to Mukunda and Janaki, and Tamal Krishna Maharaja. They cared for me, nursed me to health when I got sick, told me stories about their beloved spiritual master. They showed me the meaning of friendship, and that personal care was so gratifying that I decided to stay. I wanted to be in that kind of company.<\/p>\n

So why I did I leave temple life after thirteen years? It\u2019s politically correct to say that someone went away because of sex. It\u2019s politically correct because it\u2019s understandable: \u201cWell, he couldn\u2019t handle the celibacy.\u201d But that\u2019s a simplistic explanation. There are much deeper issues at work. If people feel embraced by the larger devotee community, if they have that intimacy, then they can continue on as devotees in the traditional way. If that personal affection and friendship are not there, that\u2019s when the sex becomes more important. And acting on that desire becomes a displaced attempt to find the lost intimacy.<\/p>\n

We really need to think about what it means to be personalists. It has to manifest in our behavior. Philosophy alone won\u2019t bring people to Krishna consciousness. Just because we know Krishna in Vrindavan doesn\u2019t mean the human psyche has become any simpler. Neuroses don\u2019t automatically disappear; poor parenting and other trauma don\u2019t magically get reversed when you take to the devotional path. The transformations occur through honest, personal exchange among sensitive, thinking people.<\/p>\n

I for one don\u2019t want to live without the company of devotees in my life, and it doesn\u2019t matter to me if they\u2019re old farts who just complain or young Turks working on Wall Street (we have a few of those now, too). There is a self-curing mechanism in honest association, and if we can just continue to work on opening our hearts to one another, maybe that will be the impetus for them to keep on beating.<\/p>\n


\nThis article is republished from Yogesvara dasa’s blog<\/a> with permission 10\/21\/07<\/font><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"HareBy Yogesvara dasa<\/strong><\/p>\n

How many times in recent years have I met up with old friends who seem to have \u201clost heart,\u201d whose enthusiasm for devotional life has waned? Too often. For those of us who began our lives in Krishna consciousness thirty years ago or more, keeping the fires burning can be a real challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}