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Satsvarupa Das Goswami: When Swamiji went to San Francisco in January 1967, leaving behind his disciples in New York, we felt bereft. He told us to carry out all the activities we had done together. We tried, but getting up early in the morning, chanting our rounds, going to the temple by 7:00 A.M. and taking turns giving short lectures was all very difficult without Swamiji. Some of us wrote to him complaining and lamenting. He wrote a letter back addressed to all the New York devotees. He said we should not lament. He told us the great secret: service in separation. He called it vani, or associating with the spiritual master by following his instructions. He said that serving the spiritual master in his direct presence (vapuh) was impermanent and \u201cimmaterial.\u201d The real thing was to follow the guru\u2019s instructions. When this was properly understood, you were not apart from your spiritual master, but he was with you always. Swamiji added that if we were feeling his absence too much we could put photos of him on his sitting places. None of us had taken photos of Swamiji, so we asked the devotees in San Francisco to send us some. They did, and we put them on his sitting places and felt solace. We posted Swamiji\u2019s letter on the wall and talked about it. It gave us courage. Among ourselves we said we had something that the devotees in San Francisco didn\u2019t have. We had service in separation, and that was the best thing. So we clung to this message, went on with our services and waited for the day when he would return to New York.<\/p>\n
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Satsvarupa Das Goswami: When Swamiji went to San Francisco in January 1967, leaving behind his disciples in New York, we felt bereft. He told us to carry out all the activities we had done together. We tried, but getting up early in the morning, chanting our rounds, going to the temple by 7:00 A.M. and taking turns giving short lectures was all very difficult without Swamiji. Some of us wrote to him complaining and lamenting. He wrote a letter back addressed to all the New York devotees. He said we should not lament. He told us the great secret: service in separation. He called it vani, or associating with the spiritual master by following his instructions. He said that serving the spiritual master in his direct presence (vapuh) was impermanent and \u201cimmaterial.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recent-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73541","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=73541"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73546,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73541\/revisions\/73546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}