Visitors
Bittersweet Swami lives mostly alone in his private health facility. It is a lovely cabin isolated in a northern California pine forest. He lives like a hermit, primarily for health purposes (slowly recovering from anticipatory migraine nervous disorder), but he also takes to semisolitude, like a duck to water. Sweet Swami is a guru, also a senior citizen, and a somewhat wealthy disciple-friend-counselor-brother bought him the cottage…
Vaisnava Compassion
Vaisnava Compassion navigates the intricate and, at times, complicated process of expressing true acts of compassion, teaching how emotive prayer as the core attitude residing in the chanting of the holy names of God empowers compassion. “Feeling helpless in the face of others’ suffereing helps us feel human.” (p. 141) “Although active [helping] is important, it is in prayer where we can recollect ourselves and touch the nature of universal suffering.”
Truthfulness the Last Leg
Suta Gosvami had been describing the glories of Maharaja Pariksit, the last emperor in the dynasty of the Pandavas. Suta had narrated other post-Kuruksetra topics, such as the disappearance of Lord Krsna, the Personality of Godhead, and the disappearance of His intimate devotees, the Pandavas. The Age of Kali (hypocrisy and quarrel) had already begun, but its symptoms had not developed due to the presence of the strong, God conscious emperor…
The Wild Garden
The Wild Garden is collected from unpublished manuscripts written over a three-year period. Much of the writing was done between travels and was written not as a book, but as individual writing sessions. A writing session has its own integrity. It starts at the beginning and reaches its own conclusion without being dependent on any other previously written session and without having to fit into a predetermined theme…
The Waves at Jagannatha Puri
The Puri waves, the Puri waves catch your metaphor in rise and fall of waves on beach. Don’t go too far out! But what is the length of each piece, chorus, stanza? It’s shallow—five breaths and two sonatas—no longer. It’s all here in trance and steno pad. This age it’s all computers, but I don’t go for that. The Puri stanzas. Roll in in praise of Gaurariga…
The 26 Qualities of a Devotee
Five hundred years ago, under the personal direction of Lord Caitanya, Sanatana GosvamI wrote all about Vaisnava behavior in Hari-bhakti-vilasa, and Srfla Rupa GosvamI wrote Bhakti-rasamrta-sindhu. In modem times, His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhu- pada has given us the essence of Vaisnava behavior throughout his writings, especially The Nectar of Devotion and The Nectar of Instruction. And Srila Prabhupada’s personal activities…
Stowies
There are many stories frightening and fatal relating to stowaways, but I will tell you the one that scared me most, because it involved personal friends, a married couple. The husband is a respectable gentleman, but his beautiful and delicate wife lacked proper immigration papers, so he placed her in the trunk…
Stories of Devotion
In the Introduction to Nimai dasa and the Mouse, I justified the use of fiction in Krsna conscious literature, as long as the Vaisnava parampara is kept intact, and the “rasa,” or devotional mood is in order. I do not want to repeat all that here, but I would like to at least ease my readers and myself into the present story. It employs fiction based on the facts of the Seventh Canto of Srirnad- Bhagavatam…
Sri Krsna
Srila Rupa Gosvami enumerates the sixty-four transcendental qualities of the Supreme Lord Krsna. These qualities appear in Chapters Twenty-one and Twenty-two of The Nectar of Devotion, Srila Prabhu- pada’s summary study of Bhakti-rasamrta-sindhu. The devotees, who are never satiated with hearing the Lord’s glories, relish these descriptions…
Songs of a Hare Krsna Man
The poem series, Songs of a Hare Krsna Man, came to me after hearing Allen Ginsberg read on a recording Jack Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues (242 Choruses). Kerouac prefaces his poems with this Note…
