12.30.08
Posted in Esoteric Teaching, Podcasts, Sunday Satsangs at 2:16 pm by Nava-yauvana dāsa
In this Sunday Satsang, we talk about svarūpa-lakṣaṇa or the intrinsic
characteristics and taṭastha-lakṣaṇa, the extrinsic characteristics or the boundary conditions of pure bhakti. Similarly the living entity or soul has parallel intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics.
We had a camera crash due to setup error, and the sound became unsynchronized, and we were unable to fix it during editing. Sorry about that.
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12.21.08
Posted in Esoteric Teaching, Podcasts, Sunday Satsangs at 1:59 pm by Nava-yauvana dāsa
This Sunday Satsang is the first based on our new series, Śrī Bhakti-Nirukti. We will discuss the definitions of the essential terms describing the path of pure bhakti, devotional service to the Lord. How can we describe or discuss bhakti if we don’t have a vocabulary of terms that names its elements?
Please review the posts of Śrī Bhakti-Nirukti:
In this satsang, we discuss uttama bhakti or pure devotional service.
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12.19.08
Posted in Bhagavad-gita, Darshan, Esoteric Teaching, Podcasts at 5:43 am by David Bruce Hughes
This Evening Darshan is a class on Bhagavad-gītā 2.59:
viṣayā vinivartante
nirāhārasya dehinaḥ
rasa-varjaṁ raso ‘py asya
paraṁ dṛṣṭvā nivartate
“The embodied soul may be restricted from sense enjoyment, though the taste for sense objects remains. But, ceasing such engagements by experiencing a higher taste, he is fixed in consciousness.”
The conditioned soul is suffering in material relationships and activities, but he thinks that he has no other source of enjoyment. But the self-realized soul knows that there is a superior source of enjoyment in Kṛṣṇa consciousness.
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12.17.08
Posted in Bhagavad-gita, Esoteric Teaching, Podcasts, Sunday Satsangs at 8:41 am by Nava-yauvana dāsa
This Satsang is based on Bhagavad-gītā 2.55:
śrī-bhagavān uvāca
prajahāti yadā kāmān
sarvān pārtha mano-gatān
ātmany evātmanā tuṣṭaḥ
sthita-prajñas tadocyate
The Blessed Lord said: “O Pārtha, when a man gives up all varieties of sense desire which arise from mental concoction, and when his mind finds satisfaction in the self alone, then he is said to be in pure transcendental consciousness.”
If someone is really self-realized, they have no more desire for material sense enjoyment. But we see that most of the so-called gurus created through some political process fall down. This is because they can’t find satisfaction in the self, because they don’t actually understand the meaning of self, or consciousness. They may be able to repeat the words in the scriptures, but they don’t really understand them. The key to real understanding is in the definitions. To actually attain self-realization, first we have to deeply understand what self-realization is. That requires scrutinizing study of the scriptures, meaning that we have to look up every word in a good dictionary. Yes it’s a lot of work, but that’s the only way to duplicate the knowledge in scriptures like Nectar of Devotion, that actually describe the deep meaning of Kṛṣṇa consciousness.
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12.11.08
Posted in Bhagavad-gita, Darshan, Esoteric Teaching, Podcasts at 6:10 am by David Bruce Hughes
In five wonderful ślokas, Kṛṣṇa sums up the entire Esoteric Teaching and the authentic path of spiritual life. Bhagavad-gītā 13.8-12 are a capsule summary of Vedānta, the ultimate conclusion of Vedic Absolute Truth.
“Humility, pridelessness, nonviolence, tolerance, simplicity, approaching a bona fide spiritual master, cleanliness, steadiness and self-control; renunciation of the objects of sense gratification, absence of false ego, the perception of the evil of birth, death, old age and disease; nonattachment to children, wife, home and the rest, and evenmindedness amid pleasant and unpleasant events; constant and unalloyed devotion to Me, resorting to solitary places, detachment from the general mass of people; accepting the importance of self-realization, and philosophical search for the Absolute Truth—all these I thus declare to be knowledge, and what is contrary to these is ignorance.”
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12.08.08
Posted in Community News, Esoteric Teaching, Sunday Satsangs at 11:09 am by David Bruce Hughes
If you have been following our videos then you know that we are building a self-reliant rural spiritual community to ride out the changes around 2012. We follow the Vedic principles of varṇāśrama, simple living and high thinking, consensus management and economic decentralization. This Sunday Satsang is a community meeting and discussion about the Community Project Summary in this post. Please download it, read it completely and carefully, and then this discussion will make sense.
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12.07.08
Posted in Bhagavad-gita, Darshan, Esoteric Teaching, Podcasts at 4:52 pm by Nava-yauvana dāsa
yadā te moha-kalilaṁ
buddhir vyatitariṣyati
tadā gantāsi nirvedaṁ
śrotavyasya śrutasya ca
SYNONYMS
yadā—when; te—your; moha—illusory; kalilam—dense forest; buddhiḥ—transcendental service with intelligence; vyatitariṣyati—surpasses; tadā—at that time; gantāsi—you shall go; nirvedam—callousness; śrotavyasya—all that is to be heard; śrutasya—all that is already heard; ca—also.
TRANSLATION
“When your intelligence has passed out of the dense forest of delusion, you shall become indifferent to all that has been heard and all that is to be heard.” [Bhagavad-gītā 2.52]
In this Darshan we discuss the three divisions of the Vedas: the karma-kāṇḍa, jñāna-kāṇḍa and upāsanā-kāṇḍa; or pious activities leading to religiosity, economic development, sense gratification and liberation; the cultivation of empirical speculative knowledge; and cultivation of spiritual self-realization by devotional service leading to actual liberation from material existence. These three sections are the Vedas, Upaniṣads, and finally the Bhagavad-gītā, Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam and Vedānta-sūtra.
The devotees are only interested in the upāsanā-kāṇḍa, because they have no desire for fruitive activities, mystic power or liberation because they are already in a liberated condition by virture of pure spiritual Kṛṣṇa consciousness. This is kevala-bhakti, pure devotional service.
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12.02.08
Posted in Community News, Esoteric Teaching, Podcasts, Sunday Satsangs at 11:51 am by David Bruce Hughes
This Sunday Satsang is about the challenge before us, to create a model self-sufficient rural agricultural community that can be duplicated in any part of the world to deal with the coming changes. Some of the weaker students are freaking out because we do not just sit around and philosophize, but we want to serve Kṛṣṇa in a very active way.
Real spiritual things are eternal and material things are temporary; that is given in Bhagavad-gītā 2.16: “Those who are seers of the truth have concluded that of the nonexistent there is no endurance, and of the existent there is no cessation.” This verse and Bhagavad-gītā 2.13 have been the core of our preaching work since 2004. Now we are moving forward into the explanation of karma-yoga in Chapter 3 of Bhagavad-gītā. Therefore we are stressing practical service based on our transcendental philosophy of the Esoteric Teaching.
This may come as a shock to those who are only comfortable with armchair philosophy, but Kṛṣṇa recommends actions of devotional service as superior to theoretical knowledge. Work that is offered in sacrifice to the Supreme is free from karma, so that one can work without becoming entangled in the material world. But it is very difficult to work in this way without the support of a spiritual community and the direction of a self-realized soul.
So we are creating a community model based on the Esoteric Teaching of Kṛṣṇa in Bhagavad-gītā, where we can remain safe and free from anxiety even during the change from the materialistic culture to the succeeding spiritual culture. We invite our students to join us in this great adventure. Take courage and live your life as a sacrifice to a great cause. Those who join us now will become the spiritual leaders of a great new civilization.
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