Bhakti’s Perpetual Spring Season
Bhakti’s Perpetual Spring Season ~ A few reflections from the 25th annual Vaishnava Christian Dialogue
~by Krishna Kanta Dasi
Spring is upon us, here in Virginia, announcing its presence with colorful yellow daffodils and pink cherry blossoms everywhere! The flower blossom is a favorite symbol in ancient Vaishnava verse, symbolizing our own consciousness in its fully awakened state. It is said that each of us begin as a tight little bud, and, gradually, begin opening, sharing our unique fragrance. What makes each of us blossom is love!
This year, at the 25th annual Vaishnava Christian Dialogue conference, graciously hosted by Rukmini Devi Dasi and her husband, Anuttama Dasa, several of us gathered amidst flowering trees to contemplate the theme of Unity in Diversity. Together, we reflected on building deep friendships—heartfelt brotherhoods and sisterhoods—with each other, regardless of our differences.
In our own Bhakti tradition, heartfelt offerings are at the core. We dive deep within our own hearts to find the many variegated ways we feel moved to express our love outwardly, in our daily exchanges with others in our families or communities, with the plant and animal kingdoms, with Mother Bhumi—or our environment—and directly with the Divine via the ancient rituals of nama bhajan and archana vigraha. We also enter deep into our own hearts, through our individual sadhana—our personal spiritual practices.
What do we find when we enter the garden of our hearts? These last couple of years, the global pandemic has given rise to much grief in the hearts of many. Yet, during the conference, we contemplated how this grief has brought us together, all around the world, helping us feel more connected to one another, in our feelings of compassion and empathy for one another, despite our differences.
Compassion is a beautiful unifying agent. Together, with grief, it powerfully exercises our hearts in ways that help us connect more deeply, and lovingly with others. It is in these heartfelt exchanges with one another that we begin to water our little flower buds, in earnest. Sometimes, we don’t know what lovely blossoms hide within each of us, until we are in the company of those who will nourish them.
This special loving sanga is the wellspring of water from which we each drink, regardless of how we identify. In our interfaith dialogue, we encouraged one another to find the spiritual wells within our own hearts—and drink from them deeply—so that we may be able to sincerely appreciate the value of others who “drink from other sources”, as Pope Francis put it in Fratelli Tutti. (quoted by John Borelli at the conference). For, whether we are drinking from Christian wells or Vaishnava wells, ultimately, we all draw from wells of love.
It is this love that unites us. When we make a practice out of sincerely drawing from our hearts in our exchanges with others, and being truly present to them, we also help them get in touch with the love in their own hearts. The quality of such exchanges then attracts to us the “all attractive” Supreme Beloved. When we draw in a divine presence to our dialogues, then, we naturally become more intimate with that divine presence, and our own divine essence starts to blossom.
In the end, we reflected on how we are all fellow travelers on the path, the camino, and in journeying with each other’s loving support—in heart-to-heart dialogue—we can “…plunge the depths of the mystery of God…”, (FT). But not before we learn to connect well with one another, plunging the depths of the mysteries of our own hearts, watering our buds until they too, blossom, like flowers in the spring.
This reminds me of the beautiful full moon night of the Rasa Dance in our sacred Bhakti literature, in which the Vrindavan forest began to blossom, spontaneously, in the middle of the autumn season! The forest was responding to the love exchanged by Krishna and the cowherd maidens of Vraja, the Gopis. That beautiful night, the Gopis linked arms with one another, uniting as one, drawing Krishna into the circle by the purity of their love.
Under the rasa purnima, the full moon of that sacred night, everything was in full bloom, including the Gopis and Krishna. In our Bhakti tradition, this circle of the Rasa Dance reveals to us a model for our exchanges with others, showing the potential each of us has to also beckon the season of love into own relationships, which causes us all to blossom, in Bhakti’s perpetual spring!
Krishna Kanta Dasi
Karuna-Sindhu: Oceans of Compassion
At the heart of our own humanity is our ability to be sensitive to the feelings of others. When—upon seeing others suffering—we feel our own heart ache, and reach out to soothe their pain, we are living up to our highest human potential. This kindness, as I understand it, is compassion in action: the unsupportable urge to relieve another of their wounds.When I reminisce on my life, the regret that makes my stomach churn the most is that of not having treated others with more kindness. But regrets cripple compassion. So, instead of wallowing in them, I make a conscious, daily effort to use my old regrets as inspiration to be kinder today. Sometimes this warrants summoning the compassion goddess within me.[perfectpullquote align="full" cite="" link="" color="" class="" size=""]The quality of compassion was so revered by ancient eastern traditions, that they gave it divine status, ascribing it to merciful goddesses who ferried souls from states of suffering into states of enlightenment. From Sri Radha to Kuan Yin, Hindu and Buddhist texts alike, consider most worthy of worship those who hear and respond to our cries.[/perfectpullquote]But what happens when our own cries are so loud that we become irresponsive to the cries of others? It’s not uncommon for our own compassion to falter when we ourselves are struggling. Suffering can overwhelm us to the point that we disconnect from our own kind nature. Sanskrit texts refer to this phenomenon as the impossibility of a drowning person to rescue another drowning person.Compassion then enters as one who has transcended the sea that drowns us, and descends from above. The Buddhist tradition depicts such a compassionate one as Avalokitesvara, or “that lord, or ruler who gazes down upon the world”. For looking upon the suffering of this world with compassion is inseparable from successful lordship or governance. Leaders, or guides in our lives, that can elevate us past feelings of anger, fear and anxiety inspire us to move toward the best versions of ourselves: owners of compassionate hearts.
Cultures that cultivate karuna, or compassion, thrive. This includes extending compassion toward animals as well. This is one of the basic tenets of Eastern traditions. Compassion becomes like nourishment for society. It is easy to feel compassion for an orphaned child, a homeless person, or a little bird that has fallen out of a nest. Our hearts are tested, however, when life invites us to extend compassion even toward those who may be hurting us, or others. What does this kind of compassion look like?The form compassion takes in each of our lives differs from person to person. For me it begins with trying not to take the aggressions of others personally. I find that when I do, I may slip into the very feelings that are fueling oncoming attacks.Deep hurts can all too easily move into anger. People who are hurting all too often become hurtful. In becoming sensitive to my own wounds and those of others (and whatever triggers them), I more readily access the compassion in my own heart.In the Jain tradition, compassion is regarded as one of the “four reflections” of universal friendship, as there is no hope of cultivating true friendships, without the ability to empathize and feel compassion toward others. Compassion thus becomes a sturdy bridge between hearts. Even two wounded hearts.[perfectpullquote align="full" cite="" link="" color="" class="" size=""]When we surround ourselves with those in whose presence we feel heard, kindly treated, and most loved, we are extending compassion toward ourselves. Within compassionate communities everyone feels safe, respected and honored. Such sangas become the backbone of nations in which love reigns supreme.[/perfectpullquote]In the Bhakti yoga tradition, those who spontaneously give rise to such sangas are seen are valuable leaders, teachers or gurus. Such inspiring people are referred to as karuna-sindhu, or “oceans of compassion”, for their sensitivity toward others never expires. In meditating on extending compassion outward into the world— that is as deep and broad as the sea—we’ll find ourselves effortlessly connecting with our own compassionate heart. Only when we allow ourselves to be governed by thoughts, words and behavior that flows from this sea of compassion, will our world be at peace. I find comfort in knowing there are such souls on this planet
Finding Our Souls in a Sea of Identities
Finding Our Souls in a Sea of Identities
Krishna Kanta Dasi
In the Bhakti paradigm, at our deepest level, we are each individual units of consciousness (atmans) trying on different identities, lifetime after lifetime. The minute we are born, we are given specific identities involving race, nationality, gender and family. As we age, individuate from our parents, and cultivate our own set of beliefs, we begin to shed old identity-constructs, and/or add on to them. This sense of self, or ahamkara, changes and becomes more sophisticated as we develop.In Sanskrit ahamkara means “I am acting” according to so many temporary roles. Rich and colorful factors related to our upbringings, biology, environments and cultures all come into play when shaping the individual roles we play, the persons we see ourselves as. Because we each “contain multitudes”—as poet Walt Whitman once put it—it is always fascinating to hear others describe themselves.“Who are you?” is a loaded question indeed, sometimes requiring a complex reply! After all, we are so many things to so many people. For example, in this world I am a daughter, sister, mother, wife and neighbor. I am also a student, teacher, doll-maker, vegan, homeowner, naturalist and an artist. I am also multi-ethnic, bilingual, and a resident of U.S.A. I can continue defining myself ad nauseam—as most of us can—for we wear our identities in layers. Some layers are worn very deliberately, while others are a product of our circumstances and conditioning. Some run shallow, like waves, and others seems as deep as the sea. Eventually, as we develop our sense-of-self, parts of our identity will emerge that we may feel very committed to—perhaps like being a vegan—and others that we may be more flexible about—like our specific beliefs about the afterlife.[perfectpullquote align="full" cite="" link="" color="" class="" size=""]Those who have embarked upon a spiritual journey are often characterized as feeling unsatisfied with superficial identity constructs.[/perfectpullquote]We may feel that none of the ways in which we present ourselves on the outside, match the person we feel ourselves to be on the inside. Naturally, we are drawn to exploring new definitions for ourselves. Such identity explorations may stretch even beyond culture and religion, all the way into race, gender and species. Some individuals even like to think of themselves as being from other planets! This is a perfectly natural phenomenon experienced by embodied atmans all around the world and throughout time.We are all searching for an unshakable identity that does not depend on fluctuating externals. If everything we identify with in this world were taken from us—our family, our career, our community, etc—would we feel as if we have also lost our selves?
This is what happened to Arjuna at the start of the Bhagavad Gita. Everything he previously identified himself with—his relatives, his warrior status, the kingdom—began to crumble before him. He then felt completely lost. Many of us can relate to the experience of an existential crisis. Although our core self, or atman, remains in tact, we nevertheless feel lost due to our shaky connection with it, and our human habit to revolve our sense-of-self around fleeting aspects of existence.From the Bhakti perspective, we began collecting impermanent identities before we were even born! Our souls have been cycling around in the circle of samsara for ions, reincarnating into different races, nationalities, genders and species. Our consciousness is like a container that holds all of these combined experiences, influencing the ways in which we define ourselves today. While it is easy to make intellectual assertions like “I am atman. I am a spark of God’s splendor”, behaving in a manner that reflects this ancient truth can take lifetimes of practice.[perfectpullquote align="full" cite="" link="" color="" class="" size=""]Bhakti Yoga is the practice through which we cultivate a sturdy connection with our core self, our atman. The atman is made up of sat (eternal being), chit (pure awareness) and ananda (deepest joy): the same inextinguishable ingredients that make up Divinity only in smaller quantities.[/perfectpullquote]Our experience of this core self increases as our connection with the Supreme Divine, Krishna, also increases. The deeper we enter into our relationship with Krishna, the more we begin to reciprocate the love he has for us. We practice doing this here, in this world, within the many roles we play in our daily lives. Denying these roles in the name of identifying only as sat-chit-ananda, ultimately makes us insensitive to the world we are—undeniably—still a part of.All the ways in which we define ourselves in this world—as temporary as they may be—have the potential to enter into our practice of Bhakti, and act as signposts to our deepest self. In Bhakti Yoga, we do not reject the world around us, prematurely renouncing it and the ways in which we define ourselves within it. Instead—as Krishna suggested to Arjuna—we give ourselves wholeheartedly to those external roles, while internally focused on the ways in which they will help illuminate our permanent role, our inextinguishable identity: our eternal role as beloveds of Krishna, devoted to reciprocating his divine love for us.When we focus on the love God has for us, and the love he would like to see flowing between us—while simultaneously honoring the fleeting roles given to us in our lives—we are cultivating a balanced Bhakti Yoga practice: one that is in harmony with life around us.As Krishna cautioned Arjuna, early in the Gita: “What will repression accomplish?” Hastily denying our own humanity, will not jumpstart our connection with Divinity.
In fact, it may very well do just the opposite. The only way to liberate ourselves from the human experience is to go through it, while remaining conscious of God’s love for us. Arjuna did not run off the battlefield in the Gita. Instead, he participated in it, with his mind focused on Krishna, his heart set on love.Loving exchanges that awaken our love for Krishna are at the heart of the Bhakti tradition. When our sense-of-self—our identities—revolve around facilitating and participating in such loving exchanges, our practice will thrive. This does not happen in isolation. It happens when we interact with other people. One of the ways in which we can be most helpful to others while sharing Bhakti Yoga is to be sensitive to them: to really hear them, see them, and respond to whom they identify as the most. This fosters deep, heart-to-heart dialogue: the kind Krishna shared with Arjuna.Acknowledging our “multitudes”—the many roles we play as humans—in the context of a Bhakti Yoga practice, nourishes dynamic relationships with our atmans. The two are quite interrelated, perhaps more intimately than we think. It is counterproductive to see them as disconnected from each other. For this reason, when we share Bhakti with others in ways that harmonize with the situations souls find themselves in today—as Krishna did with Arjuna in the Gita—we honor their individual soul’s journey. In doing so, we honor them, thus increasing their receptivity to Bhakti. This type of sensitivity to others is critical to cultivating love in our hearts: both for our fellow humans, as well as for Divinity.