New Vrindaban Brijabasi Spirit

I had the opportunity to spend much of the our Janmastami Festival weekend with two devotees from Toronto, Jaganatha Misra and Rajasuya Prabhus. They came with their families to New Vrindaban dhama to bathe the Lord, get association from the Vaisnavas and chant the holy name.

On Saturday morning we all walked up to Sri Sri Radha Vrindabancandra’s garden to help harvest some vegetables and I can’t remember having a more pleasant time with friends. I never heard three young men get so excited about the color of fresh organic tomatoes before. At first we thought to just harvest one bucket, but soon we found that we were genuinely addicted to picking more. Finally, we had to force ourselves to leave with two large buckets of tomatoes and one large bucket of green beans. They were sorry that the rest of the family hadn’t come up and assured me that on Sunday morning they would bring the rest of the crew up for some nectar. Sure enough they did just that.

The whole family became so enlivened by our festive atmosphere that they decided to stay an extra day. These devotees were so pleased I could not help but think, “this Janmastami celebration was a success.” The New Vrindaban Community will certainly appreciate the efforts of the Congregational department and New Vrindaban Management team in their organization of the festival.

With a heavy heart I was forced to watch Rajasuya and Jaganatha Misra drive off into the distance, but they left me with a gem to remember. “This was the best vacation I have ever had. No it was the best time I can ever remember in my life.” Both nodded in agreement. Who can deny the success of the festival with such words.

Your Servants,
CD dept, NVMT and Arya Siddhanta dasa

by Visvambhar

On August 18th, the first 24 Kirtan festival was held in New Vrndavan.

Hundreds of participants flocked from all corners of the east coast, driving as far as 15 hours, to attend this historical event. There are no hard and fast rules for chanting the holy names, no specific time or place is required, and so this festival was solely for the purpose of glorifying Krsna in the form of His holy names. No other festivities were scheduled, it wasn’t any specific holiday, just the ‘holy’ day of the holy names!

The author leading intensely

The program began at 8:30 am on Saturday 18th with Swasti Vacanam to invoke auspiciousness. And then from 9am the 18th, till 9am the 19th, it was: Hare Krsna Hare Krsna Krsna Krsna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare, nonstop!!! Sri Sri Radha VrndavanChandra seemed to be dancing in ecstacy as the devotees from New York (Ananta, Acyuta, Akincana Krsna, and Caitanyananda) inaugarated the first shift. Next was the Alachua Crew (Visvambhar, Rasika, Balarama Chandra, Kishor, and Jamuna) causing waves of bliss that took the heart on a roller coaster ride of the holy names. Similarly, DC, represented by GauraVani, shook the very core of our hearts, dispelling all unwanted material desires and allowing the cooling rays of the benediction moon to shine through.

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This evening we began the celebration of Jhulana Yatra. Devotees are welcome to come at Gaura arati time and offer some love-tugs for the most beautiful trascendental couple. It will go on only four more days.

See  you there!

YS,

Arya Siddhanta dasa

Janaka Mahajana invited me down to Sri Sri Radha Vrindabancandra’s water and sewage treatment facility, just a short way down the road from the temple. We met up with Tejo Maya Prabhu and his son Gopal, who have been maintaining these services for quite some time.

It was amazing to see how much energy was put into the required process of purifying the sewage water. First the water flows down the hill and splashes into the primary pond. Air is constantly being pumped into this pond, some swampy moss is collected at the same time and then the water is pumped into a big box which captures undesired particles.

In a second pond the water is once again aerated/treated and then it is pumped into a sand pit, which captures a majority of the remaining waste. This sand pit is scraped clean from time to time so that more unpurified water can pass through.

That water then flows into a series of cemented chambers and is treated with a chemical to remove the finer particles, finally ending up dumped into a flowing stream. These devotees are actually down here daily taking water quality samples for both the potable and discharged waters. They then run tests and file the results with regulative agencies. Additionally, they are tending to broken pipes, run down motors, rewiring something or cleaning out the various filters.

One interesting thing Gopal and Tejo Maya noted was that a cardinal regularly follows them around and takes shelter in that area. After a few minutes, sure enough, we spotted the cardinal relaxing in the shade of a nearby bush. There used to be a group of geese down here too, but now only one lone survivor remains. “probably attacked by other animals,” Gopal said.

The temple also has two wells just around the corner from the sewage facility. Unfortunately, the well which usually pumps over 10,000 gallons for the temple daily has a busted pump. Right now the temple water needs are all being supplied by the small 5,000 gallon per day well, which actually is not enough. Considering that we have many festivals coming up, it is a priority to get the larger well repaired, but it will be no small task. In fact we may have to dig another well, as sediment has collected on the bottom, one of the reasons why our water has the sea-like smell to it.

I now have a whole new appreciation for water in the dhama. I pray to Sri Sri Radha Vrindabancandra that I will never waste another drop of that precious well water. Similarly we are appealing to the community to be very conscious of the water situation and do their part to properly utilize the resources Krsna is providing.

raso ‘ham apsu kaunteya
rabhāsmi śaśi-sūryayoḥ
praṇavaḥ sarva-vedeṣu
śabdaḥ khe pauruṣaḿ nṛṣu

O son of Kuntī, I am the taste of water, the light of the sun and the moon, the syllable oḿ in the Vedic mantras; I am the sound in ether and ability in man.

PURPORT (Segment)

The taste of water is the active principle of water. No one likes to drink sea water, because the pure taste of water is mixed with salt. Attraction for water depends on the purity of the taste, and this pure taste is one of the energies of the Lord. The impersonalist perceives the presence of the Lord in water by its taste, and the personalist also glorifies the Lord for His kindly supplying tasty water to quench man’s thirst. That is the way of perceiving the Supreme.

Your Servant,
Arya Siddhanta dasa

Another time, Sankirtana, newly arrived to New Vrindavana, was very thoroughly and devotedly washing the Deity plates after the noon offering and dumping the water down what he thought was a regular sink drain….and washing his own feet in astonishment. You could frequently hear his distinctive voice calling from the kitchen for Ruci to bring him a tissue (something almost unheard of in New Vrindavana at the time) as his eyes and nose streamed in the smoke choked kitchen.

It was a standing joke that there was no such thing as a true drain, or a genuinely straight doorway anywhere in New Vrindavana. On many occasions in the summer, Hladini and I couldn’t hardly see each other standing across and cutting table in the kitchen due to the smoke and flies being so dense.

One wonderful devotee lady who had two young sons was assigned to cook the 4pm offering for Lord Jagannatha (primarily because her husband needed some more opulent prasadam in order to function than was ordinarily available to devotees at the temple). She was a highly educated, refined, and dedicated wife.

After her first day cooking in the smokey kitchen she started doing her service with a pair of wrap around goggles to protect her eyes. This wasn’t just overkill. Two of the main cooks at Bahulavana developed painful styes in their eyes from the constant intense smoke irritation—and Madhuvana kitchen was more smoke filled and less ventilated than the Bahulavana kitchen.

One day, an enterprising, enthusiastic young local college student knocked at the side kitchen door of the temple. He was going house to house around the ridge selling encyclopedias to make money to go to school.

He was a little chagrined to say the least when the supposed lady of the house answered the door with goggles on and smoke pouring out around her through the doorway while two little kids played in what looked like an old burned out farmhouse. But he had seen the mailbox and trying to compose himself and be polite to someone he felt less and less was likely to be a prospective subscriber, he timidly said, “Mrs. Temple?”

Manipuspaka bless her, got him some prasadam and settled him down in the ‘prasadam room’ (the old living room) of the farmhouse. Of course it had no furniture in it and all those pictures of Krishna around plus all the ‘strange’ smells from the temple room and kitchen. He was polite enough to take prasadam, but for some reason he never came back.

Madhuvana had no drains at all: just buckets underneath the sinks that had to been hauled out behind the temple building and dumped down the embankment out back. The big dump buckets’ contents started to look like swirling gallons of primordial soup by the time they were full enough to make it worth the struggling endeavor to get it out to the back of the temple. You really tried to not disturb the surface of the contents any more than you had to ‘cause the noisome smell generated from the ‘soup’ could almost knock you over faster than trying to lift and carry the bucket in the first place.

Then you had to be extra careful not to step on the edge of the cistern cover right smack in the exact middle of the pot room floor and about 3ft across.

If you hit the cistern cover wrong, it tipped up and you dropped suddenly straight down into the black abyss below. Not to worry though, no one ever went clear to the bottom or anything. You would get wedged solid by your elbows meeting the two opposite edges of the rim of the hole and the edge of the raised cover. You would occasionally hear this blood curdling scream out of the pot room, and knew you had to run to help pull someone up that had just ‘gotten eaten by the hole’.

Many devotees became so expert at both dodging the lid despite it’s central location and wide diameter; or leaping in mid air to miss the bone jarring fright of free fall and its abrupt stop, Hladini listed it as one of the ’64 arts of New Vrindavana’ after reading about the 64 arts of the gopis in the Brahma Samhita.

Madhuvana went through about a gunzillion managers. It seems just about every senior man of the old days was at one time or another appointed to be the manager at Madhuvana.

Some were obsessive/compulsively picky. Some were control freaks. Some were derogatory about how Hladini did her service. Some were more or less inert. Some were more concerned with what they saw as politics at Bahulavana. There was only one I could remember who actually felt it was his job to try to help facilitate the service mood of Lord Jagannatha in a real and sustained way with his own attention and offer of assistance. And all of them seemed to feel that if they painted at least what served as the prasadam room they’d made a significant upgrade in the place, ‘proved themselves’ and were ready to move on to more ‘essential’ and ‘bigger’ services.

It may sound like Mahhuvana was a regular train wreck of a place, dilapidated, something right out of the mode of Ignorance. But Madhuvana had a secret. A Big wonderful secret-actually four of Them.

They were Big Lord Balaram, Big Lady Subadhra, and Big Lord Jagannatha. And the fourth secret was the unmotivated, uninterrupted loving devotion Hladini had for Them. If you saw that: if you let yourself be caught up in that, you were indeed in the spiritual world, and the circumstances and facilities that were being dovetailed in that expression became cherishable additions to the aura of Gokula manifested there.

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Need we say more…

YS,

NVMT and Arya Siddhanta dasa

The following are some excerpts from emails that I have received from Gopi lila’s husband, Haribhakta written on the 20th and 22nd. Please keep her in your prayers, as Haribhakta so nicely states below, “ to carry her through her treatment and soothe her soul”.

From the 20th:  “Just wanted to inform you about Gopi lila’s health. She has been having some pain in her lower abdomen area and was experiencing some bleeding. She went in for a check up and was diagnosed with a tumor on her cervix. The doctors will know in a week how serious she is. Three days ago she started losing a lot of blood and she fainted a couple of times. She was then rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. She has stabilized and they have been able to stop the loss of blood. She was also given a blood transfusion yesterday and will be given another one either today or tomorrow.”
From the 22nd: “The current situation seems quite serious. She has been diagnosed with cervical cancer. Apparently there are four stages in cancer and the doctors suspect that hers is stage 3 (they still have a couple of tests to run). Either tomorrow or the next day, the doctors will perform furthur tests, whereby they will determine how serious the cancer is, where it has spread, etc,  after which they recommend a combination of radiation and chemo therapy or surgery if it is very serious (stage 4).
    Yes prayer is a powerful force and we would love for the devotees,
especially in New Vrindaban, which is very dear to us, to keep her in their prayers – to carry her through her treatment and soothe her soul.
   Thank you for your kind words and prayers and I will communicate them to Gopilila.
Wishing you the best,  Hari Bhakta Das

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by mrupa

Madhuvana-smokey, cold, crazy, and dirty.

Madhuvana-one of the 12 forests of Vrndavana where Dhruva performed austerities and met both Narada and Lord Visnu face to face.

Madhuvana-an extension of the Lord Caitanya half of Golaka Vrndavana where Lord Caitanya and His associates reside eternally. Where ISKCON along with Srila Prabhupada are and where Lord Jagannatha must be the predominating Deity, as He is in Jagannatha Puri.

Madhuvana-Where Srila Prabhupada and His servants would sometimes reside when He visited New Vrndavana.

Madhuvana–now torn down and “gone”. For a time it was cultivated by Vidya and Madhava Ghosh when they lived there. Now there are only two engraved stone markers remembering Hladini and her dear Godsister Kunti Devi at the base of the tree that used to stand at the back of the tin shed.

Madhuvana-Big Lord Jagannatha was installed there on Gaura Purnima long long ago, after returning from Pittsburgh. (I’m not sure of the year anymore)

MADHUVANA-The chicken coop where the devotee family lived, ( I used to know their name, the husband worked for Spiritual Sky and I think later on Prabhupada’s books after they moved to LA). The fields on each side (one of these was home to Resham the highly territorial ox),the tin shed next to the temple housing the bucksaw for cutting firewood, as well as Cakradhari and his wife for one summer.

It was very crudely subdivided into about 10ft squares; storage or housing made no difference. There was a rickety wooden frame of sorts ‘built’ as an extension from the back wall of the shed that had black plastic stapled around it-the shower facility for everyone. (quite literally a real scream in the winter time).

There was an outhouse across the often shoulder high grassy field. The drain water dump, the water tank, the kids, the Prabhupada houses, the Dhruva ghat-now obliterated, the grazing area (all downhill), Jarasandhadhama, the haunted furnace room, the truning milk can covering the hole in the floor by the stove in the kitchen, the ‘walker’ upstairs, reflexive chanting while falling asleep (standard operating procedure to keep ghosts from attacking you),

The dirt and stone wall basement, the sewing room with a hole completely through one wall and no window in the other. (great cross ventilation especially about January or February). The asrama room, the rats in the walls (excellent maha thieves), the crazy people, crazy teacher, and crazy kids, also the simple sincere sweet people like Candraraikekha and others, the crazy husbands.

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As all of the Temple area residents should be aware of, there is still a shortage of water supply with the New Vrindaban Water System.  Although we’ve had so much rain lately, that has no real immediate effect upon the lower levels of water in the ground far below us where our well get the water from.  It takes many many months to years of time for that to happen.

So please be extra conservative, especially now, as with these upcoming festivals and big weekends, the demand of water will be much more than usual with all the guests coming. 

Please no washing of vehicles, filling of large water containers for any reason, etc.

Thank you,  Jaya Murari dasa