Everyone

Achieving anything in life requires focus and determination. If our efforts and attitudes are consistent, we can achieve our intended goals easily and quickly. But if our motives are impure and our endeavors distracted, our success is hampered. In spiritual life, pure intentions and consistent focus on the prescribed practices are of vital importance. The timeless scripture Srimad-Bhagavatam (1.2.6) emphasizes this principle:

A pandemic can seem monstrously meaningless. A virus from one corner of the world can mean death for thousands, disease for millions, and disruption of daily life for billions.

No one likes suffering. But what we especially dislike is meaningless suffering. If we are given an injection, we accept the momentary pain as part of the cure. But if a thorn pricks us while we walk on a road, we find that pointless pain especially annoying.

prabhu kahe, vedanta-sutra ishvara-vachana
vyasa-rupe kaila yaha shri-narayana

bhrama, pramada, vipralipsa, karanapatava
ishvarera vakye nahi dosha ei saba

It has been almost two years since I began to deal more deeply with the issue of sustainable living. When I started, I did not think that researching sustainability would lead me to another interesting field, which was meditation, a topic I had already known to some extent. I would like to share the key steps of this exciting intellectual journey so that I can rouse or further your interest in both areas.

Though there are many maha-vakyas, or “great sayings,” four of them, one from each of the four Vedas, are often singled out as the standard maha-vakyas of the Vedic tradition. They all refer to the same universal truth, evoking the true spiritual nature of all living beings. This article focuses on tat tvam asi, often translated as “Thou art that.”¹ Many scholars interpret this to mean that all living entities are the same as God.

The esteemed Narottama Dasa Thakura (born 1520 CE) taught that to understand the loving affairs of Radha and Krishna we must serve the lotus feet of Sri Rupa Goswami with intense eagerness. He also wrote:

A New York Times article published in 1977 sums up the incredible splendor of Devasadan Mandir, ISKCON’s Hare Krishna temple in Detroit, Michigan, where I lived in 1994 and ’95:

We all face fearful situations in life. The Vedic literature tells us that fear is one of the ever-present conditions of life in the material world. How can we deal with our fears effectively? Here I propose four strategies, summed up as the acronym FEAR:

F – Focus
E – Engage
A – Arise
R – Release

Prayers, mantras, and hymns composed of sacred syllables abound in religious traditions, and they are highly developed in the Vaishnava tradition of ancient India. Some prayers and mantras stand supreme, largely because they express a selfless intention and purity of purpose. A prayer that asks for some selfish end or reflects conditioned responses to the material world is not as pure as one that asks for nothing in return.