May/Jun - Back to Godhead

May/June 2014

WELCOME Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu introduced the means to God realization in this age: congregational chanting of the names of God. As anyone who has seen Hare Krishna devotees chanting in public can attest, dancing always accompanies our singing. We don’t just chant; we chant and dance. In “The Movement of the Soul: Dancing in Krishna Consciousness,” Satyaraja Dasa discusses some history of the dancing of Krishna’s devotees, which traces back to the original dancing couple: Radha-Krishna.

In the earliest days of the Hare Krishna movement, Srila Prabhupada introduced a simple dance his followers dubbed “the Swami step,” a mellow move whose performance he occasionally lost to illness. As Brahmananda Dasa, one of his first disciples, writes in “The Prayers of Queen Kunti and Prabhupada’s Triumph Over Adversity,” in challenging times Prabhupada often turned to the prayers of a certain great devotee.

Prabhupada’s illnesses showed that anyone in this world, even someone of his spiritual stature, has to deal with the realities of the soul in a material body. In “Exclusive Controllership Versus Self-Ownership,” Dr. Aswini Kumar Misro discusses the limits of our control of our own bodies and helps us see why someone else is controlling behind the scenes.

Hare Krishna.—Nagaraja Dasa, Editor