View From a New Vrindaban Ridge

Guest post by Bhakta Ed.

The events of this post are actually set in time prior to my leaving Minnesota in the RV. I was so deeply traumatized by the things I am about to disclose to Gosh’s loyal readers, that I am only now able to “go public”.  Let’s just dive in.  Bad choice of words.  Sorry.

Poop, feces, bowel contents, fecal material and waste.  There, I said it.  There are many other names for the stuff, but these set the mood well enough.  Poop is important.  We have to deal with it, whether it is the poop of a baby or an entire city.  I once read a very interesting article on the advancement of Western Civilization being dependent on the invention of the flush toilet and sewer lines. In fact, between 1868 and 1883 the rate of death from typhoid per 100,000 in Germany dropped from 80 to 10. This was due to the invention of the Lindley sewer lines by William Lindley, British engineer.

In many healthcare systems such as Chinese medicine, the frequency, color, odor, amount and consistency of poop tells a lot about the patient’s condition.  Diagnosis and treatment can be resting on the patient’s poop. That sentence could conjure up some odd visuals, but I am going to leave it.

So, I hope you understand that I have nothing against the stuff.  It must be acknowledged and handled. It must be dealt with.  Better.  It’s just that I don’t really care for it that much.  When asked if I was bringing any pets or people on my pilgrimage, I replied, “Not if they poop”.  Naturally this does not include me.  Exceptions must be made.  For an informative article on different ways of dealing with personal poop check this out.

With all this as a backdrop let the tale begin.  Romapada Swami had told me that I could come down to Chicago early in December to meet with him concerning various Krishna conscious topics. I flew down after securing lodging in the ashram during my stay.  After greeting the amazing Deities a very nice devotee showed me to my room.  It was a Sunday, so later there was kirtan, a talk and the feast.  I spoke briefly with Romapada Swami that night reminding him of our meeting the next day.  I went to bed early and slept well.

In the morning, my body wants water and a place to put some waste materials.  It can be demanding about this.  I went to the bathroom where I found the floor around the toilet to be wet.  “If you can’t aim your pee into the bowl then sit like a female”,   I thought.  I finished and reached for the toilet paper.  And that is all I did.  There was none.  Not even a toilet paper holder.  I carefully got up and walked rather like a cowboy who has spent too many days in the saddle.  I looked everywhere.  To my absolute and genuine horror there was no toilet paper.  Then I noticed a bottle of water on the floor.  It was half full.  I didn’t care if it was somebody’s drinking water.  I poured it where it was needed.  The floor got wetter.  That didn’t work, so I just got in the shower and did my best without touching any poop.  Now look! Stop laughing.  My mother taught me never to touch poop.  Period.

I felt disgusting.  I was going to walk to a gas station.  Luckily there was a devotee walking down the hall.  I said, “You are out of toilet paper”.  He gave me the strangest look.  I asked where I could get some and he replied that he didn’t think that there was any in the entire building.  None???  Things were worse than I imagined.  I felt bad for all the devotees so I thought I would go out and buy one of those big 50 roll packages.

On my way out of the building I saw the public or guest restrooms.  I looked inside.  Thank Krishna!!!  Toilet paper.  That nice devotee was wrong.  There was some after all.  I corrected the problem and changed clothes.  Then I had a nice 70 – minute meeting with Romapada Swami up in his room.  Civilized people do not talk about poop.  The problem was solved so I didn’t mention it to him.  Thankfully.

Little did I know that I had stumbled on to exactly how it is to be done.  Really?  Yes.  No toilet paper was not a mistake… no kidding.  This is something they don’t tell you when they say “chant the Maha Mantra and your life will be sublime”.  They don’t reveal that if you chant Hare’ Krsna you will never use your left hand again.

Well, I have decided that enlightenment has nothing to do with how you deal with poop.  I now carry a roll with me.  I have decided that some water in addition is a great idea.  But my return  “back to Godhead” is going to include toilet paper and sewers.  Maybe squatting for increased anatomical and physiological advantage too.  But if we ever meet, you need not fear the bacterial count of my left hand.  It will be pristine.

On the road in his RV Bhakta Ed visits a trucker’s bathroom that does have  toilet paper.

Okay, for those who have  experienced this cultural shock vicariously through Bhakta Ed, the humor in the following will now be revealed:

Militant Brahmacaris Protest Charmin Toilet Paper Factory

Posted Dec 22nd 2009 5:00PM by Joseph Lazzaro

Can any fuel form make a serious run at oil use in the U.S. in the decade ahead? Natural gas might — largely as a result of natural gas’ abundant domestic supply, if new drilling techniques are deemed environmentally safe.

Briefly, the new techniques — including one called ‘hydraulic fracturing’ — enables natural gas suppliers to profitably access more gas than before. As a result, the Potential Gas Committee says the United States now has a more than a 100-year supply of natural gas.

However, issues regarding possible well water and ground water contamination at sites that used the new drilling techniques are currently under investigation by several U.S. environmental regulatory bodies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, The New York Times reported. If proven to be unsafe, that would, most likely, decrease the U.S.’s natural gas reserves from current estimates.

But assuming most of the high tech-accessed new natural gas is safe and added to the nation’s supply, could natural gas play a larger role in the nation’s energy picture? At first review, it appears it can.

Up Ahead: Big Natural Gas?

Utilities who operator electric power generation plants are already turning to natural gas as a cleaner fuel than coal. Coal, remarkably cheap but also enormously damaging to the environment, has an uncertain future. If natural gas’ price remains low — and bountiful supplies would help achieve that goal — natural gas can continue to make major gains in electric power generation and in industrial use — substantially reducing the air-polluting particulates that coal-fired plants spew in to the atmosphere daily.

Likewise with home/commercial heating: assuming natural gas remains cheap, the energy form will likely see increased use in the decade ahead for heating. Natural gas already is the dominant form of home heat in the Midwest; in the Northeast, oil heat has been pervasive, but has seen its market share fall since the first oil shock in 1973-74.

However, use as a fuel for vehicle transportation may present the biggest hurdle for natural gas. The ease of use and wide availability of gasoline give it a decided edge over natural gas in the U.S. Further, although fleets of buses and vans have converted to natural gas, an entirely new infrastructure of natural gas filling stations would have to be built to enable universal use of natural gas for civilian vehicles. Still, natural gas does have one trump card in this struggle: price. If oil, which closed Tuesday up 21 cents to $73.93 per barrel, again trends toward the $100 level and beyond, natural gas’ price advantage over oil will widen: at some point — perhaps at $5 per gallon or $6 per gallon for gasoline, a major auto manufacturer will begin large-scale production of a natural gas vehicle, and those Americans concerned about fuel prices will be drawn to it.

Energy Analysis: The view from here argues that the energy form is not as important as the fact the American drivers need a domestic-based auto fuel competitor to gasoline. I don’t count the problematic ethanol from corn. And so far, no other alternative fuels (biodiesel, 100% electric cars etc.) present affordable, universal options. But natural gas, if the new supplies can be accessed without contaminating wells and ground water, could offer a serious challenge to gasoline in the next decade.

Here comes the wise man in the story of sick times,
telling you how to find the passage of satisfaction.
He is many million years old and has been walking
many thousand miles, more miles, more lengths of road
than the shrunk-up earth of these days possesses,
to find you. He has a veda from before creation
to sing you and, lo and behold, it is about you,
it means everything to you. Though they’ve made a rope
out of rough, heavy smoke, like a whale-thick hawser
for a steamer of dead star, and pulled it through you
from throat to crotch, from ear to ear, and hag-tied
your hands and feet with the ends, though each of them
has your own face molten with leprosy,
though your brain makes the sound of crowded trains
colliding in Kashmir and a stadium that roars hosanna,
it is still possible now, in the next moment, to know God.
That is, not die in confusion. But maybe, then, this guru
is too soon. Maybe he hasn’t come from far enough.
Maybe he’s still much too young. Maybe he’s never
asked himself clearly what happens when someone like you
hears that a lightning-opened living fig tree or a mountain
and a blue sky can be lived in and sets out
on the long road never moving from his realm in pain.

The following was from a discussion on the declining use of the sari. See the original article here.

Dandavat pranams. Jaya Srila Prabhupada.

Indians are undoubtedly and, imho, most unfortunately imbibing an ever increasing number of modern/western secular life style choices, including non-devotional dress, because they are now thinking sense gratification is the goal of life. Yet, as you and others mentioned, the mode of dress, for instance, still varies greatly depending on where you are in India.

For instance, Phalini devi and I just returned from a two month tour around India and in Udupi, the birthplace of our Madhavacarya Maharaja, and in the outlying areas, you will see some men, albeit a small percentage, wearing lungis, as mentioned by Gaura Keshavaji.

Yet, almost ALL the women there will wear saris only. Not only do the ladies wear saris daily, their hair is braided and decorated with fresh flowers. We regularly took local buses to visit devotees in areas outside of Udupi and it was hard to find any women, young or old, without fresh flowers in her hair. The exception was when you go through nearby Manipal, a university town 10 kilometers from Udupi. There, most of the college age young ladies worn jeans, untied hair and occasionally a salwar kameez. Young men wearing a dhoti/lungi are hard to find, even in a very nice, small city like Udupi.

We found a somewhat similar situation in the villages of Assam in Northeast India. Almost all the ladies worn saris and quite a few of the village men wore either a gamsha or a lungi folded at the knees and tucked in or tied at the waist. The men are mostly farmers who plow their paddy fields, which are flooded with water from the monsoon rains, with beautiful oxen. No farmer there plows his field wearing pants, as his legs will sink halfway to his knees in a muddy paddy field.

The ladies focus more or less entirely on all manner of domestic arts and services, centered around raising the children and grandchildren and assisting their husbands as needed, much like Mother Yasoda, who never commuted daily to nearby Mathura to a job.

Kindly see enclosed photos of village life in “Awesome Assam.” :-)  We plan to return to Assam soon to observe and spend time learning the time tested art of simple living from the villagers there. And depending on how that goes, we are considering the possibility of establishing a daivi-varnasrama village project there. The idea we have is to gather together a relatively small core of ISKCON devotees, mostly grihasthas, who are committed to living very simply in a non-electric, traditional village setting (mud/bamboo homes with thatched roofs).

Instead of following the modern day concept of working to make money to then purchase one’s necessities of life from stores, we will focus entirely on personally producing, from the land and our cows, all our basic necessities, namely food, shelter, cloth, herbs for medicine, etc. Srila Prabhupada referred to it as “living in the lap of material nature, depending on Krsna.”

Along with these routine daily activities centered around cow protection and farming, we envision cultivating loving relationships with the local villagers, based on advocating the principles of pure devotional service to Lord Krsna and steeped in constant Harinam sankirtan. Our plans include holding many Vaisnava festivals throughout the year at our central village ashram and traveling regularly in ox cart processions from village to village, distributing books and prasadam, and having always ecstatic kirtans wherever we go. Rather than importing many Vaisnavas from far away places, we think it more reasonable to preach to and encourage the local villagers to take up devotional service on a regular basis. Hopefully, what we establish will be able to be duplicated in many other locations throughout the world.

Being endowed with free will and realizing that our quality of life hinges, to a large degree, on the choices we make, Phalini devi and I have decided to relocate to India and try to please Srila Prabhupada by establishing Vrndavan villages. Your blessings, of course, would be most welcome. Haribol.

Yours in the service of Srila Prabhupada,

Haripada dasa

By Staff Writer for Press Trust of India on 23 Jan 2010

Al-Qaeda militant Ghulam Rasool Khan alias Khan Mirza, who was formally arrested in Purnia in Bihar while trying to cross over to Bangladesh early this week, has put forward an unusual demand.

“Provide me two kg of mutton and one kg of chicken daily or else I will sit on hunger strike inside Purnia jail”, the militant informed the jail authorities.

Jail authorities said Mirza refused to take vegetarian food served to him for two days after he was lodged in the jail, saying he was a habitual meat eater.

Confirming this, IG (Prisons), D Kumar said “We will, like other prisoners, serve meal to the prisoner in keeping with the jail manual…But, at the same time, we will abide by any court directive in this regard”.

end story

“At the present moment, so-called civilized men do not sacrifice animals to a deity in a religious or ritualistic way. They openly kill animals daily by the thousands for no purpose other than the satisfaction of the tongue. Because of this the entire world is suffering in so many ways. Politicians are unnecessarily declaring war, and according to the stringent laws of material nature, massacres are taking place between nations.”

Chaitanya Caritamrta  Madhya 24.250