The Bhakti-lata

“Thus the Lord brought the desire tree of devotional service to this earth and became its gardener. He sowed the seed and sprinkled upon it the water of His will.

“PURPORT

“In many places devotional service has been compared to a creeper. One has to sow the seed of the devotional creeper, bhakti-lata, within his heart. As he regularly hears and chants, the seed will fructify and gradually grow into a mature plant and then produce the fruit of devotional service, namely love of Godhead, which the gardener (mala-kara) can then enjoy without impediments.”

Chaitanya Caritamrta Adi 9.9

“Grace, which is charity, contains in itself all virtues in a hidden and potential manner, like the leaves and the branches of the oak hidden in the meat of an acorn. To be an acorn is to have a taste for being an oak tree. Habitual grace brings with it all the Christian virtues in their seed.”

Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1999).
P 20

Thought for the Day

“Actual graces move us to actualize these hidden powers and to realize what they mean: Christ acting in us.”

Thoughts in Solitude: 20.

 

Killing Is Not Love

“Prabhupäda: Yes. Now what is that bird who is killed in Christmas?
Devotees: Turkey.
Prabhupäda: Turkey, you see. Now, Christmas, God’s Christmas, Jesus Christ. He said, “Thou shalt not kill.” But his birthday is observed by killing, killing, killing, killing, killing.”

“[Circular Letter, Advent-Christmas, 1967] The times are difficult. They call for courage and faith. Faith is in the end a lonely virtue. Lonely especially where a deep authentic community of love is not an accomplished fact, but a job to be begun over and over… Love is not something we get from Mother Church as a child gets milk from the breast: it also has to be given. We don’t get love if we don’t give any.

“Christmas, then, is not just a sweet regression to breast-feeding and infancy. It is a serious and sometimes difficult feast. Difficult especially if, for psychological reasons, we fail to grasp the indestructible kernel of hope that is in it. If we are just looking for a little consolation-we may be disappointed.”

Thomas Merton. The Road to Joy, Robert E. Daggy, editor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989): 108.

 

Proving A Point Isn’t The Point

“Sometimes a university student or professor tries to study these transcendental literary works and attempts to put forth a critical analysis from the mundane view, with an end to receiving degrees like a Ph.D. Such realization is certainly different from that of Ramananda Raya. If one actually wants to take a Ph.D. degree from Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu and be approved by Ramananda Raya, he must first become free from all material designations (sarvopadhi-vinirmuktam tat-paratvena nirmalam). A person who identifies with his material body cannot understand these talks between Sri Ramananda Raya and Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu.

“Man-made religious scriptures and transcendental philosophical talks are quite different. Indeed, there is a gulf of difference between the two. This subject matter has been very diligently described by Sriman Madhvacarya. Since material philosophers are situated in the material conception of life, they are unable to realize the spiritual prema-vilasa-vivarta. They cannot accommodate an elephant upon a dish. Similarly, mundane speculators cannot capture the spiritual elephant within their limited conception. It is just like a frog’s trying to measure the Atlantic Ocean by imagining it so many times larger than his well.”

Madhya 8.193

“Contradictions have always existed in the soul of [individuals]. But it is only
when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem. We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.”

Thomas Merton. Thoughts in Solitude(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1956): 80-81.

“There comes a time when it is no longer important to prove one’s point, but simply to live, to surrender to God and to love.”

Thomas Merton. The Road to Joy, Robert E. Daggy, editor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989): 96.

 

Life Is Imperfect — Deal With It

“It is natural that people in the material world hanker to see a beautiful object. In materialistic life, however, our consciousness is polluted by the influence of the three modes of nature, and therefore we hanker for material objects of beauty and pleasure. The materialistic process of sense gratification is imperfect, because the laws of material nature will not allow us to be happy or satisfied in materialistic life.

“The living entity is constitutionally an eternal servant of God and is meant to appreciate the infinite beauty and pleasure of the Supreme Lord. Lord Krsna is the Absolute Truth and the reservoir of all beauty and pleasure. By serving Krsna we can also share in His ocean of beauty and pleasure, and thus our desire to see beautiful things and enjoy life will be fully satisfied.

“The example is given that the hand cannot enjoy food independently but can assimilate it indirectly by giving it to the stomach. Similarly, by serving Lord Krsna the living entity, who is part and parcel of the Lord, will derive unlimited happiness.”

SB 11.1.6-7

“We cannot avoid missing the point of almost everything we do. But what of it? Life is not a matter of getting something out of everything. Life itself is imperfect.

” All created beings begin to die as soon as they begin to live, and no one expects any one of them to become absolutely perfect, still less to stay that way. Each individual thing is only a sketch of the specific perfection planned for its kind. Why should we ask for it to be anything more?”

Thomas Merton. No Man is an Island. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983)
128-129.

 

Mere Being Alone Is Not Solitude

“Narada is giving more ways to cross beyond maya. The first is solitude (vivikta-sthanam sevate). Several times in the Bhagavad-gita Lord Krsna advises that one practice spiritual life alone.

“Solitude is particularly stressed in meditative yoga, which requires that one live alone in a secluded place (rahasi sthitah ekaki) (Bg. 6.10). And in the Thirteenth Chapter, when listing the items of knowledge, Lord Krsna includes vivikta-desa-sevitvam, “aspiring to live in a solitary place” (Bg. 13.11). Again, in the Eighteenth Chapter, when describing a person who has been elevated to the position of self-realization, Lord Krsna says that he “lives in a solitary place” (vivikta-sevi) (Bg. 18.52)”.

Narada Bhakta sutra 47

“Solitude as act: the reason no one understands solitude, or bothers to try to understand it, is that it appears to be nothing but a condition. Something one elects to undergo, like standing under a cold shower.

“Actually, solitude is a realization, an actualization, even a kind of creation, as well as a liberation of active forces within us, forces that are more than our own, and yet more ours that what appears to be “ours”. As a mere condition, solitude can be passive, inert and basically unreal: a kind of permanent coma. One has to work at it to keep out of this condition. One has to work actively at solitude, not by putting fences around oneself but by destroying all the fences and throwing away all the disguises and getting down to the naked root of one’s inmost desire, which is the desire of liberty-reality.

“To be free from the illusion that reality creates when one is out of right relation to it, and to be real in the freedom which reality gives when one is rightly related to it.”

Thomas Merton. Learning to Love, Journals Volume 6, Christine M. Bochen, editor (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997): 320-321

“Hence the need for discipline, for some kind of technique of integration that keeps body and soul together, harmonizes their powers, brings them into one deep resonance, orients the whole being towards the root of being. The need for a “way”, Presence,
invocation, mantram, concentration, emptiness. All these are aspects of a realized solitude. Mere being alone is nothing. Or at least is only a potential. Sooner or later he who is merely alone either rots or escapes.”

Learning to Love: 321.

 

Struggle and Purification

” ‘The real identity of the living being is that he is the eternal servant of Krsna.’  So if one engages himself in his original, spiritual business, acting as the servant of Krsna, then all processes of purification and reformation are fulfilled.”

CAT 10: The Process of Purification

“Life is, or should be, nothing but a struggle to seek truth: yet what we seek is really the truth that we already possess. Truth is mine in the reality of life as it is given to me to live: yet to take life thoughtlessly, passively as it comes, is to renounce the struggle and purification which are necessary.

“One cannot simply open his eyes and see. The work of understanding involves not only dialectic, but a long labor of acceptance, obedience, liberty, and love.”

Thomas Merton. Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday and Company,1966): 184.

“A great deal of virtue and piety is simply the easy price we pay in order to justify a life that is essentially trifling. Nothing is so cheap as the evasion purchased by just enough good conduct to make one pass as a ‘serious person’. ”

Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander: 195.

 

Simple Living, High Thinking

“But we have encumbered our civilization in such a way that we have lost all simple living thing. We have manufactured in so many ways encumbered ways of life. Therefore we have neglected spiritual life. And because we have neglected spiritual life there is no peace.

“If you want really peaceful life, then you have to make your material necessities simplified and engage your time for spiritual cultivation. Then you will have peace. And that is the best type of civilization. Plain living, high thinking. ”

Srimad-Bhagavatam 5.5.3 — Boston, May 4, 1968

“This will give us some idea of the proper preparation that the contemplative life requires. A life that is quiet, lived in the country, in touch with the rhythm of nature and the seasons. A life in which there is manual work, the exercise of arts and skills, not in a spirit of dilettantism, but with genuine reference to the needs of one’s existence. The cultivation of the land, the care of farm animals, gardening.

“A broad and serious literary culture, music, art, again not in the spirit of Time and Life-(a chatty introduction to Titian, Prexiteles, and Jackson Pollock)-but a genuine and creative appreciation of the way poems, pictures, etc., are made.

“A life in which there is such a thing as serious conversation, and little or no TV. These things are mentioned not with the insistence that only life in the country can prepare a [person] for contemplation, but to show the type of exercise that is needed.”

Thomas Merton. The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. William H. Shannon,
editor (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003): 131.

 

True Self and the False Ego

“One must deliver himself with the help of his mind, and not degrade himself. The mind is the friend of the conditioned soul, and his enemy as well.

“PURPORT

“The word atma denotes body, mind and soul — depending upon different circumstances. In the yoga system, the mind and the conditioned soul are especially important. Since the mind is the central point of yoga practice, atma refers here to the mind. The purpose of the yoga system is to control the mind and to draw it away from attachment to sense objects.

“It is stressed herein that the mind must be so trained that it can deliver the conditioned soul from the mire of nescience. In material existence one is subjected to the influence of the mind and the senses. In fact, the pure soul is entangled in the material world because the mind is involved with the false ego, which desires to lord it over material nature. Therefore, the mind should be trained so that it will not be attracted by the glitter of material nature, and in this way the conditioned soul may be saved.”

Bhagavad Gita 6.5

“We must be saved from immersion in the sea of lies and passions which is called “the world.” And we must be saved above all from that abyss of confusion and absurdity which is our own worldly self. The person must be rescued from the individual.

“The free son and daughter of God must be saved from the conformist slavery of fantasy, passion and convention. The creative and mysterious inner self must be delivered from the wasteful, hedonistic and destructive ego that seeks only to cover itself in disguises.”

Thomas Merton. New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions Press, 1961):38.