In2-MeC

ISKCON Bhaktivedanta Sadhana Asrama (IBSA), Govardhana, India
16 May 2004

I arrived at IBSA at about noon today. It's very hot here in Govardhana. First thing I did was to take a pleasant transcendental dip in the pure cooling waters of Manasi Ganga. Rocana and Martanda are staying in Vrndavana, in the vicinity of the ISKCON Krsna-Balarama Mandira. Here my siksa-disciple Dauji das Brahmacari is assisting me. He is the former Bhakta Gennadi, recently initiated by HH Sivarama Maharaja.

Before proceeding to Nepal at the beginning of May I stopped in here to leave my six salagrama silas under the care of Dauji Prabhu. Eight salagrama silas came to me while on pilgrimage to Shalagram. So now I have fourteen and that's too many for me to travel with. Dauji Prabhu tells me that a disciple of mine in the Ukraine, Prema-vanya Prabhu, is eager to worship the original "team" of silas. In 10 days a Ukranian devotee will return to his country from Vrndavana and deliver those silas to him.

My own worship will not change. Sri-Sri Jagannatha-Sudarsana is being replaced by a new Jagannatha-Sudarsana. There's a new Sri-Sri-Sri Laksmi-Sesasayi taking over for the earlier Ones. Lord Yajna-Purusa will take the place of the Nila-Sudarsana Deity.

I return to Delhi on 20 May. On the 22nd early morning I fly to Amsterdam. Thus starts off another European tour.

So here I am, sitting here under a ceiling fan that blows spun heat, wondering when I'll be able to upload this text to In2-MeC. The Govardhana telephone connection to the Internet isn't working at present.

The lunch prasadam gong just rang.

So that's all for now. I have a lot of stuff stacked up in my head that I want to write about. But the effects of the traveling I've been doing lately, combined with India's baking summer temperatures, have cooked off a lot of my concentration. I'll be more focused after lunch, a nap, and another dip in one of the bodies of sacred waters assembled here in Sri Govardhana.

From the late 1970s through the '80s on into the early '90s I was involved in ISKCON's underground preaching effort behind the Iron Curtain. I used to feel obliged to keep myself informed of the intellectual currents in Eastern European countries. That's how I came to know of a book entitled The Unbearable Lightness of Being, originally Nesnesitelna lehkost byti by Czech author Milan Kundera.

When his book came into print in 1984 the author had for nearly a decade been living in France. But the heart of his book is the life that people lived in Czechoslovakia when the Soviet Red Army invaded the country in the late 1960s in order to halt the liberalization program of Alexander Dubcek, and, after that time of military law, when a severe Communist dictatorship of Czech and Slovak apparatchiks took power after Dubcek.

The problem a devotee will have with reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being is that there's a lot of sex in it. Not graphic sex. But many pages are about couples engaged in "making love," and about the emotional-psychological bonds that tie these couples together. I don't recommend this book for that.

Apart from the sex, the book contains some useful philosophical insights. The central theme is expressed in the title: that a person--a soul, actually--finds his being, or his bare state of existence, unbearably light. Even though great philosophers of old like Parmenides counted lightness as a positive, desirable state, and even though today we continue to equate lightness with relief, release and freedom (while on the other hand we equate heaviness with being burdened, tied down, enslaved), still it is not enough for us simply "to be." We have "to do." And, you see, that's precisely why there's so much sex in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Because when people exercise their being by doing things, what they do is centered on sex. And by so doing they hope their lives will gain weight and significance. Kundera explains on page 5:

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives comes to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Fulfillment. The Real. The True. That's what people wish will be the outcome of their activities. However, Sri Prahlada Maharaja famously states in Srimad-Bhagavatam 7.9.43, maya-sukhaya bharam udvahato vimudhan, "Foolish people carry a heavy burden of unreal happiness." In lifting such heavy burdens as are described by Srila Prabhupada in his translation and purport to this verse, people believe themselves to be accomplishing something that makes their lives worthwhile. But Prahlada points out that all they are getting from lugging their loads about is maya-sukha, a sense of satisfaction that is without any substance.

"Conversely," writes Kundera on the same page,

the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

This reminds me of Srila Prabhupada's explanation of phalgu-vairagya. He said that there is a River Phalgu that flows through Gaya in Bihar. It appears to be only a dry sandy riverbed, but if one pushes his hand into the sand he'll find water beheath. Similarly, a phalgu-vairagi seems to have renounced the world, but underneath, in his heart, he nurtures a huge desire to become God. Hence his vairagya (renunciation) is in reality phalgu (insignificant).

Srila Prabhupada elaborated in a lecture given in Vrndavana on 18 April 1975:

Rupa Gosvami says, "'Motor car is material; therefore we should not touch it'--this is phalgu vairagya." That is stated by Rupa Gosvami that prapancikataya buddhya hari-sambandhi-vastunah, mumuksubhih parityago phalgu vairagyah kathyate. Prapancikataya buddhya. "Because it is material advancement, I therefore...Brahma satya jagan mithya. This world is mithya. This, any material thing, is mithya."

No. It has got some relationship with Krsna. That is to be seen. What is that? What is this motor car? It is material. But what is this material? Bhumir apah analo vayuh kham mano buddhir eva ca, bhinna me prakrtih astadha. Where they have got this metal? This iron, wood, metal, everything, they have got from Krsna. Therefore it has got relationship with Krsna. Now, when it is manufactured, use it for Krsna. That is yukta-vairagya. So we do not hate anything, material advancement. We can utilize everything for Krsna's service. Our only preaching is that "Don't forget Krsna." That is our business.

Thus there actually is a type of "doing" that gives true significance to our "being." That "doing" is devotional service, which is yukta-vairagya, genuine renunciation in Krsna consciousness. The bhara or heavy weight of material existence comes down on us when we forget Krsna in the midst of what we are doing. Krsna is Bharadhari, the lifter of the burden of forgetfulness that crushes the conditioned soul. To know Him as Bharadari, we need to remember Him as we perform our duties in this world.

Another interesting point that Kundera makes about "unbearable lightness" has to do with Western values. From pages 1-2:

If the French Revolution were to recur eternally, French historians would be less proud of Robespierre. But because they deal with something that will not return, the bloody years of the Revolution have turned into mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening to no one. There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.

Let us therefore agree that the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstances of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler's concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period of my life, a period that would never return?

This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the non-existence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.

The "world that rests essentially on the non-existence of return" is the Western world, where the doctrine of karma and reincarnation does not prevail. Kundera's point is very well taken: if the deeds of an individual man, and of mankind in general, simply evaporate in time as soon as they are done, then they have no consequence except whatever consequence is given them by the human record of history. By dry words in old books. By the ideas of academics who are sadly out of touch with the world. (Kundera gently satirizes such an academic, an idealistic leftist-intellectual Geneva professor named Franz, with these words on page 98: "Franz felt his book life to be unreal. He yearned for real life, for the touch of people walking side by side with him, for their shouts. It never occured to him that what he considered unreal (the work he did in the solitude of the office or library) was in fact his real life, whereas the parades [political demonstrations Franz liked to take part in] he imagined to be reality were nothing but theater, dance, carnival--in other words, a dream.")

Kundera cites a German proverb: Einmal ist keinmal--"What happens once might as well not have happened at all." The Western understanding of how the world works is that the events of a life or an age are momentary phenomena never to be replayed. And so these events, as good or as evil as they might seem to be the instant they happen, might as well be no events at all. We can safely shrug them off. If we knew for a fact that these events will return in the future to haunt us again and again, then shrugging them off would not be so easy.

On page 221, Kundera has the main character of his book, a Czech man named Tomas, consider a world that worked according to a different plan.

Somewhere out in space there was a planet where all people would be born again. They would be fully aware of the life they had spent on earth and of all the experience they had amassed here.

And perhaps there was still another planet, where we would all be born a third time with the experience of our first two lives.

And perhaps there were yet more and more planets, where mankind would be born one degree (once life) more mature.

That was Tomas's version of eternal return.

Of course we here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man's power? Can he attain it through repetition?

Unable to bear the lightness of the Western "idea of history," Kundera's character speculates a universe that in key ways resembles the one described in the Vedic scriptures. There will be more ruminations on The Unbearable Lightness of Being in future entries of In2-MeC.

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