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Post by Nityānanda dāsa on May 10, 2019 4:30:52 GMT -6
Good morning from New Jersey!
Radhe Radhe!
I wanted to bring up the issue of sanga/community because while I am in an area where there are lots of IGM folks, I really find little benefit in their sanga. Yet on the other hand, those places are probably the few places where I might meet someone interested in the raga marg and the practices of bhakti coming from one of the bona fide pranali lines. What to do?
I know that this symposium is a good place and the internet can present sanga options in some sense with all the video chatting possibilities we have now, but I just wanted to throw this question out to ask what you all do for sanga in case you find yourselves in the same boat.
I do have friends who do not practice bhakti, but it is difficult to relate with them on the important things in life so to speak. I'm not a TV watcher and do find most pursuits kind of dry. I would love to connect with people to do regular kirtan, study and such, but hard to find those kind of people to connect with also.
Thanks in advance for any time and thoughts you have in this matter.
PS - Are there many people active on this site these days?
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Post by Ed on May 16, 2019 16:25:40 GMT -6
Hi, Nilamadhava Dasa
Well, that's a good question, more than a few are familiar with that boat. I do think sanga remains an essential aspect of life in all stages, and I guess it depends on the person, someone’s sense of sanga could be fulfilled with one or two people, another’s would need an entire temple complex, and everything in between. And this can change with time because of its connection with faith. Along with this sense of community there’s also the recommendation from Sri Rupa Goswamin as to what kind of sanga we should strife for, as rare as it may happen to be. I hope that you can find the sanga you’re looking for, in the meantime sites like this and other online options are good placeholders, and valuable archives.
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Post by Nityānanda dāsa on May 17, 2019 8:53:20 GMT -6
Thanks Ed. I agree and at this point, I would be lucky to find one or two sadhus to develop sanga with. This site/forum is an excellent place, but I also do like the face to face element as well.
I have participated in regular phone conference calls, whether it be a questions and answers session or a live class given by a senior sadhu. Maybe we could find out if Nitai Dasa-ji would be interested in doing something regular like that. Maybe doing a reading of what he's working on or anything else he might like to read. And/or if we have a handful of people interested, we could take turns doing readings or something? I've used freeconferencecall.com in the past and it's a great service. I'd be happy to do the leg work for that.
I do find it odd in one sense that although I live in an area where there are a good number of people who have some contact with Caitanya Vaishnavism (mostly IGM sadly), I would hope there would be one or two who are members of traditional Caitanya Vaishnava lineages. I haven't found them yet!
Anyway, just some food for thought. What do you think? Radhe Radhe!
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Post by Ed on May 17, 2019 12:06:41 GMT -6
Those regular Q&A sessions and classes sound good, but yes I think I know what you mean, specially when it’s time for kirtan.
Well, I believe Nitai Das has some plans to that effect for the future, starting with Sri Jiva’s grammar, but let’s see what he thinks. Anyway, that would be great.
Hey perhaps there are some, but don’t visit the IGM temples, or they're trying to stay low-key, hope you can find them, NJ is a big place, I’d be surprise to find none as well.
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Post by meeno8 on Dec 6, 2019 16:12:24 GMT -6
There is the larger community, and then there is our 'tribe', if you will. It consists of a widespread diaspora of CV adherents in isolated pockets outside of India and bigger semi-isolated pockets within India.
Here is the dilemma I see: People tend to get too sucked into the powerful maelstrom that is social media and blogs in general, and I admit I have falled prey to that trap more than once in the past. It is really almost hypnotic. I am not a literary critic, but I am a published author with a book from a real publisher (not vanity self-publishing), and frankly there was very little editing required on my manuscript (mostly cutting down the number of pages by about 30% or so), because I do have a good command of the English language and some writing skills on a professional level. However, I see all these people online that think that have writing skills, let they are sorely lacking in those. Spelling and grammatical errors in nearly every sentence is fairly characteristic of the content they churn out in endless posts. Being iconoclastic about maintaining the English language as it is taught in schools may seem harmless enough, but the danger is ambiguity for example, and the meaning gets garbled or lost on the reader. And the reader may push back angrily when they think the writer just wrote something other than they intended.
The bottom line is that if we are to have any CV sites with any integrity, then there has to be tight oversight and editing standards on posts, without being too restrictive on the participants.
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Post by meeno8 on Jul 30, 2020 12:53:16 GMT -6
Reflecting on my time within ISKCON from mid 1974 until early 1979, I have to say that it was a very positive experience. Yes, I had a better experience after moving on and then merging into the river of mainstream CV. However, within IGM, I had the opportunity to travel with Vishnujana Swami as a member of his band, study drawing, painting, Sanskrit and Bengali at BBT, perform puja on the altars, learning to cook and millinery skills, learning fine carpentry while working on the conversion of used Greyhound buses into temples. The added plus was having the time to do a full lakh of nama-japa when things were slow at BBT. The biggest plus was getting to know my current guru-bhais and guru-bons that came out of that institution, including Pandit Nitaidas and our senior member Jagodash Ji, who was hanging around the LA temple and studying Bengali with us in the late 1970s.
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