Bhagavad Gita Chapter 17 Verses 8 - 19

Bhagavad Gita Chapter 18 Verses 13 - 17

5- The Most Merciful Master

Choices - Sri Prahlad

Q&A session lead by Swami Sarvapriyananda as part of a spiritual retreat at the Vedanta Society of New York on February 9th, 2020. List of questions with timestamps:
• 6:25 --  How to know the Self when It cannot be objectified? Is inference sufficient?
• 27:30 -- While we agree that waking, dreaming, and deep sleep are experienced in consciousness, why can't we say that they are real instead of unreal since they are indeed experienced? 
• 44:50 -- If the realization of atman is an experiential reality, then why is there a logical conflict between different spiritual traditions? Does it mean that the realized master's have different experiences?
•  54:35 -- If consciousness illumines Maya, then why does it need the support of Maya to realize itself?  

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Ask Swami 5/3/2020

1 - Mirabai

4 - Shri Shankaracharya (Part 1) - The Greatest MIssionary

Caring - Krishna Nandini Mataji

Initiation is the beginning of a lifelong commitment to this path. As soon as we have faith in a guru and the willingness to serve and to follow, then our relationship with our Guru has been established. But the particular ceremony, the particular offering of initiation is a deep, sincere, lifelong commitment to follow. ‘yasya prasadad bhagavat-prasado’ to please our Guru, and please all the previous acharya and Krishna, though the sincerity of our efforts, 
So these vows that are taken, sometimes Prabhupad would call them rules and regulations. And especially Srila Prabhupada explains from Krishna’s words in Bhagavad Gita ‘raga-dvesa-vimuktais tu’ these are the regulative principles of freedom. They're not meant to bind us, they're meant to the parade us because we're already bound. Sometimes people think that these rules and regulations are too restrictive. But the reality is we are already restricted, our hands, our legs, our heads, our feets, our hearts, our brains, every part of us is shackled, like prisoners of Maya’s dictations. And whatever principles there are in Bhakti, are there to liberate us from those shackles, liberate us from that bondage, so that we could actually be free to live by the real spirit of the soul, to be free, to love Krishna, to be an instrument of Krishna’s love and to be happy, to be free from the fear of death and all the uncertainties of life. So, we're taking vows for this purpose.

Initiation Is The Beginning Of A Lifelong Commitment

When a devotee gives in charity, he doesn’t think that ‘I am giving something which is mine.’ He thinks that ‘this is the property of God and is meant for the benefit of others, and I am simply the servant delivering it for the benefit of others. I don’t get credit, the master who has created it, the Lord who has sent it to this person, he gets the credit, I am only did the deliverer, I am only the servant.’ This is knowledge. But even such charitable understanding of life is so rare in this age of kaliyuga. In this age everything wants to take more and more and more and more. For me, for my family, for my society. This is the mentality of Shishupal, who want to take the property of Krishna and enjoy. And the jiva soul which is part and parcel of Krishna, is also meant simply meant for Krishna’s service. As Rukmini is simply meant for Krishna’s service. And the exploitative forces of this world being directed by material energy or maya are trying to take our consciousness which is meant for Krishna, trying to take it and exploit it, rape it, use it for its own exploitative purposes. And the whole human society is simply victimized by the exploitation of materialistic forces.

Exploitative Mentality Of Maya And It's Remedy

Disquiet Junto Project 0473: Placebo Effect
The Assignment: Record the second third of a trio that others will complete.

Step 1: This week’s Disquiet Junto project is the second in a sequence intended to encourage and reward asynchronous collaboration. This week you’ll be adding music to a pre-existing track, which you will source from the previous week’s Junto project (disquiet.com/0472 3). Note that you aren’t creating a duet — you’re creating the second third of what will eventually be a trio. Keep this in mind. Leave space for what is yet to come.

Step 2: The plan is for you to record a short and original piece of music, on any instrumentation of your choice, as a complement to the pre-existing track. First, however, you must select the piece of music to which you will be adding your own music. There are tracks by 68 musicians in all to choose from, 62 as part of this playlist:

https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/sets/disquiet-junto-project-0472 4

Step 3: Record a short piece of music, roughly the length of the piece of music you selected in Step 2. Your track should complement the piece from Step 2, and leave room for an eventual third piece of music. When composing and recording your part, don’t alter the original piece of music at all, except to pan the original fully to the left if it hasn’t been panned left already. In your finished audio track, your new part should be panned fully to the right. To be clear: the track you upload won’t be your piece of music alone; it will be a combination of the track from Step 2 and yours.

Step 4: Also be sure, when done, to make the finished track downloadable, because it will be used by someone else in a subsequent Junto project.

Step 5: You can contribute more than one track this week. Usually Junto projects have a one-track-per-participant limit. You can do up to two total. For the second, it’s appreciated if you try to work with a solo that no one else has used yet ( look at the project’s post on Lines, linked to in these instructions, or to the project playlist, which will be posted here once tracks start coming in). The goal is for many as people as possible to benefit from the experience of being part of an asynchronous collaboration. After a lot of detailed instruction, that is the spirit of this project.

Track notes: 

I selected a track at random and landed on Lake Forest Sound Machine's track consisting of splattering rhythms and coarse tones. I thought I might compliment it with a similarly choppy structured feel, albeit with harmonious blurs swooshing around. I used my usual modular set-up to accomplish this, with the new addition of the (frankly) astounding Make Noise Morphagene, which just arrived yesterday. It cost a small fortune and its purchase was an opulent early-40th-birthday-present-to-me, because blowing nearly a grand (AU) on a module needs some kind of exceptional justification.

1 - Mirabai

Nityananda Charan Das