The excerpt below is from a talk Radhanath Swami gave on Creating Community at The Bhakti Center in New York City. It was first published in the weblog Notes From the Bhakti Center. - Editor
“Many years ago, my spiritual teacher, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, wrote a proposal that the best way to honor the memory of Mahatma Gandhi would be to create a community based on his teachings and the ideals he lived and died for. Gandhi was a student of the Bhagavad-gita. He read the Gita everyday and said it was his source of inspiration. So Srila Prabhipada recommended that those who were serious about honoring Gandhi should come together and create a community with the Gita’s teachings in the center.”
“The best way to honor a great person is to create a community based on the values that he or she taught and lived by and exemplified. That means each of us has to take the responsibility to understand what really is valuable. What are those values that our teachers and guides exemplified?”
“If we want to honor these great souls, we must learn to value the simple virtue of seva, unselfish service, based on Bhakti.”
“What is Bhakti? Bhakti means the inherent love of the soul. Sri Chaitanya taught this. He said, nitya-siddha krishna-prema sradhya kabhu naya. Prema means ecstatic infinite love for Krishna, for God, and it is the inherent nature within all of us. Wherever there is life, there is that prema inherent nature of life. Whether we are man or woman, black or white, whether we’re from the east or the west (village), or whether we’re a human or an animal or an insect or a fish. Wherever there is life there is the atma, the soul. And the nature of that soul is that it is part of God.”
“The perfection of our love is to serve, to be compassionate, to be completely intoxicated by absorption in the beloved. In such a state we are eager to utilize everything as an expression of that love. Real human evolution is when we rise from the desperate need to take things, to the joy of serving, giving. This is Bhakti.”
“Because it is our inherent nature, we all must serve. But we can choose where to direct our propensity to serve. As long as we are servants of greed, lust, anger, envy, arrogance, illusion– what is the question of happiness? There will inevitably be all kinds of conflict, within and without. However, we can also utilize our propensity to serve in such a way that we can help one another to find something more beautiful. Krishna means the all-beautiful.”
“This is the purpose of The Bhakti Center, here in the East Village of New York City. We are trying to create a space where people can come together to encourage one another, inspire one another, and to really go deep into what is truly meaningful and valuable in our lives. The Bhakti Center should be a kind of spiritual oasis in a desert where superficiality, greed, and arrogance are the norm. The world needs that very much.”