GeeVees - 00: Roots

The GeeVees is a series of articles covering reflections from a decade of spiritual and religious practice, lessons every bit as valuable for current and former Gaudiya Vaishnava adherents as they are for the thoughtful interpreter able to penetrate the universals in motion.


My Brief History with the Tradition

In the early age of fifteen, a rush of sudden interest brought me to the shore of Hinduism in my ongoing quest for curiosities. It was the Hare Krishna faith that I first met, the only extant Hindu sect in Finland offering prospects for a committed contemplative life. My initial expectations of life as a monk were soon betrayed, however, as I embarked on a tour that was to last the better part of my five monk years as a missionary promoting the movement’s literature.

The escalating discomfort with duty versus absorption, combined with a major fall-out with the then-guru, one of the many leaders of the movement who later came to retire from the obligations of guruhood and vanish to the fringes of the movement, led me, now a married man of nineteen, to seek a more genuine experience of spirituality along the lines I had chosen. Further disappointments with the movement’s leadership had me looking beyond for answers — answers I was to find with an elderly Indian guru of the same tradition making his grand tour across the West.

Hopes soon perished, with less than two years in the group, as my plate was filled with vain hopes, hollow prospects and scores of internal conflict. With all the verbal profundity, it turned out to be little more than a personality cult with more charlatans than actual substance. The trail of much of the half-baked esoterics led to the old school Gaudiya Vaishnava renunciates living in the Braj area of northern India, where I was later initiated by an old scholar, chairman of the renunciate assembly at Radhakund.

It was more than theory that I had sought, however, and naturally connected with more teachers to get hands-on experience on the lifestyle and practices of the babaji tradition. A certain charismatic teacher, singer and meditator in his own right, had us under his tutelage for the better part of four years, a time that opened whole new horizons on the content of the religious and mystic substance of the tradition. Partially brilliant and partially bizarre teachings, sometimes incongruent with the common doctrine, combined with behavior that had more to it than just personality quirks, led me away from him, and astray as far as my then-wife was concerned.

In the span the year following our divorce, I lived the better half in the way of the traditional babaji ascetics, myself engaged in intense practice day in and day out, in quantities easily eclipsing a decade of ordinary practice, whatever the quality may have been. Meeting with yet another disappointment of a teacher, and more dead-ends and impassable lands than paths you could decently walk, a return to a blank drawing board had me moving on for an indefinite pilgrimage without any particular destination.


In the Times Beyond

In late February 2008, I jumped onto a train towards Varanasi for the upcoming Shiva Ratri festival. The original plan was to head towards Orissa, exploring the combination of old Buddhist ruins and grand Hindu shrines in the general area. That, and the Puri beaches were quite inviting too. From there, I would have taken the grand circuit across the four principal Buddhist places of pilgrimage in the north. It was not to be, however — not yet, anyway.

In Sarnath, a Buddhist center half-an-hour drive outside Varanasi, I bumped into a colorful group of Buddhist monks from the Thai Theravada school. The Irish monk was heading south and incidentally had a spare train ticket. Off we went, visiting Ramana Maharshi’s ashram in Tiruvannamalai and Sai Baba’s headquarters in Puttaparthi, for a two-week tour and back. I had considered dropping off in Chennai and flying over to Sri Lanka to explore the ancient Buddhist ruins and the contemporary scene, but I rather liked both his company and his plans.

Returning to Varanasi, we were joined by a Romanian-American nun and two Thai monks for a walk towards Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha in southern Nepal just across the border. Crossing some seven hundred kilometers on foot over three weeks, I got to know the lot rather well. With all the positives, however, I understood their way of life was not cut out for me, not the way it was available in the contemporary setting anyway. I decided to stay back in Kathmandu as they left for a bus-and-train journey back to Varanasi.

It was Kathmandu where I was based for four months, spending time with friends old and new, working with a few NGOs, exploring the mountains and the world of men in a way I had never seen it before. It was a time of great evolution, re-modeling the past and transforming into a new being, an individual being who was no longer subject to rules of religious conformance.

A liberation in its own right, it created a grand arena of contemplations for me. Thence are the thoughts that follow in the upcoming essays, written over a cool Scandinavian winter near a crackling fireplace, surrounded by familiar nature-spirits and a regenerating atmosphere, a muse and a friend of many years sitting by my side.


On Gaudiya Vaishnavism

The religious tradition founded by Sri Chaitanya (1486-1534) came to be called Gaudiya Vaishnavism owing to the ancient name (Gauda) of its motherland, Bengal. Sri Chaitanya’s was a devotional movement, bent in its core on mystical absorption and participation in the cosmic drama of Radha and Krishna, the tradition’s transcendent god and goddess. The outer praxis was that of a people’s movement, ecstatic preachers and wandering bards spreading the gospel of Sri Chaitanya far and wide, the chanting of the holy names of god brought to every town and village in the movement’s path.

The theological foundation, based on elaborations on Sri Chaitanya’s teaching, was laid by the six Goswamis, renunciate disciples of his, scholars in their own right with abundant time to commit to philosophical pursuits in the rustic environment of Vrindavan, the place of Krishna’s sports in the years bygone. It is especially the Vrindavan tradition that holds the meditational practices in the highest value, generation after generation preserving, interpreting and elaborating on the esoteric heritage of the Goswamis.

On grassroots level, the basics of Gaudiya Vaishnavism are not that radically different from other devotional Hindu movements. Some of the tradition’s later mutations, the Hare Krishnas for a good example, appear to have almost entirely shunned the esoteric tradition, favoring a public digest version of Hindu devotional religion with a few idiosyncrasies thrown in. The stripped version of the tradition is not, however, too compelling for a western audience, for one might just as well choose any other tradition that is better localized and established, being left with every bit as much substance with fewer cultural complications.

At its heart, beyond preliminary ideas of understanding the nature of spirit and matter and their interconnection with god, the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition aims to dissociate the psyche of the adherent from the present state, associating it with a sense of identification with the residents of Krishna’s transcendent heaven realm. The inner sensation of the adherent evolves from faith through various steps to fulfilled love, transporting his soul and mind away from the current world and implanting them in the spirit-identity. It is the fundamental incompatibility of the two worlds that most serious practitioners seem to struggle with.


Appeal for the Adherent

As it is now officially declared across the vast internet fields that I am an apostate unworthy of association, why would a practicing Gaudiya Vaishnava dare reading my writings? There may, after all, be lurking many a seed-of-doubt, crisis-of-faith and confusing-concept under the foliage. It would perhaps be better to just sleep in the cradle of belief, shielded from influences that could expose you to the unwanted.

The fact of the matter is that I was every bit as much in the cradle as most of my former comrades of faith, and these are the issues I had to confront as I rocked in the cradle over the years. They are real issues, and they deserve to be explored. Whether my solutions are real is immaterial; it is the questions we must all unearth and ponder in our depths. Unlocking the questions may, in fact, turn out to be a mine of potentials revealed with the perspective expansion.

I am sometimes asked whether it might be better to just forget about it all myself, and indeed I have received a fair hate mail or two over my writings. It is absurd for anyone to assume that twelve years of intense practice, and by far the biggest continuous tract of my life so far, is something one could just wipe aside as if it never existed. And neither do I see a valid reason for it, inasmuch I may have the ability to observe subtleties beyond a black-and-white model of absolutes.

The many valuable lessons of my Gaudiya Vaishnava years remain with me as an active facet of my sphere of understanding. Experiences positive or negative, they were all due coming and molded me in the ways I needed, crashing into my life one after another on karmic tracks beyond my capacity to observe. They were all good, for they were all for the good, and I believe sharing of the experience is something that may help others in good, too. The disinclined are cordially invited to exclude themselves from the audience.


Appeal for the Broader Audience

No activity occurs in vacuum, in a dimension void of connections to the rest of human existence, and no idea is too contextually bound to become a slave to its times and unfit for broader application. The lessons learned over the journey, a journey still rather incomplete, have countless parallels in the countless lives of many akin to myself. It is for the perceptive seeker, student and master that I write, for those able to extract and reinvent, drawing from the identity of principles beyond the specifics.

While the parallel themes are developed to an extent in the upcoming essays, there’s a long way for me to go until a comprehensive, or even a half-way decent system of archetypal concepts is in place. The readers are invited to take my observations as seeds of inspiration, fountains for rivers and oceans of understandings exceeding mine a thousand-fold.

As Indic religion in general, Gaudiya Vaishnava talk is riddled with Sanskrit-rooted jargon and very specific and detailed uses of context-related terminology. I will be doing my best to keep the text friendly for non-expert readers, glossing the unavoidable complications and choosing colloquial terms wherever possible. Blind as I am with my own writing, an obtuse language-gremlin or two may escape the hunt — please feel at ease with giving feedback on any and all aspects of the forthcoming series.