Naraka Chaturdasi: Monday, 12-11-2012

Naraka Chaturdasi : Monday, 12-11-2012

On this day, the victory of Lord Krishna over the asura King Narakasura is celebrated.

Narakasura, was the powerful warrior son Bhudevi had prayed Bhagwan Vishnu for. He ruled the kingdom of Pragjyothishapuram (in modern day Assam, also once know as Kamarup), regularly troubled the Devatas and disturbed the penance of the sages. Narakaasura had also kidnapped and terrorized the gopis of Vrindavan.

Narakasura would raid and plunder the Kingdoms of the three worlds. He did not even leave the Women and would kidnap them for his own personal harem. Narakasura heard that Indra, the king of the devas, had thousands of divine elephants in his army. Now Narakasura, greedy that he was, wanted to possess everything, so he attacked the heavens.

Indra was helpless as he watched Naraka's minions plunder the heavens. Naraka himself began pursuit of the devas. While pursuing the devas, a glimmering object far away caught his eye. Upon inspection, he realised that the glimmering object was mother Aditi's (the mother of the devas) earrings. He assaulted mother Aditi and grabbed her earrings.

Tired of this harassment, Indra and the other Devatas approached Lord Krishna and pleaded with Him to protect them from the asura King.

Indra reached Krishna's palace when Krishna was with Satyabhama. He told Krishna about the happenings and begged him for his help.

But the demon king could only be killed by a woman. So Lord Krishna asked His wife, Satyabhama, the reincarnation of Bhudevi, to be His charioteer in the battle with Narakasura.

Krishna summoned his mount Garuda (a giant eagle) and made way towards Naraka's fortress. An impenetrable barrier of magic mountains surrounded Naraka's fortress. The mountains were such that a barrier would come up from any side that Krishna tried to enter the fortress. Krishna, unperturbed, hurled his mace at the barrier and shattered the entire mountain range in one blow. A downpour of mystical weapons rained down on them. Krishna fired multiple arrows and destroyed all the weapons. In this manner Krishna destroyed countless other mystical barriers and finally reached Naraka's fortress.

Naraka's palace was guarded by the five-headed demon Mura. Mura hurled countless weapons at Krishna, but Krishna shot each one down with his bow and arrow. Then Krishna used his sudarshan Chakra and hurled it towards Mura dislocating Mura's five heads. Mura fell to the ground, dead.

Krishna challenged Naraka to battle and in the fierce encounter that ensued Krishna fainted. Satyabhama took Krishna's place and killed Naraka in a fierce battle. Only a woman could kill this demon and satyabhama did it. Lying on his deathbed on the battlefield, Narakasura begged for Lord Krishna's and Satyabhama's mercy. Hearing his entreaties, Bhudevi declared that his death should not be a day of mourning but an occasion to celebrate and rejoice. Bhudevi then sang hymns in praise of Krishna and begged him to take Naraka's son Bhagdatta under his protection. Krishna placed Bhagdatta on the throne and then freed all of Naraka's prisoners. The devas showered Krishna with flowers from the heavens. Bhagadatta was a great devotee of Lord Vishnu and he obtained a great weapon called Narayanastra from him. He was also a very skillful in the art of training Elephants for war. Bhagadatta later fought on the Kauravas side with his huge Elephant battalion and Kirata army (Chinese mercenaries) in the Mahabharata War and died at the hands of Arjuna.

24-Hour Kirtan, New Vrindavan 2010

"Once, in a holy place in the forest of Naimisharanya,



great sages headed by Shaunaka assembled to perform a thousand-year sacrifice for the satisfaction of the Lord and His devotees." —Srimad-Bhagavatam 1.1.4

Like great sages from the Vedic era gathering to uplift humanity, every summer for the last few years devotees from North America and abroad have gathered at the holy place of New Vrindaban, USA, to perform congregational chanting, kirtan, of the Hare Krishna maha-mantra.

As you might expect from the event’s name, the chanting didn’t stop for twenty-four solid hours.

Thanks to our friends at Mantralogy.com, we’re again able to present you with these great kirtan recordings of the event.

In addition to traditional musical accompaniment (harmonium, mridanga, kartals), you may also hear bass guitar, electric guitar, and the occasional trumpet blast—along with hundreds of enthusiastic voices chanting the maha-mantra.

If you enjoy these kirtans, please let your friends know about them, and just try not to sing along. You may find it impossible!

24-Hour Kirtan, New Vrindavan 2009

"Once, in a holy place in the forest of Naimisharanya,



great sages headed by Shaunaka assembled to perform a thousand-year sacrifice for the satisfaction of the Lord and His devotees." —Srimad-Bhagavatam 1.1.4

Like great sages from the Vedic era gathering to uplift humanity, every summer for the last few years devotees from North America and abroad have gathered at the holy place of New Vrindaban, USA, to perform congregational chanting, kirtan, of the Hare Krishna maha-mantra.

As you might expect from the event’s name, the chanting didn’t stop for twenty-four solid hours.

In addition to traditional musical accompaniment (harmonium, mridanga, kartals), you may also hear bass guitar, electric guitar, and the occasional trumpet blast—along with hundreds of enthusiastic voices chanting the maha-mantra.

If you enjoy these kirtans, please let your friends know about them, and just try not to sing along. You may find it impossible!

24-Hour Kirtan Festival, New Vrindavan 2008

Radhanatha Swami sings at the 2008 24 Hour Kirtan Festival

The mp3s below represent the full 24-hours of the 2008 Twenty-four Hour Kirtan Festival, recorded in June in New Vrindavan, West Virginia. This once-a-year festival of non-stop chanting--one of the only such events to be held in the United States--attracts hundreds of the most devoted and experienced Krishna kirtan singers and musicians from all over the world. Lovers of kirtan will certainly enjoy hearing many vastly expanded versions of familiar kirtan melodies, recorded in a uniquely powerful and focused devotional environment.


In absolute reality, there is no difference between Krishna and His names. Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu--Krishna Himself--recommended constant chanting of the names of Krishna as the most essential spiritual practice of this day and age. The ever-fresh attractiveness of the maha-mantra certainly comes through in these recordings--which Krishna.com is happily able to present in their entirety. We think you'll agree that these are some of the most fresh, exciting, and inspiring kirtans in the world.


Make sure to also check out The 25th Hour - Remarks from the 24 Hour Kirtan, a video of the realizations and recaps from the 2008 New Vrindavan 24 Hour Kirtan Festival.

The 25th Hour - Remarks from the 24 Hour Kirtan

Hot off the editing table, become inspired by these realizations and recaps from the New Vrindavan 24 Hour Kirtan Festival 2008. Immediately following the completion of the 24 hours, we went and asked the participants to share any realizations that came to them. Here’s what followed.

01 BadaHari Dasa

02 Vishvambhar Dasa

03 Acyuta Gopi Dasi

04 Ananta Govinda Dasa

05 HH Niranjana Swami

06 Keshavacharya Dasa

07 Madhava Dasa

08 HH Radhanath Swami

09 HH Sivaram Swami

10 HH Niranjana Swami

11 Vatsal Dasa

12 Ajamila Dasa

13 Kalindi Dasi

14 Jamuna Dasi

15 Abhay Dasa

16 Gopal Dasa

17 Sarvajaya Dasa

18 Jahnavi Dasi

19 Jagannath Kirtan Dasa

20 Nirantara Dasa

21 Acyuta Gopi Dasi

22 Madhava Dasa

23 HH Radhanath Swami

24-Hour Kirtan, New Vrindavan 2007

Recently, some of the best kirtan singers came together in New Vrindavan, West Virginia, for a 24-hour kirtan festival to glorify the holy names of Krishna. Here are the streaming audio live recordings of this historic event. Songs are listed chronologically starting from the first hour until the 24th hour. You can also download the mp3 files.

01 Ananta Govinda das

02 Akincana Krishna das

03 Acyuta Gopi dasi

04 Chaitanya Ananda das

05 Vishvambhara das

06 Vishvambhara das

07 Vishvambhara das

08 Rasika dasi

09 Krishna Kishore das

10 Balarama Chandra das

11 Yamuna dasi

12 Gaura Vani das

13 Madhava das

14 Gaura Vani das

15 Gaura Vani das

16 Acyuta Gopi dasi

17 Ananta Govinda das

18 Ananta Govinda das

19 Ananta Govinda das

20 Akincana Krishna das

21 Vishvambhara Das

22 Balarama Chandra das

23 Jaya Jagannath Das

24 Jamuna Jivan Das

25 Jamuna Jivan Das

26 Madhava das

The Gita: Condensed

by Kalakantha dasa

In 1968 His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada published the Bhagavad-gita As It Is, which has since sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages. As a lifetime devotee of Krishna and a consummate Sanskritist, Srila Prabhupada spells out the clear conclusions of the Gita that are often obscured by arms-length commentators with their own agenda. Srila Prabhupada's purports (commentaries) illuminate for us the verses spoken by Krishna and Arjuna. The following condensed version of their historic conversation combines key points from the verses and purports in the same sequence as the original. These are not direct quotes and thus cannot replace the complete Bhagavad-gita As It Is. Instead, this version provides an overview of the philosophical thread of the Gita. It is consistent with Srila Prabhupada's comprehensive edition and can be used for introduction or review.

Part 1: Action

Arjuna: Krishna, please drive my chariot between the two armies. Let me see which followers of that criminal Duryodhana have come here to fight.

Krishna (Steering the fine golden chariot between the two huge armies facing each other on the vast, flat battlefield): Just see, cousin, all the great warriors assembled here.

Arjuna (aghast): Krishna, I can’t fight all these dear relatives, teachers, and elders. My whole family would be destroyed. I’d rather die, or just live as a beggar.

Krishna (smiling kindly) : You forget that everyone is an eternal soul, not a physical body. You can kill the body but not the soul.

Arjuna: Krishna, how could I kill these worshipable men? Any victory would be tainted with their blood. I don’t know what to do. Please instruct me.

Krishna: My friend, you’re a warrior. Fight, but not for yourself. Fight for the Supreme. Then you’re acting as the eternal soul you truly are. Fight all varieties of materialism and be a yogi.

Arjuna: What do yogis do? How do they behave?

Krishna: Yogis perform their external duties without attachment because they have mastered their mind and senses. They enjoy an inner happiness that is lost to most people.

Arjuna: You’re telling me to be happy within and fight at the same time. That’s a contradiction.

Krishna: You can’t live without acting, Arjuna. Instead of acting for yourself, turn what you do into a sacrifice for the Supreme. Then you’ll be happy.

Arjuna: What is this power pushing me toward acting selfishly?

Krishna: Lust, Arjuna, born of festering desire. Lust destroys your ability to think clearly. For a long time I’ve been teaching people how to use yoga to conquer lust. I taught the Sun-god, who taught his son, who started a long chain of teachers. Somehow, though, the original knowledge has been lost, so today, dear friend, I’ll teach it to you Myself.

Arjuna: How could You teach the Sun-god, who’s so much older than You?

Krishna: Ordinary bodies age and die, Arjuna, but My body is spiritual and never deteriorates. From time to time I appear in society to help the good people and to vanquish the bad. Good people get rid of their lust and turn their love to Me. But there are many kinds of people, and I respond to everyone individually.

Act for My sake, Arjuna. When you do, everything involved—your work, your equipment, your knowledge—becomes part of a blissful offering, a sacrifice for the Supreme. There are many ways to sacrifice, Arjuna, so you need to find a truly enlightened guru to help you sort them out.

Acting without attachment and acting for Me are both forms of yoga. However, by acting for Me you automatically act without attachment. Remember that I’m your friend, that I own everything, that all action is meant for Me. Then you’ll have endless inner peace. You’ll do your duty in perfect yoga, or union with Me. To do this you may find it helpful to perform the long austerities involved with the mystic process of yoga and meditation.

Arjuna: Making the mind sit still is like trying to control the wind. Mystic yoga seems too hard for me.

Krishna: Yes, it is hard, but it’s possible.

Arjuna: What if I start the path of yoga and fail? Then I’m a loser, materially and spiritually.

Krishna: If you do the right thing, how can you lose? At least in your next lifetime you’ll be better off. On the other hand, if you simply learn to serve Me with love, at death you’ll come to Me and leave this horrible world.

About Reincarnation

The Vedic teaching on the cycle of birth, death, and birth again.

Jayadvaita Swami

Does some aspect of our personality survive bodily death?
If it does survive, where does it go?
Eternal heaven or hell?
Or perhaps we merge into some sort of spiritual oneness.
At the end of one lifetime, do we embark upon another?
The explanatory value of the
Vedic point of view
Who gives credence to this?
If reincarnation is a fact, how does it work?
Why reincarnation? What’s the purpose?
What about scientific evidence for reincarnation?
Deja vu
Channeling, or mediumistic communication
Past-life regressions under hypnosis
Spontaneous experiences of past lives
Spontaneous past-life memories in children
Objections to the idea of reincarnation
If I had past lives, why don’t I remember them?
Since we don’t remember past lives, what could be the use of them?
If reincarnation is a fact, why is the population increasing?
Well, if you believe in it, I suppose it could be true for you.
How could I enter someone else’s body and become someone else?
But the Bible denies reincarnation.
Clearly, the idea of reincarnation proceeds merely from wishful thinking.
Personality is but a product of the higher nervous system and the brain. So how could it move from one physical body to another?

About Reincarnation

The Vedic teaching on the cycle of birth, death, and birth again.


Jayadvaita Swami

Live From Yoga Mala DC

As Kindred Spirits provided the entertainment for the first Yoga Mala in DC. Here are the live recordings of their bhajans.

Ram Ram Ram

Hey Govinda

Siksatakam

Jiv Jago

Krishna Murari

Gai Gaura

Hare Krishna

You Are Not Your Body

Ekendra dasa

You are not that body

The life we're living now is not our only one. We've been through many. The spark of awareness within us-- the self, or soul, or whatever you want to call it-- has no beginning and no end. No knife can cut it, no fire can burn it, no wind can blow it away.

But that spark of life keeps moving on from one body to the next. At one time you have the body of a child. Then you move on to a young person's body. Then to a middle-aged body, and then to the body of an old person. Yet in all those bodies you feel yourself to be the same you. Because you are the same you. Only your body has changed.

Your body changes, and you're always the same. So you and your body are different. You are not your body.

The final change of body is what we call "death." But it's not really final. It's only another transition, another move. Just as you change from childhood to youth to old age, at death you move on to go through the cycle again, with birth in another body.

What we do in this life sets us on our way to the next, just as what we do in school gets us ready for where we go when our schooling is over. In our next life we can go up, or we can go down. Or we can get free from the cycle altogether.

Why Meditate?

A brief intro on the subject of mantra meditation.

What are you meditating on?

Life can be full of stress and anxiety. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.

What we think about affects us. The good news is we can choose what we think about, and meditation means focusing the mind beyond our troubles on something that will give us lasting benefits.

The kind of meditation the Vedas recommend—for those of us living in the twenty-first century—is mantra meditation. This focuses the mind on the repeated sound of a mantra—a word or combination of words meant to free the mind.

There are many different kinds of mantras. The most highly recommended and effective Vedic mantra overall is the maha-mantra (“great chant for deliverance”):

hare krishna hare krishna

krishna krishna hare hare

hare rama hare rama

rama rama hare hare

Anyone who chants this mantra is said to attain the highest perfection of life—to become permanently free from all problems associated with material existence, and return to their pure, spiritual life.

God and the Absolute Truth

" . . . now there’s the Absolute Truth and not some crippled idea of luminescent gas! And all this is what we talk about when we talk about the Absolute Truth."

by Ravindra-svarupa dasa

I'd like to look at few sentences from the Introduction to Srimad-Bhagavatam and why they are important to me. When I first ran across devotees, I was in my third year of graduate school in religious studies at Temple University. I was not in comparative religion or anything as down-to-earth as that. My field was theology and philosophy of religion. I was a snob.

On campus, I ran into devotees who were jumping up and down rather vigorously, chanting with mridanga and karatalas. The first thing I thought was, "You’ll never catch me doing that."

A friend ended up dragging me to the temple. I didn’t expect much on an intellectual level. Then I read the Ishopanishad, and this crudely printed book written in simple English caused an intellectual revolution. I realized I was in the presence of first-class theology. The more I read, the more Krishna consciousness and its theology seemed to me to be professional, while everything else I had come across was amateur.

One of the first things I read was Srila Prabhupada’s Introduction to the Srimad- Bhagavatam. In the first sentence Prabhupada makes a distinction, and I have never found so clear a distinction on this point in anything I have ever read:

The conception of God and the conception of Absolute Truth are not on the same level. Srimad- Bhagavatam hits on the target of the Absolute Truth. The conception of God indicates the controller, whereas the conception of the Absolute Truth indicates the summum bonum, or the ultimate source of all energies. There is no difference of opinion about the personal feature of God as the controller because a controller cannot be impersonal.… According to the Bhagavad-gita any controller who has some specific extraordinary power is called vibhutimat sattva, or controller empowered by the Lord. There are many vibhutimat sattvas, controllers or gods, with various specific functions, but the Absolute Truth is one without a second. This Srimad- Bhagavatam designates the Absolute Truth, or the summum bonum, as the param satyam.

What is Srila Prabhupada talking about when he says that the conception of God and the conception of the Absolute Truth are not on the same level? I quickly understood that he’s talking not about the beings designated by these ideas but about the ideas themselves. In philosophy we make a distinction between a term’s connotation and its denotation. Take the terms “the morning star” and “the evening star”; they both denote the same thing, the planet Venus, but the connotation, the meaning, is different.

Srila Prabhupada is saying that God and the Absolute Truth have different connotations. He makes this clear when he says that there are many different controllers or gods. In other words, Srila Prabhupada is thinking of the Sanskrit word ishvara, which means “controller.” In principle there can be many ishvaras, or gods. The conception of God doesn’t have the same meaning as the conception of the Absolute Truth. There can be many controllers or gods, but the ultimate source of all energies is the Absolute Truth.

Here Srila Prabhupada is thinking of the definition of Brahman (Absolute Truth) given in the Vedanta-sutra. The Vedanta-sutra says that Brahman is that from which everything emanates. It is that which maintains everything then re-absorbs it all, the ultimate source of all energies. There are many controllers or gods of very specific powers, but the Absolute Truth is one without a second.

What does it mean to be a "soul?"

Ekendra dasa

body minus soul equals no action

We’re not bodies that “have” souls. We’re souls who have bodies. Souls don’t require bodies to be able to live. Bodies without souls are called “dead.”

Souls are real people, with unique personalities—complete with senses, mind, and intelligence. Souls don’t die, don’t get “old,” never cease to exist, and always maintain their individuality.

Souls are spiritual. “Spiritual” means perpetually joyful and perfectly conscious. Why do we not like pain, death, sadness, and being confused about what to do next? They don't feel right because they are the exact opposites of our natural, spiritual life symptoms.

The natural activity of souls is serving the Supreme Soul—God—in a unique relationship. We may try to avoid this, but it’s the only activity that can totally satisfy us. Our spiritual nature demands we must love and serve something.

Because we have free will and some independence; we can either direct our love and service to God (a.k.a. Krishna), or imagine ourselves to be supreme—in a temporary, illusory (non-spiritual) world.

A life of illusion can never satisfy a spiritual being. Eventually, every soul in the temporary, material world becomes convinced that there must be something more. At that time, the soul may again be curious to learn about his spiritual nature, and eventually want to re-establish his eternal relationship with Krishna.