Why must we be bound by the past? I don’t believe the descriptions in scripture are literal. It’s all symbolic. You can’t contain God/Goddess in a book, statue, nature, mantra or anything else. They’re all symbols pointing to the Divine.
In my searching, I have found no more attractive description of the spiritual world than Goloka Vrindaban. It’s where I want to be. I have my own version of it as I’ve adapted it in my own mind. I feel like I’m in a good space now and want to share with others how to get there too. I want to attract persons to this because it’s so beautiful. Yet the heavily enculturated Indian presentations present obstacles for me and other Westerners in the enjoyment of rasa. So many of the plants, foods, etc. can’t even be translated because there’s no English equivalent. Of course, it’s culturally conditioned. Every thing we experience is.
Radha Krishna, the Divine Couple, represents the epitome of realization of the Eternal Ground of All Being. They are represented differently as the Lord and Lady, Aum, yin-yang, etc. I believe it is possible to separate the divine essence, the Archetype, the symbols, etc. and transplant them to the West. I want to maintain the erotic pastimes and pure love of the Divine Couple for each other and for all beings. It’s what attracted me to this path from the beginning.
I feel and believe I was an Indian devotee renunciate in my previous life. I spent my first Saturn cycle relearning what I knew in my previous life (ISKCON sannyasi, Lalita Prasad Thakur & three years in India). I spent the second Saturn cycle readapting to the West, seeing what stuck from the past, exploring lifestyles and various spiritual paths. I have just begun my third Saturn cycle which is a time to synthesize and bring together East and West. That is why I have renamed my autobiography Full Circle: A Spiritual Journey and am continuing it up to the present.
I am ready to bring East and West together to form a new whole. Something new is being born, but it must be born from the old and not some concocted half-baked endeavor. This indiginization of Radha Krishna devotion must be done by those of us who are first and second (third?) generation Western devotees. Bhaktivinode Thakur would see this as progress.
