Looking back..... - Teachings that influenced us

This forum is becoming too heavy for sometime, I find. Please lighten up everyone! Life is too short!

Leaving aside the intellectual topics, personal attacks, accusations, sadhaka-deha, siddha-deha, raganuga, kamanuga, Rupanuga... why not just as krishna bhaktas share some personal experiences, some sayings or teachings what you received in your childhood or adulthood, what have some impacts on you including the moments of trancendance?

As I am not yet initiated I cannot share anything from that level. But the parents, grandparents are also considered as guru. We all start learning from there.

And as I can see, like me many of us have reached to a stage when we look back to see what our lives have taught us and so on…

I think, this hit me when I saw down there, Advitiya 54.

Some experiences you might share in private if they are confidential. What I am going to share can be shared with all our vaishnava friends.

This is what I asked my grandmother once when she told me to count up to 16 with my fingures very slowly, but surely while I was not able to sleep. This happened somtime in my childhood. I asked her, “But why only up to 16? Why not up to 100”? I can count up to 16 in no time. As 100 will take longer then why not up to 100? That will help me to sleep. Ah! maybe, because my grandmother thinks I am too young to count up to 100. But no, my grandmother wanted me to count on my fingures (Indian traditional way) only up to 16, and when finished start counting again until I fell asleep. So that’s what I did through out my young stage, my student life without knowing, WHY? We knew we just have to follow their words. Those were the days! So pure and so innocent!

Now, the consciousness has changed and they are not with us, but their wisdom is treasured in my heart. Being Krishna-conscious, I get the answer of my wondering why number 16 was so valuable! sholo nam batrish akshar. 16 Names, 32 syllables.

hare kRSNa hare kRSNa kRSNa kRSNa hare hare |
hare rAma hare rAma rAma rAma hare hare ||

So I was introduced to Krishna-consciousness all along without even knowing and I am glad that I never had to count sheeps while I couldn’t sleep.

Now what I do? Well, we all come to this stage again when we face blanches nuits. I apply our Jagat Baba’s siksha. I chant hare kRSNa hare kRSNa kRSNa kRSNa hare hare while inhaling, and while exhaling, hare rAma hare rAma rAma rAma hare hare ||

Please start with something light yet inspiring while ordinary becomes extraordinary!

It is perhaps inevitable that this site will become more and more and beyond the reach of any individual to fully digest. This will require finding navigating tactics, like using the SEARCH function, using MEMBER names to track those individuals whose posts we find interesting, the VIEW NEW POSTS or TODAY'S ACTIVE TOPICS to see whether anything worthwhile catches your eye, etc.

Jai Radhe!

Raise your hands, everyone who reads every single post on this site. (I don't.)

Malika, you wondered in a PM why I didn't respond to this thread yet. "...many of us have reached to a stage when we look back to see what our lives have taught us and so on..." Would that be an answer?

Besides, I don't think I heard many of those cute fables when I was a kid. I love them, Panchatantra and all. I have to do some thinking before posting on this...

I enjoyed hearing your story, that was really good.
I really don't have anything to post here, though I wish I could participate in your wonderful thread.

I was looking for a thread we could share our experiences in. Thank you, Advitiya, for starting this. I was thinking about what in my youth I could share with you guys and I don't know how relevent it may be, but I can't dismiss it...so here it goes...

When I was three I had some scrabble pieces that spelled out my name. I begged my mother for the ones that spelled mommy, too. Wanting to keep these very safe and out of reach from those thieving little elves that crawled out of the paper mache plant every night, I put them in my little amber coloured plastic juice cup, like the kind you'd find in a kitch restaurant. Some thing else drew my attention and later that night I seemed to misplace my cup'o'letters and went searching for them...I wanted to have my mother show me how to spell mommy again... I peered into her room, she was reading in bed... I crept in, stealthy and silent, scoping the dresser, sills, {i]NIGHT STAND![/i] There it was, my cup! And it was full of juice! Oh No! my little mind thought, How terrible! My letters are drowning in the juice... So I rushed over, grabbed the cup and threw the contents into my (at this point, nodding out) mothers unsuspecting face.... I have yet to experience fury as such that I did then. I was dumbstruck with perfect 20/20 hindsight, seeing now my err in judgemnt. Spanked and sent to my room, my only comfort was a stashed piece of Juicy Fruit gum I scored of the nieghbor kid the day before....salty tears mixed in with the generic fruit tastes, and this oddity was beginning to calm me down...as I lay in bed, now staring at the celeing, chewing the chewed, as it was, my mother bursts in and with a look of crazed vengence, throws a cup of juice into my face....(did I fail to mention that it was grape juice?) Stunned, all I could think of was how that grape jucie altered the taste of my Juciy Fruit, & I told her so... *sob* my gum tastes like grape kool aid *sob* ...all she could do was start laughing, so I started to... & it taught me a valuable lesson in life:

Don't throw grape kool aid on mommy

When I was little I lived in the land of thunderstorms and tornados. When I was old enough to react to them my mother explained to me that the sound of thunder was God talking to us. I used to spend hours listening, trying to understand what He was saying. I was so frustrated that I couldn't understand, but so ecstatic that He should be speaking to us so frequently. I was never afraid of thunderstorms and I still love them to this day, though we rarely have any on the west coast and never the dramatic ones of my Iowa childhood. I think this began my love of nature and my connecting it to God.

Blessed Be

Oh, but I completely skipped over the most spiritual experience of my childhood, although it was second hand. It nevertheless left a big impression on me.

My greatgrandfather was in the hospital and he was not doing very well. We all knew he might die. It was Christmas eve and my family went on with their celebration for the sake of my cousins and I. I was 7 years old. After dinner we left Grandma's house and went to spend the night at my Aunt's home a few miles away, out in the countryside. It was snowing heavily and very windy, and the power and phone lines went down. We were cut off. We went to sleep and at 4 in the morning both my Mom and my Aunt heard my Greatgrandpa, Lee, call their names. It woke them both up. I was in bed with my Mom, so when she woke up I did also. They lit a candle and sat and talked about it, so I knew what had happened. They thought it was very odd and they wanted to call the hospital to check on him but the phone was still out.

The next morning--Christmas Day--as soon as phone service was restored we received a call. He had passed away at 4 in the morning, just when they were hearing him call their names.

Thank you Tapati for sharing that. You reminded me of the time I saw "God" in a mexican Restaurant....I was like 4 or 5 and on our way out I stopped and exclaimed to my mother loudly, pointing...."Look! It's God!" This is what I saw, the Mayan Sun Calendar:

Wow!

c'mon Satyabhama, surely you have many wonderful things to share....
Let's hear it!

That is an amazing image and I am sure God is there just like He is present in thunder.
How clever of you to recognize Him!

I grew up in a small town along the Appalachian Blue Ridge Mountains.
My Grandfather was minister in one of the town’s churches.

I grew up with the impression in the innocence of my childhood
that because he was minister in the church, somehow he was able to talk to God.

I smile upon remembering times had as a young boy which seemed to be not so much
about his ability to talk to God but his ability to talk to me.

And to the day he died when I was thirteen, he only ever talked to me
and somehow God was never a part of the picture.

Through many years to this day I have met complete strangers who have told me stories
of how my Grandfather visited them or someone they knew in the hospital.

And sat and talked with them
as it seemed it was my Grandfather’s favorite thing to do.

To walk hospital halls and visit the sick and the hospitalized
and whether he knew them or not, just simply talk and chat.

And told of how this brought them comfort and dissolved the pain
and even doing this long into retirement.

Later on I learned the truth as an adult that one can merely declare oneself a minister of God
and it does not necessarily mean you can talk to God.

But now, with each person I meet to this day who tells me
of how my grandfather brought comfort in his visits.

And how he was a wonderful and loving and kind person,
I know my Grandfather was talking to God.

Beautiful...

Babu! You totally made me cry. That was so sweet.

Like many children I was fond of nursery rhymes. I had a number of books with different nursery rhymes my mother would read me every night before I went to sleep. Out of all the nursery rhymes my special favourite was 'Little Boy Blue'. When I was six I even remember dressing up as little boy blue to a fancy dress party at school. It's only now with hindsight that I can understand why this simple rhyme was so special to me.

Little Boy Blue

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,
The cow's in the meadow, the sheep's in the corn.
Where is the boy who looks after the sheep?
He's under a haystack, fast asleep.
Will you wake him? No, not I,
For if I do, he's sure to cry.

That is true. I know that because I'm one of the sufferers of GD -fever.

If this topic is totally off-base or too mundane I don't mind to stop right here.

My intention was to lighten the heavy air and to discuss some of the experiences in the light of consciousness now and then. You must have some which you could share with us as well.

Dear Madhava,

Yes, I get your point. By the time you will look back, this poor mataji will depart from this world and you will start thinking, "Once upon a time there was this poor..." Or perhaps, you will not look back because you have taken shelter at the feet of your guru. I might stop delving in my past once I have guru-pAdAzraya.

Jay Radhe!

Thanks everyone for sharing your own stories. Thanks Babu, I was moved, really.

sorry, the computer at home is blitzed out beyond even rebooting
yes, I guess I figured that God would have to be something cool with the qualities of that sun calender.... it was especially the face in the middle that made me draw the conclusion that what I saw was a person... of some-sort, and the overwhelming complexity of the image somehow prompted me to conclude that only God could be so complex. who knows what we bring over from previous lives that influence us in our tender early years.

When my step daughter, Hayley, was 4 she heard a recording of Ravi Shankar and so matter of factly told my wife that that was the kind of music she danced to in her last life...

Right on! is about all I could come up with.

Ok, so you aren't an old hag like me. That means your childhood experiences are even closer and easier to access than mine are! What are some of your earliest memories of God, or talk about God? I think all of us who ended up being seriously involved in spiritual life had an early interest as well. Or else we had a Saint Paul conversion experience later on. That would also make a good story.

I use the word hag only in its most age-positive sense, of course.

I don't think it is mundane at all, I've really enjoyed the stories (Babu, you nearly brought me to tears...good tears, of course). Parents can also add in some of the sweet encounters (as Sri Jiva did) they have with their children about Krishna or anything related to spiritual life.

Could this be some ancient rememberance of Krishna..."Little Boy Blue" in our fairy tales?

Thank you everyone for appreciations of my Grandfather. I too still cry when I remember of him.

After telling that story about the grape juice, I have been thinking about how strange alot of my earliest memories were. They all [my memories] started in that brown shingle house on Lincoln Ave. in San Rafael...the one just a few houses up from the "clinic". That house had a very strange atmosphere, I recall...what to speak of my mothers Hippied out interior designing. I used to always see little elves crawling out of this paper mache flower plant we had, and I had an encounter (a close encounter? you be the judge...) of sorts, and it is still as vivid as if it had happened yesterday....

I was three...in my room across from my bed I had a toy chest. One night as I lay starring at the ceiling (I suffered from insomnia as a kid and would stare alot a night) I glanced over to the toy chest and there sitting on it was a glowing silver illuminated owl. It was very roundish and I would put the dimensions at about 2 foot tall and 1.5 foot wide. After starring at this, in wonder, a man (or what I called a robot at the time) came to the side of my bed. He also glowed in the same silver/moonish illuminative light. I had this wool knit cap my mother made for me that I absolutely cherrished and I always slept with it....well I felt compelled to give it to him...he took it and dissappeared along with the owl. It was at that point that I screamed my little head off calling for my mother, scaring the bejesus out of her as she came running in. I told ther the robot & the owl took my hat, & that I wanted it back. Although I screemed and cried after they dissappeared, it was more because they took my hat, not that I was scared. The hat was never seen again.

Later on I tried to make sense of this, wondering if the Owl represented some kind of animal totem or something. Recalling it always gives me a spiritual feeling, in the sense that I don't know what else to make of it. Now that I am wanting to try and become a servant of Our Lord Krsna, it makes even less sense, in that it could be any number of experiences.

I have no childhood experiences of God because I had an antheist upbringing, my parents are second generation atheists. I didn't search for God, He found me via Prabhupada's books. I had a powerful spiritual experience when my second son was born, though it was not directly related to religion.

I had a waterbirth and everything went very fast and smooth. My son was a healthy and beautiful 4 kg baby, but he was a little cold and uncomfortable and didn't want to eat, so the nurse took him to check him. Then somehow she burnt his back to the first and second degree with a water bottle. This happened four hours after he was born. I was in shock. I could not even pick him up anymore because when I was told about the accident, he was already in an incubator where he stayed for one week.

My husband and I stayed a bit with him in the prenatal room, my husband chanting softly some rounds. I was too numb to chant or pray, I just couldn't make sense of it at all. Everythingi had gone perfect up to the accident, and the nurse who made this horrible mistake was an old and experienced one, one of the best in the ward. I went to my room and turned on the TV. There was a BBC production of "Wuthering Heights" going on. I started to watch and after a minute I was completely glued on the screen. I even put my bed up, so that my eyes were on the same level as the screen.

It was beautifully done, the acting was raw and powerful. There weren't any distractions like expensive decors and costumes, the girl wasn't a doll-like beauty but had deep eyes and strong features. Heathcliff did look like a gypsie. And even though the story doesn't have a happy end, somehow its message about the power of love resonated with me and I felt at peace and completely relieved. I knew then that my son would be fine.

Later the nurse came to apologize personally and to see how I was doing and she was surprised at how calm I was. And even though my son developed an infection the following morning, I still kept my composure and drew on my inner strength. And he was fine eventually, within a week his wounds healed and nowadays he has only a small pale round spot on his back where he was burnt to the second degree.

Thank you Indranila for sharing your touching incident. I had to go through similar
accident with our first child due to the negligence of the nurse who was in charge. Finally, we lost her... That's a painful story. I don't want to go through that.

The story I am going to share is much more pleasant and very interesting.

In my family, I have a brother who was born with exceptionally dark skin and when he was at the stage of crawling he used to crawl down the steps to reach the garden where he could taste the earth. The moment my mother would force him to bring inside he would cry. Slowly, only earth didn't taste so good. He needed to add some textures in it. So he used to tear some fuzzy leaves from the hedge of the garden and used to eat along with soft clay like earth. Seeing this, my mother asked the caretaker to bring some earth from the river ganges so that he can taste the most pure and holy earth. Now as he was getting the taste of the holy earth my mother thought since his colour is dark and such a nature addicted, could it be that somehow Krishna came to her as a son? This cannot be an ordinary child! Then she thought if she tried to open his mouth would she be able to see the whole universe in his mouth? So she did. She opened his mouth, and of course, she didn't see that.

But it's the thought that counts - right? It's that moment of wondering, thinking, connecting, aspiring, loving... It's just undeniable! Let us always think of Krishna this way. He is not far. He is with us always.

Nice thread and posts Mataji,

Experiences remeberd in search of Krishna although He was not known to me at that time.

Was hitch-hiking aross North America and had a spiritual experience of crying a few tears saying to myself, 'Lord,you've been so kind to me to have brought me so far,
having protected me through the ordeals of months of being on the road with no fixed adress or money.'

As I contemplated how merciful and kind the Lord was on me,my eyes became filled with tears. It was the beginning of a catharsis of sorts.'

At another time in the middle of winter,cold and snowing along the Alaska highway
in'the middle of nowhere' waiting for my next ride to nowhere in particular, I bowed down to Nature in the snow,alone:just me and God...

A few months later I met the devotees of Krishna...


Remembering this incident is good for me as I now need a real Krishna experience where He makes me new;crying for Krishna with real tears of love.

When I was about nine or ten years of age my parents decided to send me to Catechism class on Sundays (which I only attended for one to two years). The nuns told us that God was everywhere but that we were just unable to see Him. So I went home and repeatedly tried catching Him hiding by sneaking up on Him and surprising him under the a bed or couch or in a closet. He was too fast for me!

Many years later He stopped hiding and stood up on an altar in some American mandirs next to His consort within plain view of everyone, and I no longer needed to try to sneak up on Him to catch a glimpse of His magnificent form.

So it was this transcendental game of hide and seek, and He finally let you catch Him!

What a delightful story!

Jai Nitai!

Even though it recently occurred, I would like to recount part of my son's birth story. After an intense and harrowing labor, my wife requested that we listen to the "Lingastakam", a prayer to ParamVaisnava Sadasiva. As the Lingastakam played and my wife pushed, I saw my son enter into the open air. When I picked him up, everything in me- pran, mind, emotion, breath, thoughts and physical potentiality turned molten. Then froze in one blazing whole. I began sobbing uncontrollably. I placed him on my wife, and he stared straight at me- eyes wide open, frowning, no tears- then her. His look said "Where's the manager in this place- I want to see who's in charge". After a moment, I moved him when he wasn't ready. He began to howl in protest. I did not know what to do, so I began chanting a section of the Sukla Yajur-Veda- "we worship the three eyed lord- who is radiant and fragrant..." He immediately stopped crying and stared at me with pursed lips. I remembered months earlier i had asked one Sanyasini lady that my wife and I had met-"Swamini, bless this child so he may be a Hari Bhakta". She held my wife's belly and prayed. I kept crying and chanting-...Yagnesvaraya, Yagyasabhavaya, Yagyapataye... I really feel that was the day my adult spiritual journey began. Three a.m. diaper changes are sweet tapas.

IbcVishnudasji, amazing! What more can I say, it was alsmost as if I felt the empathy..

----

What do kids watch on TV these days? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Mighty Morphin Power Rangers? The Simpsons? In my day there was He-Man, the superhuman alter-ego of Prince Adam and residing in the castle of Grayskull, with Skeletor as his arch-enemy. As a child who loved cartoons, He-Man was the ultimate role model for me. He was handsome, he was very powerful, he had a good-looking girlfriend, he always won his fights, and so on. The perfect idol.

Then there was a picture of Krishna hanging on the wall of a room in my house. It is a picture of Krishna in the forest, surrounded by leaves and forest flowers, bedecked with jewels and finery, and with a charming smile playing upon His lips. My mother, who often sat down and told me stories of God, pointed out this picture and told me that this was Krishna, as if to say 'this is the one I keep telling you stories about'.

As my mother knew about my liking for He-Man, she pointed out Krishna's bulging biceps in the picture. It did not look very bulging to me, but Krishna had some good muscles nevertheless. I asked her if He was stronger than He-Man, to which she replied 'yes'. I knew then that He-Man had suddenly transformed into a relative nobody compared to the one whom I had heard about had killed so many demons in childhood, who rollicked about the fields with His brother Balarama, who stole makhan (butter) from every house, who killed Kans, and so on. I had found my new idol, and I gazed at that picture with a look of adoration. I think this is when I started yearning for God.

I still have that picture, and its still hanging on my wall.

When I was very young, my uncle bought a whole box of 'Amar Chitra Katha' comics. In India, these comics are very famous and often relate great tales of the Puranas and scriptures, as well as famous figures, in comic form so as to make them easily accessible to children.

Even though I was far too young to read or even write my name, I quickly became addicted to these comics and devoured the pictures with my eyes. My mother read them out to me but I also invented my own storylines using the pictures as a guideline. As I grew older and learnt to read, the comics took on a whole new life and meaning; I grew up reading comic sastras.

What was my favourite comic? 'Krishna' of course! My second favourite was 'Rama', but according to my mother I made a habit of reading 'Krishna' every single day and as a result it became quite tattered. My father was quite good at bookbinding and such and made several attempts to fix the comic, but it was all to no avail as my daily reading of that comic made it permanently tattered.

I still have all of those comics, and 'Krishna' is still tattered. But there are some others that are tattered too!

I also had a comic called 'Chaitanya Mahaprabhu'...