Hare Krishna
Siksha Guru Maharaja, please kindly accept my most humble obeisances; all glories to Srila Prabhupada; all glories to your good self for your own exemplary service to Prabhupada and Krishna; all glories to all the devotees of Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu.
HpS/ASA - AgtSP!!!!! Thank you for your association and Siksa!!
I trust that all is going well for your.
HpS - This is the material world. It is 7.22PM. It is getting dark. We sit alone in a ramshakle ashrama. We are struggling to eat properly. Going blind, senile, vertigo, deaf but other than that thinks are pretty good.
Our future is dark if we chose it to be.
We don't want our "Projects" to be successful.
We want to stay at the feet of Srila Prabhupada perfect, personal, service, and then in the association of others in that attitude.
Has Krsna made him our Guru?
We have free will!
Do we chose to worship Krsna, even if He handles us roughly by His embrace???
....although I think about how you are fairing in your health. I have been meaning to write sooner, but other things keep getting in the way. So many thoughts come to my mind that I would like to share, but almost always during japa or mangala arotika: and my memory retention fails me because of so much material energy throughout the rest of my days.
As of lately, Krishna has been very merciful to my wife and I. Whilst we do grieve about our poor involvement with the local community of devotees, we do get some friendship with one particular family, which I will not mention by name, due to his anxiety if his name is mentioned in this letter.
Recently, Srinivasa Prabhu was in Boise, and he surprised us both with a personal visit and some amazing prasadam from Sri Sri Radha Nila Madhava. We had a very nice morning program the day before he left to return to Houston. About a week later we were in SLC, as my wife had a medical appointment there with a specialist.
We celebrated Janmastami in SLC. I met Agnideva for the first time, and he invited me to chant beside him for the entire evening. That was an awesome occasion for at least three hours. By Krishna's grace I was invited to be the first priest to bathe Their Lordships with the first three substances (milk, yogurt and honey); and then again for the final rinse. It was so much more than I had hoped for, or deserved.
A few days after we returned to Boise, some very nice, young traveling brahmacharies stayed as our guests. It was like Krishna's mercy wasn't finished yet. They had gotten my name and contact information. They stayed the night and we had a very nice morning program, and plenty of Krishna katha over prasadam: sharing realizations and sankirtan stories. I had asked them to please pass our names on to all other traveling sankirtan parties so that our good fortune of serving the sankirtan devotees would continue.
My wife's health is not so great; she may need another surgery. She is in so much anxiety over her health, and that puts me into anxiety as a result. My sadhana is still holding, the books are still going out (although not in great numbers), and the rest of our world is still the same, as it was before Janmastami. Celebrating Janmastami was a lifesaver. I definitely need to do this more often. Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura has said that these festivals like Janmastami are the mother of devotion. And I really need a mother: these days more than ever.
I will close here, hoping that you are doing well: Hare Krishna.
Your lowly servant,
Balabhadra dasa🙏
HpS - Jaya!
Jaya!
Jaya!
As long as we can breath we can chant, no?
Is that not enough mercy, that the Holy Names appear on our lips!
Thank you for this letter and your association.
Maybe we sometimes get very little external association because Krsna is pushing us do develop our internal association.
You, me, whoever is reading this, we are all going to have to leave our external association behind, no? Of course, if the external world has been Spiritualized then it already has its internal component and the external replica of Vaikuntha merges into its original source.
So, nice to see everything as a replica of Vaikuntha and our only relationship is service, ultimately to the Lord of Vaikuntha, and our Mother, Laksmi Devi, who are all only 16-years old, no?
Like being at Disneyland with our High School classmates, and the Teacher only acting a Chaperones, friends.
We look for any more letters and then maybe TB will post some more.
We only hope for your association more and more intimately.
We talk a lot with Jaya Krsna Das in Dominican. He finds himself in a similar situation as yours also.
