Dear Guru Maharaj,
Please accept my humble obeisances, all glories to Srila Prabhupada!
I can't thank you enough, I'm always surprised by your kindness. I met with Svavasa prabhu and he also was most merciful and accomodating. We talked it over and came to a satisfactory conclusion for everyone. Please forgive me for being a little intense, Badrinarayan Maharaj advised me that I may need to push a little bit to convey a sense of urgency.
On a spiritual level, I'm happy and I'm only interested in preaching Krishna consciousness, but after years of trying I just don't see snatching brahmacari's off the street as a complete strategy for expansion. I'm interested in cultivating Vaisnava community. Even in large temples like LA with thousands of devotees hardly anyone even knows each other, but I see tight knit community as a crucial factor in terms of both maintaining and expanding the movement.
As it happens, on a material level I also have an intense creative impetus, but I don't see my spiritual desire and my material desire as incompatible. After doing some research I'm realizing that being a professional artist means spending most of my time marketing and networking. I'm actually taking a keen interest in that lately. So if I gather a network of people interested in spiritual art, a certain subset of that group will certainly be interested in Bhakti yoga. What I've learned is that art is not about selling pictures, it's about selling yourself and your ideals. It's about becoming a leader and leading people in a direction they want to go. I want to use my art to lead people to Srila Prabhupada.
What Svavasa prabhu and I agreed on is that in the meantime, I can help Naikatma prabhu with some dhama seva a few hours in the morning (gardening, sweeping) and then in the afternoon I'm free to study and paint and mess around on the internet. Later on I can buy the extra van from the temple and use it to branch out to different cities as well.
Looks like I'm already getting over 100 hits per week on my website and I haven't even started promoting it yet! Basically my idea is to keep a weekly Tumblr blog about Bhakti and art etc etc in order to educate people about my work and about Krishna Consciousness. This is meant to generate an interest for the art I'm posting on my website. Meanwhile I'm learning how to use Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc etc to drive traffic to my blog and my website. People can sign up there to an email list where they will recieve a weekly newsletter about new blogs, events and special offers. This solidifies a web community. In addition, I plan to set up a table a couple days a week in strategic locations around LA, and put pieces on consignment in local cafés, yoga studios, (veg?)restaraunts, etc. I'm a little rusty, but working with sumi ink and watercolor means I can finish 4-5 practice pieces daily which I can sell as I improve my skills and develop my ideas. When I complete some more sophisticated projects I'll begin to submit work to the list of galleries, publications and contests I've accumulated for features and exhibitions.
When all this begins to come together, I hope to utilize whatever resources I generate (after 50% net donation) to host some kind of programs, probably somewhat related to the Bhakti Vriksha modules. During the summer I can also coordinate with music festivals to get myself and a whole crew in for free to make art and distribute books and do Kirtan etc. Hopefully we could even arrange for you to speak at some events as well.
As for your question about ashram, I have no interest for the time being in getting into family life or anything like that, I just want to go deeply into this service. Nonetheless I do feel awkward as a brahmacari essentially going into business. I'm thinking about changing ashrams just as a social consideration so I don't reflect poorly on the brahmacari ashram if I have to occasionally meet or correspond with women in the course of conducting some trade in the modern world. Would it be less appropriate to join Grhasta ashram with no intention of marriage or to bend the rules in order to remain a brahmacari? Any recommendations?
Your ridiculous servant,
Ekāśma Dās
HpS-ASA - AgtSP. Paoho. I guess you can see from the posts that we have been on "traveling Sankirtan" for weeks and months now. Meeting so many people that we can't do much with our blog-world.
How are you now, two weeks after this letter. There are lots of ISKCON artists who have started Brahmacari. Even regular artists. Don't run a business. Make it a non-profit foundation.
Our whole focus with ASA is probably going to be a global, millenium shaking symposium on "Art and the Sacred" 2018 in Peru.
Hey, you can give your self an exotic title and be part of that, its development!
You can do all your business as part of NIOS.
Also, Carl Jung, Surrealist community already use art to get to a higher, spiritual status of life, no?
Whatayousay?
