Mantra Mayi Upasana - Meditation with Slokas While Taking Harinam
With their songs and their favorite scriptural slakes our Raging Canarias share their hearts and confidential moods of love with us, and as practitioners we can share these jewels of the heart with each other. We can reawaken our spiritual consciousness, and connect with the spiritual world in Raja by memorizing these gloats and using them in mantra-mayo up asana - chanting Slakes from the scriptures and meditating on the particular pastime they evoke. Thus we follow the proper traditional sequence for remembering Sri Radar-Krishna's names, forms, qualities and pastimes, and make progress on the path of pure Bhatia. As beginners we may start with gloats from Sri Upadesamrta, hearing or reading the commentaries and taking Harriman ('chanting japa') along with meditating on these glokas. Then our sadhana-bhajana will gradually evolve as our insights deepen and as we add more lokas to our repertoire. This practice will eventually lead us up to rasika scriptures such as Sri Gopi-gita, Sri Vilapa-kusumarijali and Sri Radha-Rasa-sudhanidhi. Deeper levels of the meanings of these sacred verses will manifest spontaneously in our hearts when it is done according to the traditional method. Srila Bhaktivedanta Narayana Maharaja describes this as follows, "When seidhakas study and learn these verses, deeply meditating within themselves on their meanings while chanting the holy name, they will act as stimuli to fully experience the mood described in these glokas. Then one's mind will not wander here and there. We should not just walk around talking to others while chanting, but taking our chanting beads we should sit in a solitary place and give it our mind and heart. Our previous acdryas chanted all night long, meditating on one verse after another. For half an hour the waves of the bhava of one particular verse would be coming to them: sometimes they would be fully submerged in those waves, sometimes they would rise to the surface and float on those waves, and then they would move on to the next gloka. As they did this more and more the whole night would pass, and where it went, they wouldn't even know. This is the traditional method of performing bhajan." (Bhakti Rasayana, p.1, GVP) Finally, here are some words of our A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada, who introduced Krishna consciousness on a grand scale outside India. "...we have forgotten our eternal relationship with the Lord. Every living being out of many, many billions and trillions of living beings has a particular relationship with the Lord eternally. That is called svardpa. By the process of devotional service, one can revive that svardpa, and that stage is called svardpa-siddhi -perfection of one's constitutional position." (Bhagavad-gita As It Is, Introduction, pages 4-5, 1972, BBT). Sri Caitanya-caritamrita (Madhya 8.229) describes this as well: siddha-dehe cinti' kare tamari savanna sakhi-bhave paya radha-krsnera carana siddha-dehe-in that perfected (mentally conceived) spiritual form; cinti'-by meditating; kare-does; tdhaii-in (the kurijas of) Vraja; sevana-service; sakhi-bhave--in mood of the marinara gapes; paya-gets; radha-krsoera-of Radha and Krishna; carana-the lotus feet. By meditating on one's svardpa (spiritual form) and rendering service (in that spiritual body) to the Divine Couple in the koalas of Vraja, in sakha-bhdva (the mood of a mafijara sash, one gets the lotus feet of Sri Radha and Her beloved Krishna.
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