Lifestyle of a Monk in NYC (Part 1 of 3), by Chris Fici
There is an anomaly in the middle of all the pulsating beats, sizzling woks, and careening car horns of the East Village of Manhattan. Within a humble brownstone building at First Avenue and First Street is a monastery, with simple, humble monks attempting to focus their entire being on connecting with God. The anomaly goes further: these monks are not of any known Western tradition, but instead they carry forward in the line of bhakti-yoga, the devotional expression of the monotheistic schools of the Hindu/Vedic tradition.
Many questions then arise: how do they translate and share the teachings of their tradition in the middle of a cultural mix that is, by varying degrees, wholly at odds with their choice of lifestyle? What do they do in their daily lives? How do they maintain their vows of celibacy in this midst of one of the most sexually charged environments in the world? What does it mean to be a Hindu/Vedic monk in a world that has largely left such expressions of spirituality and religion behind?
I am one of those monks. For the past two years, I have been living in the Bhaktivedanta Ashram (monastery) here in the East Village of Manhattan, and I hope to share with you in this piece some of the depth and inspiration of this life and how this tradition is thriving today in the most unusual of environments. I will share both my personal realization and experience in coming to this lifestyle, and also some of the essential theological aspects of the bhakti tradition. In this combination of the personal and singular with the universal, a sense of the vitality and joy found in our search for truth and God here in our ashram may resonate with your own search, and I pray this may inspire you to look deeper into the commitment for the spiritual in your own heart.
A Personal Path
Generally what I wanted to be when I grew up, as a young kid blooming just outside of Detroit, Michigan, depended on what local sports team was currently winning and grabbing my excited attention. I can also remember wanting to be an astronaut, fascinated as I was by the immense mystery of the final frontier of space, and the colorful mysteries of the paranormal. I had a particular quirk as well when I was young: I loved to get up in front of the local evening newscast and pretend I was the weatherman. My mom was so tickled by this that she actually called up the local news station and had them come to do the weather forecast from my own living room, where I got to read the weekly forecast live on the air in front of thousands and thousands of Detroiters. Talk about a dream come true!
With Detroit being a bastion of Catholic worship and community throughout the 20th century, both of my parents came from very strong and very traditional Catholic upbringings. From the very beginning of my life, spiritual ritual and worship was a large part of my existence, from my original baptism as a baby boy, all the way to the weekly catechism classes I would attend following my regular secular schooling. All of this created within me a sense of a very personal God, one who I could relate to, talk to, and befriend.
I can recall one lesson of my church school days which instilled in me the idea that Jesus was everywhere and with us at all times. This idea struck my young mind as something wonderful and even quite logical. Of course God and His closest associates would be able to know who I was, where I was, and what I was feeling, and that these feelings and prayers would find no hindrance in being communicated to Him in a very simple, direct, and innocent way.
Every evening before I would go to sleep, I would pray to God in a very casual and innocent way, asking for such simple requests such as the hope that the cute girl I liked at school would move in with her family to the house next to mine. Looking back at this now, of course I see a exuberant innocence and perhaps a lack of deep theological perspective, but there was always a sense of love, a free, open, and natural love that I faithfully assumed was my natural relationship with God. That faith I have carried with me in my heart and which now, as a monk, I am trying to cultivate and make more real in my life today.
But even as I was expressing these youthful devotions, the idea of a priestly life never entered my mind. A generational shift had already taken place, as the pious Detroit my grandfather once knew, one in which the church community included plenty of association and retreats with priests, Franciscan monks, and nuns, had changed into something beaten down and withered by the harsh economic and social realities of the once-booming “Motor City.”
This faltering of the “American Dream” became prominent in my consciousness as I began my study at the University of Michigan. I began to see that the story of the society I was raised in, and the secular values I had been raised to believe in with great faith, were based on a series of illusions, falsities, and cruelties, going back to the genocidal razing of the Native Americans as European settlers entered into the “New World.” All of this knowledge compelled within me to looker for a deeper and more actual sense of the truth, which took me into arenas from activist to psychedelic, eventually taking me back to where I had started as a child, to the presence of God.
With my worldview broadened by experiences and intuition, I began to look towards the wisdom traditions of the East to help me define the deeper reality that I felt was hovering so close to my grasp. Stories and documentaries of great yogis from the Buddhist and Hindu traditions dazzled my seeker’s sense of the extra-ordinary and desire for direct experience beyond the realm of intoxication and magic spells. I began to call out within me the desire to find a process of meditation, to be linked to up to a natural method of understanding the Divine within me, and while God may not have answered my prayers of having my cute potential girlfriend move in next door when I was a kid, He answered my call for a deeper practice in a way that would change my life in the most profound way.
A Connection with Krishna
While walking one day on the University of Michigan campus, I met a young man named Jim who offered me a flyer for a mantra meditation program. When I attended the program and talked further with Jim, he told me was a monk. All I knew of monks up to that point were the powerful, mythical, and otherworldly figures I had encountered in my study of the Eastern traditions (as well as dedicated Saturday-night viewings of classic martial arts films). To meet this unassuming, humble gentleman and to see in his personality that this lifestyle was still a living and breathing vitality drew me further into the theology and practice of bhakti-yoga.
Jim and his fellow monk associate Prentiss informed and revealed to me that the tradition of bhakti-yoga, a yoga of heart-felt and living devotion to God, or Krishna, the all-attractive Divine Supreme Person, was and is a central and essential part of one of the oldest and strongest spiritual traditions known to antiquity, the Vedic tradition. This tradition was brought to the West in 1965 by A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, a renounced scholar, author, and priest of the bhakti tradition who had been compelled by his own teacher, or guru, to bring these teachings to the West. Swami Prabhupada’s calling and mission expanded from his humble beginnings in New York City in the late 1960s to become a worldwide movement under the auspices of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), which now has temples and spiritual centers from Africa to Australia and most everywhere in between.
All of this spiritual culture and history piqued my interest, and the heartfelt and inspirational discussions we shared, along with the excellent vegetarian dinners, helped me to find a new sense of belonging that I had struggled to find in the over-competitive and over-charged social atmospheres of this major university. Above all, the practice of mantra meditation that Jim and Prentiss shared struck me quite deeply on the experiential level This began to fulfill my desire for a direct and profound spiritual experience, leading me onto the road to the monastic life I lead today. Before I continue with my personal story, let me share a little of the theological base behind this mantra meditation and its importance and vitality as a spiritual practice specifically meant and designed to be of great benefit for us in our fractured and chaotic contemporary age.
The Chanting of The Holy Name (Maha-Mantra)
At the heart of the practice of bhakti-yoga is the system of mantra meditation, which enables the practitioner to connect directly to the presence and reality of God by sound vibration. Mantra meditation is offered to the spiritualist of today as the most essential and practical way of connecting to God. In the bhakti tradition, this chanting of the holy names of God is known as the maha-mantra. The term mantra means to deliver or liberate the mind from materially based conditioning that impede clarity of self-realization for spiritual advancement, and the term maha means “great” or “supreme.”
The maha-mantra consists of the three most prominent names of God as known and worshiped in the bhakti line: Hare (the feminine aspect of God), Krishna (the masculine aspect of God ), and Rama (the internal pleasure potency of God). Together these three names make up the maha-mantra: Hare Krishna/Hare Krishna/Krishna Krishna/Hare Hare/Hare Rama/Hare Rama/Rama Rama/Hare Hare.
The bhakti practitioner chants the maha-mantra daily on beads (japa) or musically in a congregation (kirtan), and this chanting forms the essential foundation of their spiritual practice. Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, the bhakti saint of sixteenth-century India, inaugurated this chanting of the maha-mantra amongst his followers, with the intention of spreading it to every town and village in the world. In his Siksastaka, or series of eight verses he wrote to establish the essential mood for the practice of bhakti, he states that the chanting of the maha-mantra cleanses the heart of the dust of illusion and material conditioning that has accumulated over the course of our life and previous lives. The chanter of the maha-mantra understands that without this internal cleansing process, any attempt to focus one’s consciousness on God will remain clouded and frustrated.
The different names of God abound across the spectrum of religious and spiritual expression and tradition. When one approaches these names in a mood of humility one is able to take great advantage of the direct connection being offered by God, and the door opens to the highest spiritual understanding. The names of God are not different from the original form and substance of God. By chanting these names, one comes into direct contact with the actual reality of God, and this contact bears the fruit of realization and revelation that propels the aspirant forward on the spiritual path. The bhakti tradition, through its foundations in antiquity and contemporary practice, offers one of the clearest and most accessible paths to this kind of direct connection with God through the chanting of His holy names.
A Different Path
Looking back on the moods of my life, I can see that I was never wired to follow the paths of life considered to be normal and accepted. Some of this has to do with undeveloped personality and character traits, but a lot of it has to do with the sense of a deeper calling. In the association of my two new bhakti monk friends Jim and Prentiss, I began to study more about the bhakti tradition, diving deeper into the practice of mantra meditation and the study of the classic Eastern text at the heart of the bhakti faith, the Bhagavad-Gita.
Through Swami Prabhupada’s translation of the Gita I began to grasp the immensity but also the immediacy of this tradition, and most importantly, I began to understand a deep and thorough theological foundation to the questioning and truth-seeking I had been undertaking now for some years prior. Oddly and sweetly enough, I discovered in the words and personage of Krishna the loving, knowing, and befriending God that had been the object of my childhood affections.
I continued to spend a lot of time with Jim and Prentiss as my college career wound on, including spending time with them on retreats to the Detroit ISKCON temple where they lived, as well as one of the more prominent ISKCON cultural centers in West Virginia, where I got a first-hand taste and experience of monastic life in the bhakti tradition. Prentiss even moved to the University of Michigan campus to open a cultural center, and the personal time he spent with me training me in the art of chanting the maha-mantra, as well as his warm and intelligent friendship, were invaluable touchstones to my spiritual development.
Upon my graduation from the University of Michigan, with a degree from the film school, I found myself at the familiar crossroads of the post-graduate. It became clear enough to me that I didn’t want to follow some of the paths of my fellow film-school friends, as they schlepped West to the hallowed hills of Hollywood to fetch coffee 24/7 for over-indulged television producers. I dabbled a bit in the business of producing radio, doing freeform musical shows for local public and internet stations, but career opportunities never seemed to match up with my strange sense of idealism and ambition. Increasingly I felt like I was floating around and treading water, certainly not a unique circumstance for someone of my age at that time, but I had within me a spiritual wealth, from my time with Jim and Prentiss and their fellow monks, that began to grab my attention more and more.
The questions of my search still lingered: What is real? What is truth? How can I have access to this truth? This was now combined with a fervent search to become responsible for myself as I entered into my adult life, to find a meaning and a calling. I continued to chant and study the Bhagavad-Gita, but my association with devotees of the bhakti tradition had become limited, as Jim and Prentiss had moved away from Michigan and on to other stages in their lives. Still, what they had given me remained the deepest part of my life and of my being, and I could not forget it, and by 2006, two years after I had graduated from school, the shelter of the bhakti tradition, and particularly the monastic life within, loomed into the front of my mind as the best course to find the meaning and happiness that I was seeking.
Chris Fici is a writer/teacher/monk of the bhakti-yoga tradition. He has been practicing at the Bhaktivedanta Ashram in New York City since 2009. After receiving a degree in film/video studies at the University of Michigan, Chris began his exploration and study of the bhakti tradition. He currently teaches classes on the culture and art of vegetarian cooking, as well as the living philosophy of the Bhagavad-Gita, at New York University.
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August 31st, 2011 10:05
Hari Bol!!
Hare Krsna Hare Krsna Krsna Krasna Hare Ram Hare Ram Hare Ram Ram Ram Hare Hare!!