Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Distractions

Toronto, Ontario

Police in the city are reporting that too many deaths are occurring. The cause: a lack of space sharing between pedestrians and motorists. They say people who drive automobiles are multi tasking too much. Walkers are too focused on their MP3 players, wearing hoods and are careless when crossing at intersections.

This is merely a reminder to be attentive on the road. In the course of a day there are a number of intersections I meet. “Like a razor’s edge” our guru, Srila Prabhupada used to say, a little bit of inattention and blood will come. Our spiritual life is like that. When we pay attention to the details of our devotional endeavours moving with caution, then you avoid many potential problems.

I became guilty of a slight distraction. Hypocrite that I am, I peeked over at a vintage book store display while walking. There was a comic book collector’s issue of character, Archie. On the cover, Archie was confronted by a duplicate of himself in a spacesuit. The duplicate grabbed Archie’s shirt at the chest and proclaimed himself as the real Archie and threatened him with, “Scram! Beat it!”

This scenario may be a common enough theme. I was reminded of a story from the Bhagavatam of an imposter Krishna who aggressively approached Krishna declaring he was ‘the real McCoy’. Well, it turned out that the original Krishna let the counterfeit be known as to his actual foolishness and was actually put in his place.

My evening event was a talk I conducted, “The Fire of Desire”, at Urban Edge Yoga Centre. People were attentive with the message and we even engaged them in memorizing a verse from “The Gita”, kama esa krodha esa rajo-guna samudbhava. This translates as “desire, when too intense, leads to anger.”

I wasn’t sure whether my talk on desire and passion lacked substance. When it came to question time the majority of inquiries had to do with my walking experiences.

So I tried to please the crowd.

8 Km