Radhanath Swami: The Path of Devotion and Service

拉德哈纳特·斯瓦米:奉献与服务之路

Good Life Project

自我完善

2016-11-14

56 分钟
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Today's guest is Radhanath Swami, a Vaishnava sanyassin (a monk in a Krishna-bhakti lineage) and teacher of the devotional path of Bhakti-yoga. He is author of The Journey Home, a memoir of his search for spiritual truth. His latest book is The Journey Within: Exploring the Path of Bhakti.  His teachings draw from the sacred texts of India such as The Bhagavad-gita, Srimad Bhagavatam, and Ramayana, and aim to reveal the practical application of the sacred traditions, while focusing on the shared essence which unites apparently disparate religious or spiritual paths. Born Richard Slavin, on December 7, 1950, in his teens he came to confront a deep sense of alienation from suburban Chicago life and the civil injustices of mid-century America. At the age of nineteen, while on a summer trip to Europe, his internal struggles culminated in a commitment to search for God wherever it might lead him. Meditating on the Isle of Crete, he felt a supernatural calling and the next morning set off alone to find spiritual India. The Journey Home documents his odyssey as a penniless hitch-hiker though Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and finally India. There he lived as a wandering ascetic, first amongst the forest dwelling Himalayan yogis and later amongst a wide variety of gurus and spiritual practitioners throughout India and Nepal. Ultimately, he was led to the holy town of Vrindavan, where he found his path amongst the Bhakti-yogis. In Vrindavan he found the teacher he was searching for in A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (1896-1977) the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), and representative of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, (the Krishna-bhakti tradition stemming from the 16th century mystic avatar Sri Chaitanya). In choosing Bhaktivedanta Swami, as his guru, Radhanath Swami felt compelled to shear his matted locks and reenter Western society with a mission to share the sacred wisdom he had received. This return exemplifies the form of devotional yoga which is at the heart of Radhanath Swami’s teachings, a spiritual practice expressed as tangible action meant to bring about personal fulfillment and benefit the world. At the the age of 31 he took the monastic vows of a Vaishnava sanyassin and became known as Radhanath Swami. Today Radhanath Swami travels regularly throughout India, Europe and North America, sharing the teachings of Bhakti-yoga. He resides much of the year at the Radha Gopinath Ashram in Chowpatty, Mumbai. For the past twenty-five years he has guided the community’s development and has directed a number of acclaimed social action projects including Midday Meals, which daily serves more than 260,000 plates of sanctified vegetarian food to the children of the slums of Mumbai. He has also worked to establish missionary hospitals and eye camps, eco-friendly farms, schools and ashrams, an orphanage, and a number of emergency relief programs throughout India. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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  • Today's guest Radnath Swami, came up in the suburbs of Chicago in the fifties and sixties.

  • It was a time of pretty major civil strife, and he really suffered, seeing all the suffering around him.

  • Decided to go on a bit of a walkabout.

  • That took him on a journey into Europe, which then led him through all sorts of other countries, from Afghanistan to Iran to Nepal, where he eventually spent years as an aesthetic and found his teacher in India, where he then became a devotee of bhakti yoga, which is devotional yoga, the yoga of devotion, and has since gone back and forth for the better part of 40 plus years doing incredible acts of service, building institutions that serve more than 300,000 kids who are in need in India, and traveling the world, sharing the message of Bhakti yoga, devotion of love.

  • It was really wonderful having an opportunity to sit down with him, talk about not only his journey, his path, and what his practice is, and his offering is, but also how it relates to the world that we're living in today and how we can try and bring some of these ideals to experiences in a culture and a community and things that are happening in the world that are really challenging us.

  • So, really excited to share this conversation with you.