Strange World
Montreal, Quebec
On the mezzanine of the Montreal temple I spent hours with a group of youths rehearsing for "The Jaganatha Story" which is based on the two-thousand year old history of the Chariot Festival that goes on all over the world as well as here in Montreal this weekend. The way the script reads is to draw the crowd in almost like a fairy tale of "Once upon a time." The characters with central figure King Indradyumna are partial caricatured until we come upon clearly devotional subject matters.
In some ways the life of Krishna reads that way in the book "Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead." You could swear it's fiction the way the stories unfold and how hey are told until philosophical subject matter comes to temper it. For the devotional readers it cannot be mythical matter on the strength of the bhakti driven explanation.
When I look around me in the real world I do see lots of 'characters' that appear to come out of a dreamland- certainly influenced by the three modes of nature. And people do some rather strange and sensational stuff to verify my point. For fetched we are in what we say and what we do.
I walked with a monk by the name of Jaganatha and a new retreat person, Jean Andre. We stationed ourselves on park benches to chant quietly on our beads. It crossed my mind, "Chanting brings about sobriety while we are in this crazy world of strange utterances and strange actions."
4 KM
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