Real fulfilment can only take place in the heart. The body, the senses, and the mind can have some flickering gratifications, but the Bhagavad Gita explains the nature of these flickering gratifications—the more you have the more you need. It’s like fire; if you put fuel into fire, the fire gets hotter, bigger, and hungrier.
I write in my book, The Journey Home, about the time I spent with Mother Theresa in Calcutta in about 1971. I remember she told me something very striking. She said, “The greatest problem in this world is hunger—not hunger of the stomach—the real problem is the hunger of the heart. And because of that hunger of the heart there is so much hunger of the stomachs too.” There is only one nourishment that can satisfy the heart, that is love—to love and to be loved. If somebody has everything else but not that, the heart is empty. And in that emptiness we have to somehow or the other divert our attention away from the loneliness and the pain and the futility of our life, and we try to fill it with all kinds of sensory entertainments and all kinds of accomplishments and sometimes all kinds of drugs and alcohol—just things to divert us from what’s within.
A rich life is when we find a treasure, when we find love within ourselves and that naturally manifests as compassion toward others and that’s our actual motivation. Whether we are little Swamis travelling around without any real resources, or whether we are farmers or doctors or lawyers or teachers or politicians or millionaires or billionaires, they are all potentially wonderful if we have the right, fulfilling motivation behind it.
Who is Radhanath Swami
Radhanath Swami is 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 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.
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