How to Get Up for Maṅgala-ārati
(transcribed by Bandha-kārī d.d.)
This morning after maṅgala-ārati, for those of you who weren’t here, Aja Prabhu made an announcement in which he stated how many temple residents were present for maṅgala-ārati, and he stated in no uncertain terms that Kṛṣṇa consciousness would not spread in Denmark if this standard continues.
So I thought, “That’s an interesting point,” and thinking about it I could appreciate that this is a fact: what holds up our Kṛṣṇa conscious movement, our mission of spreading Kṛṣṇa consciousness, more than anything, is our own hesitancy to accept those various principles that we are preaching—beginning with getting up for maṅgala-ārati!
We sometimes forget that it is maṅgala-ārati. Maṅgala means “auspicious”. We sometimes forget how beneficial it is for us individually, and also collectively as a society, to “be there or be square”.
So I was thinking: what are some suggestions that I could make to help those who find it difficult to make it to this wonderful event? And those who do go to maṅgala-ārati regularly appreciate how nice it is, and appreciate the feeling that by coming to maṅgala-ārati fifty percent of the battle against māyā for the day has been accomplished.
What can I do to encourage or to help, in practical ways, those who find it difficult, or not desirable, or whatever, to come to this daily event?
So I thought the first point we have to consider is conviction. We should make an effort to first of all be convinced that it is a good idea—despite the reasons not to go—to anyway go. The best of these reasons is the order of our spiritual master.
And we chant these, or we repeat these, aparādhas that we are trying to avoid so that we can chant Hare Kṛṣṇa properly. One of them is to disobey or neglect the order of the spiritual master. We should avoid neglecting the orders of the spiritual master. If for no other reason, for that reason we should go. And actually, by following that principle, then more and more reasons for making this effort become apparent. So conviction should be there.
And actually Rūpa Gosvāmī says:
utsāhān niścayād dhairyāt
tat-tat-karma-pravartanāt
saṅga-tyāgāt sato vṛtteḥ
ṣaḍbhir bhaktiḥ prasidhyati
Enthusiasm, conviction and patience. We can apply this to this particular matter of dragging ourselves up in the morning.
Enthusiasm has to begin before you go to sleep at night. If you don’t have enthusiasm—which means also determination—to get up the next morning for maṅgala-ārati, believe me, you’re not gonna make it. Not all of the Arabian horses in the world will get you out of bed, will drag you out; nor will all the bell-ringing, the alarm clocks, whatever, get you out if you don’t have that enthusiasm and determination the night before.
Now, part of that enthusiasm and determination is to express it to Kṛṣṇa. Actually, how can we get up in the morning? It’s not possible. That’s one of the first things I learned when I was a brand-new bhakta in Stuttgart, Germany. I remember one devotee told me, “There’s no way to get up in the morning unless the Supersoul helps you.”
I thought, “Wow, that’s an amazing thing.” So, he said that in the evening before I took rest, and the next morning—BOOOOONG!—I was right awake. And I thought, “Wow, that was the Supersoul. Now I know what is the Supersoul. Now I have experience, realization. The Supersoul exists.” Because I had never woken up in my entire life at three o’clock in the morning before.
Therefore, before taking rest one has to pray: “My dear Lord, You are present in my heart, You are awake all night, so it is no problem for You to wake me up. So I beg You now, although I may have so many arguments in the morning to not hear You, kindly wake me up and get me up.”
Waking up is one thing; getting up is the next.
I’m reminded of a video which was produced by ITV in Los Angeles. The alarm clock rings, the devotee gets up, finds the alarm clock, turns it off, he goes in the bathroom, puts some water on his face, and then he feels around some more and then he picks up a pair of karatālas and he goes to his TV and he turns it on. It’s lined up so that he can see it from his bed. He climbs back in bed, pulls up the covers, sits up and watches the maṅgala-ārati in the temple on video while he plays karatālas. That’s Western mentality.
Anyway, so one thing is waking up; the other thing is getting up. And then the next step is taking a shower. Once you’re in the shower, you’re safe. You’ve made it.
But I want to back up. Another practical thing which I can suggest is: if one alarm clock doesn’t get you out, try two! It may be worth the investment. Collect a little more lakṣmī, write to your mother and father and ask them to give you a donation so you can buy an alarm clock—whatever. Get two alarm clocks. Don’t get two alarm clocks with the same sound; they should be different sounds. And one of them you can put close to you so you can reach it, that’s alright. But make the second one further away, so that in order to turn it off you have to get up.
(Aja Prabhu comments: “Or you have your roommate hide the second one.”)
Hide the second— that’s a good idea.
So if alarm clocks don’t work, if you get up, turn it off and go back to sleep or whatever, then the next step is: the night before, arrange for some other devotee to get you up. Which, by the way, is a very wonderful service for Vaiṣṇavas—to help them to get up in the morning.
Now, some temples make an arrangement that one devotee goes around with a bell or a gong, y’know, and starts bashing around. The problem with that system is that generally, within a week, everyone hates that devotee. And that devotee is going to the temple commander and says, “Please give this service to somebody else, I can’t take it any more. Everybody is giving me such nasty looks all day.”
So it’s maybe better to individually find some devotee whom you know does get up in the morning, has no trouble getting up, and have them give you the shake. That’s a practical consideration.
Now, there’s another practical suggestion I’d like to make—it’s very, sort of, very practical. Before going to bed—because what is the problem? The problem is we go way down into tamo-guṇa, isn’t it? And somehow or another, to get out of that tamo-guṇa, wow, that’s really tough sometimes.
Now I should mention, by the way, it is understandable, at least in my book, if one is sick. Now, one has to judge for oneself how sick one is—not that, “Oh, I have a little sniff… oh, I’m sick, I’m sorry, I can’t go to maṅgala-ārati, forget it.” But if conditions come when we are just really wiped out, or it may happen we have a late-night program, preaching, whatever—alright, we have to judge for ourselves how to manage our time and our day so that we can continue nicely, enthusiastically and healthfully.
And we do need to get a certain amount of sleep. It’s not that the Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement should be known as a sleep-deprivation movement. If we need more sleep, we should take rest earlier if possible, or take some rest during the day.
But the other little suggestion I want to make: some devotees find that it’s helpful to minimize that effect of the mode of ignorance during the night by doing one or another yoga-āsana in the evening just before taking rest; and that is either a headstand or a shoulder stand. Because it should be obvious—it brings the blood to your brain, and that helps you to kind of avoid or minimize the mode of ignorance. Many devotees find that it helps in the morning, when the alarm clock rings, to take the alarm clock seriously and to take Lord Paramātmā’s call seriously.
So, simply by accepting the principles of bhakti-yoga we can become acyutatām. We have to accept the principles of bhakti-yoga regularly. Regularly—the word nityam means “eternally”, it also means “daily”. Nityaṁ bhāgavata-sevayā. And it also means “obligatory”. So the principles of bhakti-yoga we accept as obligatory. That is called vaidhī-sādhana-bhakti: following rules and regulations for cultivating our creeper of devotion.
So we want to make a good start; we don’t want to start off our day on our heels, you know, or out of balance. And it’s simply a practical fact—everyone has the experience—that if we can get up early, chant most of our rounds in the early morning, things go so much better, isn’t it? They go better for us individually, and they go better for our community. Everyone feels more peaceful in dealing with each other, and we feel stronger for preaching, which is, after all, what we are supposed to be doing in this Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement.
We’re not supposed to be eating and sleeping and eating and sleeping and in between just filling up the time until the next time for eating and sleeping and eating and sleeping. That’s not our business, obviously. If it is somebody’s business, then it is better to live outside the temple and to visit the temple and associate as much as possible. That we don’t discourage. People who are finding the discipline of the temple life too much—we encourage them: “Practice Kṛṣṇa consciousness at home to the best of your ability and get association of devotees as much as you can.” And those people who come, we encourage them; we don’t say, “Oh, you are living outside, you are not a devotee,” or whatever.
Okay, I don’t want to rail on this point too much but it did come up, and in fact it was a request from Aja Prabhu that I speak about it. And it’s a fact—I realize as I travel around from temple to temple and I see this is one of the big anchors that’s holding us back. We have the perfect philosophy. We have the perfect system, process, culture of spiritual life. But we keep going two steps forward and three steps backward because we tend to neglect these basic things.
Aja Prabhu said that he’s sure that all of you will agree that you do not want to go back to that situation which was here some months ago, in which there would be one or two or three participants in the maṅgala-ārati. It was a very unhappy time—I was also hearing reports. Everyone agrees to that. So one should also make an extra effort to not let it slip back, because that’s the way the modes of nature work; they have a way of creeping up on us without our noticing.
(Watch alarm beeps.)
That’s the sign I should stop. Okay, so are there any further points on this verse, on this subject, or any questions?
Questions and Answers
Parama Dharmika dāsa: Why is it that neglecting the morning program doesn’t create a feeling of separation from Kṛṣṇa?
HH Krishna Kshetra Swami:
Oh, that’s a good question. If we were more advanced, it would. We would feel that, “Oh, I’ve just really missed out today. What’s the use of my life? I’ve not had this privilege; I’ve neglected this privilege.” We would just be lamenting all day. Tears would be falling from our eyes like torrents of rain—“I missed maṅgala-ārati, oh no!”
But we are jaded. We are jaded. That word “jaded”—I’m speculating now—but in Sanskrit, in Bengali, there’s jaḍa, like Jaḍa Bhārata. Jaḍa means dull or foolish.
(Aja Prabhu says: “Inert.”)
Inert, yeah. Jagat, jagat—this material world. So we are jaded by ignorance, by inertia and inertness. Therefore:
jīva jāgo, jīva jāgo, gauracānda bole
kota nidrā jāo māyā-piśācīra kole
Piśācīra kole means “in the lap of a piśācī”. Piśācī—I don’t know, I’ve never seen a piśācī… or maybe I have, but I didn’t know. But they’re some nasty kind of ghosts, and māyā is described as this ghost, piśācī. So: “You are sleeping in the lap of the witch called māyā.” Jāgo—“Wake up!” It’s a command. “Get out of here! Get this māyā out of here.” You have to make that command.
Uccanica devī-dāsī: If you have only one alarm clock, then you put it in different places every evening.
HH Krishna Kshetra Swami:
That helps, because in the morning you have to think, “Where is that alarm clock?” Yeah, that’s good. You kind of have to trick yourself.
Aja Prabhu: One trick that I’ve used for years—not only for getting up for maṅgala-ārati but for appointments and being on time in general—is that my clock and my watch are always about eight minutes ahead of the normal time. Eight or ten minutes ahead. In that way I got used to my time, and I’m always on time.
HH Krishna Kshetra Swami:
Actually, that’s a good point. A few weeks ago I was in Florida where they had a North American GBC meeting, and the beginning speaker—the speaker who kind of opens everything and gets everything rolling—was this Bhakta Peter, Peter Burwash, who apparently at one time was a rather famous tennis player, and he had some association with Śrīla Prabhupāda. Prabhupāda gave him three hours of instructions one day on how to run a successful business, which he said he followed to the t, and the result has been a multi-million-dollar business.
Anyway, he was speaking of what he sees as some of the difficulties in our society, and one he mentioned was that we have all adopted the principle of “Indian time”. There’s Central European Time or whatever, and there’s Indian Standard Time—which means always fifteen minutes late. So he said this is not good. He said in any sphere of life—the professional world, business world—they’re not like this. Maybe in India they are, but in the rest of the world people keep appointments on time, so we have to practice that.
Śrīla Prabhupāda oep… [inaudible]
Kṛṣṇa Prema Prabhu: You made a point about the maṅgala-ārati problem, but I was wondering—you just mentioned how important it is to be there, and of course it is. But can you give some indication how, once everybody is there, how to make the maṅgala-ārati ceremony more worth being there? That’s a problem—just like a bunch of… [inaudible].
HH Krishna Kshetra Swami:
One way that might help is to assign the leader for the maṅgala-ārati already the evening before, so that the singer is kind of anticipating, “Okay, I have to get into it in the morning.” And when his mind is focused, then that will help get everybody off the ground.
While these meetings in Florida were going on at Alachua, the maṅgala-ārati was going on in their temple room, which is less than half this size, with about five times as many devotees, and—pfff!—these maṅgala-āratis were so ecstatic. They were just knock-down, drag-out, pull-out-all-the-stops maṅgala-āratis. But one of the things is: there’s a snowball effect, that if all the devotees do come, and because they want to be there, they will feel it, isn’t it? We will feel enthusiasm.
(Aja Prabhu:) We have seen that.
Maybe different devotees have to get a chance to lead maṅgala-ārati who otherwise never get a chance, and let them have their moment at the microphone, so to speak. I don’t know—that would be something to do a isti-goṣṭhī about.
The meditation of maṅgala-ārati, the basic meditation, is that Kṛṣṇa—or in any ārati, Kṛṣṇa—is kindly appearing before us and He wants to see us. Not that we’re coming so much to see Him, to enjoy Him, but He is enjoying that we come to see Him—or They, Śrī Śrī Gaura-Nitāi.
And the song which Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura composed—which we can… well, there are different songs. In Vṛndāvana they sing:
vibhāvarī śeṣa, āloka-praveśa
After they sing the Gurv-aṣṭakam in Prabhupāda’s samādhi, then they sing this other song which is recommended, chanting different names of the Lord in the morning. But there’s another pastime of Lord Caitanya: that He gets up in the early morning—[recites Sanskrit]—“With His devotees He gets up and He goes about Navadvīpa chanting the holy name, dancing and preaching.” So we can remember that pastime when we are there.
Bhaktin Sylva: Does it also mean that it is not only auspicious for us in the temple, but also auspicious for the whole of Denmark?
HH Krishna Kshetra Swami:
Yes, we can think like that, because by our getting up and attending to the Lord’s service we are pleasing the Lord, and by pleasing the Lord He is giving us spiritual power to perform our mission, which is ultimately going to benefit all of Denmark.
Uccanica devī-dāsī: The kīrtana leader in the maṅgala-ārati would be prepared, but also, if anyone feels a little off or dull or something and he comes to the temple room, one should go near to someone who’s very fixed, very enthusiastic, because these vibrations will also… [inaudible]
HH Krishna Kshetra Swami:
Yes, yes, that’s a good point