archives

Last week we visited Toowong, an inner city ring suburb with a significant shopping center. We had visitors from Melbourne (Jolie and Sukhanti Radha dd), New Govardhan (Craig) and Perth (Sita Ram Laxman das brahmacari).

Here's a video of Sita Ram Laxman prabhu leading:

Since November 2007 we have been systematically performing harinam, the congregational chanting of the Hare Krishna maha-mantra, in each of the various suburbs of Brisbane. Our motto is: "If it has a postcode, it gets a harinam".

Check out our Climate Change Harinam Tracking page with the Google Mash up map. From there you can see photos and videos of the various harinams. Or you can browse through the Climate Change Harinam category on this blog to see the reports, and various articles on the subject.

In addition to our weekly harinam in the city we've done harinam in 30 different suburbs of Brisbane since November 2007. There are 150 suburbs in Brisbane, so that leaves us 120 more to go. Since it took us 6 months to do 30 harinams it will only take us another 2 years at the current rate to "do the whole village" - Brisbane mandala parikrama nagar sankirtan ki jay!

Given the fact that just about everything you put on your skin gets absorbed into your bloodstream, it is interesting that there is a complete lack of regulation of cancer-causing ingredients in skin care products. There are over 150 toxic cancer-causing ingredients currently used in cosmetic products alone. According to federal law, products containing cancer-causing substances should carry a written warning. But the FDA does not enforce this law with cosmetics or personal care products. Consumers are left to purchase these products at their own risk, and as a result they are being harmed by them.

Let's consider a product that's harming tens of millions of people every day in America alone: sunscreen. Sunscreen products do not block ultraviolet radiation very well unless you apply multiple coats, but there has been a flurry of research lately on the harm caused by sunscreen chemicals. These chemicals actually promote skin cancer. This product is causing the very condition from which it claims to protect people.

Read the whole story at Natural News.

You thought I was joking when I said that "sunscreen causes cancer", didn't you? I wasn't.

You don't need to be a genius to figure it out, just read the ingredients on the bottle. Given that Krishna designed and created the world - what is better to put on your skin: sunlight, or "methoxycinnamate"?

Of course, apart from cancer-causing ingredients, sunscreens also promote cancer by inhibiting the body's ability to produce vitamin D from sunlight. This leads to liver malfunction, and can be a causative factor of melanoma (His Holiness Bhakti Tirtha Swami didn't get melanoma on his foot from "exposure to too much sunlight").

Here's something else that is completely unregulated by federal health authorities - tattoo ink. Try finding out what the ingredients are - most times they aren't even listed.

Tonight at Atma Josh and I were discussing the idea of "selfish" and "selfless".

Selfish means a mentality of exploitation. Selfishness arises from a misconception of the self - not the self, but selfish - "kind of" the self.

Selflessness, on the other hand, means a mentality of renunciation. It can be favorable when your idea of the "self" is misguided. In that case it means not actually "selflessness" but "selfishlessness"

Otherwise Krishna consciousness means self-realization - not selfish, not selfless, but being yourself.

Don't be selfish, be yourself.

Recently Atma was nominated for a local Business Achiever Award.

We didn't set out to achieve this, it's just something that happened along the way.

The other day we were discussing respect. Practitioners of Krishna Consciousness are well acquainted with the idea that one should not desire respect from others. However, I put another spin on it by posing the question: "It might not be good to chase respect, but what about trying to be respectable? Is that a bad thing?"

Srila Prabhupada said that a Vaisnava is a perfect gentleman. If you try to be respectable, then automatically people will respect you, or at least they are more likely to. People may respect you, and they may not. There is one person whose respect you must always retain, and that is your own. You always have to have self-respect. And you have to earn even that. Trying to have respect without trying to be respectable is unnatural.

One is a subordinate consequential effect of the other. I blogged about the award nomination on the Atma blog, and mentioned that sustained profit is a subordinate consequential effect of service.

Another example of subordinate consequential effects is our placing on Google. Tonight I talked with Michael over dinner, and he told me that he found us through Google. People find out about us through word of mouth from their friends, by meeting a staff member doing book distribution in the street, and through Google.

I asked Michael if he had googled "Yoga Brisbane" [try it] - he laughed and confirmed that he had.

We appear twice on the first page of that search.

Once someone asked me: "How do you do it? You must do all kinds of search engine tricks."

Actually, no.

If you think about it, the goal of Google is to offer relevant search results. Assuming that Google works (which it seems to do quite well), the way to go higher in search results is to actually be more relevant to people.

So we just try to be ourselves, and strive to serve people in a more and more relevant way. The other stuff is just a natural consequential flow-on from that.

Seth Godin wrote about it the other day [his blog entry]: he contrasts "trying to beat the system" with "working the system". One is legitimate and healthy, the other illegitimate and unnatural.

Seth also wrote about it in his book "All Marketers are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World" [Amazon.com]:

The only way your story will be believed, the only way people will tell themselves the lie you are depending on and the only way your idea will spread is if you tell the truth. And you are telling the truth when you live the story you are telling - when it's authentic.

(You) are not sitting around scheming up new plans on how to deceive the public. Instead you are living and breathing your story.

This is what makes it all work: a complete dedication to and embrace of your story.

So again, you've got to be yourself. Krishna Consciousness is about self-realization. It's about being authentic, being yourself.

There is no one more qualified than you to do it.