What I Learned from the Bottle...Again

I say "again" in the title, because I've gone down this path before. When I first moved out of the temple in 2002 I went back to Michigan to live with my father. I lived in his basement and became a stereotypical artist-slacker. I had been living in the temple for the past seven years and became "fried out" as the devotees say. I had no taste for devotional service. I was having a devotional mid-life crisis and wanted to go out and explore the wonderful world of maya again. And I did it with a gusto. By the end of my experiments with sense gratification though (around 2004), I was left feeling empty, depressed and miserable. That's when my now wife, Kadamba mala, contacted me and pulled me out of the gutter and depression I was falling into. I was getting back on track, back on the devotional path.

So it's curious that I now find myself eight years later going back to the thing that I rejected. In the Srimad Bhagavatam there's that verse about "chewing the chewed". The example is that a man chews some sugar cane to get the sweetness out of it and then discards it. Then he again picks it up to try and chew more sweetness from it, but it's of course long gone. This is what I'm doing. I know there's no real enjoyment in drinking, yet here I am going back to it and trying to pretend its enjoyable.

As I woke up this morning with a migraine I realized it was a wake-up call. Why am I wasting my time in these sorts of activities? There are reasons why I ventured back into it, but to discuss it at length would betray the trust and privacy of others.

One thing I realized by openly talking about drinking is that I don't have very many friends in the devotional community. Not one devotee has contacted me to say, "Is everything okay?" Even those devotees that I served with for years and had many wonderful devotional experiences with. Why is this? Are they too busy "doing service"? What happened to all of the compassion, concern and empathy they had for me when my Guru Maharaja was physically around? Odd.

I'm not bringing this up as a criticism. I'm also guilty of not caring that much about others. Maybe that's the lesson here. Maybe that's the point Krishna and Sri Guru are trying to show me: I don't care about others, so why will they care about me?

Everyone is eager to criticize the sinful activity of my drinking, yet no one is eager to know or question why I started doing it again. Of course, like I said, I wouldn't even really be able to get into much detail about it, so maybe it's all a moot point. We should know though that most people don't act without purpose. There is purpose behind our actions and behind our words. The drinking for me was some kind of way to cope with something personal that's going on. It was also a means of trying to create commonalities in relationships.

Ultimately all of my reasons for drinking again were quite flawed. It's a pointless activity and one that apparently yields negative results for me with migraines. Kind of an obvious choice to stop such an activity, isn't it? I'm getting older and more fragile. I'm no longer a spry young teenager.

We're constantly making choices in our lives and we have to reap the results of our actions. Everyday the devotees are making choices to either be selfless and more Krishna Conscious or they're making choices to be selfish and more entangled in sense gratification. It's an eternal struggle so long as this material body and mind exist. If I continually and simply give up and give in to the sense gratification then what is the point of my existence? How than can I even call myself a devotee or a Vaishnava? It's all a farce.

I know why I dabbled with drinking again. I also know why I have to stop. I've never considered myself to be a pure devotee. I've always been keenly aware of my deficiencies and short-comings. Recently a devotee friend of mine told me that we're all just human. I have to wonder though, at some point we need to stop thinking that we're human. "I'm just a human, I'm just falible" can become a justification mantra. At what point do we fight it? At what point do we stop trying to enjoy our senses? At what point do we stop giving in to our lower natures? We're such poor, selfish creatures. At this point I can only pray to Sri Nityananda Prabhu to continue kicking me...and kicking me He is.