Course taught by Kirit Dave between September 26, 2012 and July 02, 2014.
One main goal of the course was to help attendees in their spiritual development based on their individual practice.
Namami Krsnasundaram is the book constituted by the collection of discourses by Shrii Shrii Anandamurti on the life of Krishna and its implications. According to Kirit, this is probably the most important book ever written on devotion.
In this two-years course Kirit presented the contents of the book in detail, offering clarifications and emphasizing its main points. All the book’s chapters were studied according to their sequence in the book.
The book deals with why devotion is key to the spiritual path and how it is naturally developed in practice. For example, it explains how human beings tend to follow the path shown by the example of great personalities. Particularly, this tendency is already present in less evolved living beings, e.g. when an animal comes in contact with something huge as a big mountain, creating in it a sense of awe. Then, the historical figure of Krishna, his towering personality and contributions to humanity are a main theme of the book.
According to the author, Anandamurti, Krishna lived around 3,500 years ago and his life can be divided into two phases: Vraja Krishna e Parthasarathi Krishna. In each one of them, Krishna showed very distinct sides of his personality, each one having its own purpose in his mission. Through both these roles, Krishna furthered his mission as Mahasambhuti, which is to restore the dharma (essential nature or characteristic) of humanity as a whole. In part, this mission took on a definite concrete form as the Mahabharata campaign.
In the book Anandamurti explains how Krishna promoted the spiritual development and welfare of the human society both in the individual level as well as in the collective level. Anandamurti also compares Krishna’s words and life example with different philosophies. By doing this, he concludes how each one of these is insufficient to make justice or even to take into account a personality like Krishna’s. In the context of this discussion, Anandamurti presents some of his own philosophical principles as corrections to the main flaws of those philosophies. And in its concluding chapters the book explains about devotion or spiritual development. The concepts of aesthetic science and supra-aesthetic science are introduced and then it is shown how devotion develops first through the aesthetic science and, in an advanced stage, through the supra-aesthetic science; and how these aspects are related to Krishna. (In short, in the aesthetic science there is a clear separation but also a mutual attraction between individual beings and the Supreme Being, and both derive pleasure from their relation; whereas in the supra-aesthetic science the individual is so attracted to the Cosmic Entity that it ends up losing its own sense of existence and only wants to please that Supreme Entity which is his or her Creator, Keeper and Final Goal.)
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