Asiatoday got an opportunity to meet a young travelling monk, Chaitanya Charan Das, from ISKCON aka Hare Krishna group. Chaitanya Charan Das is an acclaimed author, scholar, mentor, life coach, and monk. He has been an invited speaker at several international conferences on the interface of science and spirituality, including the World Peace Conference 2006 and World Peace Congress 2008 organized by UNESCO. Based in India, he has given talks at colleges and companies all over the world from Australia to America. He was visiting phoenix as part of his North America tour this year.
Asia Today(AT): It is very nice to meet you. We have heard lot about you but want to know more about of your journey to spirituality.
Chaitanya Charan Das (CCD): Nice to be here with you. I was following a normal career chart and I did engineering and was planning to come to America. I gave my GRE in 1996 and I was first in the state of Maharasthra, India to get 2350 out of 2400 at that time. And at that time my dream was two things. One was I want to achieve something extraordinary and secondly to contribute something to society. But, my criteria for achievement were primarily on academic field. I wanted to be a topper and when I got high score in GRE, I was not the first in my college, but first in the history of my university to achieve this. So, I felt my dreams come true. But then unfortunately there was no real satisfaction. Because looking at the marksheet does not give any pleasure rather someone has to come and congratulate you then only you feel happiness. I felt that I am becoming more dependent on others for my happiness. That time I came across Bhagavad Gita (BG). which helped me to understand that the real happiness is found within through spiritual realization and I started following the principles of BG. I was positively transformed. I had a short temper that time but that also substantially went down. Before that time I was looking at BG more like a religious book or a philosophical book. But later I realized that BG can also be a book for self development and for self empowerment. Parallel with my studies, I was doing some social service in my college. And as part of that social service group, I used to go to the slum and teach slum children. I would teach them english, maths and history and I found them most of the kids came from dysfunctional home. like father is alcoholic or there is so much of domestic abuse in the house. And I felt that I was really helping them substantially by teaching them maths, history etc. I was very much convinced about the power of education to help people. During that time, one of my friend was very much into social service. He went to a village and he saw how much alcoholism is creating havoc to poor people. We decided to make an anti alcohol campaign also. My friend by his effort got the whole village deaddicted from alcohol. And one day he was shattered seeing that in local panchayat election, local panchayat member has brought several free alcohol bottles and not only the father but the children are drunk. And that time I felt that by offering academic education, I am opening new options for people but people don’t just need options but they also need the inner capacity to choose wisely the right option. And that inner capacity to choose wise option, I felt, can come by sharing the principles of BG. By that time I passed out from my college, one year senior to me was a student who had been university topper throughout. And he had got the highest paid job in the history of our college that time. But he was a chain smoker and within the first 6 months of his high paying job, he has been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and he died. So here it struck me that whether it is uneducated people or well educated toppers working in MNC, they all had something within them which could destroy them. And then I felt that by the knowledge of BG, we become empowered internally to make healthier choices and to resist harmful forces that reside within us. Thereafter I worked in software company for sometime but I felt that whatever I was contributing to society through writing software programs can be done by several hundreds of other people. I felt that I discovered something more valuable to contribute to society. As I said earlier, BG has been initially typecasted in my mind as Hindu religious book or as a abstract philosophical text but then after I saw it as a spiritual book which is for self empowerment. And as I was having a scientific background because of my engineering I felt that science is one big mountain of knowledge and spirituality is another big mountain of knowledge. But there are few bridges between them. I felt that with my training and experience I could contribute to the society best by presenting the wisdom of BG in contemporary scientific logical terms. And thats how I decided to dedicate my life that time onwards by studying and sharing the wisdom of BG.
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