[Advaita-l] Themyth of strict old days.

[Bhaskar YR]

I was only trying to bring out the fact that one potantially gets 
distracted
over the trivialities and nitty gritties of 'essentials'.  This itself
becomes a pitfall and hooks the mind on to unnecessary pursuits than 
simple
straight bhakti and natural sontaneous state of chitta shuddhi.

praNAms 
Hare Krishna

The point needs to be noted here is that there are three category of 
people :

(a) People who follow the vidhi-s & nishedha-s as enshrined in the dharma 
shAstra-s / scriptures with shraddha & bhakti .  They sincerely believe 
that it is their svadharma and needs to be followed at any cost to get the 
required chitta shuddhi or whatever the phala is.

(b) People follow the shAstra vidhi-s just to make it a big show in front 
of others & they  follow these vidhi-s with an intention to show others 
that they are more orthodox & saMpradAyavAdins.  These people normally 
would raise an issue for everything when it comes to shAstra vihita 
dharmAcharaNa. 

(c) People, who donot want to give much care & consideration to their 
svadharma, comfortably skip their nitya, naimittikAdi karma-s and would 
always resort to 'easy means' to get this chitta shuddhi (mental 
purification)...Normally, argument of these people goes like this, see, 
any sAdhana or karmA is aimed to get chitta shuddhi, no matter which means 
we follow, our ultimate goal is to get chitta shuddhi, that we would get 
by following the bhakti, ArAdhana, keertana etc.  They prefer bhajana, 
keertana, nAma smaraNa etc. to their svadharma like  sandhyAdhi 
anushTAna...These people would comfortably forget the bhagavAn upadesha in 
geeta : svadharme nidhanaM shreyaH...

IMO, neither (b) nor (c) would bring  any justice to the injunctions of 
our shAstra and dharma ...One is 'show man' another is 'dharma 
bhrashta'...Though category  (c) people are good in their intention, it is 
a fact that they are finding some alternative 'easy' means to achieve 
their goal !!!

Hari Hari Hari Bol!!!
bhaskar