We live in a time which is distinguished by technological progress. Different machines and devices depended on income of different types of energies and also on a telecommunications are the part of our everyday life. Eventhough these achievements should make our life easier and happier we can see that oftenly it is the opposite. People get more distant from each other, lose theirselves in defining of the life purpose, more and more people suffer from the depression and other personality disorders and last but not least our life environment gets constantly worst.
Economical growth, financial profit and technological progress are the main mottos of the present direction where our society goes. Although we reach those goals in some degree, hand in hand with it it causes a lot of stir in the society including growth of poorty, lasting conflics in different parts of the world or as we already mentioned ecological problems. Certainly there is a question if such civilization which destroys 3 basics for its' healthy life - clean air, drinking water and healthy food - could be really considered as advanced and high. No wonder that permanent way of maintaining life becomes more and more disputable topic even on the highest level.
Vedas, ancient spiritual scripts of ancient India, teach us that in the reality this whole created world is absolutly self-sufficient. Shri Ishopanishad states:
"The Personality of Godhead (Krishna) is perfect and complete, and because He is completely perfect, all emanations from Him, such as this phenomenal world, are perfectly equipped as complete wholes. Whatever is produced of the Complete Whole is also complete in itself. Because He is the Complete Whole, even though so many complete units emanate from Him, He remains the complete balance."
In other words everything in this world is created in such a way that there is a sufficiency of everything for everyone. But as Mohandas Gandhi once said: "There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed." So we may say that certain social class of people tries to live at the expense of other people and this leads to many social and ecological worldwide problems.
Vedas teach us also that the real problem of life is the repetition of birth, old age, disease and death. For such a purpose vedic teachings dare us to simplify our life and instead of investing our life energy into gaining of limited and temporary material values we should engage our time into our own self-realization. Less person depends on the world that is based on artificially created cycle of production and consumption, on civilizational devices, on constantly propagated sense gratification and technologies, more he can invest his time into understanding of the basic questions of life - who am I and what is the purpose of my short stay in this temporary world.
Simple and at the same time high spiritual life based on as big self-sufficiency as it is possible, which is derived from using only things that person can locally produce and producing only things that he really needs is the goal of our spiritual farm community Nava Gokula. Of course we are conscious of that we are talking about an ideal which we can not approach nowardays and probably not even in a close future. But only the effort to come close to those principles is a great inspiration for us and we belive that it will be also an inspiration for you.
Person becomes self-sufficient when he is able to produce 3 basic living needs. There are: own food, own dwelling and own clothing.
What is about producing own food we are really active in our efforts. Since our menu is purely vegetarian we engage ourselves in growing of different types of fruits and vegetables. Also our project of producing and processing of own grains develops more and more. Protection of cows and consumption of wide range of milk goods is one of the basic principles of the vedic lifestyle and diet.
Even in this area we try to expand. We produce our own milk and use bull's strength to work on land. In this way we try to act in self-sufficient symbiosis between human, cow and land. Lovingly we take care of cows, bulls and calves. Cows thank us by their milk which is produced in greater quantity than calves can drink. In such a way we can produce our own butter, curd, cheese, ghee and other products. Cow dung itself is a great manure and can be used for many other purposes such as fuel or as a construction material. We use bull's strength to cultivate the land and the land itself will thank people and animals by providing a rich harvest. Naturally we also use different machines and electrical supplies, but we hope that with time as we adopt traditional crafts and technologies we would be able to eliminate using of such devices.
Build your own dwelling from local and freely available materials is not an easy task in our latitude and legislative environment. Furthermore our farm which was a big property of agricultural cooperative provides us many buildings. Nevertheless we would like to experiment with a possibility of construction changes by using of our own materials.
Production of own cloth is also a great challenge and a lot of studying and practising stands before us. In any case we also make effords to achieve this. For example not a long time ago we bought a weaving loom.
Our energetic dependency on outer world we try to reduce as much as possible by for ex. using local wood from constantly renewable resources and cow dung for cooking and heating. We work manually and with help of our bull's strength. We also use a solar power and heat as much as possible. Of course nowardays it is really hard to achieve an absolute energetic independency and in some way it is not our intention either, because we want to stay open to the world and to the public, so we use different electronics and our web sites for this goal. Nevertheless our longterm plan is to create an environment which can be absolutely independent and can take care of all members of our society and also people from the surroundings.
The main point of the whole idea of this projet is however to bring Lord Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, in the center of all our activities and do everything for his pleasure. So our community is based especially on principles of spiritual life described in vedic literature. One of the main ideas of this project is to give people that take part in it more time for studying of vedic literature as Bhagavat-gita and Srimad Bhagavatam, and for practising of the process of self-realization which nowardays bases on chanting of Hare Krishna mahamantra:
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare