Service to the Dham is Bhakti

Prema Narayan Das asked:

Destroy the holy dham? how does one destroy what is eternal? I don't have the vision to see the glories of that land regardless of man-made infrastructure. My param guru maharaja told we are at the mercy of the environment, so all our energy should be spent towards harmonization of our minds with the environment. I think it's so we can try to serve undisturbed. Also I think if Krishna didn't want something to happen it wouldn't happen.

Everyone should act according to their faith. But if you want to know the siddhanta preached by Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati and Bhaktivedanta Swami, then it is this: The world is real. It is Krishna's energy. Devotional service means engaging all the senses of this body in Krishna's service. That way the body, mind, and actions are all spiritualized.

How do we do that? By making the material energy more closely resemble the spiritual.

What is the spiritual energy? It is the idealized concept of truth, beauty and love.

In the language of the Gaudiya Mission, service done in this mentality is called "preaching," but it actually should be understood in much broader terms than simply speaking about Krishna.

Words are the most powerful tools in shaping our consciousness, but they are only part of the story. Our minds are the clearing house of all sensual information, therefore as far as possible we must inundate the mind with spiritualized sense data.
As our mind becomes transformed, it begins to interpret all data in a spiritual way.

The Dham is directly the spiritual energy, but like the Holy Name, it can be covered by our imperfect consciousness. So how does one uncover the consciousness? One performs internal sadhana for purifying the mind with the goal of getting inner vision, but one also engages the senses in external service, attempting to realize the tiny fledgling inner vision externally.

When we serve the Dham, we have to think of results because all action is result-oriented. But we are not attached to the external results. The real results, the real vision of the Dham, will come internally, no matter what results there are externally. The trick is to serve externally, see internally.

The idea of Vrindavan is something like the Christians' Kingdom of God. It exists in the mind, but demands to be reproduced, to the best of our abilities, in this world. Since such an ideal can can never be fully realized in this world, it must at least be made as possible as possible for people to realize it in their minds.

How? By inundating the senses with love and beauty.

The positivists say, “Nothing exists in mind that did not first appear in the senses.” We agree. The only difference is that we say, the world has a spiritual dimension that requires a different kind of processing, through faith.

Our beginning point, our center, our yoga pith, is the Holy Dham. That should be the focal point of our service. They say that siddhi is the ability to make one's inner vision manifest in the outer world.

As you work toward that goal, the inner vision becomes clearer and clearer. The service cleans your heart, and you internally progress in your vision from detail to detail. That is what this is all about.

Just engaging in bhajan without serving the manifest form of Radharani’s heart as the Holy Dham is what is known in this tradition as phalgu vairagya.