User:Tirthapada Das

Tirthapada Das is a Vaishnava, poet, writer and the present-day editor of the magazine called "The Rays of the Harmonist". He was born on November 22, 1947 in Dwarf, Kentucky, USA, in the Appalachian mountains at 10:00 p.m. His original name on the birth certificate is Ted Edwards, the second boy of twin boys. His twin brother passed away some six months later, the victim of a congenital heart problem, commonly called "a blue baby". He migrated at the age of four with his father, Bill Edwards, a coal-miner in his early Appalachian days, to Madison Heights, Michigan. There he graduated from Madison High School with honors and went on to get his B.A. in English, Creative Writing, from Michigan State University. After graduating, he went to New York to live with his artist brother, Roy Edwards. He lived off and on with him for two years before joining a transcendental meditation group of bhakti-yogis, commonly known as the "Hare Krishnas". He had already published a few poems in his college days and was working on a book of poems in his New York days when he joined and became a traveling monk. Having traveled the world, and especially to India some twenty times, he is a senior devotee who preaches and writes from his present-day residence in California. He is working on a translation and finishing a book on his experiences with his brother Roy, an apprentice to the master, Mark Rothko. Das means "servant" and "Tirthapada" means "at the feet of the holy places of pilgrimage". His life has been such, a spiritual quest and life-long search for establishing the principle questions of human life: Who am I? What is the goal of life? and not knowing these two, why am I suffering? To answer those questions, he became an initiated disciple of the renowned Vaishnava founder of ISKCON, Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Maharaja Prabhupada in 1972. When Srila Prabhupada departed for Goloka Vrndavana, he continued his spiritual quest through the instructions of his elder gurus, Srila Bhakti Raksaksa Sridhara Deva Gosvami and Srila Bhaktivedanta Narayana Maharaja. He considers himself as a mere glowworm in the presence of these three great shining examples of Vaishnava acaryas in the world.