Zvonimir sent us the following apology recently and asked to post it on Tattva-viveka:
Dear all
With this letter I want to reflect on my recent response and offer you a sincere apology.
I took some time to reflect carefully because I didn't want my true feelings and thoughts be obscured by any cloud. Firstly, I didn't want that a gentle rose of my appreciation and love for Swami perish in fear when faced with your own love and appreciation for Swami. Mine may be minute and somewhat different compared to yours, but is nonetheless dearmost to me. As there are many kinds of shapes, sizes, growing habits, colours and fragrances a rose choses to show herself in this world, in a similar way there's also many ways love shows herself.
Perhaps of a foreign origin to many, but in its nature an innocent and affectionate academic phrase (best understood in a wider context which was left out) I've used several times in my life, was understood as an offense or challenge and I'll try my best to apologise to everyone, who ever had a slightest doubt about it and any doubt in intentions behind my words.
I'm so sorry. I don't know what else to say. If I say more, it might look I'm going too far in defending myself but I indeed don't want to be perceived that way.
My sincere apologies to everyone; I find you all admirable, sincere and it's a pleasure to be with you.
If you find any value in this reflection, please attribute that to Swami Tripurari Maharaja, who has been my inspiration. During the last 8+ years of my life he had influenced me beyond dreams, inspired in so many ways. For me he's a father I wanted to know and be with, an undiscovered true friend I always wanted to find in my life.
Thank you all and please forgive me.
Zvonimir
This sounds very sincere and I am so happy he did it! I don’t know him outside of what he was writing in the forum, but I think his mistake in attitude was to a big extent because of lack of some living experience of ashram life and live communication with a sadhu and devotees. So many delicate tunings of one’s approach and attitude come through this. From his posts it’s obvious that in his way of thinking and expression he’s different from the initiated devotees here, but it is also expected to be so, since they have so many years of practical devotional life behind while his communication seems to have been only mental and virtual (at least I got this impression from the posts of his I’ve read).
When I was invited to join this forum I also felt clearly the differences between me and most of the devotees here, but it is normal, since somehow we were living in different spiritual families of different Gurus and we are different personalities. Zvonimir compared with us is rather like a motherless child… of course he is even more different. When I posted my first question here regarding two different versions of Maharaja Parikshit’s story (from Mahabharata and from Bhagavatam), he tried to give me an explanation which was completely symbolical and irrelevant, not responding my question in any aspect. But I preferred to disregard the content of his answer without even commenting it and still appreciated his good desire to help me about my question. He wanted to protect the Vaishnava point, by rendering completely symbolic sense to Mahabharata’s version and completely non-symbolic to Bhagavatam’s version. His arguments were naïve for me and not well based, but his desire and siding with the Vaishnavism was admirable.
He won my sympathy with this apology and I am sure that he would be very happy if given a second chance. Maybe if he could have some personal service in which to be engaged and taste it, he will get deeper realizations and finer tunings and will also get closer to the other devotees in the best possible way – through shared service. I’ve seen a post about description seva and he seems qualified to help into this… just an idea.