Citsvaru'pa - Chuck Paprocki ( March 21, 1944 - Dec. 17, 2020)
He grew up in a suburb of Chicago and in the late 60's he organized and ran summer education programs for underprivileged kids in Batavia, Illinois, and then in Carbondale, where he studied at Southern Illinois University. He was initiated there in 1969, and given the spiritual name Citsvaru'pa - "the characteristic self which is pure consciousness". He bought the first jagrti for Ananda Marga in the country there in 1975, and served as co-chair of the First Earth Day in Carbondale in the 1970s. He organized and ran an Ananda Marga halfway house for teenage girls in both Carbondale and in Wichita, Kansas.
In 1980, he moved to New York City, creating Progress Agency, a business inspired by Prout that consulted on third world development projects. He worked with the United Nations Communications Coordination Committee, which allowed him to meet people from all over the world and to learn “even more fully how . . . the economy is structured and who is doing what and what the banks are doing.” He also successfully lobbied the NY state government to fund free daycare.
In 1992 he came to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as a UN NGO representative for the first Earth Summit. There and regularly in the United States he gave lectures and workshops on Prout.
In 1995, he moved back to Carbondale to join a new Sufi community there and manage the organic Dayempur Farm that grew many tons of fresh produce feeding over 100 families. In 2007 he joined the Illinois Local Food, Farms and Jobs Task Force to facilitate mechanisms by which the vast unmet consumer demand for locally grown food could be met by Illinois farmers. The motto they chose was “Growing the Illinois Economy”. In 2009 the Task Force convinced both political parties in the state legislature to pass the bill they proposed recommending that all state institutions that serve food, including universities, schools, hospitals and prisons, should purchase 20 percent of their food from farmers within the state.
In February 2019, he became the Carbondale Spring Food Autonomy Board President, connecting all the community gardens, and managed to supply the Southern Illinois Collaborative Kitchen and local neighborhoods with fresh produce at no cost during the worst months of hardship in 2020. He became a sort of spiritual mentor to many young people working in the project. Their gratitude is expressed in this song they composed for him:
https://soundcloud.com/jacobtheforester/chuckwagon-prod-by-rp-beat-makers?ref=clipboard&p=a&c=0
Sylva Bars CHUCKWAGON (Prod. By RP BEAT MAKERS)
In his twilight years, with his brother Tom Paprocki, he published with Innerworld Publications a five-volume work, The Untold Story of Western Civilization, plus Universal Ideology: The Thought of P.R. Sarkar. A seventh book on revolution is not yet printed, as is Meetings with Spiritual Masters: A Memoir.
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