Who will say which religion is false and which genuine, which harmful and which beneficial? What we need is not someone’s self-interested opinion but a reliable, nonsectarian standard for separating the bogus religions from the bona fide.
The promise of art is illusory. Art cannot save us, no matter how beautiful and well wrought its objects may be. They are, essentially, fictions. At best, art may palliate the pains of life, but even in this it dangerously misleads.
At the great chariot festival in the holy city of Jagannatha Puri, Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu danced in ecstasy before the chariot of Lord Jagannatha, revealing a most intimate pastime of the Supreme Lord.
While Europe, as if weary of its medieval concepts of God, turned with new interest toward man and the mundane, a spiritual revolution in India—destined to spread worldwide—was revealing the dynamic nature of the Absolute Truth.
In the midst of the great battle, surrounded by the clash of arms, where the dust churned up by the horses dimmed the sun and blood turned the earth to mud, Krsna suddenly stopped the chariot and sprang to the ground.
The powerful tyrant, Kamsa, was as vile as they come. After usurping the throne from his father and killing and imprisoning many of his own relatives, he turned on his chief rival, Lord Krsna.
What do we do in paradise? What makes it such a desirable place to be? The dominant image of the kingdom of God I retained from childhood is of a sort of perpetual suburban Saturday spent on the back patio in an interminable family reunion with pious resurrected relatives.
The law of karma is as strict, relentless, and impartial as the grosser natural laws of motion and gravity. For example, if I eat the flesh of animals even though I can live as well without it, my bad karma will force me to be born as an animal and to be slaughtered myself.
We must invite Krsna back as the central object of all our senses. He is as available to us today as He was when He wandered at will in the Vrndavana forest, charming all beings. We need only chant His holy names.
Character formation is one of the main goals of the gurukula system, and it requires that the students have continuous and intimate association with a teacher who instructs them by the example of his own conduct.
“Political language,” wrote Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” But neither Orwell’s essay nor the popularization of his lesson in Holocaust seems to have deterred people from using political language.
“In the Dvapara-yuga people should worship Lord Visnu only by the regulative principles of the Narada-pancaratra and other such authorized books. In the Age of Kali, however, people should simply chant the holy names of the Supreme Personality of Godhead.”
The illusion I want to destroy is perhaps the most deeply rooted and pervasive of all human convictions. It is the idea that we can achieve happiness through the enjoyment of our senses, especially through that prototype of all pleasure, sex and sexual love.
The Republican Party seems to have emerged from its recent national convention as a reconstituted American conservative party, and the November elections may give the voters at least the appearance of choice between a clear right and a clear left.
Behind Srila Prabhupada’s appearance on the alien Manhattan streets stand five millennia of planning and effort. The story of it opens one sunrise fifty centuries ago in the Himalayas, where the sage Krsna-Dvaipayana Vyasa sits in trance on the bank of the Sarasvati.
Krishna meditated, He became God. Buddha meditated, he became god. Jesus meditated, he became god. Now god wants you to meditate so you can become god…
Strange that these Baptists should discover, looking back at them under a shaven head marked with the twin clay lines of tilaka—the signs of a servant of Visnu—such a disconcertingly familiar American Protestant face.
I had watched as one Catholic priest after another abandoned their vows to take up secular life. Some got married; others simply hit the streets.
Jnana is “book knowledge” or “theory” because it entails the renunciation of all work, the suppression of the senses, and the rejection of the world as false. Vijnana is realized knowledge because it does not come about by mental speculation and the cessation of actions but rather by engagement in active devotional service.
Krishna wants us to eat only food offered first in sacrifice to Him: “The devotees of the Lord are released from all sins because they eat food which is offered first for sacrifice. Others, who prepare food for personal sense enjoyment, verily eat only sin.”