The trouble with elections is they give us the sensation things have changed because our representatives have changed. Year after year, century after century, institutions, administrations and world leaders come and go while the common never gets what he wants: satisfaction.
People do not know that they are spoiling their life. They are thinking, “I’ve got a very nice apartment, a very nice car, a very nice wife, a very nice income, a very nice social position.” All these material attractions make us forget the purpose of our life—to worship Krsna.
While recently watching the evening news, I saw that almost the entire show was about killing and death: a murder, a rash of drug poisonings, a massacre of refugees by military forces, and a sampling of wars and preparations for war.
The Bible says, “Thou shalt not kill.” Yet this simple moral maxim seems impossible for most Americans to accept, or even understand—even those clamoring for a return to morality.
In this era of rising unemployment, it is common to see hundreds of people lining up at the doors of companies offering a few jobs—and those who don’t get those jobs often wind up at the doors of other institutions, namely our hospitals and prisons.
The solution to the problem of male domination and exploitation is not for women to become dominators and exploiters—to compete for social, economic, and political supremacy. So-called supremacy can’t satisfy women any more than it satisfies men.
One of the highlights of last summer’s Festival of India in Britain was an ecumenical dialogue at Westminster Abbey, where British clergymen gathered to learn more about the Hare Krsna movement and its role in English society.
Sex life, according to the Vedic wisdom, is the greatest cause of material bondage because it is the greatest pleasure of material life. Therefore it must be restricted, and the restriction is to marry and to have sex only for the purpose of generating children.
There are many international societies, such as the United Nations. So the idea of an international society is very nice, but we must try to understand what the central idea of an international society should be.
So God’s role in preventing a nuclear holocaust is not peripheral—it is crucial. Humankind, having created such a disastrous situation, should study God’s instructions in the revealed scriptures and try to understand how to rectify their mistakes.
Nationalism demands that we abandon our real spiritual identity and instead fight like dogs and cats. Since conflicts of interest between nations are endless, nationalism can never be the basis of lasting peace, which must stand on a superior awareness of the oneness of all life.
This material nature is constituted in such a way that we have to suffer; it is God’s law. And we are trying to relieve the suffering by patchwork remedies. Everyone is trying to get relief from suffering; that is a fact. The whole struggle for existence is aimed at getting out of suffering.
The poet John Berryman was my teacher at the University of Minnesota the year he jumped from a bridge over the Mississippi and killed himself at the age of fifty-seven. In some respects, his suicide puzzled me.
The majority I suppose, came to express—well, in a word, fear. Fear that thermonuclear weapons might blow the world, or a big part of it—or at least their part of it—to pieces. Hot pieces.
West Virginia Sheriff Robert Lightner doesn’t like people to shave their heads and wear long robes. “When the founding fathers wrote about freedom of religion,” he says, “they didn’t have people like these in mind.”
The present state of chaos in education throughout the world is no more than the natural result of the aims (or, rather, aimlessness) of the modern educational system.
Unemployment. Inflation. Recession. High interest rates. Mounting personal, national, and international debt. Depression. The litany of economic woes pours from television, radio, and printed page, and no one can seem to explain them, much less do anything about them.
My landlord is a descendant of the Rothschilds, that complex genealogy of European aristocrats who have been accused of everything short of cannibalism, including the takeover of the world by manipulation of their vast fortunes.
“We learn everything they learn—like English, arithmetic, history, and geography—but we also learn Sanskrit, the Bhagavad-gita, and how to know Krsna. So our education will get us out of the cycle of birth and death, but theirs will keep them in it.”
Complained one young worker in a recent letter to Time: “First they sent us to Vietnam. Now they want $3,000 a year [from me] in Social Security taxes to finance their Winnebagos and European vacations.”