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.”
Considering these different viewpoints, how should traumatized herpes victims be counseled? Are they being punished by an omnipotent God? Are they random victims of forces of nature beyond the control of a well-meaning but limited God?
Historically, men have chosen to sacrifice individual autonomy for the benefits of life within human society. Nations, communities, tribes, communes—all attest to the truth of John Donne’s famous adage: “No man is an island.”
The news reports of the Falkland Islands War revealed that both Britain and Argentina were confident that God was on their side. During Pope John Paul II’s visit to England, millions of Britons cheered him and prayed with him for peace.
By disease, accident or providence every one of us will be forced out of our body for what seems an unknown destination. Death’s stroke doesn’t wait for us to resolve our unfinished business, nor does it heed our careful moves to stave it off. When it’s time to go, you go.
The central myth of the whole nuclear disarmament movement—the innocent citizen. These “innocent citizens” surmise that if they can just get Ronnie and Leonid to sit down together the U.S. and the Soviet Union could bury the nuclear hatchet.
General Jaruzelski had just clamped down martial law on Poland, at the instigation and with the undercover help of his Soviet bosses. (There were even reports that some of the “Polish” troops we’re actually Russians in Polish uniforms.) Solidarity was virtually crushed.
The crash of a Boeing 737 jetliner in which 78 people died, raises the perennial question of why people feel compelled to travel so much. Domestically, Americans travel more than a trillion miles every year by air, rail, car, and bus, at a cost of $250 billion.