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.
Personalistic Bhagavad-gita scholars reject the idea that God is a formless entity. On the contrary, the personalists, or Vaisnavas, maintain that God’s personal form is the source of all others.
Since everyone, no matter how he chooses to define the self, is interested in self-fulfillment, it is of paramount importance to know what the self is. Generally our concepts of the self are vague and speculative; so we often feel unfulfilled, even after attaining our goals.
By speculation Aristotle may have known something about God, but our point is that we can know everything about God from God Himself. This is not a question of “religion.” It is simply a matter of the best process to know God.
Srila Prabhupada often translates dharma simply as “religion.” But he indicates that he uses this particular translation for convenience and for want of a better single English term, and he expresses dissatisfaction with a translation that could be misleading.
Socrates faces his death calmly and without fear, an attitude he said was but proper for a philosopher who is interested only in the care of his soul and is unaffected by bodily conditions.
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…
you can use the car for reaching people with the message of Krsna consciousness. You can use everything for Krsna. That is what we teach. If there is a nice car, why should I condemn it? Utilize it for Krsna: then it is all right.
By mental speculation one concludes that because material forms are temporary, spirit, to be eternal, must be formless. This reasoning, however, is illogical, like the conditioned thinking of a cow in a barn.
In a dream we see so many things that have nothing to do with us. This is our nighttime dream, and we recognize it when we wake up. Unfortunately generally we go back into our daytime dream. “I am this.” “I am that.” “I am white.” “I am black.” “I am American.” And so forth.
William James’s “Soul Theory” seemed imposing at first—as imposing as William James Hall must have looked to my grandmother. As it turned out, James was pretty close to home. by Mathuresa Dasa Gammy, my grandmother, had a passing acquaintance of sorts with William James, the great American psychologist and philosopher. She owned a two-century-old white […]
Satyaraja dasa addresses a gathering at the Whole Life Expo in New York City. Thank you for allowing me to speak at the 1985 Whole Life Expo. I would like to ask you all to reflect for a moment on the implications of the word whole. What does it mean to be truly whole? That […]
There are many philosophers. Some of them think the Absolute Truth is impersonal, and others say it is personal. In India the impersonalists are known as Mayavadis and the personalists are known as Vaisnavas. So, here Lord Krsna resolves the controversy about whether the Absolute Truth is impersonal or personal.
Do we have free will? Are we all on the same path? Are we going in the same direction? Will we all reach the same destination?
Our modern society, with its emphasis on science and technology, would certainly seek to view itself as being rooted in reason rather than in faith. Faith, after all, connotes unquestioning belief and seems at variance with the “scientific method.”
In brief, a believer in Theosophy accepts as a fact that, “in and through all things, a Directing Will is at work, with a plan of Action from moment to moment towards a predominated end.” That is the version of the Theosophist in a different way as the Vaisnavite works. The predominated end is to serve the purpose of the Predominator Absolute.
Plato believed society can enjoy prosperity and harmony only if it places people in working categories or classes according to their natural abilities. He thought people should find out their natural abilities and use those abilities to their fullest capacity—as administrators, as military men, or as craftsmen.
Even in the so-called normal condition, the pleasure derived from sexual intercourse is simply frustrating and insignificant. For ordinary men attached to the materialistic way of life, their only pleasure is sexual intercourse.
Atheist-existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre writes that because man wants to be God but cannot, he is a “useless passion” in a universe that has no purpose—and thus, he is always in anxiety.