Times vs. Eternities

The Culture of Amnesia

By Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

I’ve been writing this blog now for almost three years. Sometimes I feel that it’s hard to stay relevant. I like the motto “Read not the Times, read the eternities.” Spiritual contemplation, yoga, and Krishna consciousness are based on perennial wisdom.

The morning news with its ephemeral sensationalism is as easily forgotten as the tweeting of sparrows. At sunrise we find out that there’s a chance of rain followed by a mass shooting with possible electoral corruption. By lunchtime we can’t even remember where the new disaster or shooting took place. There’s a different reason for panic on the horizon. By evening time in the 24 hour news cycle there's a new earthquake or hurricane on which to focus our attention.

With all the latest gossip on social media, it’s impossible to remember what happened yesterday or last week. How can we be expected to pay attention to any long-term problems or solutions, when the incessant focus on the latest scandal has captured us so totally.

It may be that there is some conspiracy to increase this forgetfulness of our true self-interest. After all, the greatest creative and literary minds of our generation have been co-opted to create the mythology of consumerism. The best critical minds of the day now work at developing the algorithms that curate your entertainment options. Giant companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple are moving away from buying and selling products. They are getting into the business of repackaging and selling your privacy and attention span. With all the focus on selfishness, forgetfulness of self is the coin of the realm.

Absorbed in forgetfulness we are unable to evaluate what is critically important. When the Buddha was asked, “What is the most wonderful thing?” he answered, “The most wonderful thing is that everyone is dying and everyone is going to die, but no one thinks he is going to die.” Absorbed with ephemera, we fail to consider our place in the cycle of birth and death.

Forgetfulness serves the interests of the masters of the universe who sell eternal youth and enjoyment. It is inconvenient to remember that the material world is temporal, that death is real and imminent. It is impolitic to consider the consequences of unlimited exploitation.

Whether there is a conspiracy afoot to increase forgetfulness, or whether it is simply the tendency for conditioned souls inflated with ego to forget their own self-interest, forgetfulness is our disease.

And corporate advertising for the consumer society promotes our forgetfulness of self. In his letters to his son, Cicero counseled that Old Age has the advantage of allowing us to contemplate the self. Who would consider this to be wisdom today? There is no need to contemplate the eternal soul. Why be morbid? With cosmetic surgery and viagra you can be sexy forever.

The fascination with “News” promotes the culture of forgetfulness, since it is impossible to focus. Confronted with constant urgency, we lose perspective. The concentration on “News” means we lose all interest in history.

As a consumer-friendly fascism allows a small global elite to destroy and monetize cultures and traditions, we stumble quietly into darkness, peering into hand-held screens, watching videos of the world shrinking into chaos and corruption.

Forgetful of our own self-interest, our eternal spiritual nature, we suspend our disbelief and submit to the endlessly repeated “big lie” that sensual pleasure leads to self-realization. We eschew “religion” as dirty fanaticism even while embracing the alternate mythology: we can live forever surrounded with the hedonistic fun of empty technology.

The destruction of memory is viral. It is a self-inflicted wound. Camels enjoy eating thorn-bushes. When their tongues are pierced by the thorns the taste of their own blood makes their food more delicious. Our self-inflicted amnesia helps us pretend that ignorance is bliss. But ignorance is not enlightenment.

Absorption in scandal and disaster helps us forget our own self-interest, the life of the soul. In this sense constant absorption in the latest scandal is insidious, for it destroys our capacity for reason and disregards history.

Forgetfulness fuels a contorted view of history. At the present moment, with so many earthquakes, hurricanes, mass shootings and hydrogen bomb tests, many people think that we are at a unique moment in time. We are coming to the end of the world. But, again, this is forgetful of history. This is not the first time that the end of the world has been discussed.

Are we coming to the end of the world?

In 1981, I had the good fortune to find shelter at the ashram of His Divine Grace Bhakti Rakshak Shridhar dev Goswami. He was generous with his time and allowed us to pepper him with questions about everything from the Bhakti Rasamrita Sindhu to the end of the world.

At that time there was a class of truth-seekers promoting apocalyptic doom. According to their view, their guru had predicted the end of the world. They were convinced that the end of the world was coming soon.

It seems that one day they found their guru reading the news instead of the eternities. They were shocked and asked what he was doing. He explained that he was concerned about the situation between India and Pakistan. When they asked for a further analysis, the master scratched his head. He said, “Well, India has the bomb. Now, Pakistan has the bomb. Russia is backing India, and Pakistan has the backing of your United States of America. So, it may be that in the conflict between India and Pakistan, if there is an attack it may lead to a wider conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.”

His students immediately saw the logic. Long after the master had thrown the newspaper into the trash they promoted the idea: World War III is coming soon. I remember when the Master’s students sold atom-bomb survival suits with vegetarian canned food to be opened in case of nuclear war.

When these truth-seekers went to Shridhar Maharaja, they wanted confirmation. In those days, many people would come and go from the ashram, trying to get Shridhar Maharaja to confirm something for them. Everyone wanted the magic touch.

They asked him about the war after carefully laying out the argument: “Pakistan and India would enter into clash; The United States would back Pakistan. The Soviet Union would back India. Atomic war between the different parties was inevitable.”

Shridhar Maharaja responded as follows:

Student: Many people are worried about nuclear war. They think it may come very soon.

Sridhar Maharaj: 

That is a point on a line, a line on a plane, a plane in a solid. So many times wars are coming and going; so many times the sun, the Earth, and the solar systems disappear, and again spring up. We are in the midst of such thought in eternity. This nuclear war is a tiny point; what of that? Individuals are dying at every moment; the Earth will die, the whole human section will disappear. Let it be.

We must try to live in eternity; not any particular span of time or space. We must prepare ourselves for our eternal benefit, not for any temporary remedy. The sun, the moon, and all the planets appear and vanish: they die, and then again, they are created. Within such an eternity we have to live. Religion covers that aspect of our existence. We are told to view things from this standpoint: not only this body, but the human race, the animals, the trees, the entire Earth, and even the sun, will all vanish, and again spring up. Creation, dissolution, creation, dissolution—it will continue forever in the domain of misconception. At the same time, there is another world which is eternal; we are requested to enter there, to make our home in that plane which neither enters into the jaws of death, nor suffers any change.

In the Bhagavad-gita (8.16) it is stated:

abrahma-bhuvanal lokah
punar avartino 'rjuna
mam upetya tu kaunteya
punar janma na vidyate

"Even Lord Brahma, the creator himself, has to die. Up to Brahmaloka, the highest planet in the material world, the whole material energy undergoes such changes."

But if we can cross the area of misunderstanding and enter the area of proper understanding, then there is no creation or dissolution. That is eternal, and we are children of that soil. Our bodies and minds are children of this soil which comes and goes, which is created and then dies. We have to get out of this world of death.

We are in such an area. What is to be done? Try to get out. Try your best to get out of this mortal area. The saints inform us, "Come home dear friend, let us go home. Why are you suffering so much trouble unnecessarily in a foreign land? The spiritual world is real; this material world is unreal: springing and vanishing, coming and going, it is a farce! From the world of farce we must come to reality. Here in this material world there will be not only one war, but wars after wars, wars after wars.

There is a zone of nectar, and we are actually children of that nectar that does not die (srnvantu visve amrtasya putrah). Somehow, we are misguided here, but really we are children of that soil which is eternal, where there is no birth or death. With a wide and broad heart, we have to approach there. This is declared by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, and the Bhagavad-gita, the Upanisads, and the Srimad-Bhagavatam all confirm the same thing. That is our very sweet, sweet home, and we must try our best to go back to God, back to home, and take others with us.”

So, the point I’m trying to make in writing this blog is that the “eternities” are more important than the “Times.”

The eternal wisdom of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads, and the Srimad-Bhagavatam cannot be ignored, and serve as a guide even in these turbulent times. By taking advantage of that wisdom we will gradually come to our true self-interest, leaving behind the amnesia that so shockingly afflicts us.