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.

Mindpower and reading

Reading the Bhagavat

by Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

Through the curious form of mental telepath known as reading we may traverse the physical universe and enter into the minds of great seers and wise men who lived and wrote thousands of years ago.

An eminence of oracles appear in the pages of the Bhagavat: There is Shaunaka, president of the forest sages; Suta whose edition of Mahābharata was learned from Vyāsa and amplified by Vaishampayana at the snake sacrifice of Janamejaya. Suta heard the Bhagavat from Shukadeva when that son of Vyāsa spoke the Bhagavat before Mahārāja Pariksit, the grandson of Arjun when that great king had less than a week to live, condemned to die from snakebite. Shukadev is compared to a parrot who picks only the finest, ripest fruit, for he picked the juiciest essence of Vedic truth to include in his edition of Bhagavat.

The pantheon of prophets who preach the Bhagavat includes not only Vyāsa and his sons and disciples but Nārada, acharya to the gods, and his transcendental conversations with Lord Brahma, the universal creator.

No other scripture makes the claim that the creator of the universe himself is involved in the conversation. The Koran cites the Angel Gabriel and the Bible has prophets like Ezekiel. But the Bhagavat’s truths include conversations with the universal creator Himself.

In the beginning Cantos Shukadev answers Maharaj Pariksit’s questions by referring to older dialogues between revered and saintly brahmins. When Vidura, elder statesmen and advisor to both Kurus and Pandavas at the time of the great Kurukshetra war had doubts that troubled his spiritual conscience he sought help from Uddhava. Uddhava had received instruction from Krishna Himself in the Uddhava-Gita which occupies the 11th Canto of the Bhagavat. But with typical humility Uddhava recommends that Vidura study with Maitreya.

The great Maitreya reminds Vidura of the teachings given by Lord Kapila to his mother Devahuti. The names of Kapila and Maitreya resound in Indian lore; this Kapila is not the atheist founder of the Sankhya analytic school of philosophy, but an incarnation of God Himself.

In this way, Shukadev and later Suta make reference to a fellowship of prophets, seers, mentors, and adepts on the spiritual path. They describe the teachings of rishis, gurus, munis, and wise men, even conjuring their words from former lives, ancient incarnations and distant kalpas explaining the essence of teachings that have come down from other worlds, parallel universes, different bardos of consciousness, and former creations.

It must be remembered that the Bhagavat is the natural commentary on the Vedanta Sutra--and so it is dangerous and impossible to summarize the Bhagavat. If the Bhagavat is the commentary on Vedanta, then the most appropriate summary of the Bhagavat would be the terse sutras of the Vedānta. If we could write the message of the Bhāgavat in short, haiku-like phrases we would have the sutras of the Vedānta or the syllables of the Gayatri mantra.

The best summary of the intent of the Bhagavat is the Brihad-Bhagavatamrita of Sanātana Goswāmi which has been summarized in the Search for Sri Krishna by His Divine Grace Bhakti Rakshak Shridhar dev Goswami. Shridhar Mahārāja explains that the proper answer to our inquiry athāto-brahma-jijñāsa is achieved through the search for Śrī Kṛṣṇa which is revealed in the 18,000 verses of the Bhagavat and and uncovered in the glorious pastimes of the Personal Godhead, Bhagavan Śrī Kṛṣṇa as Gopijanavallabha, the Lord of the Dance. Surrender to Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the true meaning of the Bhagavat.

This should color our reading of the book. If surrender to Krishna is the internal purport of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, then all the other ideas, suggestions, recommendations, tales and mythological digressions, cosmology, geography and measurements found in that book are to serve this meaning. All else is superficial.

Mystic Powers

Mental Telepathy

and Mind-Reading

IN a recent movie, What Women Want, a misogynistic ad executive played by Mel Gibson is struck by lightning. After the accident, he gains the ability to hear what women are really thinking. He uses his mind-reading powers to great advantage and wins the love of his life.

Men have long used magic and alchemy to attain mystic powers. Certain occult yoga practices of meditation are said to endow their adepts with the power to levitate, with invisibility, and even with the power to read minds.

What if I could read your mind or you could read mine? If you could communicate with the greatest minds in history through mental telepathy would you do it? Of course, mental telepathy doesn’t exist, does it? But what if it did?

Would you take the opportunity to connect with the wisdom of great souls? Today we have YouTube. You can watch masters give violin lessons or explain quantum physics. But how to connect with the minds of the great thinkers? What technology is needed to read the minds of the great sages of history?

Strangely, the technology exists. It’s called reading.

Author Stephen King avers that “All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation. ” King claims that books are uniquely portable magic, since they allow you to converse with Dickens, with Shakespeare or Homer. Through the power of mental telepathy found in reading we can traverse the centuries and read the minds of ancient seers. If even ordinary books offer you an escape hatch into another reality--a hatch that you can open standing in line at the bank or waiting for your clothes to dry at the laundromat--what about transcendental literature?

Many argue that there’s no need for books. We can discover the truth on our own. In fact many books have been written supporting this point. Can you really achieve the highest realization of the spirit without referring to the ideas given by others who have gone before you on the path?

It may be possible to enter another world through meditation or with the help of psychedelic drugs; but it’s hard to meditate in this noisy violent world and drugs are expensive, illegal and deadly. But why not look to the pages of transcendental literature? Why not enter another world through the use of literate mental telepathy using only the portal of a book?

Of course, reading is often criticized. Reading is an intensely private, personal, and selfish affair. It is perhaps the most selfish activity there is, next to writing. This is why both reading and writing are discouraged as subversive activities in many authoritarian states. Women in Saudia Arabia, for example, have just been granted the privilege to drive cars.

 One wonders when Saudi women will achieve the right to read and express their opinions through writing. But perhaps driving is more utilitarian than reading, and so it is being allowed, where reading and writing is dangerous and must be prohibited.

Writing is dangerous because it is the most powerful form of mental telepathy. Thoughts are dangerous. In Orwellian societies, ideas are surpressed wherever they appear by the Thought Police. The first job of the thought police in Ray Bradbury’s distopian Fahrenheit 451 is to burn books. Books communicate powerful ideas and allow us to reflect on them. Thoughts and ideas are not only dangerous, but liberating, since they transport us to other worlds beyond this one.

The sages of the Bhagavat reveal these higher worlds to us; worlds beyond exploitation--even beyond liberation. They propose that God is By Himself and For Himself; Absolute Divinity exists only for his Own Pleasure; you can participate in that divine ecstasy if you join the dance. The dance of dedication is the highest realization available to sincere souls who cultivate pure Krishna-bhakti. The nine kinds of surrender are fully delineated. Can you discover all this for yourself without a book to guide you?

It may be possible to put aside the cares and worries that hypnotize us and contemplate the inner self. It may be possible to have some vision of divinity without taking help from another more highly realized soul.

But if the sages of the Bhagavat took the energy to write their thoughts, why not take the time to read them? If I can find no living saint to help me on the path, why not use the method of mental telepathy to connect with the great saints who lived before me? With the use of literate mental telepathy, simply by reading the Bhagavat you can be transported into the very world Vyāsa saw and knew. Why not take advantage of your hard-earned right to read and dive deep into the mental telepathy of the Bhagavat?

Spiritual Strength

I’ve written over 1,000 posts on this blog and feel that I’m barely scratching the surface. I feel very unqualified to write about spiritual life. People tell me I’m not very “spiritual.” I see their point. I have a lot of qualities I’m not proud of: I’m easily given to anger. I’m not above pride or ego. As far as lust and greed, I’m not immune to temptation.

Still, I feel it’s somehow my duty to remember the teachings of my Guru Mahārāja and to remind others.

We are supposed to take the guru’s instruction seriously. While some men constructed temples and built missions, my orders were different. Personally I was instructed by Śrīdhar Mahārāja to publish his books. I was to work with Goswāmī Mahārāja to promote his words as literature. As far as possible I have dedicated 30 years of my life to doing this. My blog is an extension of this work. People say that Śrīdhar Mahārāja is difficult to understand. I find his words and teachings to be very clear. But I have been asked again and again to explain some of his ideas and this blog is my humble attempt to do so to the best of my capacity. One of the main themes I see running through his teachings is the importance of having a deep reading.

Deep reading has not come easily to me. I had to re-educate myself on many levels to be able to publish Śrīdhar Mahārāja’s books. But I think it is possible, given proper adjustment and a certain amount of training, for anyone to read deeply.

Śrīla Prabhupāda insisted that we take the literal meaning, especially when reading the Bhagavad-Gita. He taught us Bhagavad-Gita As It Is. And yet he took 700 pages of commentary to explain 700 verses. Even while defending literal interpretation he framed his argument in thousands of words.

I think some flexibility must be required, even when searching out the exact literal meaning of a text. This is because the texts themselves are esoteric; they are not for the uninitiated. Rupa Goswami was a great poet who could find several meanings in a single syllable of Sanskrit. How do we incorporate his perspective in our own reading?

This means that we prioritize our preaching; we do not insist on the number of wagonloads of hay it takes to get to the moon. Rather we are interested in the deep cosmology of the soul as represented by Sanātana Goswāmi in his description of the internal universe of Bṛhād-Bhagavāmṛta.

Even so, sometimes it’s hard to sit behind a laptop in a tiny room and crank out blogposts on Bhagavat cosmology and ontology.

Sometimes my spiritual strength wavers. Over the last two weeks there were three major hurricanes, wiping out parts of Mexico, Texas, Florida and Puerto Rica. Three major earthquakes hit Mexico, in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Mexico City, creating a national disaster here. In the little town where I work and teach, San Miguel de Allende, it has been raining continuously for the last 2 weeks. If earthquakes and hurricanes weren’t enough, I suffered a personal loss with the death of an old friend and had to attend a funeral. Meanwhile heads of states are busy testing Hydrogen bombs and preparing end-of-the-world scenarios.

I had planned to continue writing about the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam. I still plan to do this, but sometimes I need to catch my breath.

I write these reflections in the hopes that they may be useful to you dear reader. If you find anything worth while in what you see here, please pray for my soul.

Humbly,

Mahayogi.

ripple2

Pobre Mexico

Viva México

There's an old expression coined by Porfirio Diaz, "Pobre México--tan lejos de Dios, tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.¨

Today we feel great solidarity with the people of Mexico and great sadness. It´s strange to see so many disasters--solar eclipses, hurricanes, earthquakes, hydrogen bomb threats--follow one another so quickly. Some folks feel like the end of the world is near.

https://www.facebook.com/1453098948330162/videos/1474435632863160/

Personally, I'm very upset by the huge earthquake that hit Mexico City yesterday. As you know, I live and work in Mexico, but I'm in San Miguel de Allende, a small town in the mountains.We're on solid bedrock and earthquakes don't reach here. Mexico City was originally built on Lake Texcoco.  Huge skyscrapers tower over the city.  They are easily shaken by seismic activity. The temblor has caused incredible damage. Children are trapped under rubble in schools. It's a big disaster.

While I'm not in the earthquake zone, these national disasters have repercussions that affect everyone.


https://www.facebook.com/michael.dolan.7587/posts/10210324952261845?notif_t=feedback_reaction_generic&notif_id=1505866373221425

Everyone I know has loved ones in Mexico City, so we are busy trying to make sure everyone is safe.
Electricity, phone and internet service is down in a lot of places and people are spread out, so this is not an easy task.

Many devotees have reported in safe: https://www.facebook.com/ufi/reaction/profile/browser/?ft_ent_identifier=10154827292226752&av=1282962211

No Need for Books

Why Read Books?

In Defense of the Bhagavat

by Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

[Sorry for the length of these articles but I find it difficult to be concise...]

Back in the 1960s I was different from most of the kids in high school. While they were getting ready to fight the cold war and support the troops in Vietnam, I studied Russian and learned to play the songs of Bob Dylan at the guitar. We all admired our teacher. He had been in World War II and encouraged us to think for ourselves. While nominally we were studying languages, sometimes he let us discuss ideas.

One day we noticed a book by J. Krishnamurti on his desk and asked him about it. After some discussion with our classmates I had some more questions and he let me borrow the book.

Krishnamurti used to teach that meditation is the mind emptying itself of its own content. There is no need for books or teachers, but only to look at ourselves with great attention and care. I found it ironic that Krishnamurti wrote a book to explain that we don’t need books.

Growing up, my generation had a lot of cultural heroes like Krishnamurti. Another one of our heroes was Alduous Huxley who coined the famous phrase “Doors of Perception,” which inspired Jim Morrison and company to form their L.A. rock band, “The Doors.” As good poets steal where bad poets only copy, the expression “Doors of Perception really derives from England’s first Psychedelic poet, William Blake, who in a poem called the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” once wrote:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Huxley appropriated Blake’s phrase to describe his experience of taking mescaline in 1953 and how he was able to “break on through to the other side” gaining a heightened awareness of reality and a deeper understanding that was not only artistic but sacramental.

He felt that taking psychedelics not only unleashed a kind of madness, but led to a visionary awareness of the sacred.

As were Annie Besant and the Theosophists before him, Huxley was fascinated with the teachings of Krishnamurti. He wrote the introduction for one of Krishnamurti’s books, “First and Last Freedoms.” Huxley, grandson of famous Darwinian scientist Thomas Huxley and author of Brave New World, was notably erudite.

In 1946 while partially blind from his extensive reading he wrote a book called “The Perennial Wisdom” a comparative study of mysticism and compilation of great quotes he had gathered from books on spiritual traditions from China and India to Christianity. By 1954 his position had evolved to the point where he rejected the need for such books. Here’s a short passage from Huxley’s introduction:

This fundamental theme is developed by Krishnamurti in passage after passage. ''There is hope in men, not in society, not in systems, organized religious systems, but in you and in me." Organized religions, with their mediators, their sacred books, their dogmas, their hierarchies and rituals, offer only a false solution to the basic problem. "When you quote the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Bible, or some Chinese Sacred Book, surely you are merely repeating, are you not? And what you are repeating is not the truth. It is a lie, for truth cannot be repeated." A lie can be extended, propounded and repeated, but not truth; and when you repeat truth, it ceases to be truth, and therefore sacred books are unimportant. It is through self-knowledge, not through belief in somebody else's symbols, that a man comes to the eternal reality, in which his being is grounded. Belief in the complete adequacy and superlative value of any given symbol system leads not to liberation, but to history, to more of the same old disasters. "Belief inevitably separates. If you have a belief, or when you seek security in your particular belief, you become separated from those who seek security in some other form of belief. All organized beliefs are based on separation, though they may preach brotherhood." The man who has successfully solved the problem of his relations with the two worlds of data and symbols, is a man who has no beliefs. With regard to the problems of practical life he entertains a series of working hypotheses, which serve his purposes, but are taken no more seriously than any other kind of tool or instrument. With regard to his fellow beings and to the reality in which they are grounded, he has the direct experiences of love and insight. It is to protect himself from beliefs that Krishnamurti has "not read any sacred literature, neither the Bhagavad-Gita nor the Upanishads". The rest of us do not even read sacred literature; we read our favourite newspapers, magazines and detective stories. This means that we approach the crisis of our times, not with love and insight, but "with formulas, with systems" - and pretty poor formulas and systems at that. But "men of good will should not have formulas; for formulas lead, inevitably, only to "blind thinking". Addiction to formulas is almost universal. Inevitably so; for "our system of upbringing is based upon what to think, not on how to think". We are brought up as believing and practising members of some organization - the Communist or the Christian, the Moslem, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Freudian. Consequently "you respond to the challenge, which is always new, according to an old pattern; and therefore your response has no corresponding validity, newness, freshness. If you respond as a Catholic or a Communist, you are responding - are you not? - according to a patterned thought. Therefore your response has no significance. And has not the Hindu, the Mussulman, the Buddhist, the Christian created this problem? As the new religion is the worship of the State, so the old religion was the worship of an idea." If you respond to a challenge according to the old conditioning, your response will not enable you to understand the new challenge. Therefore what "one has to do, in order to meet the new challenge, is to strip oneself completely, denude oneself entirely of the background and meet the challenge anew."
Those who would with Krishnamurti reject the wisdom of the ancient traditions in light of the soul’s own personal realization would do well to traverse the path of Huxley and first read them.

Perhaps erudite scholars like Huxley have a certain right to cast their books aside in old age and attempt a more direct approach. Krishnamurti’s rejection of books strikes me as too facile a paean to dyslexia. To boast that one has "not read any sacred literature, neither the Bhagavad-Gita nor the Upanishads", is not a qualification. Even dogs and cats could make the same boast if they could talk. The idea, I suppose, is that the truths about life are available to anyone upon introspection. And yet there are many truths that escape us even upon great self-reflection. And self-reflection in our age of distraction is often uncomfortable and sometimes impossible.

Science builds on the achievements of past scientists. The primitive batteries of Volta were the forerunners for the battery in your cell-phone; without access to the accomplishments of past generations of scientists we would be lost. Huxley would never have accepted that modern scientists ridicule and reject the scientific discoveries of his grandfather; why then ridicule and reject the spiritual discoveries of our ancestors?

It may be true that “religion” conditions people socially and that such “conditioning” may have negative effects. But this is not a good reason to reject centuries of research work done by saints and savants who dedicated themselves to self-reflection and spiritual discovery. If generations of scientific discovery are worth preserving that we might better exploit this material world, why not preserve the spiritual discoveries of antiquity to better understand the human spirit?

Krishnamurti wished to discard all the old books. Conveniently, he had not taken the trouble to read them. Are the old books merely sham and mystery? There is paradox in reading the book of a man who did not read books and concluding with him that books are not worth reading or writing.

But are the old spiritual books merely a convenient fraud perpretrated by fools who wish to defy the laws of nature; idiots who scorn science and promote dogma? Are the traditions of the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad-Gita merely the lies and riddles of the weak-minded? Are we to believe that the perennial wisdom of self-realization that flows from ancient times to the present is no more than dogma and eyewash for the general public? Is it really true that these so called “religious” texts are no more than fables and legends to control women and children while the strong devour the weak?

If modern atheists are right and death is final, then it is more courageous to say with Sartre and Camus that life is meaningless and absurd. According to Ann Douglas’ introduction to The Dharma Bums, when Jack Kerouac finally left the road in 1956, he claimed, 'The only thing to do now is to sit alone in a room and get drunk.” Kerouac famously drank himself to death at the age of 47 in 1969. Are we to conclude that the most courageous answer to the paradox of time is to end life with a shotgun blast as did Hemingway? Or with a sword to the entrails as did the fearless Samurai?

Or shall we rather conclude with Tertullian who wrote in 203 AD, “Credo quia absurdum” I believe because it is absurd. Or with Carl Jung who said, “The heavy-handed pedagogic approach that attempts to fit irrational phenomena into a preconceived rational pattern is anathema to me.”

The strident reaction of anti-theists is as harmful to human freedom as the dogma they pretend to oppose. And antitheism with its opposition to certain books often serves a more political end.

People forget, for example, that the post-revolution Soviet communist state carried out a comprehensive “war on religion,” and that even after the revolution the Bolsheviks continued to tear down churches, arrest clergymen, and destroy them in the name of destroying dogma. Atheism took rather savage forms in the Soviet Union in its reaction to the church. While such repression might be unthinkable against the orthodox church today, repression against minority religions is carried out as a consequence of “terrorism laws.”

While “scientists” like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris rail against religion and its books, it is worthwhile to remember how such campaigns end when taken up by governments.

Communist regimes throughout the 20th century used “scientific” justifications to repress religious faith wherever it became a prominent social force.

And this armed assault on religious faith was aimed not just at Christians—Protestants, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox—but against Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and other faiths. 

In Easter Europe, social movements connected with religious faiths were systematically repressed as “dogmatic.” And For every Cardinal Mindszenty in Hungary, there was a Cardinal Wyszynski in Poland, a Richard Wurmbrand in Romania, a Natan Sharansky or Walter Ciszek in Russia, a Vasyl Velychkovsky or Severian Baranyk or Zenobius Kovalyk in the Ukraine.

In Afghanistan repression led to dire consequences for the Moaddedi. And internationally for followers of the Dalai Lama in China, or for the jailed nun in Cuba who spoke against the Castro regime. During the time of the Khmer Rouge of Pol Pot in Cambodia, Buddhist monks were repressed, forced to renounce their vows, and worked to death in the flooded rice paddies of the Tonle Sap.

The so-called “dogmas” of religion have been repressed by anti-theists wherever free thought and conscience threatened the new regime; whether the despot was Fidel Castro or Pol Pot or Stalin, the sentiment was the same: “Religion is poison,” as Mao Tse-Tung was said to have stated.

From East to West, from Africa to Asia, from Phnom Penh to St. Petersburg, repressive anti-theistic regimes have pursued an all-out assault on religion.

In the 20th century, the Communists may have quibbled over the details of how to implement Marx’s vision, but they were unanimous in one thing: religion was the enemy, a rival to Marxist mind control, and it had to be vanquished regardless of costs and difficulties.

British author Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory documents the post-revolutionary repression practiced against the Catholics in Mexico in the 1930. That repression resulted in the Cristero War, so named for its Catholic combatants' slogan Viva Cristo Rey (long live Christ the King).

The message of the old books is so powerful that whenever it is taken to heart, whenever a social movement grows in strength based on the ancient wisdom it must be repressed, brutally if necessary. I have often heard the meme that “religion is the root of all evil,” or that “religion causes all wars,” but a good case may be made that it is materialism that is the root of all evil. The determination to force people to conform to a materialist way of life has caused much evil in the world as has been seen in the failed systems of communism and the regimes of Mao and of Stalin, of Pol Pot and Fidel Castro. Those revolutionary regimes held science to be the new god as did the bloody followers of Robespierre and Danton during the French Revolution and the age of Terror that followed.

Krishnamurti and company would do away with the old books and their superstitions, having never read them. Modern anti-theists cite the absurdities of the Book of Genesis: “How could the world have been created in seven days?” they say. “The fables of Noah and the Ark or Jonah and the Whale are patently ridiculous. Why not believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy or unicorns and the Great Spaghetti Monster?”

But the old books with all their absurdities and exaggerations help us see through the madness of daily life and the meaninglessness of death. They reveal the experience of spiritual reality that has colored human life since the time of Noah and Jonah and Abraham. They faced great trials and were guided by their faith as were the Rishis of the Bhagavat who penned their visions of divine wisdom on palm leaves thousands of years ago.

How do we confront the mystery of death if not with the mystery of faith? Without faith there is only paralysis. Without faith there is only hopelessness. We need the anaesthesia of the bottle or the needle to help us make it through another day.

The mythic stories of the Bible and Puranas are not mere lies and riddles. They help us strike deep at higher truths; they strike a harmonic chord deep in the human soul that understands intuitively the nature of the eternal soul and the power of divinity. The sound of that chord cannot be silenced or stopped. The old creed has survived the whips and scorns of anti-theistic critics over generations because it reveals the self-reflection and realization of thousands of advanced sages over milennia.

The ancient wisdom of the Puranic and Upanishadic wisdom has survived the onslaught of Muslim conquest and British colonization in India and has spread to the west through the teachings of Thoreau and Emerson, of Schopenhauer and Schlegel, and even the quantum realities of Schrodinger and Oppenheimer. While these books were ridiculed by Christian missionaries as the crude fables of black Hindooo tribesmen, the old books survived on the basis not only of their deep wisdom and insight but their supple and flexible handling of the problem of human mortality, the transcendental reality of time, and the eternal relationship between soul and Deity.

While Krishnamurti and his fans offer us nothing more than empty introspection in the face of an absurd and meaningless reality, the ancient Bhagavat has the nature of an Oracle. The Oracle reveals truth; but the truth has many meanings and interpretations. Every time we consult the Oracle we find a new idea, a new sense. The text remains the same, but oddly reveals new light every time it is consulted. Self-reflection is often a stagnant, futile exercise. Every time I look into myself I find the same qualities of fear, selfishness, lust, anger and greed.

But the Oracle reveals other qualities: faith, surrender, devotion, toleration, and selflessness. Where self-reflection is often opaque and reveals nothing more than my own limitations; The Oracle teaches there is something higher. In a world of infinite gradations, where is the infinite? The Oracle gives us a hint. The Bhagavat is an oracular text spoken by oracles like Suta, Shukadev, Vyasa and Narada. It is filled with revelations from Kapila, from Maitryea, from Vidura and Uddhava. The stories of the Bhagavat give us insight into the character and vision of these great saints and oracles. Each time we read the Bhagavat we find a newer and deeper meaning. This is why the old books are there. They respond to our questions. They are living texts, unlike the book of our own life which is limited and marked by our own limited memories and imagination.

The Greek Heraclitus pointed that it is impossible to set foot in the same river twice. The current has changed. The water has changed. Even the river bed itself has subtly shifted. We ourselves are changed from the version of self we knew only a few moments ago, for now we have the memory of the river and its water. Now it is slightly colder or warmer. The same river is never the same river twice. In this way the text of the Holy Bhagavat reveals something new every time we approach it, for we have changed, our world has changed, our body has changed.

It has been said that mythology is really someone else’s religion. But mythological texts survive, not because of their fables and tales but because of their universal truths. As young men we read the Iliad and thrill to the heroism of the Greeks and Trojans. As mature men we find the angry pouting of Achilles repellant. He seems to be more of a cry-baby than a hero. Why not confront the challenge? He is a coward who refuses the call of adventure with tragic results. As older men we understand the anger and reluctance of Achilles and pity him his shortcomings while recognizing his true heroism. He overcomes his petty sentiments and gives his life while submitting to his karma.

In the same way, we first read the happy stories of Krishna as children and find entertaining bed-time stories. We read the Bhagavat in the full bloom of youth and look for a message about love. Later we read the Bhagavat in our maturity and consult the Oracle for news of what happens beyond our death and discover our real eternal prospect through faith.

Our understanding changes as we grow and develop Our penetration in to such deep works of faith--our capacity to interpret their meaning-- is always tempered by our own expectations, regrets and short-comings as we approach the text. So it is that the text itself never changes--its meaning is always literal--but our own version and interpretation must change even as we change. It is for this reason that the old texts, the ancient Puranas, and especially the Bhagavat continue to have a living meaning--even for a highly technological society with a deep dependence on technology and the logic-driven algorithms that drive our daily life.

But even personal consultation with the oracular literature of the Bhagavat may not provide us with the peace that surpasses understanding. In the end, we must consult an adept whose faith is deeper than our own. Our own personal understanding of the book Bhagavat is enhanced by the person Bhagavat who explains with both precept and example the inner sense of the oracle.