End of the World vs. Future so Bright

The End of the World,

or the Future is so bright I need sunglasses

Michael Dolan/B.V. Mahayogi

The events of the last few weeks have been eye-opening: Hurricanes in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico left a trail of devastation. Earthquakes in Mexico left Mexico City destroyed. An armed man shot thousands of rounds into a crowd of concert-goers in Las Vegas. A madman in Korea has threatened the madman in Washington with Hydrogen bombs. Is the end of the world near?

I think it was Alexis de Tocqueville who said that Americans prefer sentiment to truth. As I comb through sources looking for meaning this seems to ring true.

In the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, for example, News sources ask us to focus on everything from the firing mechanism of automatic rifles to the Facebook pages of killers. We hear the compelling personal stories of panicked country music fans who were stampeded by a rain of bullets at an outdoor concert at a tragic massacre.

The President is flown in to offer his condolences. Cable News, Twitter, Facebook, cover the minutiae of every moment. But there is no attention to what it all means, no interest in understanding the cause of so much urban blight. Nowhere are we encouraged to think about the ethos that leads to this kind of dysfunctional society.

Politicians on the right call for moments of silence and prayers for the family; politicians on the left call for legislation that restricts gun ownership. Religious figures claim that this is punishment from God for the hedonism of our times.

We are offered a constant diet of sentiment, but little perspective, truth, or meaning. Absent from the public forum are any public intellectuals who are willing to give perspective on our culture of violence. Apart from the analysis of the killer given in an FBI psychological profile, we have no insight into the motives involved in the massacre.

The killing is all the more shocking for the lack of motives we are told. But perhaps the riddle may be solved by looking in the mirror. Perhaps the motives for massacre can be found in the endless culture of exploitation that molds our daily life. There may be some deep thinkers would could give some insight into these events, but perhaps their voices have been silenced. After all, introspection might threaten the bottom line of corporate media sponsors. We are to avoid the prophets of doom.

And then again analysis seems to fall into two camps: the optimism of progress vs. the apocalyptic. The prophets of doom tell us these massacres presage the end of the world where prophets of progress tell us not to worry. There is a warring dichotomy between "the end of the world is near" and the “future is so bright I need sunglasses.”

These different perspectives on the future have been around for a while. I grew up in the 1950s when the space race was on. The future was full of endless wonder. We felt that by the year 2000 we would conquer Mars, commute with flying cars, wear invisibility suits and anti-gravity belts. Engineers were optimistic about atomic motorcars, using uranium generators. Science fiction was no longer the stuff of fantasy.

Counter-posed to the optimism of engineers and science fiction aficionados, some Christian sects predicted the end of the world. During the Cold War of the 1960s it seemed perfectly credible that the world would end in atomic war.

As the year 2000 approached, many millenarian movements felt that the world would end. The ancient Mayan calendar was calculated to the year 2012, at which time it was predicted that time would stop.

I have watched the battling dichotomy between these two world-views for a life-time: the technocrats claim that the future holds only progress, while the prophets of doom tell us the end of the world is near. According to the prophecies of the ancient Vedas, the world is not to end soon. The Mahabharata predicts a gradual decline into what is called Kali-yuga or the “Age of Iron.” This prophecy holds that the age of technology began some 5,000 years ago and will continue for another 400,000 years or so as humans gradually decline into barbarism. The world ends as T.S. Eliot put it, "not with a bang but a whimper."

It seems that today there are two camps; either you follow the optimism of the futurisitc technocrats or you are branded as a doom-saying Luddite. But it wasn't always so. Many intellectuals in the last century grew to question the prevailing model. One of the most prescient minds of the 20th century studied the decline of Western Civilization through the rise of the megalopolis in the iron age. Lewis Mumford was a scholar, a literary and social critic who wrote extensively on cities, architecture, technology, literature, and modern life.

Lewis Mumford

He was one of the last great intellectual humanists of the 20th Century. the whose most important views are found in The City in History, 1960, Technics and Human Development, 1967, and The Pentagon of Power, 1970.

His analysis of civilization is noteworthy. While most 20th scientists expressed the optimism that we are in an age of continuous discovery and technological progress, Mumford was less sanguine:

“Plainly, a civilization that terminates in a cult of barbarism has disintegrated as civilization; and the war-metropolis, as an expression of these institutions, is an anti-civilizing agent: a non-city. To assume that this process can go on indefinitely is to betray an ignorance of social facts: decay at last halts itself. While the tasks of building, co-operation, and integration are never finished, unbuilding may be completed in a few generations. The chief question now before the Western World today is whether disintegration must be complete before a fresh start is made.”

Mumford's works explore how modern life while apparently offering opportunities for personal growth, for wider expression and development, really subverts spiritual growth and promotes an empty, soul-destroying conformity. He focuses on the paradox of progress. Scientists propose to explain everything, but end in the meaninglessness of a random universe.

Mumford could see even in the 1950s that the advance of technology while promising the utopia of endless development ends in the dysfunctional megalopolis.

The Megalopolis

In books like The Myth of the Machine, Mumford shows in lucid detail how the modern ethos of karmic exploitation released a Pandora's box of mechanical marvels which eventually threatened to absorb all human purposes into the religion of science and the myth of technology. An interesting example of his study of architectural dystopia in the age of iron is his article critiquing the building of the giant World Trade Center in New York, in 1970. Mumford Article on World Trade Center

The Myth of the Machine

In his later years, Mumford was more optimistic: he held out hope that the problems we face might be solved through spiritual advancement:

Certainly it is not in extensive cosmonautic explorations of outer space, but by more intensive cultivation of the historic inner spaces of the human mind, that we shall recover the human heritage.

 The Pentagon of Power, 1970.

Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - I Won't Back Down

Tom Petty passed on yesterday. Here he is doing "I won't back down" with some great musicians including Beatle members Ringo Star and Sriman George Harrison, a friend of the Hare Krishna movement back in the 1960s.  I hope Tom Petty found the peace he was looking for.  He will be missed. I think this is a song about a faith that perseveres in spite of all obstacles: "You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down."

Adios Amigo.

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.

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