Jagat

This article was first sent on the short-lived Garuda  list serve run by Rocana Dasa, most probably in 1997. It was available on line on the Wise Wisdoms site for a while, but was taken down. On rereading, I find it still relevant. Reason and scriptural interpretation We are human beings endowed with reason, with which we try to make sense of our experiences in life and learn from them. In Krishna consciousness we have been indoctrinated to mistrust reason and even our direct experience to the benefit of authority-based learning. The argument is, of course, cogent: You cannot invent your own language, and there is no point in reinventing the wheel, and if we wish to see far, it is advisable to stand on the shoulders of giants. But even when standing on the shoulder of a giant, it is with our own eyes that we see and with our own brains that we process the sensory or extrasensory information our eyes give us. Thus, where scripture is concerned, we state the following: C...

Ultimately all Krishna devotees will have to give up the literal interpretation of myth and turn to a symbolic understanding, or their faith will collapse on its own contradictions. The reason a Gaudiya Vaishnava cannot be a literalist is because a literalist is always an unconscious dualist. As with all seekers of Truth, we hold that "when one's ultimate concerns are relative truths, that is called idolatry." (Paul Tillich) In other words, it is misplaced and misguided faith. The literalist may appear to be unitarian who has resolved the problem of duality, but in fact he has a big unacknowledged Jungian "Shadow". Therefore his views are unsynthesized. This is why I say his position will ultimately collapse on its own contradictions. We are acintya-bhedābheda-vādis . Acintya means paradox or mystery. Acintya-bhedābheda is not about artificially throwing up one's hands and saying, "It is all one anyway!" it is about the experiential and con...

Subal  Das-Steve Bohlert Steve Bohlert , otherwise known as Subal Das Goswami, is a friend and a senior Godbrother, having taking initiation from Lalita Prasad Thakur several years before I did. Since his life trajectory and mine have some interesting parallels, I feel a great affinity and friendship for him. Some time ago he sent me a book that he has written,  Universalist Radha Krishnaism: A Spirituality of Liberty, Truth and Love , published by Sky River Press . My intention was to review the book then, but for whatever reason, I have been amiss in so doing, which is more than just a minor oversight. This book is sufficiently important that its wide dissemination amongst devotees is a desideratum. Indeed, with the book Subal sent an ebullient review written by former ISKCON public relations officer and author, Nori Muster , which shows that it can answer at least some of the doubts and fulfill the desires of erstwhile devotees who are seeking to use their religi...

My basic idea here is simply this: I don't think that after Marx, Nietzsche, Huxley, Spenser, Freud, Sartre, Camus, and the rest of the 19th and 20th century's giants of atheistic thought, that there will be much new to be said. I have read most of these authors and also responses to their thought by Christian authors like Borhnoeffer, Tillich and Niebuhr. Nevertheless, I think that there is value in the contribution all these thinkers made, and atheism had a strong influence on the development of Christianity in the post WWII period, both as a transformative in liberal mainline Protestantism as well as in the reactionary fundamentalisms. Of course, I find liberalism more attractive, and that is one of the reasons I appreciate the atheist critiques of fundamentalist thought. In India, the influence of Buddhism meant that the most basic arguments of atheism were given much more credence philosophically and theism could not credibly grow in India without the intermediate ste...