[vodpod id=Video.5525386&w=425&h=350&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26] Recently, I was asked to explain the benefits of kirtan to the owner of a yoga school who was considering organizing a kirtan concert. My response was that in kirtan people experience:
If crying is the preserve of advanced devotees steeped in devotional mellows, should it bother us to display a show of apparent weakness, by crying for Krishna? Shedding tears in lamentation, as a plea for sympathy, as ostentatious syrupy hype or as a tantrum disguised as frustration, can all be good enough reasons not to […]
From where do the jivas come before descending into this multi-dimensional world of imitation gods? Who is Srila Prabhupada? What is his svarupa? These highly intriguing questions are induced by an inbred curiosity befitting man’s on-going quest to wrestle with the inexplicable. Having not yet reached spiritual perfection – svarupa-siddhi – devotees too sometimes channel […]
In my question which forms the title of this blog, I am using the word “religious” to indicate a person who is only a “part time devotee”, or whose practice of Krishna consciousness is sort of on the back burner—only one of many interests. It is important to think about this for both a new […]
Faculty Lecture at Ambrose Ali University, Ekpoma, Nigeria, by Bhakti Vasudeva Swami — June 2010. First, I thank the Vice Chancellor of this university for giving us the opportunity to be able to meet with all of you! Second, I would like to thank the Dean of the Faculty of Arts for creating an avenue […]
Is this a ghost story? It could be if we consider how many of us are nitya-baddha wandering spirits searching for a permanently settled situation. But now we have human occupancy we still like to be scared and awed by graveyard tales. Since the word human sounds better than subtle body, this could be described […]
Krishna’s final and concluding instruction in the Gita is that we should give up all materially motivated religions and just surrender unto him. Since surrender could be considered a filled out application for the keys to the Kingdom, so to speak, we need to really understand what “surrender” means.
It can sometimes be tough being an intellectual in Iskcon. The tendency to keep one foot in the empirical camp and the other in the devotional arena can cause incompatibilities of faith, especially when continuing to grapple with “oddities” like elephant sized mangoes, airborne mountains, talking hyenas and bodily exuded cosmic bubbles. Almost everything is […]
Unlike the ancien regime wherein the king represented the link between man and God and the clergy were secondary to the king, in a Vaishnava society, the invert is true. The guru/sannyasa is the link between man and God – he occupies the topmost position in society and is the unifying figure. In Krishna Consciousness, […]
“They [the masses] must have their illusions at all costs, they turn instinctively, as the insect seeks the light, to the rhetoricians who accord them what they want. No truth, but error has always been the chief factor in the evolution of nations…. The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence […]
