1
Recognizing divinity
1.
2.
3.
4.
Scriptural references
Bodily characteristics
Personal activities
Capacity to give divine
experiences to others
Vaishnavera kriya mudra…?
Normally achara should be
scripturally-based.
Then
occasional
apparent
deviations can be seen as
inconceivable
Obeisances to the Gita
ajïäna-néradhir upaiti yayä viçeñaà
bhaktiù paräpi bhajate paripoñam uccaiù |
tattvaà paraà sphurati durgamam apy ajasraà
sädguëya-bhåt svaracitäà praëamämi gétäm ||
Lord Chaitanya’s gift of love is
more important than his divinity
We leave it to our readers to decide how to deal with
Mahaprabhu. The Vaishnavas have accepted Him as the great
Lord, Shri Krishna Himself. Those who are not prepared to
accept this perspective may think of Lord Chaitanya as a noble
and holy teacher. That is all we want our readers to believe.
We make no objection if the reader does not believe His
miracles, as miracles alone never demonstrate Godhead.
Demons like Ravana and others have also worked miracles and
these do not prove that they were gods. It is unlimited love
and its overwhelming influence that would be seen in God
Himself.
- Bhaktivinode Thakur, Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu: His Life
and Precepts (1896; reprint, Madras: Sree Gaudiya Math,
1984), 60-61.
Lord Chaitanya’s gift of love is
more important than his divinity
Bhaktivinoda Thakura underscores
that the most important gifts of
Gaudiya Vaishnavism are not so much
the knowledge of the divinity of Lord
Chaitanya as the love evident in his
activities and accessible through his
teachings.
NEGLECTFUL PARENTS
PERMISSIVE PARENTS
AUTHORITARIAN PARENTS
AUTHORITATIVE PARENTS
NEGLECTFUL PARENTS
Tend to flee the responsibilities. They may be too busy with their
professional lives, or too consumed with their own problems. Their
children receive neither discipline nor love.
•Children Develop Low esteem
(Gift of God- Sent for a purpose- Lesson of love)
•Neglect is Selfishness
•You Teach How to Neglect
•Child takes Seriously than you Mean
PERMISSIVE PARENTS
Have Love and care about their
kids, but fail to set limits. They
often fear that discipline will
drive children away
or interfere with affection.
•No clear Understanding is given what to do
or what not to do,
•Another form of neglect
•Like to say, “Do it
because I say so!”
else…..
•They often fight with
their kids and
motivate by threats
and punishment.
•Most parents fall
into this category.
AUTHORITARIAN
PARENTS
AUTHORITATIVE PARENTS
•Set consistent,
logical limits and
are ready
to enforce them.
•Yet they spend time
explaining reasons
for the limits and teaching their children
how to make good decisions on their own.
•Do what I do, and I explain to you why
Qualities of Authoritative Parents:
•Show a balance of love and discipline.
•When setting limits or requiring specific behavior, they take the
effort to explain why.
•They’re consistent in dealing with their children, and they teach
by example.
Scriptural Examples
Neglectful – Dhruva’s father
Utthanapada;
Permissive – Dhritarashtra;
Authoritarian – Hiranyakashipu;
Authoritative – Bhaktivinoda T
Subtle forces that shape our behavior
Ignorance – neglectful;
passion – permissive;
goodness – authoritarian;
Transcendental – authoritative.
Essence of leadership
• Balance between love &
discipline
• Emphasize principles, not
preferences
BST – SP differences
•
•
•
•
No pictures in books
No western dress for preaching
Nityananda Prabhu on altar
Reverse order of guru-parampara
Why Difficult without KC…
Principles in goodness,
priorities in passion,
practices in ignorance
Be adept to adopt and adapt
• Adopt principles
• Adapt preferences
Be adept to adopt and adapt
Devotional adepts grasp the core of the philosophy: the
heart of Krishna, a heart longing to love us and be
loved by us. Due to this inner harmony with Krishna,
they know how to express and experience Krishna’s
love in all situations in a way that is practical and
appealing to the emotional and intellectual ethos of
the times. Thus, they become receivers and radiators of
divine love, with their radiations emanating at the
frequency at which the contemporary people’s hearts
are vibrating.
Be adept to adopt and adapt
By observing, serving and learning
from such an adept, we too can
gradually become adept and
develop a spiritual sixth sense to
know what to adopt and what to
adapt.
Carrying on the legacy of a charismatic leader
1. Transfer of charisma
2. Routinization of charisma
Overpopulation - space?
Every man, woman, and child (about 6
billion total) could be placed within the
210, 038 square miles of France, with each
person having about 975 square feet of
space.
Overpopulation - food?
By practicing the best agricultural methods now
in use, the world's farmers could raise enough
food to provide a meat-centered diet for a
population ten times greater than the present
one. If people would be satisfied with an equally
nourishing but mostly vegetarian diet, a
population thirty times greater than the current
one could be fed.
- University of California's Division of Agricultural Science study
Overpopulation or mismanagement?
In the early 1970s there was some famine in
sub-Saharan Africa, but studies have shown that
every country affected also had, within its own
borders, sufficient agricultural resources to feed
its own people… much of the best land was
being misused for production of cash export
crops.
- Frances Moore Lappi in Food First
Meat-eating: From one niyamagraha to another
No exception to the rule: To every rule
there is an exception
Eg. Apad-dharma
Principles – Compass; Rules – Roads
Eg. Rules about yajnas with animal
sacrifices were roads to move people
towards God consciousness
Different ways of looking & naming
• The power of Sankarshana = the
power of gravitation
• Eg. Nobel Laureate Roger Sperry:
why does a car move?
Different ways of looking & naming
• Krishna pushes the button of
creation and starts a chain reaction
• Top-down causation vs bottom-up
causation
The Singular Lord acts in Plural Ways
• Cause of malaria
Level of
Causality
Immediate
Cause
Remedy
Remote
Bad karma
Karma-kanda
Ultimate
Forgetfulness
of Krishna
Bhakti-yoga
Mosquito bite Science
We need food for the mind and ear
If our endeavor (prayäsa) is not to
inquire about the Absolute Truth, we
will simply increase our endeavor to
satisfy our artificial needs.
Hunger vs Pseudo-hunger: Eat for
nutrition vs eat for recreation
All specific hunger is usually pseudohunger
Soma = Liquor?
Western Indologists’ approach to Vedic
culture:
1. Downsize – Not so large
2. Postdate – Not so old
3. Downgrade – Not so good
Eg. Max Mueller – sannyasi should cut
cows
Gross Body
Subtle Body
Soul
Three levels
of being
Subtle Body
Ghost: Soul with
subtle body
Soul
How a person
becomes a ghost
Gross Body: dead
on the departure of
the soul
Gross Body
Possessing
ghost
Soul
Soul
Possessed
person
How possession
works
Is the milking of the earth-cow figurative?
Historically earth took that form at
that time, so that action of milking
applied literally at that time.
That same action when understood
figuratively reveals a principle that
holds true even today.
Are all these species fictional or real?
• Science keeps discovering unexpected life forms eg. life-forms
deep inside the earth. The orthodox magazine Scientific
American admitted, "Long-standing scientific dogma held that
this realm was essentially sterile. But that belief, as it turns
out, was wrong."? "Microbes Inside the Earth," in Scientific
American [online journal] (October 1996; available from
http//www.sciam.com)
• Scientists have now recovered organisms from depths
extending to almost two miles under Earth's surface, at
temperatures as high as 75 degrees Celsius.
Are all these species fictional or real?
Heat-loving microbes, called thermophiles. are the best-studied
extremists. They can easily reproduce and grow in temperatures
exceeding 45 degrees C. Surpassing them, however, are
hyperthermophiles, which flourish above 100 degrees C and
derive their nutrition from water and rock. Karl O. Setter and his
colleagues at the University of Regensburg in Germany have
isolated more than fifty species of these super heat-lovers, who
live without oxygen or light. The current champion inhabits
undersea rock chimneys called smokers. This foremost
hyperthermophile, called Pyrolobus fumarii, reproduces most
comfortably at 105 degrees C, but can get the job done even at
113. Below 90 degrees C, however, it can't tolerate the cold.
Are all these species fictional or real?
Psychrophiles go the other way-they love cold. In July 1997 a deep-sea
submarine team observed dense colonies of pinkish worms living inside
mounds of methane ice on the ocean floor. The researchers, geochemists
from Texas A & M University. had allowed for the possibility of bacteria
colonies. But never did they expect to find animals-with a fully developed
digestive tract-moving about in these icy deposits, at such high pressure and
low temperatures.
Then, in 1999, out from ocean dredgings in the South Atlantic, emerged the
largest single-celled organism ever found. Thousands of times bigger than the
usual bacteria, at 0.75 millimeters wide, it can be easily seen with the naked
eye. Although most forms of life cannot live in an environ of hydrogen sulfide,
this entity feasts on sulfur. The scarcity of oxygen is no obstacle-the creature
"breathes" nitrates instead, and can store them in a sack.
Are all these species fictional or real?
• Scientists have discovered colonies of microbes
12,000 feet under the ice of Antarctica. Not only are
these creatures uninhibited by the frigid temperatures, but also they are undeterred by the complete
lack of sunlight. Conventional wisdom holds that
sunlight is the usual source of energy for life.
• "Extremophiles" are now known to flourish in the
most inconceivably hot, cold, acidic, or alkaline
environs.
Nature of scientific knowledge
1. The more scientists know, the more they realize how little
they know –
Science “conquered” space – and realized how little it knew
about space. To the uninformed, space missions proved human
greatness. To the well-informed, they showed human smallness.
Space research reveals that there are more stars in the universe
than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of earth, and our
sun is just one of these cosmic grains. No wonder former
President of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science Kenneth R Boulding admitted, “Cosmology… is likely to
be very insecure because it studies a very large universe with a
small and biased sample.”
Nature of scientific knowledge
2. The more scientists know, the more they realize what they
previously “knew” was wrong –
Newton' laws were considered bedrock truths of physics till they
were found inapplicable in the microscopic and the macroscopic
realms. Quantum physics was developed to explain the atomic
world, and relativistic physics for the cosmic. But then both of
them turned out to be violently contradictory. As both have to
coexist at the origin of the universe – when both the microscopic
and the macroscopic were one, science had the formidable
challenge of devising with a Theory of Everything (ToE) to unify
these irreconcilable pillars of science.
History of Theory of Everything
1. Initial vain roar: Physicist Leon Lederman, “we hope to
explain the entire universe in a single, simple formula that
you can wear on your T-shirt.”
2. Subsequent exasperated grunt: Astrophysicist Steven
Weinberg, “As we make progress understanding the
expanding universe, the problem itself expands, so that the
solution always seems to recede from us,”
3. Final concealed whimper: Theoretical physicist John
Wheeler, “Never run after a bus or woman or cosmological
theory, because there’ll always be another one in a few
minutes.”
Nonenvy: See universe as university
• See competitors as fellow-students
• Superiors: As the same spiritual
expressway that they took is open to us,
we feel inspired to accelerate our journey
on that way by learning from them
instead of getting stuck where we are by
envying them
Nonenvy: See universe as university
• See competitors as fellow-students
• Subordinates: The awareness that we too
were at that level once inspires us to
extend a lifting hand rather than a
pushing hand
Nonenvy: See universe as university
• Our competition is with ourselves, not with
others
• Scarcity mentality – limited seats vs
abundance mentality – our own seat
• The more we win our competition against our
lower self, the more we can use our god-given
talents for not only fulfilling our own
potentials, but also assisting others in fulfilling
theirs.
4.19.22: Sin in Kali Yuga is
• Intellectually rationalized
• Culturally glamorized
• Technologically facilitated
4.19.23: Daridra Narayana
Glamorization of social service as
equivalent and even superior to
devotional service misleads spiritual
aspirants away from spirituality to
materialism, so it deserves criticism
4.19.23: Daridra Narayana
Social service is a necessary kshatriya
activity.
Eg. Rantideva, Shibi, Prithu M
4.19.23: Daridra Narayana
“Those who think that devotion to God and kindness to
the jivas [souls] are mutually different from each other,
and perform accordingly in their life, such persons will
not be able to follow the devotional culture. Their
performances are only a semblance of devotion.
Therefore, all the types of beneficence to others -- like
kindness, friendliness, forgiveness, charity, respect,
etc., are included in bhakti. …
Bhaktivinoda Thakura in Tattva-Sutra
4.19.23: Daridra Narayana
“…Among these, according to the triple categories of
the recipients. viz., high, medium and low, the actions
of respect, friendliness and kindness are the very form
of love and the characteristic portion of bhakti: Charity
of medicines, clothes, food, water, etc., shelter during
adversities, teaching of academic and spiritual
educations, etc., are the activities included in the
devotional culture.”
- Bhaktivinoda Thakura in Tattva-Sutra
4.19.23: Daridra Narayana
Mayavadis reacted to Christian conversions by
glamorizing humanitarian work as if it were
spiritual
Eg “Watering brinjal is better than watering tulasi”
Narayana seva is essential for all
Daridra seva is a natural expression of human
compassion and is expected of kshatriyas
But the two are not equivalent
4.19.24: Symbolic representations
of their sinful activities
Sannyasis like these existed in the past
Indra set the precedent for using their
garbs to get away with sinful activities.
So now those dresses often represent
sinful activities.
4.19.34 Tolerance saves us from the darkest
regions of material anxiety
Accept things that are beyond human
control so that mental energy freed
from wastage in resentment
Not passivity, but humility
Not a justification for passivity in all
situations eg. Vasudeva – Kamsa