"I recited all these verses like the blowing wind, how could you remember even one of them" The Lord replied "By the grace of the Lord someone may become a great poet and similarly by his grace someone may become a great sruti dhara, who can memorise anything immediately".

 

So in this connection sruti dhara is a very important word. Sruti means hearing and dhara means one who can capture. Formerly at the start of kali yuga, almost everyone, espescially intelligent men, the brahmans, were sruti dharas. As soon as the student heard any of the Vedic wisdom from his teacher, he would remember it forever. There was no need to refer to books, therefore in those days there were no written books.

 

So the spiritual master delivered the Vedic hymns, along with their explanations, and the student remembered them forever. To become a sruti dhara, one who can remember by hearing is a great achievement for a student. In Bhagavad Gita Krsna says "Note that all opulent, beautiful and glorious creations spring from but a spark of my splendour". As soon as we find anything extraordinary, we should know this is the special grace of the Lord.

 

 

Keshava Kashmiri pandit has many descendents nowadays, scholars, intellectuals, puffed up by their academic achievements. Now of course there are two extremes. One is to be proud of ones learning, and another extreme, which is sometimes popular in religious circles, is to be proud of ones ignorance. In other words those who are proud of not being educated, as everyone takes pride in something. Because we are conditioned souls, its like if you are hungry you will always find something to eat. If we have that craving for pride we will find something to be proud of. You can go to skid row where drunks are lying on park benches, but they have their social hierarchy, their pecking order. Someone is the leader, someones the follower, someone gets the good bench, someone the middle bench, someone is under the bench, just like amongst animals who are very hierarchical.

 

There was a Christian philosophical position called fideism. Fideism is a position held by people like Pascal, one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth century, a great philosopher, mathematician and inventor. The idea was that because human beings tend to be proud of their intelligence and their education, God humbled them by giving them an irrational revelation. There are many irrational claims, imagine if in the middle of the night there was a knock on the door and somebody dragged you off to jail, because it turned out that geneologists had discovered that thousands of years ago one of your ancestors had comitted a crime, and not been punished, and so now, thousands of years later, you are being punished for it. We would consider that to be wildly unjust and crazy.

 

Yet this claim was made for God, that God does crazy things like that. This is called original sin, we are all suffering and we have to be punished for something one of our ancestors did thousands of years ago, its a very nutty idea. Actually John Stuart Mill, the great english philosopher of the 19th century said "I cannot worship a God who is morally inferior to human beings". Or lets say at the weekend you give your child a list of things to do and if the child refuses or does it imperfectly, then the only reasonable thing to do is kill it. What else would a good parent do? After all, this is Pauls argument in a letter to the Romans.

 

 

If you have ever seen the film Narnia, this is one of the basic arguments, we all deserve to be killed. Even if you are a good person, pay your taxes, smile at your neighbours, love your children and mow your lawn. Even if you do all of these things you still deserve to be killed, obviously, because your supreme, all loving, infinitely compassionate father believes you have imperfectly followed him. And so what else would a loving father do? However, because your supreme loving father is so kind that instead of killing you, he has decided to kill himself. And so he sends his good son and according to the church, that good son is fully God as well as fully man.

 

What would you think if your parents came to you when you was a child and said that you are not perfectly obedient and therefore as your loving parents we have no choice but to kill you. However, because we love you so much we have decided to kill ourselves instead, to prove our love for you, for we so loved our children we decided to kill ourselves. It occured to more than one person that this is grossly nutty. In many of the religious traditions there are many examples of people who gave their lives to help other people, however you can only follow one of these people and the rest are going to hell. There are so many irrational examples, and living here in America, where these things are very prominent, devotees should be educated about this.

 

There are good and pious elements, but there is also a lot of poisonous theology. Actually one thousand years ago, the philosopher Ancell gave what became a very famous argument to prove the existence of God. It is called the ontological proof for the existence of God. He argues that God is that being whom no greater being can be conceived. If you say God does not exist, then i can conceive of a greater being namely one that has all the attributes of God and does exist. As you probably notice this is a kind of philosophically tricky argument, and yet one thousand years later atheists still get disturbed by it. Now Ancell was simply trying to prove the existence of God, but in doing so he opens up other philosophical possibilities.

 

 

About 500 years after Ancell, Rupa Gosvami, a great Vaisnava saint, gave basically the same argument, which is found in the Bhaktirasamritasindhu. In that book which Srila Prabhupada translated as the nectar of devotion, Rupa Gosvami argues that if you study all the different candidates for God, such as Siva or Narayana or Visnu, Krsna is the most likely candidate. Outside of Bharata there are not that many candidates, almost like faceless, anonymous candidates. In the sense that you cannot really know God. In the jewish tradition it was widely believed that God is so holy you cannot even speak his name, what to speak of carving deities.

 

In Christianity, we have the non scriptural belief that God is very similar to an elderly person and dresses like a palestinian, wearing robes, even though the Bible does not state that. So basically you have Vedic candidates and you have anonymous candidates from other parts of the world. Rupa Gosvami concerned himself with the known ones. So Rupa Gosvamis argument is that Krsna is the original form of God. Krsna is Svayam Bhagavan because he has the most glorious qualities. So in abstract philosophical terms, Rupa Gosvamis argument is that the highest conception of God is the truest, that is what he is saying philosophically. God is infinitely great and therefore the greatest conception is the closest and therefore the truest, therefore Krsna is God.

 

 

Now go back to Ancell who sort of paraphrases Rupa Gosvami, Ancell came first but as we have the greatest religion, he is paraphrasing us. So Ancell says that God is that being then whom no greater being can be conceived, and this is what Rupa Gosvami says, the highest conception is the truest. Therefore i would say to Ancell, if anyone can channel him, that you are right and therefore the ultimate conception of God is not the one you are stuck with. Not the one which has led to almost innumerable atrocities, acts of barbaric cruelty and so on. I would like to say that this evil, this barbarianism is directly related to this concept of God.

 

There is a correlation, an essential connection between the philosophy and the practice. In the Gita Krsna says "whatever the best man does, the common people will follow. Krsna is saying, as God, whatever i do becomes evidence for everybody else or becomes the justification for everyone else. Just like the belief that God will torture you forever, which is a very long time. What if after the first five seconds of torture you have a religious conversion. There you are in the lake of fire, thrashing around and after a few seconds you realise you do want to follow God. It does not matter, for trillions of quadrillions of quintillions of septillions of octillions of years you are going to be continually tortured, even though you have come to your senses. There is something so profoundly evil about this conception.

 

In my view, this conception comes closest to what i would call absolute evil, it is monsterous. So if you believe this is the behaviour of God and if you want to follow the best person, well. And to put the cherry on the poisoned cake, all this hideous, monsterous behaviour is being given out because of thought crimes. Its not because you have done something physically wrong, like beating up some elderly person, these are for mental crimes. You are being tortured in the most hideous, painful ways forever, with no chance of redemption. And the person who is torturing you is your all loving father. Now i defy anyone to come up with a greater evil than this. This is perhaps the most evil conception of God ever imagined by a twisted human mind, i would categorise it as psychotic.

 

 

And so i would say to Ancell, that your concept of God is "God is that being whom no more evil being has ever been conceived". And taking the positive side of "God is that being whom no greater being can be conceived" well guess what? we have a winner here, Krsna. Now if we compare Ancells conception to Krsna, who does not have anger management issues. God, as conceived by many people, needs various twelve step programmes. In the Bhagavad Gita Krsna says you can be materially happy, wise and elevated in this world, without him. Krsna clearly says, "those standing in goodness go upwards, from goodness comes happiness and goodness is enlightening because of its purity, and then Krsna says "those in the mode of goodness worship the demigods".

 

So this is not a jealous God, this is a God without self esteem issues. One of Krsnas six opulences is he is completely detatched and therefore he lays out his system of justice. Krsna says in Gita, that as people approach me i reciprocate precisely in that way. So if you are morally good, pious, Krsna will reciprocate and reward you, if you accept Krsna or not, thats another issue. Krsna says if you want me then you have to worship me, if you want something else you will go to that, Krsna does not have a personal problem with it. Krsna is asking us to come to him purely for our own benefit, and he will perfectly reciprocate with you based on what you want. In fact Krsna is so liberal, he says in the Gita "whoever endeavors with faith to worship whatever form, i will bestow upon him unmoving faith" and then Krsna says "endowed with that particular faith, the person begins their worship, and they get their wishes"

 

So why do people have such strong faith in so many religious and spiritual processes? Because, Krsna says, "I am giving them unmoving faith and then they are achieving their wishes" So if someone gives you unmoving faith in something and you actually get what you want, you will become a true believer. So then Krsna says "they achieve their wishes, but those wishes were actually granted by me alone" This is not a jealous God. What if the universe was created in such a way, you was inclined to worship a particular demigod, but what if you did not really believe in it. If that was the case you could not fully pursue your material inclinations and you could not discover the natural consequences of these desires. If Krsna stopped any non Krsna conscious pursuit, or inclination, people would never fully get those things out of their system, they would never deeply understand the consequences and the nature of what they were pursuing.

 

 

Krsna brings us back to him, not through violent cohersion, its not that if you dont love me, i will rip you into tiny little pieces. Apparantly in the north east of the united states, among certain ethnic coomunities they have a certain curse they utter "crash, burn and live". So if Krsna, by cohersion, pre-emptied our inclinations, how would we freely come to choose Krsna, Krsna wants us to freely choose him, based on an objective understanding. We of course want people to love us, all of us want to be loved, and if we become attatched to someone we need that person to love us, otherwise we crash, burn and live.

 

So Krsna wants us to love him for our own benefit and because it is in our own self interest, because of the nature of Krsna, not because of any rewards and benefits, which are attatched to different types of behaviour. So whatever Krsna allows or forbids is because of the intrinsic nature of that behaviour. So even if there was no God, it would still be in your interest to behave in a certain way and not to behave in a certain way, based on the objective intrinsic nature of different living entities within this world. Thats why Krsna says if you are not Krsna conscious, your faith depends on the objective moral quality of your behaviour, its not ideologically based.

 

We get into this monsterous perversion, this poisonous twisting of religion, that what God really cares about is ideology. So even if you actually love God, but commit subtle theological mistakes, you are still going to be tortured because it is all about ideology. You can see very clearly how the ideological wars of the twentieth century, the bolsheviks, the Nazis and so on, kept the same psychology as fanatical religion, they simply secularised this poison, so you had wars of ideology.

 

This article was taken from a class given by Hridayananda Das Gosvami. If you would like to listen to the full class please click here. You can also download it from there or just click on the player below.

 

 

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