paul108

I haven't read this whole thread yet, but it looks very good and I intend to. For fun I wanted to bring the total replies up to 108. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare

I haven't read this whole thread yet, but it looks very good and I intend to. For fun I wanted to bring the total replies up to 108. Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare

Maybe someone could form a Vaishnava Association club for Drug Addicts, Meat Eaters, Gamblers, and Illicit Sex Mongers (VADAMEGISM). What fun that would be! And spiritual advancement too! We might have to edit out some of the offenses against the Holy Name, but that should be easy once the scriptures and Mahamantra have been rendered transcendental by a few changes. Actually, Srila Prabhupada already conceived of this club; he called it "The Society of the Cheaters and the Cheated."

I too was shocked when I saw the changes at Chakra, and have been offended by the posts there lately. I could hardly believe when I saw that they published an article of suggestions beginning with changing the scriptures and concluding with changing the maha-mantra! Next they'll try to elect a different person to be God! I noticed that the split occurred right after Umapati Swami wrote an article on women's dharma in an apparent attempt to bring some spiritual wisdom to the fighting over the issue that had been going on on Chakra. I thought his article was very good, and I think my wife appreciated it as well. (She was just saying yesterday how people used to tell her in high school that she's so smart she'd do great in college, do something important, etc., but actually she was smart enough to realize that she'd find real hapiness raising our children at home!) I also appreciate hearing a little more from jndas about what happened; it confirmed my feelings about it. I doubt most devotees have the luxury of checking up on online issues daily, and probably many missed what happened. I think Chakra ought to provide a link to www.dipika.org near the top of the page, so that those who missed the change would know where to go. Hare Krishna

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/10ANIMAL.html?ei=1&en=94d1d58b37155efd&ex=1040410102&pagewanted=print&position=top November 10, 2002 An Animal's Place By MICHAEL POLLAN he first time I opened Peter Singer's ''Animal Liberation,'' I was dining alone at the Palm, trying to enjoy a rib-eye steak cooked medium-rare. If this sounds like a good recipe for cognitive dissonance (if not indigestion), that was sort of the idea. Preposterous as it might seem, to supporters of animal rights, what I was doing was tantamount to reading ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' on a plantation in the Deep South in 1852. Singer and the swelling ranks of his followers ask us to imagine a future in which people will look back on my meal, and this steakhouse, as relics of an equally backward age. Eating animals, wearing animals, experimenting on animals, killing animals for sport: all these practices, so resolutely normal to us, will be seen as the barbarities they are, and we will come to view ''speciesism'' -- a neologism I had encountered before only in jokes -- as a form of discrimination as indefensible as racism or anti-Semitism. Even in 1975, when ''Animal Liberation'' was first published, Singer, an Australian philosopher now teaching at Princeton, was confident that he had the wind of history at his back. The recent civil rights past was prologue, as one liberation movement followed on the heels of another. Slowly but surely, the white man's circle of moral consideration was expanded to admit first blacks, then women, then homosexuals. In each case, a group once thought to be so different from the prevailing ''we'' as to be undeserving of civil rights was, after a struggle, admitted to the club. Now it was animals' turn. That animal liberation is the logical next step in the forward march of moral progress is no longer the fringe idea it was back in 1975. A growing and increasingly influential movement of philosophers, ethicists, law professors and activists are convinced that the great moral struggle of our time will be for the rights of animals. So far the movement has scored some of its biggest victories in Europe. Earlier this year, Germany became the first nation to grant animals a constitutional right: the words ''and animals'' were added to a provision obliging the state to respect and protect the dignity of human beings. The farming of animals for fur was recently banned in England. In several European nations, sows may no longer be confined to crates nor laying hens to ''battery cages'' -- stacked wired cages so small the birds cannot stretch their wings. The Swiss are amending their laws to change the status of animals from ''things'' to ''beings.'' Though animals are still very much ''things'' in the eyes of American law, change is in the air. Thirty-seven states have recently passed laws making some forms of animal cruelty a crime, 21 of them by ballot initiative. Following protests by activists, McDonald's and Burger King forced significant improvements in the way the U.S. meat industry slaughters animals. Agribusiness and the cosmetics and apparel industries are all struggling to defuse mounting public concerns over animal welfare. Once thought of as a left-wing concern, the movement now cuts across ideological lines. Perhaps the most eloquent recent plea on behalf of animals, a new book called ''Dominion,'' was written by a former speechwriter for President Bush. And once outlandish ideas are finding their way into mainstream opinion. A recent Zogby poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that primates are entitled to the same rights as human children. What is going on here? A certain amount of cultural confusion, for one thing. For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history. One by one, science is dismantling our claims to uniqueness as a species, discovering that such things as culture, tool making, language and even possibly self-consciousness are not the exclusive domain of Homo sapiens. Yet most of the animals we kill lead lives organized very much in the spirit of Descartes, who famously claimed that animals were mere machines, incapable of thought or feeling. There's a schizoid quality to our relationship with animals, in which sentiment and brutality exist side by side. Half the dogs in America will receive Christmas presents this year, yet few of us pause to consider the miserable life of the pig -- an animal easily as intelligent as a dog -- that becomes the Christmas ham. We tolerate this disconnect because the life of the pig has moved out of view. When's the last time you saw a pig? (Babe doesn't count.) Except for our pets, real animals -- animals living and dying -- no longer figure in our everyday lives. Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible. The disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there's no reality check, either on the sentiment or the brutality. This is pretty much where we live now, with respect to animals, and it is a space in which the Peter Singers and Frank Perdues of the world can evidently thrive equally well. Several years ago, the English critic John Berger wrote an essay, ''Why Look at Animals?'' in which he suggested that the loss of everyday contact between ourselves and animals -- and specifically the loss of eye contact -- has left us deeply confused about the terms of our relationship to other species. That eye contact, always slightly uncanny, had provided a vivid daily reminder that animals were at once crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, tenderness) and something irretrievably alien. Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away. But that accommodation has pretty much broken down; nowadays, it seems, we either look away or become vegetarians. For my own part, neither option seemed especially appetizing. Which might explain how I found myself reading ''Animal Liberation'' in a steakhouse. This is not something I'd recommend if you're determined to continue eating meat. Combining rigorous philosophical argument with journalistic description, ''Animal Liberation'' is one of those rare books that demand that you either defend the way you live or change it. Because Singer is so skilled in argument, for many readers it is easier to change. His book has converted countless thousands to vegetarianism, and it didn't take long for me to see why: within a few pages, he had succeeded in throwing me on the defensive. Singer's argument is disarmingly simple and, if you accept its premises, difficult to refute. Take the premise of equality, which most people readily accept. Yet what do we really mean by it? People are not, as a matter of fact, equal at all -- some are smarter than others, better looking, more gifted. ''Equality is a moral idea,'' Singer points out, ''not an assertion of fact.'' The moral idea is that everyone's interests ought to receive equal consideration, regardless of ''what abilities they may possess.'' Fair enough; many philosophers have gone this far. But fewer have taken the next logical step. ''If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit nonhumans for the same purpose?'' This is the nub of Singer's argument, and right around here I began scribbling objections in the margin. But humans differ from animals in morally significant ways. Yes they do, Singer acknowledges, which is why we shouldn't treat pigs and children alike. Equal consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment, he points out: children have an interest in being educated; pigs, in rooting around in the dirt. But where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest that we share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain. Here Singer quotes a famous passage from Jeremy Bentham, the 18th-century utilitarian philosopher, that is the wellspring of the animal rights movement. Bentham was writing in 1789, soon after the French colonies freed black slaves, granting them fundamental rights. ''The day may come,'' he speculates, ''when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights.'' Bentham then asks what characteristic entitles any being to moral consideration. ''Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse?'' Obviously not, since ''a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant.'' He concludes: ''The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?'' Bentham here is playing a powerful card philosophers call the ''argument from marginal cases,'' or A.M.C. for short. It goes like this: there are humans -- infants, the severely retarded, the demented -- whose mental function cannot match that of a chimpanzee. Even though these people cannot reciprocate our moral attentions, we nevertheless include them in the circle of our moral consideration. So on what basis do we exclude the chimpanzee? Because he's a chimp, I furiously scribbled in the margin, and they're human! For Singer that's not good enough. To exclude the chimp from moral consideration simply because he's not human is no different from excluding the slave simply because he's not white. In the same way we'd call that exclusion racist, the animal rightist contends that it is speciesist to discriminate against the chimpanzee solely because he's not human. But the differences between blacks and whites are trivial compared with the differences between my son and a chimp. Singer counters by asking us to imagine a hypothetical society that discriminates against people on the basis of something nontrivial -- say, intelligence. If that scheme offends our sense of equality, then why is the fact that animals lack certain human characteristics any more just as a basis for discrimination? Either we do not owe any justice to the severely retarded, he concludes, or we do owe it to animals with higher capabilities. This is where I put down my fork. If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the interests of the steer I'm eating into account or concede that I am a speciesist. For the time being, I decided to plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak. But Singer had planted a troubling notion, and in the days afterward, it grew and grew, watered by the other animal rights thinkers I began reading: the philosophers Tom Regan and James Rachels; the legal theorist Steven M. Wise; the writers Joy Williams and Matthew Scully. I didn't think I minded being a speciesist, but could it be, as several of these writers suggest, that we will someday come to regard speciesism as an evil comparable to racism? Will history someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their ordinary lives in the shadow of Treblinka? Precisely that question was recently posed by J.M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, in a lecture delivered at Princeton; he answered it in the affirmative. If animal rightists are right, ''a crime of stupefying proportions'' (in Coetzee's words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice. It's an idea almost impossible to entertain seriously, much less to accept, and in the weeks following my restaurant face-off between Singer and the steak, I found myself marshaling whatever mental power I could muster to try to refute it. Yet Singer and his allies managed to trump almost all my objections. My first line of defense was obvious. Animals kill one another all the time. Why treat animals more ethically than they treat one another? (Ben Franklin tried this one long before me: during a fishing trip, he wondered, ''If you eat one another, I don't see why we may not eat you.'' He admits, however, that the rationale didn't occur to him until the fish were in the frying pan, smelling ''admirably well.'' The advantage of being a ''reasonable creature,'' Franklin remarks, is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do.) To the ''they do it, too'' defense, the animal rightist has a devastating reply: do you really want to base your morality on the natural order? Murder and rape are natural, too. Besides, humans don't need to kill other creatures in order to survive; animals do. (Though if my cat, Otis, is any guide, animals sometimes kill for sheer pleasure.) This suggests another defense. Wouldn't life in the wild be worse for these farm animals? ''Defenders of slavery imposed on black Africans often made a similar point,'' Singer retorts. ''The life of freedom is to be preferred.'' But domesticated animals can't survive in the wild; in fact, without us they wouldn't exist at all. Or as one 19th-century political philosopher put it, ''The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all.'' But it turns out that this would be fine by the animal rightists: for if pigs don't exist, they can't be wronged. Animals on factory farms have never known any other life. Singer replies that ''animals feel a need to exercise, stretch their limbs or wings, groom themselves and turn around, whether or not they have ever lived in conditions that permit this.'' The measure of their suffering is not their prior experiences but the unremitting daily frustration of their instincts. O.K., the suffering of animals is a legitimate problem, but the world is full of problems, and surely human problems must come first! Sounds good, and yet all the animal people are asking me to do is to stop eating meat and wearing animal furs and hides. There's no reason I can't devote myself to solving humankind's problems while being a vegetarian who wears synthetics. But doesn't the fact that we could choose to forgo meat for moral reasons point to a crucial moral difference between animals and humans? As Kant pointed out, the human being is the only moral animal, the only one even capable of entertaining a concept of ''rights.'' What's wrong with reserving moral consideration for those able to reciprocate it? Right here is where you run smack into the A.M.C.: the moral status of the retarded, the insane, the infant and the Alzheimer's patient. Such ''marginal cases,'' in the detestable argot of modern moral philosophy, cannot participate in moral decision making any more than a monkey can, yet we nevertheless grant them rights. That's right, I respond, for the simple reason that they're one of us. And all of us have been, and will probably once again be, marginal cases ourselves. What's more, these people have fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, which makes our interest in their welfare deeper than our interest in the welfare of even the most brilliant ape. Alas, none of these arguments evade the charge of speciesism; the racist, too, claims that it's natural to give special consideration to one's own kind. A utilitarian like Singer would agree, however, that the feelings of relatives do count for something. Yet the principle of equal consideration of interests demands that, given the choice between performing a painful medical experiment on a severely retarded orphan and on a normal ape, we must sacrifice the child. Why? Because the ape has a greater capacity for pain. Here in a nutshell is the problem with the A.M.C.: it can be used to help the animals, but just as often it winds up hurting the marginal cases. Giving up our speciesism will bring us to a moral cliff from which we may not be prepared to jump, even when logic is pushing us. And yet this isn't the moral choice I am being asked to make. (Too bad; it would be so much easier!) In everyday life, the choice is not between babies and chimps but between the pork and the tofu. Even if we reject the ''hard utilitarianism'' of a Peter Singer, there remains the question of whether we owe animals that can feel pain any moral consideration, and this seems impossible to deny. And if we do owe them moral consideration, how can we justify eating them? This is why killing animals for meat (and clothing) poses the most difficult animal rights challenge. In the case of animal testing, all but the most radical animal rightists are willing to balance the human benefit against the cost to the animals. That's because the unique qualities of human consciousness carry weight in the utilitarian calculus: human pain counts for more than that of a mouse, since our pain is amplified by emotions like dread; similarly, our deaths are worse than an animal's because we understand what death is in a way they don't. So the argument over animal testing is really in the details: is this particular procedure or test really necessary to save human lives? (Very often it's not, in which case we probably shouldn't do it.) But if humans no longer need to eat meat or wear skins, then what exactly are we putting on the human side of the scale to outweigh the interests of the animal? I suspect that this is finally why the animal people managed to throw me on the defensive. It's one thing to choose between the chimp and the retarded child or to accept the sacrifice of all those pigs surgeons practiced on to develop heart-bypass surgery. But what happens when the choice is between ''a lifetime of suffering for a nonhuman animal and the gastronomic preference of a human being?'' You look away -- or you stop eating animals. And if you don't want to do either? Then you have to try to determine if the animals you're eating have really endured ''a lifetime of suffering.'' Whether our interest in eating animals outweighs their interest in not being eaten (assuming for the moment that is their interest) turns on the vexed question of animal suffering. Vexed, because it is impossible to know what really goes on in the mind of a cow or a pig or even an ape. Strictly speaking, this is true of other humans, too, but since humans are all basically wired the same way, we have excellent reason to assume that other people's experience of pain feels much like our own. Can we say that about animals? Yes and no. I have yet to find anyone who still s to Descartes's belief that animals cannot feel pain because they lack a soul. The general consensus among scientists and philosophers is that when it comes to pain, the higher animals are wired much like we are for the same evolutionary reasons, so we should take the writhings of the kicked dog at face value. Indeed, the very premise of a great deal of animal testing -- the reason it has value -- is that animals' experience of physical and even some psychological pain closely resembles our own. Otherwise, why would cosmetics testers drip chemicals into the eyes of rabbits to see if they sting? Why would researchers study head trauma by traumatizing chimpanzee heads? Why would psychologists attempt to induce depression and ''learned helplessness'' in dogs by exposing them to ceaseless random patterns of electrical shock? That said, it can be argued that human pain differs from animal pain by an order of magnitude. This qualitative difference is largely the result of our possession of language and, by virtue of language, an ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to imagine alternatives to our current reality. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett suggests that we would do well to draw a distinction between pain, which a great many animals experience, and suffering, which depends on a degree of self-consciousness only a few animals appear to command. Suffering in this view is not just lots of pain but pain intensified by human emotions like loss, sadness, worry, regret, self-pity, shame, humiliation and dread. Consider castration. No one would deny the procedure is painful to animals, yet animals appear to get over it in a way humans do not. (Some rhesus monkeys competing for mates will bite off a rival's testicle; the very next day the victim may be observed mating, seemingly little the worse for wear.) Surely the suffering of a man able to comprehend the full implications of castration, to anticipate the event and contemplate its aftermath, represents an agony of another order. By the same token, however, language and all that comes with it can also make certain kinds of pain more bearable. A trip to the dentist would be a torment for an ape that couldn't be made to understand the purpose and duration of the procedure. As humans contemplating the pain and suffering of animals, we do need to guard against projecting on to them what the same experience would feel like to us. Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I need to remind myself that this is not Sean Penn in ''Dead Man Walking,'' that in a bovine brain the concept of nonexistence is blissfully absent. ''If we fail to find suffering in the [animal] lives we can see,'' Dennett writes in ''Kinds of Minds,'' ''we can rest assured there is no invisible suffering somewhere in their brains. If we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty.'' Which brings us -- reluctantly, necessarily -- to the American factory farm, the place where all such distinctions turn to dust. It's not easy to draw lines between pain and suffering in a modern egg or confinement hog operation. These are places where the subtleties of moral philosophy and animal cognition mean less than nothing, where everything we've learned about animals at least since Darwin has been simply . . . set aside. To visit a modern CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) is to enter a world that, for all its technological sophistication, is still designed according to Cartesian principles: animals are machines incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this any more, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert your eyes on the part of everyone else. From everything I've read, egg and hog operations are the worst. Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle deep in their own waste eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they do get their beaks snipped off with a hot knife to keep them from cannibalizing one another under the stress of their confinement, at least don't spend their eight-week lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing. That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who passes her brief span piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage whose floor a single page of this magazine could carpet. Every natural instinct of this animal is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral ''vices'' that can include cannibalizing her cagemates and rubbing her body against the wire mesh until it is featherless and bleeding. Pain? Suffering? Madness? The operative suspension of disbelief depends on more neutral descriptors, like ''vices'' and ''stress.'' Whatever you want to call what's going on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can't bear it and simply die is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the others begins to ebb, the hens will be ''force-molted'' -- starved of food and water and light for several days in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life's work is done. Simply reciting these facts, most of which are drawn from poultry-trade magazines, makes me sound like one of those animal people, doesn't it? I don't mean to, but this is what can happen when . . . you look. It certainly wasn't my intention to ruin anyone's breakfast. But now that I probably have spoiled the eggs, I do want to say one thing about the bacon, mention a single practice (by no means the worst) in modern hog production that points to the compound madness of an impeccable industrial logic. Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic-fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. ''Learned helplessness'' is the psychological term, and it's not uncommon in confinement operations, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal slats suspended over a manure pit. So it's not surprising that an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Sick pigs, being underperforming ''production units,'' are clubbed to death on the spot. The U.S.D.A.'s recommended solution to the problem is called ''tail docking.'' Using a pair of pliers (and no anesthetic), most but not all of the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it. Much of this description is drawn from ''Dominion,'' Matthew Scully's recent book in which he offers a harrowing description of a North Carolina hog operation. Scully, a Christian conservative, has no patience for lefty rights talk, arguing instead that while God did give man ''dominion'' over animals (''Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you''), he also admonished us to show them mercy. ''We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality but . . . because they stand unequal and powerless before us.'' Scully calls the contemporary factory farm ''our own worst nightmare'' and, to his credit, doesn't shrink from naming the root cause of this evil: unfettered capitalism. (Perhaps this explains why he resigned from the Bush administration just before his book's publication.) A tension has always existed between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency and the moral imperatives of religion or community, which have historically served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market. This is one of ''the cultural contradictions of capitalism'' -- the tendency of the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society. Mercy toward animals is one such casualty. More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these places life itself is redefined -- as protein production -- and with it suffering. That venerable word becomes ''stress,'' an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or beak-clipping or, in the industry's latest plan, by simply engineering the ''stress gene'' out of pigs and chickens. ''Our own worst nightmare'' such a place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a ''production unit'' in the days before the suffering gene was found. Vegetarianism doesn't seem an unreasonable response to such an evil. Who would want to be made complicit in the agony of these animals by eating them? You want to throw something against the walls of those infernal sheds, whether it's the Bible, a new constitutional right or a whole platoon of animal rightists bent on breaking in and liberating the inmates. In the shadow of these factory farms, Coetzee's notion of a ''stupefying crime'' doesn't seem far-fetched at all. But before you swear off meat entirely, let me describe a very different sort of animal farm. It is typical of nothing, and yet its very existence puts the whole moral question of animal agriculture in a different light. Polyface Farm occupies 550 acres of rolling grassland and forest in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Here, Joel Salatin and his family raise six different food animals -- cattle, pigs, chickens, rabbits, turkeys and sheep -- in an intricate dance of symbiosis designed to allow each species, in Salatin's words, ''to fully express its physiological distinctiveness.'' What this means in practice is that Salatin's chickens live like chickens; his cows, like cows; pigs, pigs. As in nature, where birds tend to follow herbivores, once Salatin's cows have finished grazing a pasture, he moves them out and tows in his ''eggmobile,'' a portable chicken coop that houses several hundred laying hens -- roughly the natural size of a flock. The hens fan out over the pasture, eating the short grass and picking insect larvae out of the cowpats -- all the while spreading the cow manure and eliminating the farm's parasite problem. A diet of grubs and grass makes for exceptionally tasty eggs and contented chickens, and their nitrogenous manure feeds the pasture. A few weeks later, the chickens move out, and the sheep come in, dining on the lush new growth, as well as on the weed species (nettles, nightshade) that the cattle and chickens won't touch. Meanwhile, the pigs are in the barn turning the compost. All winter long, while the cattle were indoors, Salatin layered their manure with straw, wood chips -- and corn. By March, this steaming compost layer cake stands three feet high, and the pigs, whose powerful snouts can sniff out and retrieve the fermented corn at the bottom, get to spend a few happy weeks rooting through the pile, aerating it as they work. All you can see of these pigs, intently nosing out the tasty alcoholic morsels, are their upturned pink hams and corkscrew tails churning the air. The finished compost will go to feed the grass; the grass, the cattle; the cattle, the chickens; and eventually all of these animals will feed us. I thought a lot about vegetarianism and animal rights during the day I spent on Joel Salatin's extraordinary farm. So much of what I'd read, so much of what I'd accepted, looked very different from here. To many animal rightists, even Polyface Farm is a death camp. But to look at these animals is to see this for the sentimental conceit it is. In the same way that we can probably recognize animal suffering when we see it, animal happiness is unmistakable, too, and here I was seeing it in abundance. For any animal, happiness seems to consist in the opportunity to express its creaturely character -- its essential pigness or wolfness or chickenness. Aristotle speaks of each creature's ''characteristic form of life.'' For domesticated species, the good life, if we can call it that, cannot be achieved apart from humans -- apart from our farms and, therefore, our meat eating. This, it seems to me, is where animal rightists betray a profound ignorance about the workings of nature. To think of domestication as a form of enslavement or even exploitation is to misconstrue the whole relationship, to project a human idea of power onto what is, in fact, an instance of mutualism between species. Domestication is an evolutionary, rather than a political, development. It is certainly not a regime humans imposed on animals some 10,000 years ago. Rather, domestication happened when a small handful of especially opportunistic species discovered through Darwinian trial and error that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own. Humans provided the animals with food and protection, in exchange for which the animals provided the humans their milk and eggs and -- yes -- their flesh. Both parties were transformed by the relationship: animals grew tame and lost their ability to fend for themselves (evolution tends to edit out unneeded traits), and the humans gave up their hunter-gatherer ways for the settled life of agriculturists. (Humans changed biologically, too, evolving such new traits as a tolerance for lactose as adults.) From the animals' point of view, the bargain with humanity has been a great success, at least until our own time. Cows, pigs, dogs, cats and chickens have thrived, while their wild ancestors have languished. (There are 10,000 wolves in North America, 50,000,000 dogs.) Nor does their loss of autonomy seem to trouble these creatures. It is wrong, the rightists say, to treat animals as ''means'' rather than ''ends,'' yet the happiness of a working animal like the dog consists precisely in serving as a ''means.'' Liberation is the last thing such a creature wants. To say of one of Joel Salatin's caged chickens that ''the life of freedom is to be preferred'' betrays an ignorance about chicken preferences -- which on this farm are heavily focused on not getting their heads bitten off by weasels. But haven't these chickens simply traded one predator for another -- weasels for humans? True enough, and for the chickens this is probably not a bad deal. For brief as it is, the life expectancy of a farm animal would be considerably briefer in the world beyond the pasture fence or chicken coop. A sheep farmer told me that a bear will eat a lactating ewe alive, starting with her udders. ''As a rule,'' he explained, ''animals don't get 'good deaths' surrounded by their loved ones.'' The very existence of predation -- animals eating animals -- is the cause of much anguished hand-wringing in animal rights circles. ''It must be admitted,'' Singer writes, ''that the existence of carnivorous animals does pose one problem for the ethics of Animal Liberation, and that is whether we should do anything about it.'' Some animal rightists train their dogs and cats to become vegetarians. (Note: cats will require nutritional supplements to stay healthy.) Matthew Scully calls predation ''the intrinsic evil in nature's design . . . among the hardest of all things to fathom.'' Really? A deep Puritan streak pervades animal rights activists, an abiding discomfort not only with our animality, but with the animals' animality too. However it may appear to us, predation is not a matter of morality or politics; it, also, is a matter of symbiosis. Hard as the wolf may be on the deer he eats, the herd depends on him for its well-being; without predators to cull the herd, deer overrun their habitat and starve. In many places, human hunters have taken over the predator's ecological role. Chickens also depend for their continued well-being on their human predators -- not individual chickens, but chickens as a species. The surest way to achieve the extinction of the chicken would be to grant chickens a ''right to life.'' Yet here's the rub: the animal rightist is not concerned with species, only individuals. Tom Regan, author of ''The Case for Animal Rights,'' bluntly asserts that because ''species are not individuals . . . the rights view does not recognize the moral rights of species to anything, including survival.'' Singer concurs, insisting that only sentient individuals have interests. But surely a species can have interests -- in its survival, say -- just as a nation or community or a corporation can. The animal rights movement's exclusive concern with individual animals makes perfect sense given its roots in a culture of liberal individualism, but does it make any sense in nature? In 1611 Juan da Goma (aka Juan the Disoriented) made accidental landfall on Wrightson Island, a six-square-mile rock in the Indian Ocean. The island's sole distinction is as the only known home of the Arcania tree and the bird that nests in it, the Wrightson giant sea sparrow. Da Goma and his crew stayed a week, much of that time spent in a failed bid to recapture the ship's escaped goat -- who happened to be pregnant. Nearly four centuries later, Wrightson Island is home to 380 goats that have consumed virtually every scrap of vegetation in their reach. The youngest Arcania tree on the island is more than 300 years old, and only 52 sea sparrows remain. In the animal rights view, any one of those goats have at least as much right to life as the last Wrightson sparrow on earth, and the trees, because they are not sentient, warrant no moral consideration whatsoever. (In the mid-80's a British environmental group set out to shoot the goats, but was forced to cancel the expedition after the Mammal Liberation Front bombed its offices.) The story of Wrightson Island (recounted by the biologist David Ehrenfeld in ''Beginning Again'') suggests at the very least that a human morality based on individual rights makes for an awkward fit when applied to the natural world. This should come as no surprise: morality is an artifact of human culture, devised to help us negotiate social relations. It's very good for that. But just as we recognize that nature doesn't provide an adequate guide for human social conduct, isn't it anthropocentric to assume that our moral system offers an adequate guide for nature? We may require a different set of ethics to guide our dealings with the natural world, one as well suited to the particular needs of plants and animals and habitats (where sentience counts for little) as rights suit us humans today. To contemplate such questions from the vantage of a farm is to appreciate just how parochial and urban an ideology animals rights really is. It could thrive only in a world where people have lost contact with the natural world, where animals no longer pose a threat to us and human mastery of nature seems absolute. ''In our normal life,'' Singer writes, ''there is no serious clash of interests between human and nonhuman animals.'' Such a statement assumes a decidedly urbanized ''normal life,'' one that certainly no farmer would recognize. The farmer would point out that even vegans have a ''serious clash of interests'' with other animals. The grain that the vegan eats is harvested with a combine that shreds field mice, while the farmer's tractor crushes woodchucks in their burrows, and his pesticides drop songbirds from the sky. Steve Davis, an animal scientist at Oregon State University, has estimated that if America were to adopt a strictly vegetarian diet, the total number of animals killed every year would actually increase, as animal pasture gave way to row crops. Davis contends that if our goal is to kill as few animals as possible, then people should eat the largest possible animal that can live on the least intensively cultivated land: grass-fed beef for everybody. It would appear that killing animals is unavoidable no matter what we choose to eat. When I talked to Joel Salatin about the vegetarian utopia, he pointed out that it would also condemn him and his neighbors to importing their food from distant places, since the Shenandoah Valley receives too little rainfall to grow many row crops. Much the same would hold true where I live, in New England. We get plenty of rain, but the hilliness of the land has dictated an agriculture based on animals since the time of the Pilgrims. The world is full of places where the best, if not the only, way to obtain food from the land is by grazing animals on it -- especially ruminants, which alone can transform grass into protein and whose presence can actually improve the health of the land. The vegetarian utopia would make us even more dependent than we already are on an industrialized national food chain. That food chain would in turn be even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel farther and manure would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful that you can build a more sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature -- rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls -- then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do. There is, too, the fact that we humans have been eating animals as long as we have lived on this earth. Humans may not need to eat meat in order to survive, yet doing so is part of our evolutionary heritage, reflected in the design of our teeth and the structure of our digestion. Eating meat helped make us what we are, in a social and biological sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the fire where the meat was cooked, human culture first flourished. Granting rights to animals may lift us up from the brutal world of predation, but it will entail the sacrifice of part of our identity -- our own animality. Surely this is one of the odder paradoxes of animal rights doctrine. It asks us to recognize all that we share with animals and then demands that we act toward them in a most unanimalistic way. Whether or not this is a good idea, we should at least acknowledge that our desire to eat meat is not a trivial matter, no mere ''gastronomic preference.'' We might as well call sex -- also now technically unnecessary -- a mere ''recreational preference.'' Whatever else it is, our meat eating is something very deep indeed. Are any of these good enough reasons to eat animals? I'm mindful of Ben Franklin's definition of the reasonable creature as one who can come up with reasons for whatever he wants to do. So I decided I would track down Peter Singer and ask him what he thought. In an e-mail message, I described Polyface and asked him about the implications for his position of the Good Farm -- one where animals got to live according to their nature and to all appearances did not suffer. ''I agree with you that it is better for these animals to have lived and died than not to have lived at all,'' Singer wrote back. Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering and the slaughter of an animal that doesn't comprehend that death need not involve suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal happiness, provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one. However, he added, this line of thinking doesn't obviate the wrongness of killing an animal that ''has a sense of its own existence over time and can have preferences for its own future.'' In other words, it's O.K. to eat the chicken, but he's not so sure about the pig. Yet, he wrote, ''I would not be sufficiently confident of my arguments to condemn someone who purchased meat from one of these farms.'' Singer went on to express serious doubts that such farms could be practical on a large scale, since the pressures of the marketplace will lead their owners to cut costs and corners at the expense of the animals. He suggested, too, that killing animals is not conducive to treating them with respect. Also, since humanely raised food will be more expensive, only the well-to-do can afford morally defensible animal protein. These are important considerations, but they don't alter my essential point: what's wrong with animal agriculture -- with eating animals -- is the practice, not the principle. What this suggests to me is that people who care should be working not for animal rights but animal welfare -- to ensure that farm animals don't suffer and that their deaths are swift and painless. In fact, the decent-life-merciful-death line is how Jeremy Bentham justified his own meat eating. Yes, the philosophical father of animal rights was himself a carnivore. In a passage rather less frequently quoted by animal rightists, Bentham defended eating animals on the grounds that ''we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. . . . The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier and, by that means, a less painful one than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature.'' My guess is that Bentham never looked too closely at what happens in a slaughterhouse, but the argument suggests that, in theory at least, a utilitarian can justify the killing of humanely treated animals -- for meat or, presumably, for clothing. (Though leather and fur pose distinct moral problems. Leather is a byproduct of raising domestic animals for food, which can be done humanely. However, furs are usually made from wild animals that die brutal deaths -- usually in leg-hold traps -- and since most fur species aren't domesticated, raising them on farms isn't necessarily more humane.) But whether the issue is food or fur or hunting, what should concern us is the suffering, not the killing. All of which I was feeling pretty good about -- until I remembered that utilitarians can also justify killing retarded orphans. Killing just isn't the problem for them that it is for other people, including me. During my visit to Polyface Farm, I asked Salatin where his animals were slaughtered. He does the chickens and rabbits right on the farm, and would do the cattle, pigs and sheep there too if only the U.S.D.A. would let him. Salatin showed me the open-air abattoir he built behind the farmhouse -- a sort of outdoor kitchen on a concrete slab, with stainless-steel sinks, scalding tanks, a feather-plucking machine and metal cones to hold the birds upside down while they're being bled. Processing chickens is not a pleasant job, but Salatin insists on doing it himself because he's convinced he can do it more humanely and cleanly than any processing plant. He slaughters every other Saturday through the summer. Anyone's welcome to watch. I asked Salatin how he could bring himself to kill a chicken. ''People have a soul; animals don't,'' he said. ''It's a bedrock belief of mine.'' Salatin is a devout Christian. ''Unlike us, animals are not created in God's image, so when they die, they just die.'' The notion that only in modern times have people grown uneasy about killing animals is a flattering conceit. Taking a life is momentous, and people have been working to justify the slaughter of animals for thousands of years. Religion and especially ritual has played a crucial part in helping us reckon the moral costs. Native Americans and other hunter-gathers would give thanks to their prey for giving up its life so the eater might live (sort of like saying grace). Many cultures have offered sacrificial animals to the gods, perhaps as a way to convince themselves that it was the gods' desires that demanded the slaughter, not their own. In ancient Greece, the priests responsible for the slaughter (priests! -- now we entrust the job to minimum-wage workers) would sprinkle holy water on the sacrificial animal's brow. The beast would promptly shake its head, and this was taken as a sign of assent. Slaughter doesn't necessarily preclude respect. For all these people, it was the ceremony that allowed them to look, then to eat. Apart from a few surviving religious practices, we no longer have any rituals governing the slaughter or eating of animals, which perhaps helps to explain why we find ourselves where we do, feeling that our only choice is to either look away or give up meat. Frank Perdue is happy to serve the first customer; Peter Singer, the second. Until my visit to Polyface Farm, I had assumed these were the only two options. But on Salatin's farm, the eye contact between people and animals whose loss John Berger mourned is still a fact of life -- and of death, for neither the lives nor the deaths of these animals have been secreted behind steel walls. ''Food with a face,'' Salatin likes to call what he's selling, a slogan that probably scares off some customers. People see very different things when they look into the eyes of a pig or a chicken or a steer -- a being without a soul, a ''subject of a life'' entitled to rights, a link in a food chain, a vessel for pain and pleasure, a tasty lunch. But figuring out what we do think, and what we can eat, might begin with the looking. We certainly won't philosophize our way to an answer. Salatin told me the story of a man who showed up at the farm one Saturday morning. When Salatin noticed a PETA bumper sticker on the man's car, he figured he was in for it. But the man had a different agenda. He explained that after 16 years as a vegetarian, he had decided that the only way he could ever eat meat again was if he killed the animal himself. He had come to look. ''Ten minutes later we were in the processing shed with a chicken,'' Salatin recalled. ''He slit the bird's throat and watched it die. He saw that the animal did not look at him accusingly, didn't do a Disney double take. The animal had been treated with respect when it was alive, and he saw that it could also have a respectful death -- that it wasn't being treated as a pile of protoplasm.'' Salatin's open-air abattoir is a morally powerful idea. Someone slaughtering a chicken in a place where he can be watched is apt to do it scrupulously, with consideration for the animal as well as for the eater. This is going to sound quixotic, but maybe all we need to do to redeem industrial animal agriculture in this country is to pass a law requiring that the steel and concrete walls of the CAFO's and slaughterhouses be replaced with . . . glass. If there's any new ''right'' we need to establish, maybe it's this one: the right to look. No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians. Many others would look elsewhere for their meat, to farmers like Salatin. There are more of them than I would have imagined. Despite the relentless consolidation of the American meat industry, there has been a revival of small farms where animals still live their ''characteristic form of life.'' I'm thinking of the ranches where cattle still spend their lives on grass, the poultry farms where chickens still go outside and the hog farms where pigs live as they did 50 years ago -- in contact with the sun, the earth and the gaze of a farmer. For my own part, I've discovered that if you're willing to make the effort, it's entirely possible to limit the meat you eat to nonindustrial animals. I'm tempted to think that we need a new dietary category, to go with the vegan and lactovegetarian and piscatorian. I don't have a catchy name for it yet (humanocarnivore?), but this is the only sort of meat eating I feel comfortable with these days. I've become the sort of shopper who looks for labels indicating that his meat and eggs have been humanely grown (the American Humane Association's new ''Free Farmed'' label seems to be catching on), who visits the farms where his chicken and pork come from and who asks kinky-sounding questions about touring slaughterhouses. I've actually found a couple of small processing plants willing to let a customer onto the kill floor, including one, in Cannon Falls, Minn., with a glass abattoir. The industrialization -- and dehumanization -- of American animal farming is a relatively new, evitable and local phenomenon: no other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way. Tail-docking and sow crates and beak-clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering 400 head of cattle an hour would come to an end. For who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals, we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony and respect they deserve. Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of ''The Botany of Desire.'' His last cover article was about the beef industry.

When I have a sinful thought, unless I counteract it with a pious thought, that sinful thought will soon become a sinful action. Having the feedback of punishment for sinful thoughts could be of some help in purifying our thoughts and raising our standards of thinking. Instead I am satisfied with my sinful mind as long as long as my thoughts do not bring punishment. How can I please Krishna and taste the nectar of the Holy Name if my mind is polluted with so many sinful thoughts? Instead I chant like a parrot, "Hare Krishna give me a cracker!" How will I ever know love of Krishna when maya has such control over me? O Krishna have mercy on me!

"Actually God has no name.By no name we mean he has many names.We give him names according to his qualities." I have to object to this statement posted near the beginning of this thread. Krishna's name is identical with His form, qualities, pastimes, etc., and to say He has no name apart from what we have given Him is equivalent to saying that His entire personality is an anthropomorphization. Krishna's name is completely independent of our descriptions of Him. While His innumerable names describe His activities, that does not mean His names are less than completely real, which would be the case if they were merely names given to Him by us. A practical example is in the naming ceremony for Krishna, Garga Muni gave Him the name Krishna, but prior to this, Krishna was not lacking His name. He is "Krishna" eternally.

Everyone is always chanting Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare.

For anyone wanting to share very large files, such as full length movies, full audio cd's in wav format, etc., the edonkey2000 program enables that and works very well. They also have a new program that is supposed to be an improvement over this powerful network, but I do not know much about that yet. Info about edonkey2000 and the new network can be found at the following web site: http://www.edonkey2000.com/ Of course the faster the internet connection the better, but with edonkey, slow also works, just slower. All that's lacking is the sharing of files glorifying Krishna and His devotees, and that hole can be very easily filled.

One Krishna devotee told me that He has done this. The personality's name is Siva.

Thanks I really liked looking at the picture, and I like to remember that Radha and Krishna can do whatever they want. Wow, what a great feeling to know that I've written something that's appreciated by Radha-Krishna's devotees! Hari bol!

Thanks I really liked looking at the picture, and I like to remember that Radha and Krishna can do whatever they want. Wow, what a great feeling to know that I've written something that's appreciated by Radha-Krishna's devotees! Hari bol!

Are we talking about a piece of material cloth or a portion of Srimati Radharani's clothing? Why can't Her clothing serve two purposes, even if it does not obey the laws of material nature? Who can say that Her cloth cannot cover Her body as much as She requires even while she is lifting a portion of it? Can a spiritual tree not produce apples, pears, oranges, and mangos at the same time? Why then must Radharani's clothing expose Her form when She lifts it to shade Her devotee? If we remember that Krishna supplied an unlimited length of cloth for Draupadi, why is it difficult to imagine Radharani lifting her clothing without even exposing Her toes?

Are we talking about a piece of material cloth or a portion of Srimati Radharani's clothing? Why can't Her clothing serve two purposes, even if it does not obey the laws of material nature? Who can say that Her cloth cannot cover Her body as much as She requires even while she is lifting a portion of it? Can a spiritual tree not produce apples, pears, oranges, and mangos at the same time? Why then must Radharani's clothing expose Her form when She lifts it to shade Her devotee? If we remember that Krishna supplied an unlimited length of cloth for Draupadi, why is it difficult to imagine Radharani lifting her clothing without even exposing Her toes?

What about Jaya and Vijaya? They went from being gatekeepers of Vaikuntha to being Lord Caitanya and Nityananda's devotees. Did Lord Caitanya send them back to the gates when He finished His pastimes on Earth? It seems unlikely, but I haven't heard anything about it.....

I've got about 5 occasions I could talk about, but usually devotees don't want to hear about them because I was not following all of the 4 regs at the time and because I'm still not following up to the standard. The first time I went to a Hare Krishna temple I thought everyone there was going back to Godhead that day. At the very least I thought I would meet people who've had similar experiences. Imagine my surprise when I relized that practically everything devotees say about Krishna is heresay and not actual realizations or experience. I figured that if Krishna can maintain the whole cosmic scene, it should be no trouble at all for Him to show up in my home. He apparently agreed, and so I got a private Bhagavad-gita lecture from Sri Krishna.

That is not true. Imagine that a sincere soul may have been at an important crossroad in life, wanting to know whether it is better to pursue the impersonal or personal path. At that time he may have felt that Krishna should be able to very easily set the person on the personal path if that is the best, and assume that if Krishna does not show up, then He must be an ordinary person. Krishna is certainly free to give whatever proof is required, and He does this from time to time. His Gita serves His purpose flawlessly, and no one can change that. His Gita is not merely words on paper. It is spiritual. I would also like to stand by the argument that time can do some very very strange things when Krishna is talking. Krishna is in complete control over time. I don't know why this is controversial. Krishna does whatever He wants. One more thing, Krishna was not an incarnation of God. He is eternally the Supreme Personality of Godhead. His activities are not just to be thought of in the past tense as if they're done and over with, and He's long since dead. He is speaking Bhagavad-gita to Arjuna right now, somewhere, and He will also be speaking it in the future. Some people are pure and have faith. I, having practically no faith, somehow got some mercy. (AGTSP!) The proof is that I have gotten some association of Krishna's devotees, something I never would've done had Krishna not advised it. I could not accept Krishna's mercy very well on account of my foolishness, so He left and said to get some association of His devotees. On account of that association, I'm getting a little faith. Now my fear is that what little faith I have will be broken by witnessing Vaishnavas insulting each other. So everyone, before you type that insult, please consider the effect it may have on those of us who are trying to get a little faith. Humility is glorious. Hare Krishna

Thank you for your nice reply. However, although at risk of identifying the guru I was speaking of, I should add that he is a grihastha. Your advice would have been helpful, though. It's too bad I learned this piece of etiquette almost a year late. My observations of my own tendencies supports your opinion that the demands required for initiation may be too stringent for many if not most householders. I could easily keep a vow of 4 rounds and no meat eating. Obviously 16 rounds and 4 regulative principles would be better, but it keeps me uninitiated because I can't maintain that every day. Most days I chant 16 rounds and keep 4 regs. However, when I fail to meet those requirements, there is no lower platform established so the difference between chanting 4, 8, or 1 round is fuzzy. Nothing less than 16 meets the requirement, so it's easy to quit for the day when I could've done a few more. Likewise there is no distinction between someone who has one glass of wine (I don't) and another person who smokes crack. Ironically, the system appears somewhat impersonal because although Srila Prabhupada sometimes bent the rules to accommodate sincere individuals into his society, that seems to have stopped with his departure. I know very little about the requirements held by other branches of Lord Caitanya's movement. Hare Krishna

Maybe I'm being a little too outspoken here, but I do think diksa is important, enough so that I've been in a good deal of anxiety since Bhakti Marga Swami recommended that I wait another 15 to 20 years. I had to accept his recommendation, as difficult (while, somewhat paradoxically, also a relief) as it has been to accept at times. I just cannot understand how a conditioned person can take the strict vows of initiation when the three gunas are always competing for dominance. This is why I can't help but think the vows can only be made with real confidence by a liberated person. It would be easy to think that it is simply my own weakness that I am unable to fully live up to the vows I hope to someday take, but I know of so many devotees who have already broken their vows. I'm well aware that I'm not a perfect husband, but I have not broken my vows, and, God willing, I hope I never will. Come to think of it, devotees have an extrordinarily high divorce rate, which also stands as evidence that vows are often taken too lightly. Did Srila Prabhupada ask his disciples to chant 16 rounds and follow the four regulative principles, or was it required? I think there is a huge difference between asking something of someone and requiring a vow. If it was just a matter of promising to make a good effort, I would've done that years ago. However, because I can neither predict the future nor control material nature, I have to wait. It's just a shame that some devotees would not accept me as one of them because of my reluctance to take vows that so many devotees fail to keep. Almost a year ago I hosted several devotees and their guru at my house for a home program. The guru insulted both my wife and I by commenting that a person who is not initiated should not cook for the Lord (we worship Gaura-Nitai and Jagannatha, Baladev, and Subhadra Deities in our home) and told his disciples that he would also chant mantras to offer the bhoga to Their Lordships along with me, implying that They would not accept the offering if it was just me doing the offering. It was a very strange contrast to be so insulted in our own home, compared to our last visit to New Vrindavana Dhama, when I was asked to give Bhagavad-gita class for nearly two hundred pilgrims on Sunday, and my wife was asked to cook their Lordships dinner. Of course neither situation was probably appropriate, but the one at New Vrindavan encouraged us, while the one in our own home was a source of discouragement. Hari bol

I'm not sure, but I may have misunderstood what Jagat said about that. Maybe because I'm tired. Time for bed now. Hari bol

My point about vows was that a vow has to be kept, not just when it's convenient, or when one feels strong, but always. I can't help but wonder how many initiated devotees have kept their vows every day and will continue to do so forever. I'm sure there are some, but right now I think it is probably a small minority. Jagat said (paraphrased) that a guru's mercy follows even an ungrateful disciple. I think that is true, but what kind of disciple uses his spiritual master that way? Maybe I could cheat some guru like that, but actually I couldn't because it's just too perverted. I have heard that bhakti-yoga begins at liberation. Initiation also means beginning, and it naturally follows that initiation is meant for liberated persons. I am conditioned by material nature, sometimes a little but usually a lot, and so I am not qualified for initiation, no matter how much I may think it would be to my benefit. I can chant 16 rounds and follow the 4 regs nicely for a year or more without fail, but sooner or later I always seem to fall, maybe just for a day or two, or maybe more. Because I know I have that tendency, and I can't seem to shake it, I can't take those vows. At most I can make practice, pretend vows to myself, but again, they end up broken sooner or later. It is usually said that a guru is Krishna's representative to the disciple, but it is also true that a disciple is the guru's representative to the world. If I were to take initiation now, and not keep my vows perfectly, I would be dragging my spiritual master's name through the mud. I know there are so many disciples of Srila Prabhupada and other gurus who are always glorifying their gurus by their actions, but I also know of many who give their gurus a very bad name. Just consider the ISKCON child molesters and some other so called disciples who have done tremendous harm to Srila Prabhupada's reputation and life work. The vows don't say "I will TRY" to do these things; they say "I will do" them. Although in one sense it's none of my business who keeps their vows every day, but an anonymous poll on the topic would be very interesting. I think it would reveal a lot about why Krishna's fame does not seem to be increasing in the world right now, why so many temples are facing bankrupcy, etc. Hari bol

In general I would agree, and I like the rest of your post(s). However, what about initiated devotees who have broken their vows, or who no longer even attempt to keep their vows? I know of many initiated devotees who probably haven't chanted Hare Krishna in a long time. Are they to be considered to have a higher realization, to be more advanced, than a person who is waiting for initiation until they know they can keep their vows? The only vows I've taken so far are marriage vows (7/20/96 Toronto Rathayatra, by the way). I would not have taken them unless I knew I could keep them 100%. If not I would not have gotten married. A few years back, when I was living at New Vrindavana, and my wife was becoming dissatisfied with some things there, more than a few devotees recommended that I abandon my wife and join the bhakta program. I was pleased when most of them apoligised for their suggestion, because I had lost a lot of respect for these people who thought I could advance my spiritual life by breaking my only vow. I'd like to know how many initiated disciples have failed to chant 16 rounds in a day, or have in any way broken the regulative principles. Isn't that lying to their spiritual master? Actually I think it's worse. Recently I watched a video of Srila Prabhupada saying that a person who falsely presents himself as an authority in a subject is a cheater. In order to take initiation vows, I would have to know for certain that I am liberated. Otherwise, how could I make such strong promises. I've understood that the vow against meat-eating includes fasting on scheduled days and several other dietary restrictions. Intoxication is very vague (like could I take valerian root, catnip, or lemon balm if I'm having trouble sleeping?). does illicit sex include mental sex? It would not be far-fetched to say that sex is at least 90% mental. What 18 year old boy can say for certain he'll never think about sex again? Gambling seems like an easy one, but I've heard it includes wasting time. Good luck keeping that vow forever. Anyway, my time's up. Gotta go... Hare Krishna

This is a pretty heavy topic. Maybe someone can give me a little advice (go easy on me -- I'm bewildered by maha-maya) or at least something to think about. Obviously I'm not initiated. I seem to have a rather unusual history in Krishna consciousness. Since anyone who's reading down this far can't possibly be afraid of long posts, I'll start a ways back. I remember being 8 years old, after church thinking, "I don't really know if there's a God. It doesn't really seem like people at church know for sure either. One thing makes sense, though, if some day I happen to find out that there actually is a God, that would be the most important thing to know." Jump ahead to college. During my first two years of college I majored in intoxication. The first year was study (really), when I read _The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs_, almost every article from around 1967 to 1990. Second year I was stoned beginning to end with hardly a break at all. I spent most of my time alone in the woods at the edge of campus. Eventually I got lonely, experimented with magic, and got pretty far out. The magic worked, and got me a hot girlfriend. About 1.5 years into that relationship I started reading about yoga, since I was taking a yoga gym class. I got a little purified and the magic began to wear off. (I later learned that the magic bound me not her.) She dumped me. Depression hit bigtime. Somehow I got some mescaline, took it, and was given a lesson about karma and its results. I never could understand that before. I went to the library, and started studying the yoga books. There were several hundred, maybe a couple thousand books on yoga in the university library. I read over a hundred of the ones that seemed the most authentic (usually the older ones). I put it to practice. I started with hatha (like in gym class), then studied karma, raja, jnana, and eventually met a kundalini yoga teacher who also trained me to teach (and I did teach for about a year). By this time I thought I knew yoga pretty well for a Westerner. In all the books I think I read something about Krishna not more than five times, but I didn't know that was important then. Finally I graduated. Although my official major was Environmental Studies, I spent more time and was more interested in yoga than that or anything else. I decided that I couldn't progress much more as long as I maintained a social life. So I moved from New York to Washington state. When I got there, the first day I went to Olympia to see what the place was like. I did three notable things that day: 1) I bought a used Bhagavad-gita As It Is. (I'd read three other translations and didn't think it was a very impressive book, but I wanted to learn Sanskrit, and I was very impressed with the scholarly presentation Srila Prabhupada made. 2) Across the street was an imports store, where I bought a painting of Krishna. 3) Around the corner was a metaphysical book store, where I learned of a upcoming healers' gathering two days away. I went home and started reading Bhagavad-gita, but found it very difficult. I had been studying _Vasistha's Yoga_ for two years, and I couldn't get these to both fit in my understanding. Sunday came and I went to this healers' gathering called "Energy Circle." One thing I was told was that there was a concensus among many psychics that there was going to be a big earthquake soon and we were going under the ocean. Talk about heavy. So the week went on, and I was getting a bad headache trying to understand Vasistha's Yoga and Bhagavad-gita together. On Wednesday night I wrote in my journal that "If Krishna is a real person, and is who Srila Prabhupada says He is, then I need to see Him." I didn't think this would be any trouble for God, and I was thinking I might die very soon anyway. By Friday I felt I was getting nowhere, so I went out to Olympia, where there was a film festival taking place. The movie playing at 9:00 was "Kids." I didn't know about it, and since most people don't know about it, I'll just inform that it's written by kids about kids, and the theme is hardcore drugs, sex, and violence. Very kali-yuga. Someone in the line for the movie gave me two hits of acid. Halfway through the movie, I took them. I got home at 11:00, went to my room, and opened up Bhagavad-gita. I read with rapt attention until around 4:00, when I noticed the acid was wearing off. The next thing I noticed was that the book was acting strange. It was quite normal until then, but somehow, just when I should've been calling it a night, I turned another page, and my eyes fell on "Krsna." Again, again, again. Then I kept seeing "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare/ Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare" no matter which page I turned to. Next (sequence begins to get a little fuzzy soon) I became mystified looking at "Krsna," particularly the three dots below the "rsn." I remember wondering how oneness could be the absolute truth when I'm seeing these three dots here. Suddenly my perception began to spiral into the center dot, and in a flash I was back. In a flash I was back; I looked to my right, and saw Krishna. He didn't look like a painting anymore, but was fully animate and very real. [since it's now past my bedtime, I'll copy/paste something I wrote a few years ago about this.] I looked at Krishna, my heart stopped, and I remember Him laughing, "You think you're a yogi?" I was plunged in an ocean of ecstasy. Nothing was there, but nothing was missing either, except "where is Krishna, I can't find Him. I just saw Him. Where is He?" Immediately I was back with Him in my bedroom. I can hardly remember much more about what He did. I remember passing through dreaming and deap sleep while fully conscious and awake. I remember time moving backwards, foreward, backward, repeatedly. I remember seeing Vedic mantras emmenating from His face in the shape of a lotus. I remember seeing His face take the shape of many loved ones. He also showed me how I had passed through what seemed like high millions to billions of lifetimes, forgetful of Him, and that in some of them I did some service to Him. I remember asking Him why he was showing this to me, and then looking down to see the word "mercy" written. I remember turning a the page and finding a large "108" printed on the paper, looking up and seeing a "door" about the same size as the painting, also with "108" glowing in front of it. As I continued chanting "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna Krishna Krishna Hare Hare/ Hare Rama Hare Rama Rama Rama Hare Hare," I felt myself being drawn to the door. I realized suddenly that going through that door would change everything, and I was not prepared. Still I could not bear to leave Krishna. As I kept chanting I saw that the painting of Krishna caught on fire, beginning with the top corner. I remembered how yogis catch fire from tapas as their soul leaves out the top of their heads, and I felt afraid of leaving. I remembered my family, and Krishna assured me that if I go with Him now, that I would never have been born. He could do that. While I was deliberating for a moment, the flames subsided and the painting was restored. As my mind went to Krishna again, the painting started burning again. After this repeated a few times, I got totally freaked out. I tore the painting in a frenzy of terror, pulled my Buddha tapestry off the wall, and hid in my bed until I fell asleep. The last thing He said to me was, "Always chant My names. Get some association of My devotees. At the end of this life you will see Me again, and you will come with Me... And this painting will be in one piece." Today the painting is matted and hanging on my wall in 8 pieces. One piece, the cow's nose is missing. [End of copy/paste.] Srila Prabhupada brought Krishna to me, and because of this I knew I could not fathom his greatness. This was a person who I could accept as a guru, not anyone else. Then I learned he'd passed from this world when I was just 5 years old. I did not think there could be anyone else who could compare with Srila Prabhupada, and he was the only person whom I considered a bona fide guru. I was stumped, except I remembered Krishna's parting words. He did not tell me to find a guru and get initiated. He said "always chant My names and get some association of My devotees." Over the years I've been sometimes very gung-ho about practicing devotional service, and at other times not. I've had several dreams about Srila Prabhupada, and in my most memorable one, I discussed my predicament concerning diksa with him. He said, "I will take care of you," and then I woke up. So any comments or advice? There's some more relevant info I'd like to add, but that's the gist and I've got to go to bed. I've since found one person who's inspired me enough to discuss initiation with. He's a GBC (although wasn't at that time), and a guru of a relatively small number of disciples. I expressed my concern that as much as I may try, unless I am liberated (which obviously I am not) I do not know how I could take the vows of initiation. I simply cannot predice if I would fall down. At that time I was chanting 16 rounds and following the 4 regs. He told me to wait until I am near retirement or retired before seeking a guru. I thought that was a good answer, although it has also given me a lot of worry, like "what if I am killed before then, what will become of me? Will I miss my golden opportunity? Ok, again, any comments or advice? I don't usually share this with anyone, but since I didn't get flamed for talking about _S. divinorum_ on the current events board, I'm feeling a little brave, or is it foolish? It seems that the gist of my post is that I don't know how I can find anyone who can earn my respect as a spiritual teacher to the extent that Srila Prabhupada has. Leaving my own unworthiness aside for a moment, how can I accept a guru while thinking he is inferior to Srila Prabhupada?

Hare Krishna Salvia divinorum is not mild. It has the most potent known psychoactive substance in its leaves. Upon smoking it, the effects are quite startling. It comes on even as it is being taken into the lungs, in about 10 seconds. The active substance, Salvinorin A, works at 200 micrograms, comparable in this regard to LSD. However, it is not a pseudohallucinogen like LSD. It is considered a true hallucinogen, although I and others do not believe the experience is a hallucination any more than anything else. On the contrary, the few experiences I've had with it seem to be on or at least reveal a platform of reality that is greater than my normal day to day experience of maha-maya. I do not think this happens with persons unfamiliar with bhakti-yoga, but every time I've had Salvia, I have felt Krishna there and/or seen Him. I was just remembering one rather strange time... Upon taking Salvia I found myself in the company of Radharani, Krishna, and several gopas. Then strange and powerful entity approached, seemingly greater than Krishna, who then left. Everyone went to try to find out who this was. Suddenly an "a-ha!" came over me and I turned around to see Krishna together with Radharani, alone. Right then I got a glimpse of Radharani's special nature, loving Krishna without any disturbances such as concern over who is God. I thought it was a good lesson for me. Another time I smoked some Salvia and immediately found myself in the temple room at New Vrindavana, chanting japa. Probably the weirdest was the third time I tried Salvia, on the same night as the first and second (which I mentioned in my above post). I took a hit and found myself in the body of a cow, in a line awaiting slaughter. There was grievous mooing in front and behind me, and I was dreading my fate. Suddenly I remembered "Krishna;" my cow body fell to the ground, and I was back in the hotel. These goings from here to there are usually very sudden. Imagine being totally sober, smoking a pinch of leaves, and within 15 seconds being somewhere else, quite possibly in a completely different body. In another 15 minutes, you're back. I don't think this is the kind of thing most people could handle very well. If someone is totally engrossed in material consciousness, they might think there may be something more, or maybe they'll just chase after a different type of sense gratification. Alternately, a steady devotee would have no use for any psychoactive substance. Personally, I've found Salvia to be very helpful in my spiritual life. I seem to be bound to Krishna by a very long leash, on which I roam around in the material world. Although I feel strongly connected to Krishna, I also feel very distant from Him most of the time. So sometimes I feel dejected, helpless in my spiritual life, and even foolish for trying. It is these times, when my chanting of Hare Krishna seems to be impotent, that Salvia has helped me to get me out of it. The 15 minutes of Salvia journeying seems to be a spiritual pick-me-up that helps me to keep practicing devotional service for months. That's not to say that I'd recommend it to anyone, least of all a steady devotee. I wouldn't want the responsibility of influencing anyone either way, apart from just telling my own experiences. For me, though, it seems to sometimes help. Hare Krishna

I'm fairly familiar with this herb. I tried to discuss it on the Mela about a year ago, but was mostly demonized for it. Last spring I had been pretty distanced from from my spiritual life, and hadn't chanted more than a couple rounds of Hare Krishna in a day for several months. I was living in the material world almost 100%. Naturally at that time I was inclined to take some intoxication occasionally. The occasion was perfect for that: I was staying in a hotel for a week for my job. Very boring. One of my co-workers who had been staying in the hotel came by and mentioned that he had some _Salvia divinorum_, but didn't know much about it. I'd heard of it, but also didn't know. I figured it was another wimpy herb that people might try when they wanted to get stoned but had no pot. I was wrong. I smoked a bit and immediately felt very weird. A force came over my body, and moved me to a more reclined position. I felt a big grin on my face. Mostly I just felt that for a little while, and then back to normal. My friend also tried some, but his technique was so poor that I doubt he felt much. He left, and left me with some Salvia. I took a bigger hit, and within 15 seconds I was lying flat on the bed chanting Hare Krishna like mad. Almost immediately I lost consciousness of my physical body. I felt my soul was now chanting Hare Krishna, and I could feel material nature lifting away from me in response to the chanting. It felt like the weight of the whole universe lifting off of me. I kept chanting at what seemed like an incredible speed, and I felt like I was beginning to accomplish something big. I could hear thoughts of others, what seemed like their thoughts in sleep, murmuring about how I was getting pretty close to completing the puzzle. I felt Krishna was very near, in person, and I was very excited to be chanting His name. After a short time my altered awareness wore off, my mind wandered, material nature came crashing down, and I found myself in the body again. Yet something changed. Although it was evening when I had the Salvia, I finished 16 rounds that night. The next day I chanted almost 40 rounds. I was back on track. Since then I've tried Salvia about 10 times, mostly orally, which provides a longer but less intense experience. It's not like any other drugs. That much is certain. That's why it's legal. LSD is nothing compared to Salvia. For one thing, Salvia is a plant, but also a person. The Mazatecs believed the plant to be the Virgin Mary. I felt Lord Balarama in it. One thing's for sure: the plant has power. It got me chanting Hare Krishna again. Hare Krishna