theist

Bump for Sonic/Ksama

Not a small point because the difference is really between sectarian religiousness and transcendental realization per Lord Caitanya.

From prior post:

Q. 5) Is it not sin to kill silkworms for silk and deer's for 'krishnaa-jina'?

How would you answer this question? Are you ok with the killing of silkworms to meet someone's standard of ritual purity for some religious ritual?

Or do you find ,as I do, that the idea of so-called "ritual purity" that involves cruel actions towards another living being to stain with that beings suffering and far from pure in the eyes of God?

Since he was mentioned in the opening post to this thread let me quote Eckhart Tolle who said "Analyzing the pointer is pointless."

In discussion religious works outside of the recognized vedic canon of India

Sonic Yogi wrote:

Except for chanting the Holy Name of Krishna, there is no other religious process in the age of Kali that will deliver the soul from samsara.

 

If any religious book's essence does not teach that, then in fact that book is useless.

And I responded:

And what if it does teach the chanting of the Holy Name?

I am still waiting for a response from Sonic Yogi.

But either way primate you are missing the point which is the timeless, seemless existence of Krishna and His aura the Brahman effulgence with Krishna as the basis of that Brahman.

Focus on the Moon bro. and forget the finger!

Quote:

The material (therefore not perfect but in this case nearly) example is the sun and the sunshine. Even though they both exist simultaneously still no one would argue the fact that the sun is the cause of the sunshine.

Indeed, the Sun and its rays are not a good example, because the Sun’s nuclear reactions are clearly the cause of its rays. They don’t exist simultaneously.

Clearly from my quote above I anticipated your response would be to quibble with the example, which you did anyway despite my attempt to it by acknowledging the fault in the example. Every material analogy is imperfect when attempting to illustrate a spiritual reality. Indeed all human language and thought fails.

Ever hear Lao Tzu's famous saying, "Don't mistake my finger for the moon"?

When someone is pointing you to the Moon don't stare at the finger, look at the moon.

But seriously I have nothing beyond the few points I have given already to say. If I see something I will add it.

Please do not think there is any bad feelings in this. I enjoy our exchanges and look forward to more.

Hare Krishna

As far as I can see the only true sacrifice that pleases God is the free will sacrifice where one offers himself and his life possessions in the loving service of Krishna and others.

Capturing some helpless animal or so-called man/animal and sacrificing them is just incredibly barbaric.

HUman sacrifice happened.?.Whos the translator of the verses.

I read that madhwacharya criticised and didnt accept the ashwamedha yagya process shown in the veda.Does the ramayan mention the horrid nature of rams ashwamedha yagya.

This is nice to hear.

primate, I see now you think you know better what Prabhupada meant more than Prabhupada himself. Due to this no more can be gained by this conversation at this point.

Good luck

Hare Krishna

Well, I said: "there is in fact no difference between Krishna and Brahman or God". Krishna is the person (or knower) and Brahman is the mechanical system (or mechanism, if you like). In reality, I don’t think one is 'the basis' of the other. To be the basis of something, the basis must come first. This implies sequential order, which implies time, which implies Maya. And God isn’t subject to Maya or time; God is Maya..

Krsna says in the Gita:

 

And I am the basis of the impersonal Brahman, which is the constitutional position of ultimate happiness, and which is immortal, imperishable and eternal.

Sequential thinking is of time. You are correct. But it is you who are attempting to impose that conception onto the absolute.

Krishna is called the Cause of all causes. Krishna caused the Brahman effulgence.This has to be accepted even though both Krishna the Supreme Personality of Godhead and His effulgent the Brahman.

You call this sequential thinking but it is not. It appears contradictory to our minds because we are conditioned by sequential thinking as in past and future. Krishna perfectly houses all such apparent contradictions.

The material (therefore not perfect but in this case nearly) example is the sun and the sunshine. Even though they both exist simultaneously still no one would argue the fact that the sun is the cause of the sunshine.

Micheal Jackson an avatar. What a joke!!! The pedophile incarnation maybe. Sheesh

Wow that is a beautiful crop circle. Alien graffeti just to get our attention?

As a devotee of Hari, do you think eating onion and garlic would matter?

Not at all IMO. However if you have a spiritual master who instructs you differently then you should follow what he says even if it seems out moded by today's medical science or not, for to disobey the guru would be detrimental to the spiritual life of the disciple.

Agreed.

Not exactly.

As I suggested earlier, I think God (impersonal Brahman) is total consciousness as well as total energy, all present in a singular cosmic oscillation. Our individual (material) consciousness is a discontinuous fraction of this total consciousness, and a function of its creative energy or Maya. In such a model we are simultaneously one with God and different from God, and God is the origin or basis of our (partial) consciousness.

Well yes this is the impersonalist idea. But we should not confuse this with Lord Caitanya's teaching on oneness and difference.

According to this, our consciousness is incomplete, and since our knowledge is obviously part of our consciousness, our knowledge is incomplete. Therefore, we can never fully know God, or the origin of our consciousness.

The jiva's consciousness is complete when it is fully Krishna conscious, that is, fully conscious of Krishna. Krishna never directly experiences incomplete consciousness. Understanding the distinction between ourselves and Krishna is essential.

Here is how Krishna's completeness is described in relation to the universe.

Sri Isopanishad invocation TranslationThe Personality of Godhead is perfect and complete, and because He is completely perfect, all emanations from Him, such as this phenomenal world, are perfectly equipped as complete wholes. Whatever is produced of the Complete Whole is also complete in itself. Because He is the Complete Whole, even though so many complete units emanate from Him, He remains the complete balance.

 

If Krishna/Vishnu, or the supreme personality of Godhead, has total consciousness (including our own consciousness), then Krishna has complete knowledge of Brahman, and there is in fact no difference between Krishna and Brahman or God.

Brahman is a feature of Krishna, Krishna is not a feature of Brahman. Do you see what I mean? The Brahman is Krishna's emanation, His aura. A person emanates an aura, an aura does not emanate a person. There is a critical difference primate.

Perhaps my (implicit) question was, whether consciousness or knowledge and (mindful) understanding are equivalent. In other words, can total consciousness (or God) fully understand itself? I suspect, however, that 'understanding' is just a characteristic of our material brain and subtle mind. Beyond that, only absolute knowledge might exist..

Personally, I would be quite content just to know how the universe approximately works, and to understand who or what we are ourselves in relation to God. No need to understand God and/or His origin.

Yes this is good. To know the relationships between God the universe and ourselves is the platform of real knowledge.

Concerning origins, it's not a question of understanding as much as it is one of acceptance. God is His own origin and never was there a time when He did not exist.

There is no need for the intellect to wrap it's tiny little arms around this truth before the self can be be brought into knowledge of this reality because the intelligence is not the self.

It’s even questionable whether any sentient being (including Vishnu/Krishna) can understand God as the origin of everything (or Brahman).

Here the mistake is made of concluding that God must be without sense perception. So you are conceiving of God as deaf dumb blind and the totality of UN-awareness, the supreme unconscious. This is a definition of death.

But I ask you how you can be sure of this. Not how can you prove it to me but how can you prove it to yourself.

You can not.

The other choice is that God means the Supremely aware one. The Omniscient Being not the senseless being. The one whose sense perception knows no limitation. The Supremely alive one.

These are the choices and need to be considered deeply. Is spiritual enlightenment one of entering into life or death?

Logically, no conscious entity can have complete knowledge of its own origin, because any knowledge is a part of the entity itself and therefore it is different from its origin.

Well, this presupposes that there is a difference between the conscious entity and the origin of his own self. In one sense this is true of ourselves but it is not true of God.

Aren`t you satisfied, Theist, with Prabhupad`s purports he wrote for each verse in Srimad Bhagavatam? It becomes monotonous if it were to me. Then I move on. Having arrived at a conclusion myself. If I say something to your thread on the forum it`s the real me reacting to a comment on Srimad Bhagavatam not from Prabhupad`s purports. To do so is parroting.

We are not hearing Prabhupada's purports properly.We are hearing through our contaminated minds. To think you have exhausted Prabhupada's purports is crazy talk.

At least for myself I have yet to properly comprehend one sentence of his descriptions of Krishna.

Selling is not my forte, Theist. That`s your specialty. You`re trying to sell Prabhupad`s books. That`s good. So, it`s obvious the moment you open a thread from a verse in Srimad Bhagavatam that one takes notice, " Here we go again.." I`m not against it. What the consumer demands is for you to open a thread say, a verse from Caitanya Caritamrta or Narada Pancaratra. That way, it would not be a monotony. You`ll be surprise, there`ll be an increase demand in Prabhupad`s books ( Srimad Bhagavatam). If direct selling won`t work try the indirect one. God bless!

Thanks but I am not trying anything so noble as promoting Prabhupada's books. When I notice something that catches my eye from the SB I sometimes immediately try to share it. In Krishna consciousness the best way to keep this knowledge is to share it.

I am really only here for myself melvin. Selfish but true. Rather entertaining or being monotonous is quite irrelevant. But we should worry about finding these verses monotonous. That just means we have no idea what the verse is saying.

Actually I am not sure it is a quote from Jesus but no matter. I would add that we have little to no knowledge on what he told his discples. We have only what the 3rd & 4th centuary Catholic Church didn't destroy.

Thank God for those devotees and disciples of Srila Prabhupada that have preserved his original books intact otherwise we would only have Jayadvaita's version of what he wrote.

The religionists waste little time trying to prevent the truth from shinning.

And what if it does teach the chanting of the Holy Name?

These quotes appear to countenance some human sacrifice, so now I am concerned about how to reply to that.

The person you are debating is correct. The Bhagavatam is relating a story and not recommending human sacrifice as I read it.

I admit it happened in those times and I find it abhorent. I also find animal sacrifice horrible and disgusting and I care not if it is taught in the veda's or not.

Just admit the truth of it to your friend and admit that many horrible things have been done in the name of religion.

It has no place in Krishna consciousness. Perhaps just present basic God consciousness to your friend. The best and atheist may admit is that there might be some Intelligence behind the universe.

Going beyond we are not the body and intelligent Design with such people is a total waste of time.

galaxy108 also has a nice blog linked in his post #1.

Sorry Sonic. I think you are still missing the idea of taking the essence. This means so much of the vedas should also be set aside and only the essence should be accepted.

Further if some veda suggests we worship so & so demigod for elevation to heaven and a resulting good birth and so on and someone else's holy book from their land says to abandon the goal of heaven and the means to achieve it and just surrender to God, what are you going to do?

Myself I will without hesitation recognize and acknowledge the higher truth of surrendering to God in devotion vs. striving for heaven. It has the same conclusion as the Bhagavad-gita.

Not this "it's from India so it must be alright" sort of attitude.

I care not for the canon or origin of any holy book, only the conclusion. And it's the conclusion that separates poly-theism from mayavad from Vaisnavism.

That's the best way to understand any verse.

Perhaps the only way. I have often experienced that some verse I read I took it in one and remembered it like that until revisiting it and seeing it in context of all the surrounding verses.

My mind had seen it the way I was conditioned to see and thus I never saw it at all.

Considering this tendency of the mind I have become comfortable with only the bare facts when speaking to others about God and spiritual life. We are not the body,God is a person, we are part of the Supreme Being and are therefore personal and eternal also along with a handful of other basic concepts like avoiding Mayavad philosophy etc. Beyond this narrow perimeter I get much more cautious.

To Clear Karma (May be Good Karma or Bad Karma) the only way is surrendering the Lord Krishna. As he said in Bagavath Geetha!.

 

Reagrds

Yes, this is actually the only way because it clears away the tendency to create more karma.

So surrendering in the beginning means surrendering the fruits of our karma to Krishna as karma-yoga. Then when we develop love for Krishna and surrender our hearts as well we enter the realm of pure bhakti yoga.

My lingering question is: "Does a person who loses past 'bad' karma--also lose 'good' karma?"

Or does he gain more "good karma" to replace the bad? Or does karma accumulate due to specific individual actions with the good and bad labels being added on by our minds? I think the later.

But from the view of someone who wants off the wheel of birth and death any karma is bad because it necessitates another birth somewhere in the material world to collect it.

This is a problem we encounter as we strive to rise out of the offensive chanting stage. We want the mantra to clear all our perceived bad karma and leave the rest alone or even increase it, "please don't let me suffer and let me also win the lottery for 10 million bucks."

But those that Krishna favors will often lose their karma for becoming rich and instead He may make them beggars just to draw them closer to Himself.

Best we forget trying to manipulate our karma and just leave it all up to Krishna. Karma only relates to the body and mind anyway. It can't touch the soul so why should we care for it?