Redsox

I don't get it, he is the lord, he is the cause of our existence, he never really needs anything, he is perfect, 'self satisfied' so to speak , independent, then why would he care if I wake up at 5:30 am in the morning to do pooja for him? Not that I am doing that by the way, but why do anything? Its not like he will be pleased and will come rushing to see me anytime soon. These rituals are not going to please him, actually nothing is going to please him if he is "self satisfied". I don't get it, why do we do these things?

Thanks for clearing that up, I don't think we were ever inferior to God and the devotees who claim that are wrong. I know I don't have to feel like a pathetic, next to nothing garbage or trash can when compared to god, its good when someone else verifies the same thing, even if it is on the internet.

I am not trying to wreck your belief system here, but the way i understand it... God needs me. He would not have been a "God" if he was the only one who existed. Prabhupada: "“Then the Supreme Personality Narayana desired to create living entities.” He creates us , but who was he before he created us , was he "God"? He created us, then who is he now? He is "God". Because he has the power to create. In a sense then , we created him too, because he is called "God" by us after he created us.

thats reason enough to make you inferior to God?

One more question. What makes you inferior to God?

God kills atheists?

What is God?

Nevermind, I think I understand perfectly, I understand now that I can never understand Him, I will just simply surrender to Him, and go by my business. Forget I said anything.

I wanted to chant laxmi , laxmi instead of money and money , I got the same effect. It is probably the mood, but lets say you transcend the mood and view laxmi as nondifferent from narayana. In that case, laxmi = money = Narayana. Then, when you transcend this bias toward money, would you not get the same feeling that you get when you chant krishna, krishna?

If krishna felt like we would not understand his teachings ,why give us bhagavad gita? Whats the point of reading the Isoupanishad? But you are not krishna, you are a simple jiva - unless you prove to me otherwise and I don't expect to see a vishwa rupa from you anytime soon. Hopefully:ponder: so your backgammon game analogy is not appropriate. The reason for this is Krishna claims that everything comes from him. Your backgammon does not come from you, it comes from krishna . Not only that, your backgammon game that you create with computer coding - that computer and all that material comes from prakriti which is not you. Nothing really comes from you when you make that backgammon game. When krishna makes it, he also makes it from prakriti but everything, including prakriti comes from Him. "without the energetic , there is no energy". so just like a plant in the seed, world exists in Him. This is root of my confusion, if everything exists in Him , then am I not limiting my view by saying that He is the idol I worship and not anything else? when I worship the idol and not the tree, not the ocean, not the sun, not the moon, not the stars, not the universe itself , am I not saying that he is only the idol and nothing else? Prabhupada mentions that mayavadis think that krishna is impersonal, but actually my argument (maybe I am not a foolish mayavadi, could be that I am just a confused idiot) is that the only person in totality of "being" is Krishna, the rest of us are just not even people... I don't even know what to call us, maybe i am just going crazy. I am not settling for less, I am asking you if there is a way out of this confusion, hoping to find an answer through a simple discussion could be just a farfetched attempt to find some peace, maybe I won't get any by discussing this here, but I am willing to try.

Alright, I will accept my foolishness because prabhupada says that my conclusion is that of a fool, he knows more than me, but you didn't answer my question at all and did not relieve my confusion at all. I will come back later and try to make my questions clearer, when I have time, hold on.

Now I don't want to be "an ass", being one is not my intention here. This is a geniune question which I believe strikes at the core of vaishnava values, which keeps troubling me constantly. With that said, lets get on with this. Bhagavad Gita tells us that Krishna is Omnipotent, he controls everything , Omniscient- he knows everything and Omnipresent, he is everywhere (far far away but simultaneously closer than we think). And to add to that, the Lord is also the beginning, the middle and the end of everything. My heart completely accepts all this to be true. However! (and its a big however) , when this becomes acceptable then praying to the Lord seems unnecessary , not only that , I feel that because everything comes from the lord (he is the beginning) , everything sustains within the lord (the middle) and everything ends in the lord (he is the end) , we really don't have to strive (spiritually) for anything! Chanting the hare krishna mantra seems unnecessary because all words are the Lord's names, speaking one name seems like I am limiting my view that lord is only one thing rather than account for the fact that he is everything. The funny thing is, I felt this when I was chanting hare krishna. I stopped and started chanting Allah, allah , allah, I got the same effect. I will go further to say that i felt like even if I chant "computer, computer, computer" I will get the same effect, because the lord is in the computer. Not only that, I also asked myself who I am , because the lord is everywhere, He is the controller of everything, He is controlling me, controlling my environment, my actions, what I say , what I do, what I type right now, and all of this happens within the Lord (He is eveywhere) , so what am I? Vaishnavism tells us that we are para prakriti (the jivas) , and if thats true then---> where did this prakriti have its origin? Then we find it is the Lord himself. So if are just parts and parcels of the lord, do we even exist to be called something of its own like a jiva? The fact that we are jivas tell us that we collectively do not exist independently and only Lord alone exists and if that is true, I am simply an imagination--- but I feel myself as though very real. Advaita tells us that it is simply the mind that lets us think that we are "real" , but thats crazy , I don't have the control over my mind, the Lord does. All this is very confusing. So my realness is dependent on the Lord's control, he makes me real, and if thats true , he is the source of my reality. He is real, I am not. So He exists , I don't, He lives like everything and me thus creating this feeling of "reality" pertaining to "me". So, this "I" which is "this entity" that is writing behind redsox clearly is a product of lord's imagination. How is this any different from Advaita?!

Could it be that we are just annoying or troubling Him? When you are setting up the christmas tree, your two year old wants to help and you give her something to do. How do we know this is not like that?

How do you know? Jesus was very virtuous , if he ate fish, it might have not amounted to much bad karma. Ravana was arrogant , even if he did not have the animal killing karma , he still had karma for killing alot of people. Being a vegetarian helps you stay away from the bad karma associated with animal killings. If you murder everything and leave the animals alone, you are still going to jail.

Maybe. By the way, I cut up a midsize plant the other day, the branches were growing everywhere in the room. Yea I am ruthless, but when I took the branches and put them in other pots, they started growing into new plants. Universe works in mysterious ways. Our judgements are meaningless. No one knows except krishna.

Why is it so that we don't remember our previous lives? Again, please understand that this is not to challenge any views. It is simply to know. Isn't it better for us to know about our past lives and make amends? Why is it that the nature of the jiva is "forgetfulness"?

Since when is Feeling= Consciousness? A yogi does not feel anything when his body gets immolated in fire. Are you saying there is no "consciousness" there?

Ravana was a vegetarian. So was Gandhi. Dalai Lama eats meat. Point?

No , my point was that if you *really* care, you will lead a campaign to stop the atrocities in Corporate America. And Jagdish Chandra Bose experiments? - What a bunch of hoopla . There is no established relation between cell membrane potential and "feelings". He found that plants grow with beautiful music. What is beautiful pleasant music? A person might like Arnold Shoenberg's new expressionist music, I might like mozart, another person might detest all of them and only like Hare krishna chanting. Being a Hare krishna , some one might find only that to be pleasant, if the plant grows to some other music , then from the perspective of this hare krishna , it might just be growing due to an effect of unpleasant music. His data may correlate with what he is saying about 'feelings' but it does not show any connection of "feelings" to membrane potential or some other sort of physical phenomena. Just because something is his opinion, does not make it true. He is not krishna to know whether they have feelings or not. We have to really look at these "scientific findings" with a bit of skepticism

I don't buy it. Consciousness is a tricky matter. You say it has to do with "feelings" , but there is no justification for that. If I say no, there is no justification for that either. So what am I saying? I am saying you are wrong.

The problem here is not milk. The problem is the corporate world that is trying to handle the industry in a cost effective manner with no desire to uphold the values of basic morality. No offense, but I find your position on this to be a bit selfish. You try to avoid drinking milk and in effect avoid the karma associated with these killings, but this avoidance doesn't really help the cows. Your share of milk is just used by another person or thrown to waste at the end of the day.

Okay , maybe an illustration or two will help. yes? The number of joules taken from sunlight and passed on up the ladder in a ecosystem are probably just hypothetical and used to make the illustration easier to understand. As you can see from the second illustration, you get more out of being a secondary consumer than a tertiary consumer, so on and so forth. You get more out of eating plants, than you get from eating animals.

Plants don't have feelings. They don't have a nervous system. Their reactions to light and other such things are due to light induced chemical mechanisms that trigger them to spontaneously grow in one direction vs another. Some plants have evolved in such a way that if you eat them, you are helping them. Vegetables have seeds, animals eat fruits and vegetables and can't digest the seeds. The animal moves to another location to do its thing where it evacuates the seeds and this helps disperse seeds. Is it good to be a vegetarian? Ofcourse it is. The energy that comes from the sun gets lost as you go up the food chain. If you are a herbivore, you eat less and gain more energy. If you are a carnivore you have to eat more to get the same amount of energy. Ofcourse, hindus are not vegetarians for these reasons, but scientifically it is favorable to be a vegetarian, but I have a question. how do you get your protein?

I will continue with my chanting and puja. Thank you very much for your time and your help. You and theist, mahaksadasa, tackle berry, bija and everyone here.

So basically trying to accomplish something materially for krishna is quite useless. I think.