So if some of you have been following this blog and have picked up on the references to Hare Krishna but have no idea what it's about aside from a few foggy late-night memories of SNL reruns, I invite you to watch the following film, produced in 1983 detailing the biography of His Divine Grace AC Bhativedanta Srila Prabhupada:
http://www.krishna.com/node/1213
The events and sentiments described to my knowledge are represented accurately with the exception of the qualifications of the teachers at the ISKON primary school pre-1985, which is sheer propaganda, as students of the school during that era have told me personally.
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From the site:
Religion should be understood to mean, not faith, but our intrinsic nature and eternal relationship with God.
While reality is one, so also, rightly understood, is religion. Religion is not what we believe to be true. It is our actual relationship with God. Human life should be used to uncover that religion, which is everyone’s natural heritage.
This is very very very true. I am intrigued by these teachings, and it further vindicates my theory we all pray to the same god but we just don't realize it...
Let me recomment, maybe we don't all pray to the same god, there is the idea of idols, and worshipping deities that are not 'God' persay... I wonder how God distinguishes that out... Oh well, he knows what he's doing...
The term "religion" sort of looses it's teeth outside of a western philosophical context as it's derived from the Latin, meaning to "relink," but in the majority of theistic eastern philosophies, Vaishnavism included, one's relationship to the divine is never severed, but "covered up;" the metaphor most often used is "dust on a mirror." The discrepancy in thought comes in when considering whether the individual soul is one or separate from God. Vaishnavism holds, much like Christianity, that the individual soul is eternally separate from and subordinate to God; this is contrary to the tradition popularized by Sankarachrya and practiced by many Hindus. The notion of deity worship is often seen as idol worship in the west. The difference being , from a Vaishnava perspective, that because God is transcendental, He is non-different from His Name and even various physical renderings of Him. Of course, spiritual avenues aren't charted in a vacuum. Anyone raised in America has to confront the residual effects of such theological cultural artifacts as Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The American culture of fear did not start with Mr. Bush, nor will it end with him ; his people just know how to exploit it.
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