Karl_Aspelin-Luther_Wittenberg
Luther burns the Papal bull in the square of Wittenberg year 1520, painting by Karl Aspelin, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

‘This is what I feel, if I can find other people that feel like that, that’s truth.’

Because of the identifying so strongly with the modern culture, especially the Protestant, as the prominent element of the First World culture… Means, you can be any religion, but the whole social economic thrust is Protestant, meaning, it’s just you and your feelings because that’s what the Protestant is: ‘me and God and my bhāva.’ That’s more trying to be rāga, not so vaidhi like the Catholics were. But in that, the bottom line is, as Nārada Muni pointed out to Vyāsadeva, ‘You are going to drop the actual purpose of it, the Mahābharata is trying to get you Kṛṣṇa conscious, and you are just going to see the material side of it and forget the God consciousness.’ So in the same way, they are going to ‘It’s just my bhāva, what I want to do, that’s reality.’ And that works very nicely with the sophists, the sophistry of vox populi. ‘This is what I feel, if I can find other people that feel like that, that’s truth.’

So then with this combination of the sophistry and just the emotional element of the Protestant, that culture is totally devastating to any sense of authority, because that’s the first thing they go after. That’s the first thing that’s gone after, is any authority, śāstra, Prabhupāda, previous authorities, anything like that, varnāśrama. It’s all just thrown out, it’s the first thing to go, because it’s just your mood. And then, ‘Whatever I feel and my friends feel – that’s truth. So therefore if we establish, this is law, it’s correct.’ But this is all coming from identifying, the mind identifying with these things. Because if one doesn’t, then the whole point is, if I am servant of Kṛṣṇa, therefore this has to be pleasing to Kṛṣṇa, so it has to be coming down from Kṛṣṇa, so what does Kṛṣṇa say in the śāstra? What is Prabhupāda saying? These would be the prominent elements, what is the example Prabhupāda set? What are the [examples] previous Ācāryas set? Then we would start looking at it from that angle and that’s a completely different flavor.

From lecture on Vedānta Psychology #4, 17th February 2009, Bhaktivedānta Academy, Śrīdhāma Māyāpura

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sign In

Register

Reset Password

Please enter your username or email address, you will receive a link to create a new password via email.