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Universalist Radha-Krishnaism: The Way of Natural Devotion; A Practitioner’s Handbook

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXCERPT:

ABOUT THE BOOK

A REVIEW OF THE NEW EDITION

Steve Bohlert has dared to break the shackles of fundamentalism to deliver a much-needed re-visioning of an ancient religion of India, giving it new life for those of us in a multicultural 21st Century world. He has extracted the essence of Bengali Vaishnavism, and while staying true to its person-ality, has planted the seed back into the human body, so we may again receive the Original Blessing. I do not hesitate to call Steve Bohlert a prophet, not only as one gifted with spiritual insight, but also as one who foretells the future — of a path that must be something like he sees it or not be at all. That is, without such a re-birthing of Vaishnavism, its soul will never plant roots in the world at large. The orthodox will of course decry it and condemn him. “The dogs may bark, but the caravan will pass.” — Daniel Cooper Clark, longtime Radha-Krishna devotee

FROM REVIEWS OF THE FIRST EDITION:

Many Westerners are attracted to diverse aspects of Hinduism and, in particular, devotion to Radha-Krishna, but soon find themselves alienated by two factors: an inescapable emphasis on ‘Indian-ness’ and the uncompromising literalism of the movement as it has come to the West.  Steve Bohlert’s approach to spirituality merges Western and Eastern thought by de-emphasizing cultural trappings and literalism, while maintaining a passionate emotional bond with the Supreme Being in this especially effective form of the Divine Couple, Radha-Krishna. — Dr. M. Valle, who teaches philosophy of religion

Hundreds of years ago, Radha-Krishna, the archetypal goddess and god of love, were little-known outside of India, and worshiped only within the Hindu faith. Eighteenth and nineteenth century archaeologists and scholars made us aware of Hindu gods, but prior to the twentieth century, nobody in the West had any actual experience of Radha and Krishna. Even today, god and goddess remain concealed behind a brick wall of fundamentalism, which most of us from a Judeo-Christian background are powerless to navigate. On one hand, we may sense truth there, but until Bohlert’s interpretation, there was no way to pierce the fundamentalist views and practices that keep these deities off limits. — Author Nori Muster

This book is sufficiently important that its wide dissemination amongst devotees is a desideratum.… old beliefs are given apparently radical new interpretations that widen their scope and potential for meaning.… Subal [Steve Bohlert] has done a great service by introducing or naming the Vaishnava concept of deity as panentheism.… I favor rāgānugā [natural devotion], as it seems does Subal, precisely because it … is about reforming the id-controlled ego into a love-permeated ego.… There is no doubt that Subal’s is an important brick in the wall of religious discourse … His great contribution … is that he has gone out on a limb and attempted to make a coherent and systematic presentation of Radha-Krishna according to his vision. This means of course that he has set himself up for criticism, but that kind of courage is what is needed to push the discourse further. — Jagadananda Das/Jan Brzezinski, translator and scholar.

Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex

by James Ledbetter, editor in charge of Reuters.com. Yale University Press, 2011.

I grew up in a Republican family admiring Ike as a military leader and a president. People said “Everybody likes Ike.” After reading this book, now I know why. Raised in a Mennonite family, he became a distinguished top military leader, president of Columbia University, and then president of the U.S..  Still he was unprepared for what he encountered. What he called “the military-industrial complex” was already in place. It controlled much public policy independent of and often contrary to the wishes of the president/commander-in-chief.

At the end of his second term, he was disappointed at not being able to do more to set the country on the right track for world peace and human betterment. He gave a powerful farewell address warning the nation about “the military-industrial complex”, which today we may call the military-corporate-congressional complex that relies on a perpetual war economy. It created a garrison state and is bankrupting the country–funding the war machine at the cost of public services and individual freedoms.

Fifty years after Ike’s speech, this book is well worth reading to get a better understanding of what todays protests are about. I think Ike would be quite supportive of them. Get it at the public library or Amazon.com.

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American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan by Peter Dale Scott

This book took my reading from the ancient warfare and politics of the Mahabharata to the current day situation that is affecting all of us regardless of nationality. It provides a thorough history filled with little known facts and normally unasked questions that point to the unseen forces that control our lives. I’ll quote from his “Final Words”:

This has been a book about an imperfectly perceived but pernicious, murderous, ongoing, and often criminal interaction between the forces of covert operations and of drug trafficking–and interaction I have called the gobble drug connection. I have argued that this global drug connection (including whatever ancillary dark forces are working with it) has been a seriously under-recognized factor in America’s deep events, in American politics, and particularly in the wars and other foreign adventures of the U.S.  war machine. As a result of early unauthorized decisions by small groups, using secrecy as a cover and drug traffickers as assets, Americas’s war machine grew to be able to induce preemptive wars repeatedly in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, was that were deceptively disguised, by deceptive deep events, as responses to enemy provocations. In the case of Afghanistan, it is particularly remarkable that the tragedies of the Laos and Vietnam wars were willingly and consciously prolonged or repeated by later presidents, including President Obama, whom to office promising change. (255)

For more than a century the land and people of America have provided hope and insertion to freedom-seeking peoples elsewhere. That could continue to be the case–but only if a mobilized American public can restore rightful priorities to its broken political system, corrupted by drugs and war. (257)

It confirmed my thinking in more detail and ruthless premeditated disregard for life than I could imagine. It shows what people on the streets are protesting against.  I highly recommend reading this book. I got it at the public library or you can buy it from Amazon.com.

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Universe or Multiverse?, edited by Bernard Carr. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Despite the growing popularity of the multiverse proposal, it must be admitted that many physicists remain deeply uncomfortable with it. The reason is clear: the idea is highly speculative and, from both a cosmological and a particle physics perspective, the reality of a multiverse is currently untestable.…

For these reasons, some physicists do not regard these ideas as coming under the purvey of science at all. Since our confidence in them is based on faith and aesthetic considerations (for example mathematical beauty) rather than experimental data, they regard them as having more in common with religion than science.… Indeed, Paul Davies regards the concept of a multiverse as just as metaphysical as that of a Creator who fine-tuned a single universe for our existence. (14)

To the hard-line physicist, the multiverse may not be entirely respectable, but it is a least preferable to invoking a Creator. Indeed anthropically inclined physicists like Susskind and Weinberg are attracted to the multiverse precisely because it seems to dispense with God as the explanation of cosmic design.… Indeed, Neil Manson has described the multiverse as ‘the last resort for the desperate atheist.’ … On the other hand, science itself cannot deal with such issues, and it seems unlikely that — even in the extended form required to accommodate the multiverse — science will ever prove or disprove the existence of God. (16)

Convictions about God’s existence must surely come from ‘inside’ rather than ‘outside’ and even those eminent physicists who are mystically inclined do not usually base their faith on scientific revelations. (17)

Multiverses may be useful in explanatory terms, but arguments for their existence are ultimately of a philosophical nature. (25)

Many people have promoted the multiverse hypothesis as the atheistic alternative to a theistic explanation of the fine-tuning of the cosmos for the existence of life. (27)

Thus, life appears to depend upon delicate coincidences that we have not been able to explain.… The happy coincidences between life’s requirements and nature’s choices of parameter values might just be a series of flukes, but one could be forgiven for beginning to suspect that something deeper is at work. That suspicion is the first deep root of anthropic reasoning. (45)

Let us be philosophical for a moment. Anthropic arguments and invocations of the multiverse can sometimes border on being non-scientific. You cannot test for the existence of other domains in the Universe outside the one visible to us — nor can you find a direct test of the Anthropic Principle. This leads some physicists to reject anthropic and multiverse ideas as being outside of the body of scientific thought. (241)

Although their ultimate purpose is to account for (and even predict) events, i.e. things that actually happen, physical (and other) theories are mainly concerned with what I shall refer to as eventualities, meaning things that may or may not actually happen. (286)

In discussions of their different opinions about what is appropriate in cosmological contexts, authors such as Hawking and Vilenkin tend to use the definite article for what they call ‘the’ state of the universe, but the reasoning I am developing here would suggest that such definiteness is unjustifiable, and that the most that is reasonable would be to propose ‘an’ a priori probability operator. (296)

This is in conformity with the precept that questions of ontology are of a theological nature that is beyond the scope of ordinary science (whose modest ambition is to account for appearances, and not for ultimate reality, whatever that may mean). (300)

The only eventualities about whose reality we can be sure are the conscious perceptions in our own minds (of which some, namely those occurring in dreams, are evidently uncorrelated with anything outside).… It seems reasonable to postulate the validity of Page’s principle, according to which conscious perceptions are the only eventualities that can be considered actually to happen. (304)

The set of such perceptions (not just yours and mine, but also those of everyone else) can be described as objective, and it is the only thing in the theory that can be considered to be real. (306)

This is the question of the nature of what I have referred to as a perceptor, whose actual perceptions are the only entities within the model that are considered to be real (which is not to deny the reality, in some theological sense, of other entities beyond the scope of the model).…

Is the perceptor unique? The notion that all anthropic observers might just be avatars of a single perceptor will not seem strange to anyone familiar with oriental (Hindu or Buddhist) religious tradition.… The obvious Wheelerian epithet for the succinct encapsulation of this idea — namely that we all share the same abstract identity — is solipsism without solipsism.…

Nevertheless, in the framework of the occidental (Judaeo-Christian-Islamic) religious tradition, it might seem more natural to suppose that there are many distinct perceptors. (308)

Whether — as in the oriental version of the anthropic interpretation — there is a unique perceptor, or whether — as in the occidental version — the number of perceptors is large (even compared with the number of anthropic observers) — is an issue that belongs to the realm of theology rather than science. (309)

One thereby obtains an interpretation of quantum mechanics that is compatible with Einstein’s desideratum that ‘God does not play dice’, in the sense that uncertainty is no longer involved at an objective global level, but arises only at the subjective level of particular perceptions. It could therefore be said that we play dice, but God does not! (317)

I have felt for many years about how otherwise sensible people, some of whom are among the scientists I most respect and admire, espouse an approach to cosmological problems — the Anthropic Principle (AP) — that is easily seen to be unscientific. By calling it unscientific I mean something very specific, which is that it lacks a property necessary for any scientific hypothesis — that it be falsifiable. (323)

I will discuss this in some detail below, but — put briefly — there is a vast logical difference between taking into account a known fact (e.g. that most of the galaxy is empty space) and arguing from a speculative and unproven premise (e.g. that there is a large ensemble of unseen universes).… To the extent that they are causally disjoint, we have no ability to make observations in universes other than our own. (324)

Thus, so long as we prefer a science based on what can be rationally argued from shared evidence, there is an ethical imperative to examine only hypotheses that lead to falsifiable theories.  (326)

It is not surprising that some theologians and scientists take the complexity problem as evidence that our universe was created by a benevolent God. They argue that if the best efforts of science lead to an understanding of the laws of nature within which there is choice, and if the choices that lead to a universe with intelligent life are extremely improbable, the very fact that such an improbable choice was made is evidence for intention. (338)

An important point is that, in order for an ensemble with varied properties to explain fine-tuning, it must be an actually existing ensemble and not a potential or hypothetical one. This is essential for any such anthropic argument. (389)

The implication is that the supposed existence of true multiverses can only be a metaphysical assumption. It cannot be a part of science, because science involves experimental or observational tests to enable correction of wrong theories. However, no such tests are possible here because there is no relevant causal link.

A belief that is justified by faith, unsupported by direct or indirect evidence, should be clearly identified as such, so that one knows precisely what one is being asked to support. I suggest the claim that properly disjoint multiverses exist is a metaphysical one, which by its very nature, can never become a scientific one. (400)

Gardner puts it this way: “There is not the slightest shred of reliable evidence that there is any universe other than the one we are in. No multiverse theory has so far provided a prediction that can be tested. As far as we can tell, universes are not even as plentiful as two blackberries.” The existence of multiverses is neither established nor scientifically establishable. The concept is justified by philosophy rather than science. They have explanatory power, but the philosophical nature of their justification must be appreciated. (407)

Though there has been much discussion of the Anthropic Principle (AP) over the last 35 years or so, it is still a very tantalizing and controversial subject, on the boundary between scientific cosmology and philosophy. (445)

It is important in this regard to note that there is a general consensus that the acceptability of any appeal to multiverses depends on there being a testable theory which independently predicts their existence. This requirement is crucial and must be kept in mind in evaluating these theories and in contemplating their use in anthropic arguments. (450)

If we have a final theory that still allows some ‘play’ in the laws of nature, then a theological answer in terms of intentional action by a divine agent or Creator is certainly acceptable, as long as we are allowing ourselves to go beyond the natural sciences and admit a theological or metaphysical frame of reference. Science can neither support nor exclude such a conclusion. It cannot even adjudicate the question. (456)

However, in wider-ranging philosophical discussions of the multiverse hypothesis — as found in various books on the topic — the issue arises as to what is the relation between the multiverse hypothesis and much larger philosophical issues, particularly whether reality is ultimately impersonal or personal in nature. In such contexts, the multiverse hypothesis is often presented as the atheistic alternative to a theistic explanation — such as that offered by John Polkinghorne — of the purported fine-tuning of the cosmos for intelligent life. (459)

I take the theistic hypothesis to be the claim that an omnipotent and omniscient being is ultimately responsible for the existence of the Universe. The concept of God I will assume is the standard so-called Anselmian one, according to which God is defined as the greatest possible being, but this is not essential to my argument. It is often claimed that this conception of God is central to all of the world’s theistic religious traditions — Islam, Judaism, Christianity and theistic versions of Hinduism. (459–60)

I will argue not only that theism is compatible with the universe-generator version of the multiverse hypothesis, but also that theists might even have reasons for preferring a multiverse over a single universe. Since within the world’s theistic traditions, God is considered infinite and infinitely creative, it makes sense that creation would reflect these attributes, and hence that physical reality might be much larger than one universe. Further, it makes sense that an infinitely creative God might create these many universes via some sort of universe-generator, since arguably this would be somewhat more elegant and ingenious than just creating them ex nihilo. (460)

Indeed, the fact that the multiverse scenario fits well with an idea of an infinitely creative God, and that so many factors in contemporary cosmology and particle physics conspire together to make an inflationary multiverse scenario viable, should give theists good reason to consider a theistic version of it. (461)

Fine-tuning has been widely claimed to provide evidence of, or at least suggest, some sort of divine design of the Universe.… Using what could be called the ‘surprise principle’, it follows that the existence of intelligent-life-permitting values for the constants provides evidence in favour of theism over the non-design, non multiverse hypothesis. (462)

Essentially, the argument is that if God is good — an assumption that is part of classical theism — then it is not surprising that God would create a world with intelligent beings, because the existence of such beings has positive value, at least under the theistic hypothesis.… I think that at minimum one has to admit that it is in no way arbitrary or ad hoc to hold that God has the desire to bring about states of goodness and beauty. (463)

In sum, even if an inflationary multiverse-generator exists, it must involve just the right combination of laws, principles and fields for the production of life-permitting universes; if one of the components were missing or different … it is unlikely that any life-permitting universes could be produced.… Thus, it does not seem that one can completely escape the suggestion of design merely by hypothesizing some sort of multiverse-generator. (466)

Many scientists feel very uncomfortable, if not hostile, to linking science and religion. As many leading historians have pointed out, however, natural theology and religion were closely linked with scientific practice, and indeed provided much of the inspiration for scientific work, until the late nineteenth century.

This unease with a science/religion dialogue extends to an unease with publicly discussing anything metaphysical at all in relation to science, including such topics as the anthropic principle and the multiverse hypothesis. On careful analysis of the overall purpose of doing science, however, I think it becomes clear that scientists should be talking about these issues, and doing so in dialogue with other thinkers, such as philosophers and theologians. (476–77)

I hope this chapter provides some understanding of why a theist might not only be sympathetic to the multiverse hypothesis, but might even see some of the findings of physics and cosmology as supportive of theism. (478)

In this section, I shall argue that, in a certain mathematical sense, the most general multiverse model (e.g. Tegmark’s Level 4 version) are ontologically equivalent to naïve deism, by which I mean the existence of a Cosmic Designer/Selector who judiciously picks a single real universe from an infinite shopping list of possible but unreal universes. Indeed, I suspect the general multiverse explanation is simply naïve deism dressed up in scientific language. Both appeal to an infinite unknown, invisible and unknowable system.… If I am right, then the multiverse is scarcely an improvement on naïve deism as an explanation for the physical universe. It is basically just a religious conviction rather than a scientific argument. (495)

Taken to its logical extreme, the multiverse explanation is a convincing argument for the existence of (a rather old-fashioned form of) God! This is certainly ironical, since it was partly to do away with such a God that the multiverse was originally invoked. (496)

My point is that to follow the multiverse theory to its logical extreme means effectively abandoning the notion of a rationally ordered real world altogether, in favour of an infinitely complex charade, where the very notion of ‘explanation’ is meaningless. (497)

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In Search of the Multiverse: Parallel Worlds, Hidden Dimensions, and the Ultimate Quest for the Frontiers of Reality by John Gribbin

One of the great scientific achievements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been to establish that the Universe did begin in a Big Bang, almost exactly 13.7 billion years ago, and has been expanding ever since in line with the description of space and time provided by the general theory of relativity. The more sure cosmologists are that they understand the Universe we see around us, the more obvious it is that the only way to reconcile this view with quantum physics is to take on board the Many Worlds Interpretation … (31)

All possible quantum states exist, corresponding to all possible moments of time in all possible universes.… Anything possible can happen, but it is our decisions that determine which of those futures we experience.… everything is real. (82–83)

In spatial terms, there is room in an infinite universe not only for everything possible to happen, but for an infinite number of infinite universes, in each of which anything possible can happen an infinite number of times.… Cosmologists today are quite happy to consider the idea that the Universe is infinite in space, but their standard models start from the Big Bang at a definite moment in time, 13.7 billion years ago. But if our Universe is just one component of the Multiverse, the Multiverse itself may be infinite in all directions — in time as well as in space. (89)

If we are living in a fluctuation within such a meta-universe, all that can be said about the meta-universe is that it exists, and that within it other fluctuations exist. The arrow of time (or arrows of time) only exist within those fluctuations. (98)

Tegmark argues that the idea of a Level I Multiverse is implicitly built in to the assumptions cosmologists make when talking about their interpretation of observational evidence. (102)

There must be a choice of universes, and the nature of life forms like ourselves selects the kind of universe we see around us. (131)

The most exciting thing about M-theory, and the most compelling reason to take the idea of the Multiverse seriously, is that it offers an infinite choice of possible worlds, … Leonard Susskind has dubbed the variety offered by M-theory ‘the cosmic landscape’, and it is currently the hottest cosmological game in town. (165)

In the Multiverse, information can shift from one region of spacetime — one universe — into another through wormholes, so that in the entire Metaverse information is never lost. (178)

Our universe has to be seen as just one component in a vast (presumably   infinite) array of universes connected by tunnels through spacetime. (184)

From the Inside Flap

Is our universe just one of many?

The most fascinating mysteries in modern physics seem to point us in that direction. As impossible as it seems—that other universes came before ours, float alongside ours, or even mirror ours—the evidence is surprisingly convincing.

In his most mind-blowing, sweeping work since Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality, acclaimed science writer and astrophysicist John Gribbin takes readers In Search of the Multiverse, launching an extraordinary journey to the frontiers of reality. Touching on the newest research on quantum physics, thermodynamics, string theory, and even the nature of God, this brilliant tour of the current state of cosmology also goes beyond the realm of settled science to the astonishing questions theoretical physicists have only now begun to ask.

Gribbin has long been known for his ability to explain even the most bewildering and complex ideas in the simplest of terms, and that skill is fully on display here. In this new book, he reveals why even the greatest thinkers can’t explain the realities of quantum physics without bumping up against the unimaginable. He explores certain anomalies in our Universe that only make sense when you incorporate ideas that were once found only in science fiction. But which fantastical notion of alternate universes is the right one?

Gribbin guides you expertly through the competing Multiverse theories, who thought them up, and what problems they were hoping to solve with such outlandish ideas. You’ll visit a realm of infinite space containing an infinite number of regions separated by infinite distances and ruled by different sets of physical laws. You’ll drift along an infinite time line, on which different universes are strung out, one after the other, like beads on a wire. And you’ll leaf through an infinitely thick book stuffed with an infinite number of pages: each page a different universe, existing in a different dimension—tantalizingly close together, but eternally unable to communicate with each other.

If our universe is three-dimensional and infinite, how could it be inside something else? Is it possible to travel to one of these alternate universes? Are particles traveling there every moment? How can scientists prove the existence of the Multiverse if they can’t travel to it? Read In Search of the Multiverse and enter a world that is more mind-bending, thought-provoking, and imagination-sparking than the fantasy worlds you’d discover in a bookstore full of science fiction novels.

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The Making of an Elder Culture: Reflections on the Future of America’s Most Audacious Generation by Theodore Roszak

The Summer of Love. Vietnam. Woodstock. These are the milestones of the baby boomer generation Theodore Roszak chronicled in his 1969 breakthrough book The Making of a Counter Culture. Part of an unprecedented longevity revolution, those boomers form the most educated, most socially conscientious, politically savvy older generation the world has ever seen. And they are preparing for Act Two.

The Making of an Elder Culture reminds the boomers of the creative role they once played in our society and of the moral and intellectual resources they have to draw upon for radical transformation in their later years. Seeing the experience of aging as a revolution in consciousness, it predicts an “elder insurgency” where boomers return to take up what they left undone in their youth. Freed from competitive individualism, military-industrial bravado, and the careerist rat race, who better to forge a compassionate economy? Who better positioned not only to demand Social Security and Medicare for themselves, but to champion “Entitlements for Everyone”? Fusing the green, the gray, and the just, Eldertown can be an achievable, truly sustainable future.

Part demographic study, part history, part critique, and part appeal, Theodore Roszak’s take on the imminent transformation of our world is as wise as it is inspired—and utterly appealing.

Theodore Roszak is the author of twenty books, including the 1969 classic The Making of a Counter Culture. He is professor emeritus of history at California State University, and lives in Berkeley, California.

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Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy: The Harvard Medical School Guide to Healthy Eating‚ by Walter C. Willett, M.D.

Amazon.com Review

Aimed at nothing less than totally restructuring the diets of Americans, Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy may well accomplish its goal. Dr. Walter C. Willett gets off to a roaring start by totally dismantling one of the largest icons in health today: the USDA Food Pyramid that we all learn in elementary school. He blames many of the pyramid’s recommendations–6 to 11 servings of carbohydrates, all fats used sparingly–for much of the current wave of obesity. At first this may read differently than any diet book, but Willett also makes a crucial, rarely mentioned point about this icon: “The thing to keep in mind about the USDA Pyramid is that it comes from the Department of Agriculture, the agency responsible for promoting American agriculture, not from the agencies established to monitor and protect our health.” It’s no wonder that dairy products and American-grown grains such as wheat and corn figure so prominently in the USDA’s recommendations.

Willett’s own simple pyramid has several benefits over the traditional format. His information is up-to-date, and you won’t find recommendations that come from special-interest groups. His ideas are nothing radical–if we eat more vegetables and complex carbohydrates (no, potatoes are not complex), emphasize healthy fats, and enjoy small amounts of a tremendous variety of food, we will be healthier. You’ll find some surprises as well, such as doubts about the overall benefits of soy (unless you’re willing to eat a pound and a half of tofu a day), and that nuts, with their “good” fat content, are a terrific snack.

Relying on research rather than anecdotes, this is a solidly written nutritional guide that will show you the real story behind how food is digested, from the glycemic index for carbs to the wisdom of adding a multivitamin to your diet. Willett combines research with matter-of-fact language and a no-nonsense tone that turns academic studies into easily understandable suggestions for living. –Jill Lightner –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era–A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme & Thomas Berry, Harper San Francisco, 1992.

From the big bang to the present and into the next millennium, The Universe Story unites science and the humanities in a dramatic exploration of the unfolding of the universe, humanity’s evolving place in the cosmos, and the boundless possibilities for our future.

Mathematical cosmologist, Brian Swimme and historian of cultures, Thomas Berry present an outstanding vision of our place  in the cosmos. In Universalist Radha-Krishnaism, I say,

Scientific explanations of the universe like the big bang theories and evolution constitute reasonable scientific models and explanations of how creation came about.… They also engage in creating a sort of myth that appeals to the modern imagination and world view.… Religious interpretation adds meaning to science, and science adds grounding in twenty-first century cosmology to religion. (102)

Although I had not read The Universe Story when I wrote that, it certainly fills the bill on all counts. I did not write much in my book about the nature of the universe we inhabit, since I prefer to leave such matters to those who are better qualified to write on that subject. I can now refer my readers to The Universe Story for a fuller understanding of a cosmology which is extremely compatible with Universalist Radha-Krishnaism.

I hope these few brief excerpts which follow will inspire you to read the whole book.

Earth seems to be a reality that is developing with the simple aim of celebrating the joy of existence. (3)

Fifteen billion years ago, in a great flash, the universe flared forth into being. In each drop of existence a primordial energy blazed with an intensity never to be equaled again. (7)

This future will be worked out in the tensions between those committed to the Technozoic, a future of increased exploitation of Earth as resource, all for the benefit of humans, and those committed to the Ecozoic, a new mode of human-Earth relations, one where the well-being of the entire Earth community is the primary concern. (14–15)

The birth of the universe was not an event in time. Time begins simultaneously with the birth of existence. The realm or power that rings forth the universe is not itself an event in time, nor a position in space, but is rather the very matrix out of which the conditions arise that enable temporal events to occur in space. Though the originating power gave birth to the universe fifteen billion years ago, this realm of power is not simply located there at that point of time, but is rather a condition of every moment of the universe, past, present, and to come. (17)

The universe is a coherent whole, a seamless multileveled creative event. The graceful expansion of the original body is the life blood of all future bodies in the universe. (18)

Always and everywhere, it is the universe that holds all things topgether and is the primary activating power in every activity.… the universe is not a thing, but a mode of being of everything. (27)

To tell the full story of a single particle we must tell the story of the universe, for each particle is in some way intimately present to every other particle in the universe. (29)

Just as the universe story has never before been told in this manner, so too the senses of meaning, even the sense of the sacred, that this story carries with it is something new both in its modality and in its order of magnitude.… The important thing to appreciate is that the story as told here is not the story of a mechanistic, essentially meaningless universe but the story of a universe that has from the beginning has its mysterious self-organizing power that, if experienced in any serious manner, must evoke an even greater sense of awe … Nor is it the case that this story suppresses the other stories that have over the millennia guided and energized the human venture. It is rather a case of providing a more comprehensive context in which all these earlier stories discover in themselves a new validity and a more expansive role. (238)

This book is far from dull scientific reading, but rather an exciting adventure which we are caught up in.

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Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, John O’Donohue, Harper Perennial, 2005

Beauty does not linger, it only visits.

Yet beauty’s visitation affects us and invites us into its rhythm,

it calls us to feel, think, and act beautifully in the world:

to create and live a life that awakens the Beautiful.

Beauty is a gentle but urgent call to awaken. Bestselling author John O’Donohue opens our eyes, hearts, and minds to the wonder of our own relationship with beauty by exposing the infinity and mystery of its breadth. His words return us to the dignity of silence, profundity of stillness, power of thought and perception, and the eternal grace and generosity of beauty’s presence. In this masterful and revelatory work, O’Donohue encourages our greater intimacy with beauty and celebrates it for what it really is: a homecoming of the human spirit. As he focuses on the classical, medieval, and Celtic traditions of art, music, literature, nature, and language, O’Donohue reveals how beauty’s invisible embrace invites us toward new heights of passion and creativity even in these uncertain times of global conflict and crisis.

All the frailty and uncertainty was seen to be ultimately sheltered by the eternal beauty which presides over all the journeys between awakening and surrender, the visible and the invisible, the light and the darkness. (2)

At first, it sounds completely naive to suggest that now might be the time to invoke and awaken beauty. Yet this is exactly the claim that this book explores. Why? Because there is nowhere else to turn and we are desperate; furthermore, it is because we have so disastrously neglected the Beautiful that we now find ourselves in such terrible crisis. (3)

As Frederick Turner puts it, ‘Beauty … is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.’ (7)

In contrast, beauty offers us refreshment, elevation and remembrance of our true origin and real destination. In this sense, the Beautiful is the true priestess of individuation, inviting us to engage the infinite design that shapes our days and dreams. She does not force on us any manufactured coherence towards which we must falsely strain; this is the diametrical opposite of all forms of fundamentalism. She invites us to surrender so that we can participate in the forming of a new and vital coherence that is native to our desire. In such unsheltered and uncertain times we yearn for this order and coherence, which brings the emerging forms of our own growth into rhythm with the concealed order of creation. (8)

The Beautiful stirs passion and urgency in us and calls us forth from aloneness into the warmth and wonder of an eternal embrace. It unites us again with the neglected and forgotten grandeur of life. (13)

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This is one of the most difficult books I have read in a long time due to my lack of a strong background in Western philosophy, and its use of unfamiliar technical philosophical jargon and describing the position of one philosopher using the positions of several other unfamiliar philosophers (especially the first half which deals with Gadamer). It seems to be aimed at an academic audience. Yet I feel it was worth the effort for the insights gained by looking at Rupa Goswami’s teachings in a new light. What are they? Let me explain using some brief excerpts since Jessica Frazier’s language says it better than my paraphrases would.

Philosophically understood, “realism” goes beyond simple thought about reality; it entails self-critical reflection on the very notion of realness. The conditions for realism and a realist debate arise where a thinker or circle of thinkers begin to suspect the possibility of something that is “more” real–even “ultimately” real, above and beyond the self-evident, everyday reality that is merely “there.” (8)

She says, “it is Gadamer’s Aristotelian affirmation of teleological identity-in-change that will be shown to share important insights with Rupa Gosvami’s cornerstone concept of rasa” (50).

Gadamer picks up on Plato’s Parmenidean portrayal of all things, identities, or unities as being ambiguously one and many, existing and not existing as such simultaneously, pointing to the same ambivalence championed as a solution to the problem of the One and the Many by those Hindu philosophers who “maintain that both identity and difference are true of the relation between the one and the many. (50)

We do not merely have the option of applying a spirit of passion to Being, nor is passion merely interwoven into the Being’s phenomenal fabric; our passions, understood as teleologies, correspond to the teleological essence of all forms and things. This is true for Gadamer much in the way that the world for Rupa Gosvami is explained as form (rupa and prakriti) proliferating through the “dialectical dynamic of love.” (67)

Through the language that Gadamer employs, and through its “fundamental” and “transcendental” character, this model of Being as the flux of unified and divided forms is subtly but surely apotheosised in Gadamer’s philosophy. Here, as in the case of various post-Vedantic schools that arose in India, a holistic, fundamental analysis of existence based on the evidence of sheer phenomena, yields a view of reality that must eschew radical dualism, and locate foundational and divine value in the finite, immanent world.

The fundamental structure of Being as “[ontologically] One and [ontically] Many is what Gadamer discovers in Leibniz in the idea that the monad is itself a universe, reflecting the world within itself. (68)

In Gadamer’s case, the implication is that non-finite absolute transcendence is a powerful religious ideal, but a false one, whereas Being as ubiquitous form, energy, telos, indeterminacy, meaning, beauty, and spirit–these are ideals into which we should be happy to assimilate our own identities. It has been written of Rupa Gosvami’s conception of the divine that it is really a “concentrated form of Being”–on a sufficiently attentive hermeneutic reading, the same might be said with regard to Gadamer. (76)

Rupa Gosvami’s synthesis of Samkhya and Vedanta philosophies yields a metaphysics in which apparent substances such as physical matter are themselves only forms of the one true ultimate substance that is the divine (brahman or Krishna).… some of the source texts of Rupa Gosvami’s tradition, such as the Brahmavaivarta Purana, play with the possibility that the proliferation of forms have a more foundational existence than the apparent ubiquity of substance. (80)

Rupa Gosvami never had to defend the idea that consciousness is universally and necessarily present, as it is a tenet discussed and recommended by some of India’s earliest and most authoritative philosophical texts. (81)

Gadamer’s universality of play is universal at all loci in Being and across all micro– and macro-cosmic levels in precisely the same way that the Platonic One and the Many, Hegelian dialectic, and the Caitanya Vaisnava doctrine of “inconceivable difference and non-difference” are universal–since as we will see, they are features of the same logical-phenomenological insight. (81–2)

both Gadamer and Rupa Gosvami, who riddles his treatises with verse quotations, draw on poetic examples–to draw us into the proper attitude of engagement, vitality, and listening to everyday life, and to enthuse us into an aesthetic state of immersion and self-forgetting. (110)

Rupa Gosvami’s worldview, which is widely claimed to constitute a dualistic theism, in fact, also formulates truths about the fundamental constitution of reality as form, motion, and teleology, and takes it as the ground of a eudaimonian ethics not merely of self-augmenting vitality, but of focused and intensifying passions. (113)

Rupa Gosvami not only incorporated the work of his predecessors within the philosophical and Vaisnava devotional traditions, as shown by the textual references woven throughout his major works, he also explicitly courted dialogue and friendly debate, harvesting the best insight of contemporary debate on reality and its translation into ethical terms. (133)

Rupa Gosvami was one of those many philosophically sensitive thinkers of his generation who was led to combine religious and philosophical modes of reasoning in sophisticated ways.…

In the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, … the synthesis of passion and reason was a central dynamic in the self-determination of the movement as a philosophically refined branch of bhakti. (136)

As in all “realist” soteriologies of the kind we are examining, including those of Gadamer and Rupa Gosvami, the ultimate human aim is to realise both in thought and action, our true natures as part of Being as a whole. (144)

Rupa lived in a multicultural, multireligious, geographically and socially mobile society in which his own experience had proved scholarship to be a valuable economic, social, and spiritual currency. He was an Indian “Renaissance man,” and in his hands the philosophy of religion was judiciously tempered both by the rigorous demands of contemporary logic on the one hand, and by a devotional readership on the other.…

In the same way in which Gadamer is a eudaimonian realist and optimist about ontology and ethics, so too is Rupa Gosvami.… Rupa Gosvami’s Hindu optimism stakes out a further postmodern possibility for realist belief, not as a Derridean waiting, nor an uncommitted Gadamerian vitality, but as a transformative, all-consuming passion. (152)

Rupa Gosvami’s bhakti philosophy incorporates the fruits of India’s own “Enlightenment scepticism” into a realistic worldview that draws added strength from the very factors that have had a demoralising influence on religious belief and realism in the West. (159)

He [Rupa] synthesises influences from a wide range of Indian textual sources, schools, disciplines, and religious orientations, while modifying and honing this mixture through extensive discursive engagement with other thinkers of his time. He distilled contemporary theological sources into a newly systematic, consistent, and comprehensive position by means of his own unique analysis of the nature of the divine, and the ultimate goals of human life. (160)

Rupa Gosvami’s earlier writings show that the prolific religious movement that had grown around Krishna already preoccupied his thoughts, and many of the ingredients of his later theological and philosophical thought predate the meeting with Caitanya. (161)

the world view that Rupa inherits combines this emphasis on embodiment, and its implicit humanist affirmation of the conditions of embodied personhood that define human life in the world (often explicitly contrasted with the ascetic practices of renouncers), with its philosophical resources. (162)

While Rupa and his sources were indeed practitioners in the process of (re)creating traditions, they were also syncretic, systematic, and philosophically discerning about their range of influences, and distinctively individualistic in the cast of their theologising. (165)

Rupa Gosvami’s philosophical position grew from Nyaya logical methods, and an engagement with the formal realist paradigms of Vedanta and Samkhya ideas that were prevalent in the Bhagavata Purana and a natural part of current philosophical-theological debate. (166)

As Shrivatsa Gosvami argues, contradicting Steve Rosen’s interpretation, acintybhedabheda is not merely a “supra-rational” concept, but in fact has a firm rational basis in the sophisticated ontological analysis that runs throughout the tradition. (168)

On the Caitanya Vaisnava model, sat-cit-ananda is rather a universal, infinite interrrelational plurality of which we are a part.… by Being we always mean consciousness, that consciousness by definition consists of contents in flux following a diachronic intentional structure that relationality is a universal and necessary feature of Being. (172)

The dynamic quality of Being is well established in the model of the divine as ultimate reality. Yet in most cases this necessarily shifting, transient, apparently “non-absolute” facet of the divine is relegated to a secondary status relative to the true, changing agent of change. Yet the Caitanya tradition, following the lead of the Bhagavata Purana, does not accept the thorough-going character of this separation; rather the form, quality, and movement of the world are the true essence of Krishna, as they are the true way to realising the divine ultimate reality. Rupa in particular presses this point through rhetorical strategies in his language and through his depiction of the sense-obsessed gopis as spiritual exemplars. This is precisely the kind of emphatically metaphysical point that is repeatedly obscured in translations of Rupa Gosvami’s works. Hence lines that are filled with philosophical terminology … lose their philosophical context when translated according to different interpretative priorities.  (173)

This is a typical mode of expression for Rupa, multifaceted and neatly mixing what we might call theological, metaphysical, and poetic discourses. It is in this way that his philosophy has to be teased out of his writings. (174)

Like every deity, but perhaps preeminently so, Krishna is not only considered to be a divine personality, but is in addition a thematisation of the philosophy of the divine, and also a meta-discourse on the nature of the bhakti mode of worship itself–psychologically, theologically, sociologically, and, of course, metaphysically. (181)

We have seen that Rupa’s main idea, the ontological and soteriological importance of rasa, is a way of enacting the essence of Being.… The progressive, dialectically structured movements of love, and of an aesthetic love of love, are intended to be a quantitative and qualitative augmentation of Being itself. (182)

Everywhere, in Caitanya Vaisnava literature as in its practice, the marks of a type of pantheism are evident. God does not dwell in objects as an obscured hermetic essence–purely purusa, “spirit” seeking to escape the impurities of prakrti, “matter,” “form”–but rather is enacted, augmented, and instantiated in the dialectical movement that is the existence of each entity. (189)

Krishna is entranced by his own divinity dialectically coming to light in the world. In the Uddhava Sandesa he is portrayed as the exemplary devotee, as full of weakness, excitement, and imaginal yearning as are his consorts and worshipers. Much is made of the theological twist whereby Krishna becomes the devotee to Radha’s deity. But we must see this too as yet another manifestation of his essential nature–dialectically taken up into the fundamental ontology of rasa. (190)

In a more dualistic context we would say that rasa is why the world was created, but here we can say that it is what the world is. We can understand rasa as the eternal third term of all dialectic, a concept of synthesis and relation personified by Radha. As this third term of the dialectic, love itself transcends Krishna as lover and object of love, and takes priority, which is why the haladini shakti, his power of enjoyment, is said to be his true nature. (191)

For Rupa, religious belief is on a continuum with our everyday truths and processes of reasoning, because it is derived from transcendental metaphysical truths that pervade them.…

Rupa Gosvami’s works stand within a discourse of radical questioning, which has centuries of precedent and arguably a greater range and depth of interrogation in India than in the tempest of modern Western debates. (194)

As is so widely noted, Krishna’s role in this theology is almost diametrically opposed to his message in the Bhagavad Gita, in which he features as the paradigmatic advocate of order, duty, and detachment. (200)

Here we have an image of a god who does indeed need and desire; who “flounders” rather than acts; who is involved essentially and purposefully in the world order, caught up by phenomena rather than merely on display in them. His actions are serious. He is fettered and conditioned by his love. Above all, he is helplessly engaged in a loving activity in separation from his beloved that is intrinsically unsatisfying. And these experiences, as Rupa Gosvami’s literature shows, are mirrored in those of humanity. (206)

Rupa’s texts form a post-sceptical, dialogical discourse in that they allow those who suffer to voice the theological doubts of the reader who sees little to celebrate in a world consisting of attachment to elusive, finite, and situationally circumscribed phenomenal objects: a life of necessary dissatisfaction. But in so doing they intuitively demand a justification or theodicy of the suffering caused by this religious mode that he so eloquently champions. (208)

In Rupa’s literary portrayals of viraha, separation is not primarily a theological gap that must be bridged by some soteriological device such as grace. It is an ontological mode of particular being, and a mode of general Being. (213)

Radha, who has theological connections with prakriti and Krishna’s power of creation, suffers her separation from Krishna as a sort of sublimation of creation’s continuous birthpangs–a pain in which we all share. She is herself a symbol of realist approaches to the world, for what she does (as devotional exemplar) is never separate from what she is (as the ultimate truth of existence). (215–16)

Rupa is concerned that we become galvanised, and he is clear that those who feel less than profound passion in their everyday activities are treading a lower path. (220)

Having dealt with the Caitanya bhakti, Vedic, and Vaisnava reasons for Radha’s importance, he [Rupa] shifts into the discourse of puranic Samkhya by pointing out that as the hladini-shakti, she is the best and the truest form of all the great shaktis of Krishna. Here he is restating explicitly what has been said previously in the text and elsewhere in his works: all powers or energies are really the power of hlad–enjoyment, gladness, exhilaration, and delight. (225–6)

Thus it is important to note the theological point embedded in the devotional exaltation of enjoyment–it is not that enjoyment is the best way to worship Krishna, nor that it is his most characteristic quality, nor even that it is his best. It is that he himself is the quality of enjoyment. Only in enjoyment, in experiencing or “tasting’ him, can we both be and see him.

If Being is enjoyment then we can enjoy as much as we like, wherever and whenever we like, indiscriminately and without prejudice as to the object of our desire. But if it is also attachment, directedness, telos, then this too must be exemplified in an appropriate attitude to our object(s) of desire. (226–7)

In many respects, while this study aims to draw limited but instructive parallels between Rupa Gosvami’s and Gadamer’s positions, it often seems that Rupa Gosvami’s insights are the more critically modern of the two; his optimism resonates with that of many of Gadamer’s contemporaries and successors. He displays an eagerness to affirm the validity and importance–indeed, the ontological importance–of emotion as our epistemological guide to the centrality of value in ontology. (230)

Again and again, this study has used the term “realism” in the sense of a perspective that locates the highest value, and the foundation for all other knowledge and action, in the correct apprehension of ultimate reality. Here we see a religious expression that is too easily identified as “devotional” without acknowledging the concurrent “philosophical” dimension of such religiosity. Krishna speaks simultaneously as deity and ultimate reality. (233)

Radha is an exemplary model of Tillich’s classic definition: “Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern, a concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of our life.” Rupa describes the experience of being impassioned and possessed by a religious ”reality,” reminding us of a neglected cornerstone of realist religious experience. (234)

Radha’s reason then is a “passionate reason” leading her to choose, on rational as well as purely involuntary, instinctive, and psychological grounds, to be guided by her passions. Her courageous choice to abandon freedom, a blank plain on which no values can be found, for an unending pilgrimage through the rich topography of the passions, is the “choice” that Being has already made, and it is a path that, for Rupa, it is our most fitting destiny to follow. (236)

It shows us that truth is not elsewhere, eluding capture by our falsifiable beliefs and metaphors. Rather, it dwells in our existence and must be captured according to our own particular, problematic, phenomenal way of knowing and acting. (243)

Indian philosophy has, from its earliest periods and throughout its history, incorporated sophisticated arguments for varieties of scepticism, nihilism, and relativism. Recognition of this rights a longstanding prejudice regarding the supposed credulity and lack of complexity in Indian thought.… Rupa Gosvami was part of a fruitful contemporary dialogue exploring particularly sophisticated, self-reflective versions of these debates, and his theology is founded on a particularly rigorous understanding of the wholesale finitude, relativity, ontological unity, mutual constitution, relationality, and innately teleological, prejudicial, or passionate character of Being. (244)