Universalist Radha-Krishnaism is addressed to seekers more than those practicing selfless devotion. Rather than emphasizing selflessness, I emphasize seeing our best self interest in devotion to Radha-Krishna that benefits us in both this life and the next. Although practitioners do not seek personal enjoyment, it is an integral part of their devotion. How can one be in an amorous relationship with Radha-Krishna and not enjoy it?

Since we can only speculate about the experience of reality other than what we consciously testify (we cannot objectively prove it) we create ‘alternate universes’ and populate them with our expectations. A cluster of such universes may constitute a ‘multiverse’. But that experience, or imagination of ours which can indeed be as real as the experience gathered through our senses here and now, is unified within us.

The idea of multiple universes from Vedic opus has evolved and came to stage as the society and its beliefs evolved. Beliefs have followed achievements in disciplines of mathematics, physics, providing them with a new vocabulary and a theatre for novel expressions. In Sanskrit terms, jagat, or universe, meant simply ‘world’, or, ‘this experience’. But because we can naturally speculate, imagine, and somehow feel (or perhaps desire out of loneliness?) that there must be something more than this experience, an idea of alternate universes, or multiverses, naturally follows. The problem is also with translators and audience, who see and interpret things in scripture based on their modern knowledge, and they cannot forget all they know today, and translate old terms without spoiling them with their own comprehension.

But I’d say that feature of our consciousness is more important to understand, than whether the idea of multiverses — as we comprehend them today — really existed millennia ago. It probably didn’t, but we *want* to see traces of it. Because we see ourselves there — we have an ability to project us there.

As the science and humanities progress on a timeline, and as our comprehension based on commonly shared knowledge of our race expands, we’ll see all new forms of embellishments and additions to our beliefs, we’ll see them in our arts, in all new frontiers discovered in all walks of life.

We can certainly say they come from our old selves, or in other words, from our forefathers and foremothers, that they had initiated a certain idea. And we’ll be right, of course, and feel them as our own. But even that feature of our consciousness is more important to understand, and can tell us more about ‘who’ or ‘what’ actually experiences, and what ‘experience’ is. Illustratively, we can see a “ghostly image”, or “a pattern of behaviour”, inside the many of our perceptions of reality.

And we do need science in our society, more than ever, to endlessly try to objectivise the image of reality and its laws we can commonly share without fight. Thus when scientists reject certain a priori conclusions, it’s not because they lack imagination, but because that experience cannot be objectivised, commonly understood, proven and shared, and therefore may lead to a conflict.

Too many people have died in vain because of a priori accusations, too much damage done to this world, and too dark an image of it has been created inside human imagination without trying to comprehend, honestly and objectively, what this indeed is all about … and share that conclusion with indisputable evidence, and very hard, selfless thinking.

And that is the test of spiritual maturity too; rejecting selflessly one’s premature idea about the unprovable can save millions, can save the nature, although we may be potentially right in some of the premises. However, even one wrong decimal in the equation of life means an infinity of error. Without a good proof, and without common participation in it through a wholesome experience of it, at that time it is nothing but a (potentially dangerous) dream.

As the Beatles so eloquently sang “All you need is love!”

Much of the world is so hung up on these externals that if you don’t look like them and submit to their institutions they think you are not on their path, and when I look where their path is heading that gives me re-assurance!

This intense, spiritual passion combined with intellectual modesty is a welcome breath of fresh air in a world full of both despair on the one hand and dogma on the other!