Dear Devotees,

Hare Krishna,Please accept my humble obesciences.All glories to Shri Prabhupada. A lot has been going in my mind .Please accept my humble obesciences. I.I am very disturbed to see the beheading of Bangladeshi Isckon devotee in Bangladesh.I also happen to watch the interview of a Yazidi women who was captivated by ISIS and really shaken to know that men in the family were killed and women if not accepted Islam were repeatedly.....and sold to next man.

The fact that west is happy to see two countries fighting and makes it a financial opportunity to sell arms and ammunition's.The  refugees being running with no food and shelter and this big world has no place for them to be accepted.there are so many wrong doings around the world.

My mind is very fragile and what I see and hear in the today's world is effecting me in a negative way. How do I become strong and control what I see or hear in the era were what's app, Facebook and media spreads the information like fire.Being a women I am very sensitive and want to create a small world with devotee friends.

Is it a devotees responsibility to spread awareness  that such heinous crimes are being made against devotees or Sanatan dharmis and we need to be strong and united. Or we should ignore it?

Its not that such things have not happened in past or will not happen in future. But how do I find peace with continuous bombardment of information technology.

The pressure of being a mother, a working women, domestic responsibilities, taking care of family is a priority.How  do I keep my mind sharp, strong and calm to avoid such information effecting me emotionally. So many questions come to my mind about the happenings around the world.

The time I want to spend reading, doing things with my daughter, cooking and gardening is being wasted in surfing through information technology which is doing no good for me.

How do I cope and what should be the right thing to do? I am a girl who is cant forget her Indian roots from a middle class Brahman family and is well settled in London for 9 years now. PLEASE HELP ME.

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  • Hare Krishna to All,

    I am not bothered what's happening to the world. My only concern is my love ones I always look after their welfare. I try to see to it they are secure, safe and sound. Family should come first before anything else. Because it is here where the Lord God lies. Narada for example when he went to Dwaraka to see the Lord God. He could see the Lord God as the husband of each every wife that lived there.

    Haribol always,

    krsnaraja melvin
  • Srila-Prabhupada-Quotes.jpg

  • Hare Krishna, 

    Religion and the Internet
    The Techno-Spiritual In Cyberspace

    The Internet is an important technological stride that many different people around the world are currently exploring. It can permeate the lives of those  who are connected to it, and cyberspace quickly becomes a part of everyday  life-especially if people are connected to the Internet for work purposes.  We do not yet fully understand the implications that the Internet has had on  our cultural and personal lives, but it is certain that it can affect many  wide-ranging parts of life, one of which is religion and spirituality. The  Internet does not revolve solely around the stereotypical pornographic or  commercial sites. Religious documents are available online, just as some  forms of religious worship or practice can be done or participated in  online. Other religions refuse to accept the Internet as a valid form of  transmittance, just as some people treat the Internet as a religion unto  itself. Even though some have denied its validity, many different spiritual  groups communicate their presence to a global audience from a relatively  small grey box that just happens to be connected to a phone line and many  other wires. How the Internet has changed religious practices and vice versa  has yet to be seen, but it seems only prolonged study will tell.

     

    To begin with, there are some major issues involved with the anthropological  study of religion and the Internet that should be identified. One is that  there are few sources coming from an explicitly anthropological, or even  sociological, viewpoint. Many sources could not even be strictly considered  to be academic and are targeted to a more general audience. Zaleski, writing  in 1997, does not analyze the material he has collected in numerous  interviews; he simply presents it. While his book is very informative in  regards to how major religions view the Internet, it does not synthesize any  ideas on why this is so. Another thing to consider is that the Internet has  only been present in mainstream, albeit somewhat limited, use since the  mid-1990s. There is no accurate way to define how the Internet has  influenced cultural patterns as of yet, since cultural patterns are  subjective analytical groupings that may change over time through a  historical perspective. In other words, most of us do not know enough yet to  give an educated opinion on just how revolutionary the Internet was-or was  not. Further, there are few existing works that deal with the comparison of  religious worship in offline life and religious worship in online life. The  ones that do tend to fall prey to many of the problems that other  researchers have. Researchers dealing with the Internet have a habit of  speculating about the future instead of offering analyses of what has really  occurred. They are simply predicting different routes that any trends seen  presently-which may very well have nothing to do with the Internet so much  as other factors-will take in the future.


     

    Some definitions will be needed in order to follow some of my lines of  thought. When discussing religion, what I refer to is a belief system that  has been institutionalized. This implies some sort of organization and a  membership or community of more than one person, which has survived through  time. Another term that is important is spirituality, which I define as  something more personal than religion. Spirituality is involved in religion,  although spirituality may not be a term that is inclusive of religion, as I  have defined it. It is more the feeling or experience than the organization  and institutions found in religion, and may exist outside of religion. In  terms of theoretical bases found in works about religion and the Internet,  many of the available sources studying religion on the Internet mention  technological determinism. To make this explicit, technological determinism  will determine cultural development; technology is a causational factor from  which all other things result. For example if taking an extreme position,  the printing press may be viewed as the sole cause of how Protestantism  became as popular as it did. Religion is thus attributed as being part of  technological development. There were, of course, many other factors  involved in the Protestant Reformation, even though the printing press  influenced religion.


     

    Technological determinism is also usually tied to a form of evolutionary  beliefs in these sources. Many of the descriptions of these beliefs seem to  be able to progress only in one direction, and towards a single end. A prime  example of these thoughts can be found in Bauwens and Rossi 1999, where a  relationship between progressions both technological and spiritual is  argued. Father Rossi disputes Bauwens' points that technology causes  spiritual progression and that spiritual development as caused by one form  of technology is a prerequisite to moving towards the next phase of  technological development. He instead finds spiritual progression is not  necessarily tied to technological development as an "enabler" for the next  level of development, but is required for an understanding of moral and  spiritual implications that the technology may have. As Father Rossi has  argued against this evolutionary ladder, most anthropologists would agree,  and then probably add some additional critique. While some sources (Cobb  1998:20) believe that technology causes humans to culturally evolve in a  manner similar to Leslie White's ideas, it would be an over-simplification  to look at the relationship between spiritual and technological developments  as inextricably connected as causal elements. They are tied together, as  both are parts of what makes up our cultural milieu, but they are not forced  into a specific pattern of relations that can be charted as an evolutionary  development. Further, there are other variables beyond technology that could  potentially alter or influence spiritual development.


     

    Part of the evolutionary scheme of beliefs, to an extent, begins to look as  if it had been lifted from science fiction novels. Indeed, it has in some  cases. The word cyberspace first came into use by William Gibson in his  science fiction novel Neuromancer (Cobb 1997:30). There seems to be several  ideas about human evolution in cyberspace that theorists toss about. Some  render technology into something that allows the next progression to become  possible, and others see it as an extension of the evolution itself. Human  evolution will follow the model of technology in terms of mass connectivity,  and become a collective mind. Others believe that a collective mind will be  enabled by the technology, and minds will be hooked up or wired into the  Internet just as computers are. An aspect of this idea is omniscience, the  ability of a person who is logged into the net to "know all" or even "be   all" by virtue of the connections that it grants them. The mind becomes  likened to a computer; thoughts and emotions as well as anything else are processed as "files." If this is true, then it is possible to take the  contents of a person's biological brain and upload them into a form of  digital brain that physically does not deteriorate: instant immortality.  Cyberspace allows users to transcend their bodies, as many religions aim  towards. To me, these qualities make the Internet into a place, which allows  people to recreate themselves as a version of their own god. Omniscience, immortality, transcending the body-all these things are classic goals or  qualities of spiritual enlightenment or spiritual control.


     

    Wertheim (1999) has worked with the idea that cyberspace is a new version of  Heaven, this time created by humans and not God. Part of her ideas rest in  the basis that the tradition of the Western world to separate the mind and  body has lead to the ideas that qualities that are not physical become  equated with the mind (Wertheim 1999:149). Interestingly, the mind also  includes spiritual qualities and beliefs. Thus, the Internet is largely a  spiritual "space" somewhere in the ether. It becomes part of the Christian concept of Heaven through this link, but also holds a promise of the sacred  to many people. One thing that is important to remember, though, is that  this version of Heaven is under our direct control. There is no intermediary  of the priest and other clergy, or barriers of divine beings that work for  God. We are directly connected to technology that allows us divine creation.  We can create our own utopic worlds online-the act of creating somehow  becoming important once we realize we can have our own six days, and own a  web page. But if you know how, creating the world can only take about six  hours. Somehow, in a crucial way, the Internet has begun to allow democratic  belief systems, or belief systems independent of control to exist as a large  presence. To some extent, this is because cyberspace works with a form of  power relations that render hierarchies of power and control in religion as  unnecessary. There is no one person that must be accessed in order to attain  spiritual enlightenment. There are multiple sources that allow each and  every person who accesses them to work at their spirituality on their own  level.


     

    Something that I may suggest about the digital divide between different  countries and cultures is a relatively important idea, which I have not seen  expressed in any literature involving religion and cyberspace. Perhaps not  only social and economic factors play a part in whether or not countries are  able to become online. It may be that because of the Western philosophical  separation of body and mind, there is some predisposition towards accepting  both the technology and the immaterial quality of it. I must emphasize that  alienation from the net would not occur simply because of backwoods  ignorance. There are people who have been raised within a Western tradition  of thought who neither enjoy the idea of the technology, or the confusing  abstract existence of the Internet. My point is simply that people coming  from a background where, perhaps the mind and the body have been kept as a  unified concept, may find the use of such a technology disdainful. I have  had personal acquaintances who refuse to use the Internet on the basis that  it is not real, and untouchable. It is somewhere "out there" in the world as  an amorphous blob of wires and electricity and clacking keys that cannot be  truly touched. In this way, the religion and spiritual beliefs of certain  people may delay their acceptance of the Internet as a valid medium used in  everyday life. Spirituality and religious doctrines could potentially  exacerbate the digital divide around the world. 
     

    Regardless, there are other religions that have no compunction about using  the Internet for their daily practices. There are primarily two ways that  religious organizations go about this. The first is communication and  information sharing, and the second is actual religious worship online.  Christopher Helland (2000:207) has identified and worked with these two uses  as what he refers to as Religion-online and Online-religion. Religion-online  is an organized attempt to present religion through a medium for  communication within a traditional top-down hierarchy, and Online-religion  is where a more egalitarian existence reigns, and the process of liminality  allows for religious practice. To Helland, use of the web for communication  implies traditional use, the kind that has been employed prior to the  Internet. For religious practice, it gives justification to holding rituals  or other practices online within Victor Turner's ideas of liminality, and  denotes a more equal state of being. These connotations should not  necessarily be applied to all instances, as both communication and religious  worship can exist outside of the specific organizational realms that he  places them in. Communication includes members of a congregation sending  each other e-mails, posting a web page in order to educate the public about  some aspect of the group's religious practices, or scheduling a chat time  where a leader of the religious community is available online. It is not  always a direct person-to-person exchange, as posting a web site does not  entail that its creator must monitor it every hour of the day; instead, it  is something that visitors receive as a kind of passive absorption.


     

    In contrast to use of the Internet by religious groups for communication,  there is also the issue of religious practices that are conducted online.  This category tends to include rituals and other symbolic practices which  contribute to religious understanding, sometimes within the tradition  specifically, and sometimes outside of it in a broader sense. Depending on  how it was intended and what it meant to the person, reading an online copy  of the Bible could be a straight form of communication-a religious group  posting it for the purpose of communicating their beliefs. But at the same  time, reading the Bible within the Christian tradition may very well be  considered a form of independent worship, if done with the proper intentions  and mindset. It is difficult to define what is religious worship when the  concepts of religion or spirituality can permeate so many aspects of our  lives. I am moving away from Helland when I note that one important point  may be that religious communication online may be considered a passive  action, whereas worship online may be considered an active action. This is,  however, a highly subjective definition that would be a personal separation  for those who are involved in the religious worship.


     

    The Internet used simply as a medium for communication seems to be much more  common for religious groups than to worship online. Most of this has to do  with the fact that religion is something that involves the human soul, some  sort of connection to the person who is performing the religious act. When a  person is logged on to the Internet, there is only a certain range of things  that may occur. Visual and audio information can be transmitted through the  wires that link a person on a computer to a server to another server to  another person on another computer. But there is no direct connection from  person to person in this sense, and a person's soul or energy is generally  not see as transmitted over the wires by most religions. As Rabbi Kazen, who  is involved with the Orthodox Jewish site for Chabad-Lubavitch explains to  Zaleski (1997:18) during an interview, "Each individual person has a spark  of godliness within them, which is the soul." According to Rabbi Kazen, many  Jewish religious acts cannot be held on the web, partly because of the  absence of the soul, but also partly because some religious acts are  physical. They cannot be separated from the actual physical connection to  the spiritual meaning. Acts, such as the Sabbath cannot be done in front of  a computer-the entire act of being online during a Sabbath is contrary to  how the time should be spent. When Zaleski interviews Swami Atma about  religion and cyberspace, he discovers that the yogic branch of Hinduism does  not suggest worshipping online for a different reason. Partly, it is  acknowledged that there is a different transmission over the Internet, but  more importantly, computers are found to be draining in a very negative  sense. Swami Atma comments, ".the energy or vibration around a computer is  not very good for [people]." (Zaleski 1997:211). He continues to speak about  how breaks away from the machine are necessary when working for long periods  of time, and connects this negative, draining feeling briefly to the  possible medical factor of electromagnetic fields. 
     

    Other religions accept the Internet for more than use as a sophisticated  form of advertising, and even encourage their members to worship online.  Schroeder, Heather, and Lee (1998) have completed participant-observation in  an online charismatic community where it was found that the religious  worship was not markedly different. Services were led online very similar to  and using the same language as services held offline. However, the sense of  community that one receives from having a spiritual community is not as  satisfying online. In the pagan Internet community, many pagans do  participate in online rituals, ceremonies, and spells. Some who worship in  this way call themselves "technopagans" to denote the connection that they  place between spirituality and technology. One recorded ritual was described  as casting the circle, where normally candles or people stand at the four  corners east, west, north, and south. In this ritual, there was a networked  personal computer with an Internet connection where those participating in  the ritual were involved both in the physical world and the abstract world  of cyberspace simultaneously (Davis 1995). The ritual allowed anyone who was  online at the same time to participate through the use of VRML, a type of  virtual reality protocol for the Internet that uses a graphical interface.


     

    The open participation granted by the technopagans running this ritual is an  important aspect. It was not only open to those who took the time to attend  in real life. Most people who were present at the actual event were probably  there because of local community connections. Real life and "virtual" life  tend to crossover; the religious community of Wiccans and other pagans  maintain sites, but do not tend to depend upon the online aspect of religion  (Horsfall 2000:181). Many sites are used in order to network in person with  other pagans in a user's local area. Paganism is characteristically a  religion that has a decentralized mechanism for control, if any control at  all. The Discordians, a specific pagan subgroup, pride themselves on chaotic  and anarchistic behavior. In many pagan groups, people take turns leading as  long as they have the proper knowledge base to do so. This is similar to the  Internet, which thrives on knowledge and content as opposed to seniority.  Many pagan people improvise their rituals and practices of worship; the  symbolism and spirituality is more important than a choreographed and  aesthetic ritual. Religious rites can be performed using a butter knife in  place of a ceremonial dagger; there is more emphasis placed on symbols to  attain the desired effect of a ritual. There is also a much more egalitarian  way of approaching worship in paganism than there would be, for instance,  with the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church does not have the  same fluid adaptability or form of organization, although that does not mean  that followers necessarily always obey the Roman Catholic Church and work  within that hierarchy.


     

    I would speculate that people with a decentralized religion would be more  successful in using the Internet effectively than others who follow a rigid  hierarchy. It would allow for more community ties between people as opposed  to discrediting, or even disallowing, contact with other members of the  faith over the Internet. A religion could become much more solid, in a  sense. The more relationships that different people in a group have, the  loser they will be with each other, and the closer they are, the more  supportive they will be. The people who logged on to the technopagans'  virtual ritual could have been from anywhere, of any faith, acquainted with  organizers or not. Whether the organizers liked it or not, the ritual was  not entirely in their hands, even though it was unstated that those  attending were supportive of what was going on. The potential reach that  religious ceremonies may attain becomes globally important when taken in  context with cyberspace. A widely disparate group of people is able to  mutually connect through these electronic connections in order to become a  spiritual community. There is no means available to record or control  participation in religious activities on the Internet, and there are ways to  conceal correct numbers if certain groups were to desire it. People who  worship in cyberspace are not falling under the normal jurisdiction of the  church or whatever other religious organization they may belong to. There is  also a certain lack of effectiveness that any religious persecution would  have when specifically directed to sites that can be mirrored or other  communicative devices employed by religious and spiritual groups. If sites  are taken down, they will be posted elsewhere (Horsfall 2000:169). 
     

    There is no authority over spirituality online except a personal authority.  There is no control over the information that is published in cyberspace  other than what restrictions particular servers may choose to enforce.  Because of the decentralization that the Internet both enables and feeds off  of, finding out what is accurate or authorized and what isn't is very  difficult. The Internet can be used in order to legitimize information. When  something is published and made available to the general public, there is an  assumption that the information that is distributed will be correct. This is  untrue; many books and articles in magazines are blatantly incorrect. There  is no cause for people to assume that various sources are correct online,  especially when the Internet is particularly deceptive. When used by someone  who wishes to be known as someone or something else, the Internet can be  used as a mask. It would be possible for someone to post a homepage under  somebody else's name out of pure malicious intent. Much more insidiously,  groups can present themselves to an audience through a carefully designed  site to appear something other than they are not. A certain religious group  may have had some negative press in the past, and wish to discredit the  harmful publicity. Or a web page may seek to be more legitimate through  content, giving the impression that there are more people involved than  there really are. It is possible to deceive people who have not had much  experience with the religious group. This may place a greater emphasis on  being able to back up claims on the organization's parts, and encouragement  for the casual browser to become more knowledgeable using dependable  sources. 
     

    The Internet also supplies a means for minority groups to get more attention  than they are usually able to. Monetary support, membership, and many other  factors are not important for getting a message out when the communication  medium is the Internet. It is entirely possible to create a website that is  free, other than the time that a person (or people) may invest in it.  Communication is also faceless, and the stereotypes that may influence how  people treat visible minorities melt away on the web. For religious groups,  this allows universality to its memberships-the only important factors are  that they are part of the spiritual community and that they are actively  worshipping. Even then, in certain cases exceptions are made. Spiritual  experiences could be purely spiritual online, as cyberspace is an entirely  immaterial "place" where physical life does not exist beyond what is  playacted as physical. In MUDs and chat rooms, commands are made that refer  to life offline, such as certain commands that will allow a user to "do" an  action as opposed to being seen as speaking something. The physicality of  the real world outside of the online world is superimposed upon the  immaterial and spiritual realm. Minority groups are able to work within the  abstractions so that others do not persecute them. In the Southern area of  the United States, to be a pagan is to be haunted by choices of religion and  spirituality for the rest of the time a person lives there. On the Internet,  there is a growing community of pagans. Since the Internet is not limited by  geographical constraints, there is more support available within the  spiritual community; it allows a greater barricade for when a person is  attacked because of a belief.


     

    New Religious Movements-also commonly known as cults, although that term is  viewed as derogatory by most academics-are generally considered to be in the  minority groups of religious belief. The New Religious Movements that are  able to post to the Internet have a wide array of tools at their disposal to  try to recruit new members. Ultimately, however, their detractors have more  of an advantage (Mayer 2000:256). Part of this may be that when a site is  posted in which a New Religious Movement is criticized, the Webmaster does  not usually go out of their way to inform the subject of criticism. Mayer  points out that religious groups can deal with negative press on the  Internet several ways. They include developing a very strong and effective  official homepage; encouraging members of the group to produce web sites  about the religion; discrediting the Internet in general; ignoring the  Internet; and finally, altering an old and unsuccessful policy that the  group held towards the Internet (Mayer 2000:260-266). The idea is to either  make sure that only good press is what people will see, which is what  happens when members of the movements construct their own sites in  overwhelming quantities, or to justify to members of a movement why they  should discount negative information that is found when they are on the  Internet. The strategies of what Mayer refers to as "propaganda wars"  (2000:268) are mainly concerned with making sure that search engines will  return the homepages with positive press as close to the top of the list for  the religious groups.


     

    Sometimes the passive transfer of information that I had referred to earlier  becomes much more active. Some could see an active search for members to  increase the members in a religious group as a form of religious worship.  The actual marketing of religious pages is done not in terms of accurate  amounts of which sites are the most applicable or informative. What is  actually found in a search, then, is what certain religious groups may  either desire or dislike their audience to find out. Much of the  communication that religious groups use the Internet for is to provide  information for members. There are, nevertheless, some pages that focus  entirely on conversion of new members, or returning former members who have  gone astray to the so-called true path. However, it does not seem that this  method of communication is necessarily all that successful. Mayer (2000:251)  points out that the members who were recruited by Heaven's Gate from the  Internet were no more than they would have accomplished in real life. The  number amounted to two. Probably, a person does not tend to stumble upon a  site that is recruiting for these religions, but finds it through other  social contacts that are somehow already connected to the movements. The  Internet is just another medium for this exchange of information.


     

    Both the Internet and religion work together, tied by their common origin in  humanity. While the Internet changes religious worship, it most strongly  affects the religious community in that the abstraction of physical space is  very different from normal practices, which occur on a spatial plane. The  Internet is not spatial; it is far more likely that a spatial view is  imposed upon it. The religious community, when combined with this immaterial  and abstract plane as in the ritual completed by the technopagans, is  embellished and expanded. The Internet also allows religious freedom, but  does not label the different religions as to which of the organizations are  legitimate. I would imagine that working spiritually on the Internet would  have a more solitary feeling to it than if it was in a religious group; it  seems more to be a tool that can be used, but also a tool that many  religious groups regard as potentially dangerous or insufficient for all  purposes of worship. It would seem a difficulty to engage in a monastic life  through a virtual community, or to meditate. Part of the problem with the  Internet is that the sheer quantity and availability of information, even if  it is not always useful, becomes another factor that adds to distraction  from spiritual pursuits. It does not limit spiritual pursuits beyond the  restraints of the medium, but it may be detrimental in that for an  individual, it may cause them to work away from their religious practices  and discipline. It would be fascinating to track how religions develop  online, and to somehow archive versions of different major sites as they  progress for later study in a context with more perspective. 

    Works Cited 
     

    Bauwens, Michel and Vincent Rossi

    1999 Dialogue on the Cyber-Sacred and the Relationship Between Technological  and Spiritual Development. 


     Cobb, Jennifer

    1998 Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World. New York: Crown Publishers.


     Davis, Erik

    1995 Technopagans: May the Astral Plane Be Reborn in Cyberspace. 


     Helland, Christopher

    2000 Online-Religion/Religion-Online and Virtual Communitas. In Religion and  the Social Order, vol. 8. Religion on the Internet: Research Prospects and  Promises. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E. Cowan, eds. Pp. 205 - 223. New  York: Elsevier Science.


     Horsfall, Sara

    2000Religious Organizations Use the Internet: A Preliminary Inquiry. In  Religion and the Social Order, vol. 8. Religion on the Internet: Research  Prospects and Promises. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E. Cowan, eds. Pp.  153 - 182. New York: Elsevier Science.


    Mayer, Jean-François

    2000 Religious Movements and the Internet: The New Frontier of Cult  Controversies. In Religion and the Social Order, vol. 8. Religion on the  Internet: Research Prospects and Promises. Jeffrey K. Hadden and Douglas E.  Cowan, eds. Pp. 249 - 276. New York: Elsevier Science.


     Schroeder, Ralph, Noel Heather, and Raymond M. Lee

    1998 The Sacred and the Virtual: Religion in Multi-User Virtual Reality.  Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 4(2). Electronic document. 


     Wertheim, Margaret

    1999 The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.


    Zaleski, Jeff

    1997 The Soul of Cyberspace. New York: HarperCollins. 

    Om namo bhagavate vasudevaya 

    krsnaraja melvin 

    2541707618?profile=original

    • Krishnaraja prabhu ji,

      you have shared a research paper from University of Manitoba, but it does not address to the specific questions i have asked.

      However thank you trying to make an effort to help me.

      Hare Krishna.

      • Please limit usage of facebook , newspaper to the minimum . It will only agitate the mind and we get involved in  hatred and negativity around us  . Thus we go to rajasik or tamasik state .  . It seriously affects sadhana . devotees generally does not discuss about this in social media . 

        The situation around the world is unfortunate . We can make people aware but if it is affecting us then better ignore it or unfollow them who spread this . 

        • Hare Krishna prg, I will follow your advice and will do only to associate with devotees or family on Social Media.

          Thank you so much. Appreciate from bottom of my heart. Will follow your advice.

  • E-Counselor

    Hare Krsna dear Mataji,

    PAMHO.

    Firstly sorry for the delay in responding. I was away and could not access net at the time.

    I hope my answer reaches you.

    You are working, have a daughter and also a house to handle. That itself makes your plate full. Why do you bother with problems of the world. I am not saying one shoudl be self centred and not bother about what is happening in the world, but one has to be able to take everything that happens in the world as lessons for us to learn.

    So what lesson we learn when we see the atrocities you mentioned - the lesson is that this world is dukhalayam ashaswatam - temporary and full of miseries, as rightly mentioned in the Gita. So what to do - shoudl we use all our energies to save the world or should we use our energies to save ourselves and once we are convinced about our path, to save others by showing them the path to deliverance.

    Assuming we take the first option of saving the world, how many people and for how many days will we be able to save them? Would it not be better to save yourself (like they say in an aircraft, if there is an emergency, please put the oxygen mask on yourself before helping an elderly or child with you). How to save ourself? By attempting to get out of this material world whihc is full of so much misery. How to do that? Chant the Hare Krsna Mahamantra and follow the 4 regulative principles.

    The amazing thing about chanting the mahamantra is that the side effects are tooooo good. One not only purifies the soul, one also gets the strength to handle day to day challenges taht we all face at all times. We also read about the happenings in the world and ourselves experience enough turbulence in our normal lives. We have understood that "I" am nothing. "I" can do nothing. "I" cannot change the world. What I can do is understand my true nature, of being subservient to the Supreme Lord and depend on the lord for everything.

    I hope I have made some sense to you.

    Chant mataji and follow 4 regulative principles. Everything else will fall into place.

    Haribol,

    Your servant,

    Radha Rasamayi DD

    • Hare Krishna dear Rashmi mataji,

      I will follow your advice and will remove my mind from mundane activities on social media.

      I will chant more now. However i can just do 2 rounds at the moment now due to work and family commitments. I feel guilty about it and it is a feeling i don't like. But this is what i can do at the moment.

      Thank you for your kind advice and soothing words. I will stick to my business now.

      Hare Krishna

  • Dear swati,

    I had the Same problem, especially with the refugee situation in Europe. First I thought I had to do sth and help and I tried to read about it and watch videos. But then I realized that it's not possible for me because I was constantly crying and was getting depressed. So I couldn't look after my toddler in a good way.
    Since years I don't watch, hear or read news anymore because it affects me in a negative way. I started focusing on positive thoughts and believing in the good. That's how I live and it works for me and my family in this way.

    I think everyone is different and you will know the best for yourself how to cope with it. Your life shouldn't be affected so negatively by sth on a constant basis.

    I wish you all the best!
    • Hare Krishna and big thank you dear Jasmin to take out time to comfort me.

      I will make an effort to make effort to stay away from negative news and media and instead spend time in Bhakti. Positive thoughts and believing in Good !!

      Hari bol :)

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