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A. Introduction

1. What is vanaprastha?

The word vanaprastha is composed of the words vana, meaning “forest” and prastha, meaning “to go,” so a vanaprastha is “One has gone to the forest.” Vanaprastha is an asrama in the Vedic varnasrama system. An asrama can be both a physical and mental place and refers to “a place where one cultivates spiritual life, where culture of the spiritual is foremost.”
The vanaprastha order is complete retirement from householder life, a time when one prepares onese

If we don’t sleep at the right time, we will sleep at the wrong time (Based on Gita 06.16)

When practicing spiritual life, we may equate spiritual advancement with denying our bodily needs such as sleep. We may deprive ourselves of sleep to demonstrate our spiritual advancement.

However, spiritual advancement centers not on physical deprivation, but on spiritual absorption. To grow spiritually, we need to become conscious of our own spiritual identity and of the supreme spiri…tual reality, Kris

Discovering Spiritual Knowledge

By Gargamuni das

It was 1981 and early in my senior year of high school, I was walking out of the East Brook Mall in Willimantic Connecticut with two friends named Steve Walton and Clyde Hall. In my hand I was holding a bag with Jimmy Hendrix’s “Axis Bold As Love” album in it, that I had just purchased at Music World. I had loved Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced”. and had played it again and again over the summer as I delved deeply into the world of marijuana and LSD.

Though, by this time, I was

As a genuine spiritual master, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada takes personal responsibility for the advancement of each of his students in the spiritual life of Krsna consciousness. Although now his transcendental instructions are available in book form, when Srila Prabhupada first began the Krsna consciousness movement, the only way his new disciples could get the answers to their many questions was to ask Sri