From Back to Godhead
Conceptions of God in the Bhagavad-gita encompass those of other traditions and give full picture of the Absolute Truth.
“The Bhagavad-gita teaches a pantheistic view of God,” he said, his confidence and years of learning clear from his authoritative tone. “The massive vishvarupa—Krishna’s universal form, which encompasses all material phenomena, including time—tells us much about God in the Gita.”
His friend, another scholar of some renown, seemed to disagree.
“The Gita go
As a teenager coming of age in the 1960s, I was preoccupied with spirituality. I had become disinterested in the mainstream religion of my forbears, and I was passionately looking for a path that spoke directly to me as an individual.
I didn’t want some amorphous, otherworldly transcendence, either — this I knew for certain. Nor did I want mere political activism, which many in my day tied to spirituality in a rather tepid, tenuous way. Instead, I wanted something that truly nurtured my inner w
By Satyaraja Dasa (Steven J. Rosen)
I recently heard a woman say, “least but not last.” She meant to say the usual, “last but not least,” but somehow, due to a slip of the lip, or perhaps because of some mild form of dyslexia, she inverted the words in this somewhat humorous way. And this got me thinking about humility, which people sometimes confuse with low self-esteem, thus viewing it as an inferior quality. To think of oneself as “least” is the last thing one would want to do.
Our Krishna-c
Since we don’t hear of a demon named Madhu in Krishna’s pastimes, why does Arjuna address Krishna as “the killer of Madhu”?
Madhusudana. The name always seemed curious to me. Where did it come from? In the Bhagavad-gita, one of our most sacred texts, Krishna is referred to as Madhusudana, or “the killer of the Madhu demon,” no less than five times (1.35, 2.1, 2.4, 6.33, and 8.2). And yet, Krishna didn’t kill a demon named Madhu. I looked through the vast storehouse of Krishna’s pastimes over an
From Back to Godhead
Nowadays everyone knows what yoga is. Or do they?
In the West yoga is more popular than ever.
“It’s at the top of its game,” says Dan Gurlitz, general manager of Koch Vision, whose distribution of Yoga Zone DVDs and videos is a “serious seven-figure business.” According to Kimberly Leonard, writing in US News & Word Report, “During the last decade the number of Americans who report practicing yoga has nearly doubled to 21 million.” Other Western countries follow close
