Remembrances of Philosophies Past
BY: JANMASTAMI DAS
Aug 28, 2010 — WEST VIRGINIA, USA (SUN) — Recent reads of ISKCON propaganda, once the long sought commodity monthly available from the BBT truck, leave us many things, but "waiting in line for the next installment" is not one of them. Consider this most recent exercise in cut and paste that ISKCON News deemed noteworthy: Remembrances of Lives Past. Aside from the mental speculation of a duo of karmically challenged, carnivore, psychobabblers, the alleged nugget of spiritual nectar that is purported to give this rambling diatribe it's value is this:
"Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, Columbia University's first Hindu chaplain, called it "a re-do," like a test you get to take over. After an unspecified number of tries, the eternal soul finally achieves perfection. Only then, in what Hindus call moksha (or release), does the soul go to live with God."
After re-raving up the Julia Roberts "Hindu" quote, and mentioning the movies on reincarnation (the apparent new ISKCON understanding of transmigration of the soul), Gadadhara Pandit's muddled explanation is properly placed as an afterthought premise of an argument whose conclusion is less than fixed. Why the "number of tries" at the human form remains "unspecified" is generally directly related to the acts of those performers, but that bit of information seems to have eluded any number of speculators, Gadadhara Pandit das being among them.
"Only then, in what Hindus call moksha (or release), does the soul go to live with God." is a most inaccurate and misleading bit of information that certainly does not reflect a true KRSNA conscious perspective. First, that "moksha equals perfection" is not the proper KRSNA conscious understanding.
Second, there is no guarantee (as is implied by Gadadhara Pandit's statement) that after a fixed number of "redo"s one will achieve this "moksha perfection". The statement implies that a fixed number of repetitions of the human life form, with no explanation of the acts required to achieve this "perfection", will yield a positive result. We cannot accept such a conclusion.
Had this article, the one for ISKCON News, been written from a KRSNA conscious perspective, it could have been written as an explanation of a cropped inclusion in the NY Times article. Instead, in the overly simplistic mood of "cut and paste", any tommyrot can pass for "KRSNA conscious information", when clearly it is not. Where are the editors in all this? How does the salary budget for such tripe get approved on an ongoing basis? How does a KRSNA conscious point of view include moksha as "the perfection of life"?
Srila Prabhupada took the debate on space travel to the speculators who posed their theories, he did not add his "speculative opinions" into the mix. He did not pose that he "was a Hindu, with ideas about having been a caveman", and to post such side show material, as if ISKCON and KRSNA conscious philosophy were a part of such thinking, is a disservice to the preaching effort. We can only hope that the editors of ISKCON News direct their staff to a more honest and accurate approach in the future, lest they lose the eroding base they still maintain.
