Things have been quiet here lately because my spare time has been consumed by another project a number of other devotees and I have started: The Samprajña Institute.

The Samprajña Institute is a free-market public policy research center, otherwise known as a "think tank." Public policy covers any kind of laws, guidelines, or policies that affect the lives of people or the allocation of resources. As a research group, we work at producing intellectual goods that try to point out how public policy should best be shaped in a broad range of areas. Further details can be found at the Samprajña Institute website.

One of the reasons we created a public policy institute is that we wanted to see how far we could go in creating public policy proposals using dharma and bhakti as first principles. If the varnashram system is universally the best social system, then it requires a group of people who can make it competitive with liberal democracy and socialism in terms of theory and practice. As a think tank, we focus on the theoretical side. Just as a Communist Manifesto preceded the global spread of communism, a systematic, and well thought-out conception of varnashrama dharma is a prerequisite for a global Krishna conscious culture.

Another reason we created the institute is our dissatisfaction with the trend to bring in outside experts to tell us, in our Vaishnava society, how best we should organize ourselves and what morals we should follow. While it is good to consider outsider opinions and sentiments, we think it has been bad public policy to adopt their various approaches wholesale, at great cost, and with little debate or regard as to how they might work with or oppose dharma and bhakti. Hence, a policy institute that conducts research that starts with dharma and bhakti as its first principles and is able to market its ideas successfully to the outside world will also produce policy solutions that are favorable to a Vaishnava society.

And finally, the institute is a good way to bring people of various perspectives together to think hard and work on solutions to real world problems. Within a religious institution, diversity of doctrine tends to be a liability; it hinders cooperation, fosters dissention, and often enough leads to splintering and schism. However, diversity of doctrine is an asset within an organization like a think tank. That is because a think tank's work tends to be (should be) focused on specific issues and specific problems. And to come up with the best solutions, you want diversity of perspective just so you don't end up talking to yourselves.

As far as ISKCON-ites are concerned, this project is a golden opportunity to put the principle of unity-in-diversity (acintya-bhedabheda tattva) into practice. We have been consciously working to make the Samprajña Institute a place where intelligent people who have widely differing perspectives go to work together on creating important solutions for pressing social issues.

If you have some interest to participate, please send an email to me at krishnakirti@samprajna.org.

Nowadays, quoting Srila Prabhupada rarely settles disputes--especially the big ones. Behind this is the Vedabase Folio. Because an inexperienced devotee can with the help of the Folio find all the quotes he wants, and more, to support his point, he becomes an instant scholar. The problem is that his opponents can do the same. Both bring to online forums their lists of quotes, and most of the time the only conclusion that can be reached by onlookers is that SP said many things at many times, and that's all.

ND: Good people don't discriminate.

G: If we don't discriminate, how do we know they are good?

Sadhaka 1: "I learned a lesson today by watching a movie about how monks in charge of an orphanage were exploiting the boys in their care for sense gratification. In spiritual life we have to accept the eternal bliss and knowlege of the soul to survive. Otherwise, we will seek pleasure through destructive channels."

Sadhaka 2: "Oh, so you learned that lesson? Which movie are you going to watch next?"

[by Jagannatha Das]

It's official. A schism has just happened within the Episcopal Church of the USA. From Christianity Today:

In a history-making gesture, conservative evangelical Anglicans, deeply alienated by the decline of the U.S. denomination, sounded a shofar to herald the creation of the Anglican Church of North America.

On a snowy Wednesday evening, about 1,000 worshipers, mostly from the U.S. and Canada, gathered in Wheaton, Illinois, for a worship service to celebrate the creation of the new entity, which comprises 656 congregations, 800 clergy, 30 bishops, and 100,000 people in regular worship. They represent the evangelical, charismatic, and Anglo-Catholic traditions within Anglicanism.

Timothy C. Morgan, "Conservative Anglicans Create Rival Church," 4 Dec. 2008, Christianity Today, 4 Dec. 2008 <http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/decemberweb-only/149-43.0.html>

Now, the why-should-we-in-Hare-Krishna-Land-care part. ISKCON is in the beginning stages of a similar struggle over sexual morality and theology that parallels the one the Episcopal Church (and other mainstream Protestant denominations) have followed. Conflict over theological sexual issues became prominent when in the 1970s the Episcopal Church decided to allow what they call women's ordination, allowing women to act as priests. Then, in 2003, the Episcopal Church ordained its first openly homosexual bishop.

Similarly, in 2000, the ISKCON GBC approved a number of laws that guaranteed women in ISKCON equal and full participation in the ecclesiastical hierarchy of ISKCON. Five years later, a small number of influential ISKCON leaders began advocating that ISKCON formally and publically recognize and encourage monogamous homosexual relationships ("gay monogamy"). Despite this being a radical departure from ISKCON's traditional understanding of sinful activity in the realm of sexual behavior and especially this being a radical departure from the teachings of ISKCON's founder-acharya Srila Prabhupada, ISKCON's highest governing body, the GBC, offered no censure, no protest.

Which is also to say that if "progress" in preaching is doing whatever Westerners do, as appears to be the conventional wisdom, then similar outcomes will also likely be obtained.

Anyone who wishes to preach to Western educated people should read Dr. S.N. Balagangadhara's book The Heathen in His Blindness. Elsewhere, Gangadhara has characterized the social sciences as an embroidering of Christian theology. In other words, he asserts, if you accept the core premises of the Western social sciences, then you must accept the core precepts of Christianity, and vice versa. His observation is that what Western social scientists write about other cultures and religions is not much different from what Christian missionaries used to write about those same cultures.

In any case, as I read the book, I'm going to be posting my notes here about it. Gangadhara is our ally, and the intent of my notes is to identify not only his key insights but also to discover what is fresh that Krishna consciousness brings to the table in the East-West / Spiritual-Material dialog.

So, here are my notes from the introduction. They aren't particularly well structured, but later I hope to distill and refine them:

Balagangadhara - Intro. Falls back on Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblences for recognition. It seems to me that we could also posit a non-trival part of our ability to recognize things for what they are as inconceivable. After all, we don't precisely know how, exactly, we "see" things, either in the empirical sense or the philosophical sense. We may have some limited measure of these things, but the emphasis is on limitation. In other words, there is a part of our ability to apprehend things which is /inconceivable/. That it is inconceivable points to an agency beyond ourselves which grants us this ability to apprehend common, abstract properties in newly encountered objects, just as an agency beyond ourselves grants us the ability of sight and sound. If you are a theist, you would say we can recognize something else as religion because God gives us the ability to leap to that conclusion. If you are an atheist or an agnostic, you might still be able to share that conviction with the theist by saying "something", not necessarily God, grants us that faculty. If you are an atheist, or an existentialist, you might still argue that "existence precedes essence", or that there is something more fundamental behind the ability to abstract, and it is a matter of scientific procedure, or philosophical inquiry, that will eventually allow us to understand (at least understand better) what is our inconceivable ability to apprehend religions as religion despite not being able to indentify non-trivial, common characteristics. Yet it is important to recongize that both the convictions that God grants us the ability to apprehend things or that something else has granted it is still a matter of faith. Faith is common to the theist, the agnostic, and the atheist. And faith arises due to contact with the modes of nature.

Jnana and ajnana are paired terms that may be preferrable to knowledge and ignorance. For example, saying the heathen has no religion may not necessarily be a statement that the heathen is agnostic. Instead, what the missionary means is that the heathen /has/ a religion, but it is the /wrong/ religion. He does not accept our categories, our savior, etc., and hence is destined to have an unpleasant encounter with reality. He has to be compelled to accept our categorizations, otherwise he will go to Hell. There is, after all, Heaven and Hell, even if he has never heard of it. Ignorance is no excuse.

"Ajnana" could mean both absence of knowledge and "anti-knowledge", or something that appears to be knowledge but is not--in other words, a "miscategorization" of reality, or, as we say "maya". We should use the terms jnana and ajnana instead of knowledge and ignorance because, on account of Hindu inclusivism, "ajnana" could accommodate both terms, and hence accommodate the secularist, or nominalist, who believes that all kinds of knowledge have some merit, and the religionist, who disbelieves in nominalism and who believes that some categorizations are illegitimate--even if it can be demonstrated that they are suitable to some purpose. Hindu "inclusivism", specifically with regard to accommodating both the theist, atheist, and agnostic within the same world view on account of Gita verse 17.3. Because different "faiths" arise from different configurations of the three modes of nature, different ways of looking at the world (methodological approaches) also descend from these different faiths. A phenomenologist begins with self-experience, because to him the /only/ way the world can be understood is from one's own vantage point. A theist, however, accepts the categorization of the world as received through his sources of authority (holy books, saintly persons, tradition, etc.). Yet both approaches are necessarily founded on faith, and faith arises from contact with the material modes of nature or, in the case of the transcendental position, the absence of the influence of the modes of nature.

The ability to apprehend characteristics like "religion" in some other heretofore unencountered culture may also be a function of our transcendental nature. The soul's intrinsic characteristics are eternity, knowledge, and bliss, and the fact that we /can/ apprehend these things means we aren't sticks or stones. We can understand something because we have intrinsic ability to do so--ability that we are not independent in aquiring.

Logocentrism - Jacques Derida's derisive term for knowledge that precedes language. He rejects this idea, of course. But if knowledge does precede language, then that conviction is the gateway to accepting an inconceivable, transcendent nature that is capable of knowledge - say, the "cit" characteristic of the jiva. It would also explain what, to many Hindus, seems inexplicable--conversion, or converting from one religion to another. If the soul is transcendental, then he can accept or reject a world view that was not a product of his cultural conditioning. In other words, the self /can/ step into different configurations of the material energy, just as people take off and put on new clothes, because there is a difference between the self and matter that temporaly identifies him.

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Balagangadhara - the Heathen in His Blindness 26 - 27.

With respect to the Hottentots, Dapper and van Riebeeck were to go further and declare that the former had no religion – organised or otherwise.

Much to the surprise of those who came into contact with the Hottentots, there was no question of a religion among them. Never had “anyone, however diligently (he) researched, been able to detect any sign of religion among them; they worshipped neither God nor the Devil. Not withstanding the fact that they know there is one, whom they call ’s Humma, who makes the rain fall on earth, moves the wind, provides warmth and cold, they do not pray to him. Because, they say, why worship this ’s Humma, who gives a double drought once and double the required rains at another time where they would rather have seen it in moderation and appropriately…” (Dapper)…Abraham van Riebeeck found no ideas about God or the Devil among them. Rain, storm and such like were ancient that came habitually…(In Molsbergen, Ed., 1916: 19, n. 1.)

Some among such travellers were even uplifted by this, because it meant that converting the ‘natives’ into Christianity would be so much more of an easy job. Columbus wrote in the journal of his 1492 voyage about the religion of the people he called “los indios”:

“They should be good servants and very intelligent, for I have observed that they soon repeat everything that is said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, for they appear to me to have no religion.”

And in a letter he wrote shortly after his journal entry, he referred again to the religion of these people. His single sentence on the subject is preceded by his observations on fish and followed by a detailed description of the trees. He wrote,

“They have no religion and I think that they would be very quickly Christianized, for they have a very ready understanding.” (Gill 1987: 174; my emphases.)

Such descriptions raise an intriguing question. Why did the early explorers and missionaries not see ‘religion’ if it was a ubiquitous phenomenon in all cultures? In this essay, I would like to probe an answer to this question too. I will do this by taking the Indian culture as a point of reference and by examining the arguments for maintaining that India knows of religion and the implications for a comparative study of cultures when the opposite stance is defended.

You can read about it, here. One thing is the Indian sources have more info on this than the Western ones. Nevertheless, these are making world headlines, especially since it appears that Western hostages were sought.

It's a war between radical islam and the secular West. That it happened in Mumbai is because it is an easily accessible outpost of Western, hegemonic, civilizational influence. Aside from the unfortunate fact that many defenseless people will suffer and lose their lives, in the long run, secularism is probably destined to lose.

That is, unless a credible, non-secular solution and counterforce can be found.

The late, Hon. Potter Stewart, Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, once famously said in a ruling,

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

So it happens over at soithappens.com that Ravindra Svarupa Prabhu gives us a similar I-know-it-when-I-see-it characterization of what he calls "Srila Prabhupada's voice," for similar reasons.

“Voice” is the aspect of a literary work which conveys the distinct power and flavor of the narrator’s personality. Voice is different from style, although it depends on style for its realization. . . . Voice is difficult to define, and evidently even more difficult to teach and cultivate. They say the writer has to “find her voice.” . . . However resistant to definition, voice is unmistakable when you hear it.

And then RS goes on to talk about Srila Prabhupada's unfiltered voice and the consequent aesthetic effect RS himself experiences:

If voice requires “passion, plus belief, plus desire,” we encounter it here, in full spiritualized force, energizing Prabhupada’s writing. In this passage, Prabhupada speaks of the urgent need for the Bhagavatam. At the same time he acknowledges his own shortcomings in presenting it and makes the case why the reader should overlook them. Almost magically, he transforms his imperfections into perfections.

To what extent does Ravindra Svarupa Prabhu's own life experience and perspective contribute to his own experience of Srila Prabhupada's text? If someone unfamiliar with Krishna consciousness were to encounter the book, would he experience it the same way? However, RS mentions that this was one of the first books he had ever read, and at that time it, too, was a source of inspiration. Indeed, it is the experience of devotees that, as they read texts such as the Bhagavad-gita, it is almost as if they are reading a new text. New realizations ensue, the experience is somehow wonderful yet different.

Although much more could be said about voice of the author, and about SP's voice in particular, RS's social status at this point in time raises another interesting question. As a senior member of ISKCON's Governing Body Commission, of which the majority voted to annotate SP's very text, is RS's appreciation of SP's voice a sign of a moving towards apprehending SP's intent or a sign of moving away from apprehending, or covering, SP's intent?

In university religion courses, sometimes the Bible is taught as a piece of literature--"voice" and all. "Bible as Literature" the course is sometimes titled. It is often found that such courses that teach the bible in this way often teach it in a way that is at odds with the various religious traditions that have preserved and promoted the Bible.

Although we do not know how RS voted in the GBC on this matter, the question of how he voted is important to understanding his take on "voice." In the BBT's response to the GBC on the matter of annotation, BBT trustees noted that annotation amounts to a softening, or an "explaining away" of Srila Prabhupada. If RS voted against annotation, then it is likely that he regards "voice" as a significant factor in determining the original intent of the author. But if he voted in favor of annotation, then it is likely that he sees voice more as something more subjective--how one feels about an author's text is regarded as more important than the effect and understanding the author intended.

Will it come to pass one day in ISKCON that his closest followers will one day teach SP's books just as secular professors teach the Bible as literature? The consensus amongst members of the GBC indicate that this is more likely than it is unlikely.

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