"Planet ISKCON" - 36 new articles
H.G. Sankarshan das Adhikari, USA: Friday 16 September 2011--Dreadlessly Looking Forward to Every Minute--and--Why Kali Yuga is Getting Worse?A daily broadcast of the Ultimate Self Realization Course Friday 16 September 2011 The Supreme Personality of Godhead, Lord Sri Krishna, and His eternal consort, Srimati Radharani are enjoying transcendental pastimes in the topmost planet of the spiritual world, Sri Goloka Vrindavan. They are beckoning us to rejoin them. (Click on photo to see a larger image.) Our Mission: To help everyone awaken their original Krishna consciousness, which is eternal, full of knowledge and full of bliss. Such a global awakening will, in one stroke, solve all the problems of the world society bringing in a new era of unprecedented peace and prosperity for all. May that day, which the world so desperately needs, come very soon. We request you to participate in this mission by reviving your dormant Krishna consciousness and assisting us in spreading this science all over the world. Dedicated with love to ISKCON Founder-Acharya: His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, our beloved spiritual master, and to you, our dear readers. For Transcendental Association Connect With Other Members of this Course. Join this Conference: http://groups.google.com/group/sda_students Today's Thought: Dreadlessly Looking Forward to Every Minute Uploaded from Sofia, Bulgaria Krishna consciousness is so nectarean that we can dreadlessly look forward to every minute of our day and every day of our life because every day and every minute is the most sublime opportunity to connect with the unlimitedly sweet and merciful Lord Sri Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Sankarshan Das Adhikari Answers by Citing the Vedic Version: Question: Why Kali Yuga is Getting Worse? If Lord Caitanya predicted that the holy names of the Lord would be spread to every town and village in the world, why is the Kali yuga (the age of quarrel and hypocrisy) continuing to get worse and worse? De Pa Answer: Kali Yuga Can Be Stopped Because the holy names of Krishna have spread all over the world by the mercy of Lord Caitanya and the dynamic preaching of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the Kali yuga is not nearly as bad as it would have been otherwise. Now if we can induce everyone to chant Hare Krishna, the influence of the Kali Yuga will become nil and everyone will drown in an ocean of transcendental bliss of love of Godhead. Sankarshan Das Adhikari Transcendental Resources: Receive the Special Blessings of Krishna Now you too can render the greatest service to the suffering humanity and attract the all-auspicious blessings of Lord Sri Krishna upon yourself and your family by assisting our mission. Lectures and Kirtans in Audio and Video: Link to High Definition Videos Link to Over 1,000 Lecture Audios Lecture-Travel Schedule for 2011 http://www.ultimateselfrealization.com/schedule Have Questions or Need Further Guidance? Check out the resources at: http://www.ultimateselfrealization.com or write Sankarshan Das Adhikari at: sda@backtohome.com Get your copy today of the world's greatest self-realization guide book, Bhagavad-gita As It Is available at:http://www.ultimateselfrealization.com/store Know someone who could benefit from this? Forward it to them. Searchable archives of all of course material: http://www.sda-archives.com Receive Thought for the Day as an RSS feed: http://www.backtohome.com/rss.htm Unsubscribe or change your email address Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Daily_Thought Thought for the Day on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Ultimate.Self.Realization Copyright 2005-2011 by Ultimate Self Realization.Com Distribution of this material is encouraged. Simply we request you to acknowledge where it is coming from with a link to our sign up page: http://www.backtohome.com Our records indicate that at requested to be enrolled to receive e-mails from the Ultimate Self Realization Course at: This request was made on: From the following IP address:  • Email to a friend •  •ISKCON Malaysia: Food & Fun Fair In SJMKLBY FFL KUALA LUMPUR
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Japa Group: Remembering Krsna
This sounded very inspirational to me as should be for every chanter. The ultimate goal of life is pure love for Krsna and is to remember Him at the time of death and this devotee surely was thinking of the Lord and meditating on His names, this is a very auspicious death and we all would like to remember Krsna like he did. I pray so every devotee does that and that my chanting becomes stronger and my faith in the Holy names improve. I wish you all a wonderful end of week and that the holy names give you lots of nice realisations. your servant, Aruna devi  • Email to a friend • •ISKCON News.com: Gita Nagari Farm Shares Bounty with City Temples
• Email to a friend • •ISKCON Malaysia: Brain Tumour Detected on Sesasayi Dasa's Daughter, MenakaBY JAI SITA RANI DD
Menaka has completed 5 days of Cyberknife treatment in Beacon Hospital in Petaling Jaya. May the Lord give her strength to recover from this ordeal quickly and be back to serve the Lord soon.
Update: 27/8/2011 Menaka has been discharged from the hospital today. She has undergone so much over the last two weeks. A biopsy was required to be done to find out the severity of the brain tumour to determine the next course of action. It was a delicate and dangerous operation which required the surgeon to cut her skull to do the biopsy. The operation was successful, but for a few days she was unable to walk. She was battling the fear of being paralysed but prayers to the Lord helped her overcome this. She is able to walk now but very slowly.
The biopsy results confirmed a level 2 stage of the tumour which means it can be cured by a laser treatment called cyberknife. She will be seeing the doctor to do this in a few weeks time. The CyberKnife® Robotic Radiosurgery System is a non-invasive alternative to surgery for the treatment of both cancerous and non-cancerous tumors anywhere in the body, including the prostate, lung, brain, spine, liver, pancreas and kidney. The treatment – which delivers beams of high dose radiation to tumors with extreme accuracy – offers new hope to patients worldwide.
May the Lord give her strength and help her endure this very difficult time.
Update: 15/8/2011 BY HH JAYAPATAKA SWAMI
My Dear Spiritual Son Santi. Please accept my blessings! All glories to Srila Prabhupada! I offered my prayers if it pleases Lord Krishna for her quick recovery. I hope devotees will go to see her. I hope this finds you healthy & happy,
Update 13/8/2011 BY SANTI VARDHANA CAITANYA DASA
Sesasayi dasa is a devotee from Bahau. His lovely daughter, Menaka - 28 years old, was diagnosed as having brain tumor. The tumor is about 3 cm big and tissues samples has been taken and sent to Singapore for analysis.
She is currently admitted at KL Pantai Medical Hospital in ICU, Block D [1st Floor]. Waiting for the analysis result to see if an operation is necessary or the tumor could be cured by laser treatment.
Simheswara dasa, Gokula Damodara dasa and I visited her yesterday and Simheswara dasa applied some Lord Narasimhadeva maha prasadam oil on her forehead.
ICU Ward visiting hours is from 12 PM - 2 PM. Devotees may contact HG Sesasayi at: 019 3860552. Please kindly offer any service you could. He is traveling daily to and fro from Bahau. His other two daughters are taking turns to care for their eldest sister. Please help by offering a place to stay and prasadam arrangements.
Please kindly pray for her well being. The girls lost their dear Mom two years ago. Menaka is a graduate teacher. The second girl is bio-medic graduate and looking for job. The last daughter is currently doing physiotherapy course. • Email to a friend • •Subhavilasa das ACBSP, Toronto, CA: Another Honorable Spiritual Son of Srila Prabhupada is no longer among us.There is reciprocal love between Srila Prabhupada's disciples and their eternal spiritual father. This love is demonstrated in various ways. In one case it is demonstrated with service to Srila Prabhupada until the last day. By constantly preaching, mentoring, writing all the while maintaining sadhana and renunciation. Such is the love of Gopiparanadhana Prabhu. There is sometimes a misconception that a bunch of hippies joined Srila Prabhupada in the 60's and 70's and it was just the "right time" for "alternative religions". However this is not the case. These devotees were sent to help Srila Prabhupada and their course and departure are part of that "lila". In Gopi Prabhu's case he was a scholar. Not just someone that could preach or repeat but a genuine scholar of sanskit and vedic texts. These are the type of bright, dedicated and selfless devotees sent to assist Srila Prabhupada in establishing ISKCON and making it flourish. Today Gopi Prabhu has departed his earthly pastimes. It serves as a reminder that we need to serve, value and learn all that we can from the honorable sons of Srila Prabhupada before it is too late to get their association. It also serves to remind all Godbrothers and Sisters that Srila Prabhupada has done so much for us and although we cannot all be scholars or as dedicated and renounced as Gopi Prabhu, now in our final years it is time to step up and do what we can to serve. Hare Krishna Gopiparanadhana Prabhu. • Email to a friend • •16 Rounds to Samadhi Magazine, LA, USA: Rational Spiritual Belief- A Challenge to Materialistic Belief
This is an excerpt from a talk Dr. William Lane Craig gave during a public discussion, a debate, he had with Dr. Peter Atkins. Dr. Craig is a philosopher and a theologian. Dr. Atkins is a chemist and an outspoken atheist.I believe that there are many reasons for the existence of God, but for this occasion I'm going to restrict myself to sketching briefly four different reasons why I think God exists.  Dr. William Lane Craig
NUMBER ONE: THERE IS THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSEHave you ever asked yourself where the universe came from, why everything exists instead of just nothing? Typically, atheists have said that the universe is just eternal, and uncaused. But the astrophysical evidence indicates that the universe began to exist in a great explosion called the Big Bang fifteen billion years ago. Most laymen do not appreciate that not only were all matter and energy created in that event, but physical space and time themselves. This is of upmost importance, for it implies, as the Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle points out, that the Big Bang theory requires the creation of the universe from nothing. Now, this tends to be very awkward for the atheist, for as Anthony Kenny of the Oxford University urges, a proponent of the Big Bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing. But surly that doesn't make sense because OUT OF NOTHING NOTHING COMES! So, where did the universe come from? Why does the universe exist, instead of just nothing. There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being. We can summarize our argument thus far as follows. Premise one: whatever begins to exist has a cause. Two: the universe began to exist. Three: therefore, the universe has a cause.
Now, from the very nature of the case as the cause of space and time, this cause must be an uncaused, changeless, timeless, and immaterial being of unimaginable power which created the universe. It must be timeless, and therefore changeless because it created time, because it also created space, it must also transcend space as well and therefore be immaterial, not physical. Moreover, I would argue that it must also be personal, for a changeless, impersonal cause can never exist without its effect. If the changeless, impersonal conditions for any effect are timelessly present, then their effect must be timelessly present as well. For example, the cause for water's freezing is the temperature being below zero degrees centigrade. If the temperature were below zero from eternity, then any water around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to just begin to freeze a finite time ago. The only way for the cause to be timeless and for the effect to begin a finite time ago is for the cause to be a personal agent who freely chooses to create a new effect without any prior determining conditions. For example, a man sitting from eternity could freely will to stand up, and thus you would have a new effect arise from an eternal cause. Thus we are brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personal creator.
In his book The Creation, Dr. Atkins struggles mightily to explain how the universe could come into existence uncaused, out of nothing. In the end, he finds himself trapped in self-contradiction. He states, “Now we go back in time, beyond the moment of creation, to when there was no time, and to where there was no space.” At this "time before time", he imagines a swirling dust of mathematical points which recombine again and again and again, and finally come, by trial and error, to form our space-time universe. It needs to be honestly said that this is not a scientific hypothesis. It is pop metaphysics, and of the worst kind, for it is obviously self-contradictory since it assumes time and space in order to explain the origin of time and space. As scientist David Park writes, it is deceptively easy to imagine events before the Big Bang, but in physics there is no way to make sense of these imaginings. As if this were not bad enough, Dr. Atkins compounds the problem by asking where the mathematical points came from. His answer? Time brought the points into being and the points brought time into being. This is like saying that the chicken brought the egg into being and the egg brought the chicken into being. It's no wonder that in his review of Dr. Atkins' book in The Times Literary Supplement the philosopher John Leslie asks incredulously, "How could such nonsense have been churned out by the author of a superb textbook like Physical Chemistry?" In fact, Dr. Atkins' Oxford University colleague Keith Ward in his book God, Chance and Necessity points out no less than seven such logical fallacies in Dr. Atkins' scenario. Ward concludes that it is "blatantly self-contradictory and so cannot be true". By contrast, the view that theists have always held, that there is a personal creator of the universe is not only logically consistent, but it also follows logically from the premises which I have laid out.
NUMBER TWO: THE COMPLEX ORDER IN THE UNIVERSEDuring the last thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a delicate and complex balance of initial conditions simply given in the Big Bang itself. We now know that life prohibiting universes are vastly more probable than any life-permitting universe like ours. How much more probable? The answer is that the chances that the universe should be life-permitting are so infinitesimal as to be incalculable and incomprehensible. For example, Steven Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe's expansion had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand billion million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a big fireball. Brandon Carter has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation, without which planets could not exist, is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeros, at least. PCW Davies estimates that change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part in ten to the one hundredth power would have prevented a life-permitting universe. There are around fifty such quantities and constants present in the Big Bang which must be fine-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. So improbability is multiplied by improbability by improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers. There is no physical reason why these constants and quantities possess the values they do. The former agnostic physicist Paul Davies comments, "Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact." Similarly, Fred Hoyle remarks, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics". And Robert Jastrow, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has called this the most powerful evidence for the existence of God ever to come out of science.
We can summarize our reasoning as follows. Premise one: the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe is due to either natural law, chance, or design. Two: it is not due to either law or chance. Three: therefore, it is due to design. NUMBER THREE: OBJECTIVE MORAL VALUES IN THE WORLDIf God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist. Many theists and atheists agree on this point. Michael Ruse, a noted agnostic philosopher of science explains, "The position of the modern evolutionist is that morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction and any deeper meaning is illusory". Friedrich Nietzsche, the great atheist of the last century who proclaimed the death of God, understood that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life. I think that Friedrich Nietzsche was right. But we've got to be very careful here. The question here is not "Must we believe in God in order to live moral lives?". I'm not claiming that we must. Nor is the question "Can we recognize objective moral values without believing in God?". I think that we certainly can. Rather, the question is, "If God does not exist, do objective moral values exist?". Like Niche and Ruse, I just don't see any reason to think that in the absence of God the morality evolved by Homo sapiens is objective, and here Dr. Atkins would agree with me. He says, "I see no evidence for its absoluteness. And the ethics of a lion seem to be much different from the ethics of an antelope. As for human beings," he says, "we are just slime on a planet belonging to one sun". On the atheistic view, then, some action, say rape, may not be socially advantageous, and so in the course of human development has become taboo. But that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. On the atheistic view there's really nothing wrong with your raping someone, thus without God, there is no absolute right and wrong. But the problem is that objective values do exist, and deep down we all know it. There is no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world. Actions like rape, cruelty, and child abuse aren't just "socially unacceptable behavior", they are moral abominations. Some things, at least, are really wrong. Similarly, love, equality, and self-sacrifice are really good.
Thus we can summarize this third consideration as follows. Premise one: if God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. Two: objective values do exist. Three: therefore, God exists. NUMBER FOUR: THE IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE OF GODThis isn't really an argument for God's existence, rather it's the claim that you can know that God exists wholly apart from arguments, simply by immediately experiencing Him. This was the way people in the Bible knew God. As Professor John Hick explains, to them God was not an idea adopted by the mind, but an experiential reality which gave significance to their lives. Now, if this is so then there's a danger that proofs for God could actually distract your attention from God Himself. If you're sincerely seeking God, then God will make His existence evident to you. The Bible promises, draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. We must not so concentrate on the external proofs that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our own hearts. For those who listen, God becomes an immediate reality in their lives. IN CONCLUSIONWe have seen four reasons to think that God does exist. Together, these reasons constitute a powerful cumulative case for the existence of God. If one wants us to believe atheism instead, then he must first tear down all four of the reasons I've presented, and then in their place erect a case of his own to prove that God does not exist. Thus, until he does that, I think that we can conclude that theism is the more plausible world view. • Email to a friend • •16 Rounds to Samadhi Magazine, LA, USA: The Forbidden Archaeologist: Knowledge Filtering and Extreme Human Antiquity Michael Cremo, with some 50 million year old artifacts from the California gold mines.
Some years ago, Doug Kenyon, editor of Atlantis Rising, asked me to write a column for his magazine. I agreed, and it was a good decision. I named the column "The Forbidden Archeologist." In it, I have commented on many topics of interest to me.
Eventually her paper was published in a geological publication. Steen-McIntyre wrote in a letter to one of the editors (Steven Porter, 8 February 1980): "The ms [manuscript] I'd like to submit gives the geologic evidence. It's pretty clear cut, and if it weren't for the fact a lot of anthropology textbooks would have to be rewritten, I don't think we would have had any problems getting the archeologists to accept it. As it is, no anthro journal will touch it with a ten foot pole." A few years ago, a scholar was putting together a collection of essays about Alfred Russel Wallace, who along with Darwin was the cofounder of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace was also involved in research into paranormal. Darwin did not approve of his involvement in such things. In my book Human Devolution, I have a chapter about Wallace's research into the paranormal. The scholar invited me to submit an essay based on that chapter to be included in his book. I submitted the essay to him, but it did not wind up in the book, because of the objections of the editor from the academic publishing company that was going to bring out the book. The editor objected to my reputation as a maverick researcher, with nonmainstream ideas. Michael A. Cremo (aka Drutakarma Dasa) has been a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness since 1974. His latest book, The Forbidden Archeologist,as well as his other books, are available from his website www.mcremo.com • Email to a friend • •Dandavats.com: Devotee HolidayBy Parasuram das A short movie from the Scandinavian Tour 2011. If it seems like a devotee holiday, well errr, that is probably right. Rathayathra everyday and camping in the forest with the mooses, see you there next year |
