Srila Prabhupada often used an example that occurs frequently in Vedic literature which compares the conditioned soul to dormant fire in wood. Until the fire blazes, wood remains in a dormant state like the soul in a material body. The soul comes to its normal condition when it’s catalyzed by the Hare Krishna mantra, just as fire blazes when the temperature reaches kindling point.

Markandeya Rsi was curious to know exactly how Maya worked. He asked the Lord to show him. Almost at once there was a great downpour, and waves began to flood his hermitage. Soon they completely enveloped his home and he entire planet. Long-living Markendeya struggled for eons in giant waves and severe winds, but miraculously stayed afloat and alive for millions of years. Finally, when he thought his exhaustion might spell death, he encountered an island oasis. There, Krsna, as an infant on a huge leaf of a banyan tree, inhaled him into His body. Markendeya saw the entire universe before Krsna exhaled him back out onto the ocean. Shortly thereafter, the waters of devastation subsided entirely, and Markandeya found himself sitting peacefully in his asrama just as when he first asked about Maya. This was the lesson he learned about the Lord’s illusory energy.

It’s often misunderstood how Krsna could appear and manifest activities on earth without being attached to anything material. His enemies have accused Him of being a thief, philanderer and murderer. He becomes “mugdha” (bewildered) in the presence of His intimate associates like mother Yasoda and cries genuine tears.

On a walk in Mayapur on April 3,1975, devotees said that scientists considered that everything, even inert matter, was in motion, mainly by virtue of atoms and their charged particles. They said that even within the earth there was a great deal of unseen motion. Srila Prabhupada countered by saying the he was a “layman” and couldn’t see motion and that inanimate objects didn’t seem to move from one place to another overnight.

(The following article was posted in the “Meditations” column of the Hindustan Times, one of India’s largest english language daily newspapers, on 10 February 2003.) Beyond time and space TIME AND tide wait for no man, so the saying goes. And Chanakya Pandit wrote that unlimited amounts of gold cannot purchase even a second of time gone by. An elated J. Robert Oppenheimer, chief creator of the atomic bomb, thought it apt, after his fierce invention, to quote from a Gita verse (“Time I am, destroyer of worlds”, 11.32). Billions are spent annually on gerontology to learn the secret of prolonging life, in effect buying time. Some are utterly convinced deathlessness will be achieved by the year 2099 – for those with fat enough pocketbooks of course. Yet no amount of plastic surgery (a growing multi-billion-dollar annual industry), organ replacement or genetic manipulation has been able to arrest the seemingly inexorable flow of time. For those convinced about transmigration and the eternality of the soul, time is still in perpetual motion. Its shameless march always causes shifting, aging, natural erosion, and transference of souls to different planetary systems and into different species (humans or higher preferred). Time is often thought of as destiny, an inscrutable force never fully understood or even partially harnessed. Many think the future cannot be predicted. It was reported that immediately after Gandhi’s assassination someone said, “The meaning of being Indian is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.” Who would have thought that a life like Gandhi’s would end so abruptly and so brutally? Similarly, who at the time could have forecast the fall of the Roman, Ottoman or British empires? Yet the demise of all civilisations and their leaders relegates them to footnotes in history, ultimately to oblivion. The stoppage of time, reversing or accelerating it, has been the subject of countless fictions and fantasies (such as H. G. Wells’ “Time Machine”) for centuries. But the Gita shlokas about the Lord’s appearance and ability to alter time, to dissipate clouds, part the seas, water the deserts and crumble mountains have been with us since time immemorial; and He’s always supporting the good. The Bhagavata (2.3.17) speaks of “Ksanah”, or time utilised for the purpose of meditation on God as freeing the practitioner from the ravages of age – a state all life-extension aficionados would love to attain. In the spiritual world there is no time (no past or future), only an inconceivably jubilant and delightful present.

There’s a famous Srimad Bhagavatam verse about this that Srila Prabhupada was fond of. It’s found in the Sixth Canto, and is the twentieth-eighth text of the seventeenth chapter. It reads: “Devotees solely engaged in the devotional service of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Narayana, never fear any condition of life. For them the heavenly planets, liberation and the hellish planets are all the same, for such devotees are interested only in the service of the Lord.”

Whether or not this piece ever gets published in the Hindustan Times, I probably won’t know for a while. Nonetheless, I thought the essay suitable to read as a “Thought for the Day.” Here it is: Invisible controllers are at work. They can be reduced to three obvious forces: governments, economics and the intelligentsia. Our lives are not our own. The nation, economics of the day, and the prevailing `intellectual’ climate limit our freedom at every juncture. But there’s a fourth, more insidious influence at work: Hollywood. Entertainment is yet another, more subtle phenomenon that has a way of invading our consciousness; it determines our actions. It tells us what we should be; where to go. It sets our goals; makes us do what our instincts demand, usually that which is daring and cool. James Bond, we loved you! Above and beyond these four, lies the realm of God, millions of light years away, in astronomical language. Billions of miles travelled at the speed of mind, a Vedic philosopher might say. To the behaviourist, the moon is a satellite and heaven is outer space. God is imagined, irrelevant, irrational. Maybe God equals destiny, but in some metaphysical sense, God is inscrutable, and the concept is pigeon-holed as MYSTICAL. Some self-styled people (we may call them behaviourists) considered that they moved earth and sky — like the Man Who Would Be King in the famous Kipling story; they thought they caused the movements of heavenly bodies. They were the centres of their universes. Illusions like this that have kept most of us on the wheel of samsara for aeons and forced us to skate and slither on the rock we call earth. Some, however, feel the presence of this fifth unseen controller, who, as Brahma says, burns up all the karma of those who are imbued with devotion (BRAHMA SAMHITA, 5.54). Such is the awareness of the theist and the seeker.

Prabhupada has referred to Krishna as The Supreme Artist, explaining that as an Actor He played all His roles perfectly – those of sons, lovers, parents, husbands, and friends.

As Vaisnavas it’s important to know that something called ID Theory or IDT (Intelligent Design Theory) has come to the notice of Darwinists and neo-Darwinists, and is generally construed to be a pseudo-scientific manifestation of ‘creationism.’ But Ph.D. researchers and professors have been careful to avoid creationist and dogmatic jargon. They have even set up research institutes proposing that the Darwin theory of evolution is not rigorously scientific, that it can’t be ‘proven,’ in the way that other theories can. Most IDT advocates are careful not to mention the word God. But IDT worries some scientists. In fact the CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), a rationalist-empiricist-reductionism group has written official papers to refute IDT. This is an indication that IDT is being gradually being recognized as an optional answer to the question of “how did we get here?”

Srila Prabhupada wasn’t averse to using the ‘L-word.’ In a letter to Bhakta dasa, dated April 9, 1972, he wrote, “I can only suggest, and wherever possible that can be applied, but I do not force anyone. After all, you are working too hard to please Krsna only out of love for me, so there can be no question of force if love is there. We should not even try to force anyone or reduce our Society to an impersonal business exchange. This will kill everything. Our only purpose in every endeavor is simply to make advancement in spiritual life or in pleasing Krsna.”