Gaura wrote:My dear Janus.
Is all what you have written your realizations?
Some, I have had realization of my souls imortality, etc, but not all. Some things I realize and some things I believe. In respect to my beliefs, I insist that they be supported with some evidence, scientific, shastric, logical inference, which tends me to believe that they may be correct, and I check for logical consistancy, but there are a whole heck of a lot of things I do not know and am unsure of.
For intance Shastra states that the eternally liberated souls never fall from Viakuntha, so the analogy between Satan and each indivivual is not literally correct although poetically precise. I reason that we must have decided to enjoy the material creation before we ever realized our constitutional positions as Krsna's servents. I believe that we were created first and then given a choice of whether to play God or to serve God. Perhaps some explanation exists somewhere in Vedic literature that explains and corroborates this, or I could be wrong. when I am wrong I like to know it Delusion is something that we have enough trouble with already, no need to make things worse by being attached to our delusions
The acceptance of hearsay as evidence, accusation as proof comes from our tacit conditioning and a universal human characteristic that Both Bill Cosby, the famous American comic, and Fredriche Neitchze, the German philosopher have both commented upon. Cosby observed that "Parents aren't interested in justice, they want quite!," and Neitchze observed that "People don't want challenging questions, they want comforting explanations." This obersavtion reflects both a low tolerance to existential pressure and the tendency to relieve such pressures by accepting whatever first relieves it, an emotinal impetus rather than a philosophical justification.
As soon as you get an explanation that relieves such stresses you do not have to think about it again. Thus even blind faith belief can satisfy one's emotional need. Once such blind faith has been accepted we become attached to it. We forget or we have never learned that what we know and what we merely believe are different, we come to think that belief equals knowledge, when the exact opposite is true.
Belief equals ignorance, but it is a particulary insidious type of ignorance because we often mistakenly think that our beliefs represent knowlede and we are attached to them through our emotions. Thus anything that challenges our beliefs threatens our false sense of certitude and threatens to return us to the same emotional anxiety that first we felt that occaisioned us to accept our bellefs in the first place. Plus we may have spent half a lifetime or more building up our lives and reputations around our beliefs. Case in point is if you have spent half a lifetime in ISKCON believing that such and such and so and so were pure devotees and that Krsna is God, the likelyhood that you would want to regard anything that challenged these beliefs objectivly is highly unlikely.
If Krsna Consciousness works as a scientific process (it does, and that is from my own realization), then one should not expect that one should have to remain in the position of blind faith belief eternally, or even for the rest of one's life. You should be receiving corroboration from your own tangible spiritual experiences, and if not, then something needs adjusting.
For me I became Bhraman realized within six months of joining the movement, and Krsna Conscious, meaning conscious of Krsna as being an actual Personality during my first and only year in the movement, but I never became "fixed" up, and so my transcendence is rather "spotty". (very spotty). Krsna and Srila Prabhupada have been far more generous to me than I am deserving by my efforts though.
Never mind what others want you to believe, a scientific process is not dependent upon belief or disbelief for the success (or failure) of it's methodology to provide you with the tangible results of the experiment. Don't argue with them, just see things as they are, that these peoples minds have an emotional need for certitude and that thre more people that share their beliefs the safer they feel, and conduct your experiment in private. Your relationship with Krsna is after all between you an Krsna, an intensely personal thing. Look for Guru. You may only find i little here, a little there, but Guru is one, Guru is always there. Study yourself, relaize who you are as you are now, how your mind is actually devided in its desires and priorities and how that may be affecting the experiment. Pich up a book on human anatomy and look at the brain, the three brains rather, the fixed, the ossilating and finally that human brain which gices you your conceptual self identification. Not the primal and mamalian brain and understand that each of these has its own identity, it's own ways of processing things, note that they are also the seat of your strongest physical drives and that they regard the the promiss of liberation from false egoism and surrender to Krsna as a death threat and as a threat to their control and enjoyment. Examine yourself for your true motivations, and then follow the process, aware of the conflict of interests within you.
You cannot convince your serpent and mamalian brains with words for they do not speak any human language, they bark, they his and they growl. They present aspects of yourself which are subconscious, they on the other hand know you well " Water sleeps, the enemy is sleepless" The uncontrolled mind is one's worst enemy in this process, Krsna says that in Bhagavad Gita, you must understand them to control them with your human mind, but you must also develop and experience the higher taste, otherwise such false repression and ignorance leaves you vulnerable to their attacks and they wil attack at the worst possible time. The mamalian brain plays, it seeks pleasure and to avoid pain, the the strongest of your brains, the serpent brain, it does not fight for fun, it strike to kill any chance of your liberation and surrender to Krsna. A lot of this is from my realizations, after the fact. Nine times the span that measures night and day I fell before I understood this.