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Debunking Myths Overview

From Science to Religion and Back

This is the edited transcript of the first episode on my podcast. The episode discusses the relation between religion and science from the perspective of Vedic philosophy, and how an original meaning embodied by God expands into symbols which include both the soul and their material experiences. This relation between meaning and symbols requires us to …

Knowing Truths Overview

A Brief Guide to My Books

Over the years as I have written many books, and new readers often want to know where to begin, how to proceed systematically, so that understanding them would become easier. Implicit in this request is the problem that the books are not easy reading, especially if you don’t read them in order. While I try …

Knowing Truths Overview

The Inception of Bhaktivedānta Institute

In late 1997, H.H. Bhaktisvarūpa Dāmodara Maharaja told me that he wanted to compile Śrīla Prabhupāda’s instructions on Bhaktivedānta Institute into a book. With that intent, he and I made some recordings, where Maharaja narrated the early history of the Institute and I transcribed the tapes. Following this, I searched for quotes, letters, conversations, etc. …

Knowing Truths Overview Philosophy

Advaita – The Partial Truth

Many people who look at Vedic philosophy in current times, understand it as Advaita, which is an interpretation of Vedānta, that claims that the ultimate reality is a singular, unified existence called Brahman, from which the world is produced as māyā or illusion. The Brahman is equated with consciousness, although how consciousness comes under illusion …

Debunking Myths Overview Philosophy

What is Free Will, Really?

The previous post examined the materialist critique of free will and showed why the reduction of free will to rationality (and then to the mechanization of rationality) is flawed because rationality itself involves choices of axioms that themselves cannot be rationalized―i.e. reduced to more fundamental axioms. The only way to solve the problem of free …

Debunking Myths Overview Philosophy

Do We Have Free Will?

Attacks on free will have become fairly common. While the attackers often recognize what is at risk — namely the sense of responsibility and accountability — they are motivated by establishing the primacy of what science seems to be telling us over what we have commonsensically believed over the centuries. This post examines the critique of free will and …