Vedic Texts vs. an AI Chatbot Someone recently asked me a question about AI. The specific request was to convert Vedic knowledge into an AI chatbot so that people could easily ask it questions. As and when a question would arise, they would enter the question into the chatbot and the chatbot would produce the …
Nearly all great civilizations have a flood story. It is almost always the precursor to a new age or a new civilization. Nearly all big civilizations talk about their advent after a flood. Some of these are stories about floods in rivers. Their cataclysmic effects are not anywhere close to those of global floods. There …
This is the third of a three-part series in which I cover sexuality. In the first part, I discussed the nature of perverted sexuality whose hallmark is shame. In the second part, I discussed various types of sexuality found in the Vedic texts, leading to a perfectional stage whose mark is shyness, rather than shame. …
This is the second of a three-part series in which I cover sexuality. In the first part, I discussed the nature of perverted sexuality whose hallmark is shame. In the second part, I will discuss various types of sexuality found in the Vedic texts, leading to a perfectional stage whose mark is shyness, rather than …
This is the first of a three-part series in which I cover sexuality. In the first part, I talk about perverted sexuality whose hallmark is shame. The second part discusses various types of sexuality found in the Vedic texts, leading to a perfectional stage whose mark is shyness, rather than shame. The third part will …
We can scan the length and breadth of Vedic literature, but we won’t find the term “Universal Truth”. Everywhere, we find the term Param-Satyam, which has three meanings—(a) Highest Truth, (b) Original Truth, and (c) Best Truth. The highest truth controls everything. The original truth creates everything. The best truth enjoys everything. Param-Satyam is the …
The separation of religion and economics, like so many other separations in modern thinking, is the gift of the Western reductionist methodology of drawing arbitrary boundaries within reality and treating them as isolated systems. These separations never occurred in Vedic thinking. Wealth, for instance, is one of the qualities of Lord Viṣṇu, personified as Lakśmi. …
Standards For Different Religions My criticisms of other religions are sometimes dismissed not by a counterargument but simply by calling it an outsider’s opinion, different from the believer’s viewpoint. The critic says: Believers have an orthodox view of their religion while academics have a heterodox view of the same religion. The divergence between the orthodox …
In Chaitanya Caritāmrita 20.117, Lord Chaitanya instructs Sanātana Goswami as follows: kṛṣṇa bhuli’ sei jīva anādi-bahirmukha ataeva māyā tāre deya saṁsāra-duḥkha. Śrila Prabhupāda translates this verse as “Forgetting Kṛṣṇa, the living entity has been attracted by the external feature from time immemorial. Therefore, the illusory energy [māyā] gives him all kinds of misery in his …
I came across a denigrating portrait of Mahābhārata, written by Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, Newark. Reading through, I noticed three things—(a) ignorance of Mahābhārata in particular and Vedic philosophy in general, (b) laziness to resolve the obvious contradictions in the article’s narratives, and (c) arrogance to judge …
Lord Kṛṣṇa describes four classes of Duṣkṛti (those who have done bad deeds) and Sukriti (those who have done good deeds) one after another in Bhagavad-Gita. They are defined by a single criterion—surrender to Lord Kṛṣṇa. Four kinds of good people surrender to Kṛṣṇa, and four kinds do not. Since these verses are adjacent to …
Every now and then there are stories about a spiritual leader “falling down”. These are not limited to one religion or religious organization. They are known to occur across all religions and organizations. The reasons are simple—The spiritual journey is long, every successive stage leads to more hardship, and one must be enthusiastic, patient, and …
