(Kadamba Kanana Swami Govinda Valley, Austrailia, 2011) Lecture – Caitanya-caritāmṛta
Kirtanananda asked Prabhupada:
“Why are you always preaching about impersonalism in the west? Here maybe atheisms is the problem, and in India there maybe impersonalism”.
Prabhupada replied:
“You are saying it because you are an impersonalist”.
And later it proved that he was! So we are influenced by impersonalism, because we are not seeing how behind everything in this world, there is a personal aspect. Krishna is the original Supreme Personality, and He has many agents throughout the world!
In ancient times….in pre Christian times, throughout the world there were in various cultures an acceptance of Devas. Acceptance of divine beings that were controlling the forces of nature. We find that in the Greek, South American, African and European traditions. One country in Europe which is particularly an interesting country, is Finland, and the reason why that country is interesting is because they never converted to Christianity until eight hundred years after Christ, which is quite later on in the game…if we think about it. They went on for eight hundred years in amidst the Christian Europe, with their own tribal pre – Christian philosophy, which would have been elves, little trolls and all kinds of small Devas!
Well that is in mind with actual Vedic culture. So it is interesting how we can see that Christianity had stripped the world from that concept. The concept that everything within nature is impersonal, and then Christianity sort of projected the idea that on the clouds there were heavens!
But nowadays who hasn’t flown around? and who hasn’t seen anybody up there? So therefore under the presence of modern science, Christianity gave up on that idea about heaven on the clouds:
“Oh, well that is only symbolic uneducated men”.
Actually, God is an all pervading loving energy and in this way Christianity also became totally impersonal. And God has been seen as all pervading intelligence, or all pervading love….and that has become more or less a worldview.
The universe has developed a large mechanistic worldview. A large machine where various planets are in their orbits and magnetic fields are keeping the whole thing in balance, and everything is rotating in various ways, and in this way we are simply living in this large machine.
Somewhere remote, behind this machine, maybe there is God….maybe, or maybe not. It is difficult to say and that is a sort of religious worldview. So that is a very poor….a very sterile worldview. It is a kind of a worldview where religion has been step by step been reduced to impersonalism. But in the proper Vedic conception, there are thirty three core demigods, thirty three main principle demigods, that are in existence of one group of assistants. And these assistants are indeed includes elves and various small kinds of creatures. Elves exists….just see! Wow! Childhood fairytales come back…the return of the dwarfs and so on!
In Amsterdam in the sixties we had political party called ‘The dwarfs’ and their philosophy was:
“Dwarfs are better than people, because dwarfs are green…they are gardeners and so on…and they are looking after the environment!”
They were ahead of their time….way ahead of their time due to certain substances that these dwarfs were taking! They had a lot of vision. In the city they had a plan to get rid of cars, and when that didn’t fully fly, then they had a proposal to start roof gardens on cars, just to make up for the pollution. We can understand that they were taking a few too many of something. But the mood was being in the harmony with the environment……………………….Everything in this world is under the control of Krishna, and how everything in this world is having a purpose…….His purpose. The world exists for the purpose of Krishna, not for our purpose!
Therefore Sri Caitnaya Mahaprabhu’s movement is gradually establishing a totally different approach! Not another worldly approach…..not an approach where one simply chants Hare Krishna all day!
