ISKCON NewsThe News Agency of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness

Prof. Joseph O'Connell suddenly passed away on 5 May, at the age of 72. He has been a friend to Vaisnavas in the Academy for decades. He was an exceptional scholar, who did much for the study of Gaudiya Vaisnavism. He met Srila Prabhupada several times while he was working on his PhD dissertation at Harvard, and always spoke fondly about him.

Good filmmaking is about making people stop and look deeply into their own hearts -- to turn each of them into a better person.

On recent travels, I've had quite a few interesting conversations with the old and wise. Just last week I met an 82 year-old retired banker. We conversed about his life journey, the ups and downs, and the topic of money.

In the love market, lust is trading at an all time high. Therapists get rich as victims of affection increase, and who wants the dry life of a saint? The vacuum of spiritual training injures the health of all living entities, not just our children.

There is never a time when the spiritualist is not tolerant. At times, however, they may speak strongly, express displeasure and act assertively to create change. Despite this, they never feel personal discomfort or inconvenience, but simply act for the benefit and welfare of others.

We, like the frog in the popular story, can easily detect sweeping cultural changes but often not small, incremental cultural shifts. And as a consequence we are in danger of being boiled to death by our own society. We are not realising that, in our bid for personal freedom and social liberality, we are reaching a boiling point.

Without the grace and knowledge I have received in my practice and life as a Hindu minister, I would not be able to approach my heritage as a Christian in such a meaningful way. This reality leaves me with a grateful heart, and a desire to go deeper into this harmony, to honor where I have come from, where I am now, and where I am meant to go.

The Life article points out that man has always been fascinated by disasters. Why? I’d say it’s because we know that a disaster may strike any of us at any moment. Although in recent years a whole field of risk management has developed to counteract risks and dangers, still the only shelter is the Lord’s lotus feet.

What`s the happiest place in the world? According to a research led by the London School of Economics, the happiest place in the world is, would you believe?, Bangladesh.

Someone could propose that the true path to inner peace is to walk into your closest multi-storey car park and smash the windscreen of every blue Vauxhall Astra while simultaneously screaming at the top of your voice! Well... it’s something you could conceivably do, but something I doubt anyone would seriously consider.

Over the last couple of decades devotees in East Africa have faced many adverse situations during preaching, which resulted them in building a “fence” around themselves, limiting them in their endevours to spread Krishna-consciousness. A survey has been conducted to find the probable causes and the solutions.

As I looked over the class-schedule for February, I read the title “Modern Hindu Trends” and thought to myself: “Well, I really hope this course won’t be something too vague, but rather help me connect the history of India and Hinduism with what I practice in devotional life…”

Communal living with thirty monks isn’t easy. We may dress in a uniform way and don the same haircut, but you probably couldn’t find a more diverse group of people living in such close quarters.

For Krishna devotees, finding the right mate may be a little tricky. On the one hand, a devotee wants someone who will walk the path of devotional service with him or her. On the other hand, they are sentient beings with individual likes and dislikes, preferences, karma etc, and so they have desires that sometimes conflict with our best spiritual interests.

The Bhagavad-gita explains how the various traditions all stem from a divine source, and all offer the potential of spiritual elevation. How can we overlook striking contradictions in the various historical and cultural accounts? Could this be a naive ‘new age’ attempt to avoid confrontation and create ‘peace, love and unity’?

Vikram is an American of Indian parentage who knew a little about religion, Hinduism and yoga. He wanted to see how readily he would be accepted by spiritual seekers if he adopted the appearance, speech and mannerisms of a ‘guru.’

“It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practise either of them,” wrote Mark Twain. Wise words from the esteemed author, although it seems that some of us may well doubt their wisdom.

Civilizations endure because, from time to time, they are able to repair the deterioration that age and complacency bring to them. In a religious context such repair is often called a revival; in a cultural context it is called a renaissance.

Noisy, loud and boisterous environments; opulence and excessively luxurious habits; stressful, demanding and taxing lifestyles – these can all clutter our consciousness, and block one from accessing higher wisdom and spiritual ideals.

No less an authority than the Encyclopedia Britannica states that "in monotheistic religions, evil does not originate within the divinity nor in general within a divine world." Thus, God is barred from hell, an eternal realm of misery.