January can seem like a big deal. It’s time to put up a new calendar and throw out the old one. Of course, if your old one was a Bhaktivedanta Book Trust calendar, you must now purchase yet another dozen 11” x 17” frames for preserving and displaying all that artwork.
We sense that a new year means something more than remembering to write a new digit. There’s symbolic weight in passing the annual starting line—we feel the potential for renewal. We resolve to get back on track (if we were once on one).
We say “Happy New Year,” to wish others good fortune. We say it to remind each other that improvement is possible. It’s always easy to get distracted, but it’s never too late to make our lives perfect. At least it’s possible in spiritual life.
Nowhere are there more distractions than on a spiritual path. Any spiritual practitioner knows that every day—every moment—is filled with potential. It’s another opportunity to re-commit and re-dedicate ourselves to what really matters. It’s another chance for us to turn towards the eternal and leave the temporary behind.
And nowhere, nowhere, nowhere has more distractions than the Internet.
So if you get some spiritual sustenance from Krishna.com’s efforts (and we really hope you do), we wish you a very happy new year. We pray that your 2010 will be a spiritual success. Meanwhile, here are a few new transcendental distractions for you.
Our material bodies are wonderful and complicated machines, but they’re neither permanent nor full of bliss. We live inside them, but they’re not us. At any moment, something can go wrong, and when it does, we—the spiritual beings inside—get upset.
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a hospital somewhere that took care of the spirit soul inside the body and not just the body itself? Find out how the Bhaktivedanta Hospital in Mumbai is becoming so well-known for its expert material—and spiritual—care.
In this latest issue of BTG, you can also discover the parallels between the teachings of Ayurveda and our spiritual relationships, why so many Krishna devotees are taking extra time out of their schedules to delve more deeply into their practice of private meditation, and how you—yes, you!—can get published in Back to Godhead Magazine.
Back to Godhead Magazine—where Krishna.com gets many of its best articles—was started in 1944 by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, working alone from his home while still living with his family and working in the pharmaceutical business.
His spiritual master, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Goswami, had told him “why don’t you present Krishna conscious philosophy in English? It will be good for you and your audience.” Back to Godhead was Prabhupada’s first organized effort to do so in printed form. After he came to the USA, he asked his disciples to take over the job of publishing BTG. This article celebrates the magazine’s fifty-fifth anniversary, and explains why it’s still going strong and vitally important in the twenty-first century.
Who is this avatar of Krishna who appears in the form of a gigantic boar? Why would Krishna want to assume such a disguise? It must have been an extraordinary circumstance, to motivate the Supreme Lord to take such an extraordinary size and shape. What was His idea? What did He do? Find out more about this transcendentally amazing, stranger-than-fiction Big Pig incarnation.
If God is all-spiritual, and beyond this world, and if the world around us (at least the part we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch) is material, how can we know anything about God at all? Sure, plenty of evidence exists—in the form of writings generally referred to as “religious”—of an all-powerful Being from Whom everything emanates. But are we supposed to rely on secondhand information when it comes to something as important as the existence of the Greatest Person Ever? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see Him in Person?
Ravindra-svarupa dasa highlights some instances of God’s appearance on Earth throughout recorded history. What significance do these events have? Since an all-powerful Being can go anywhere He wants, any time, (including here) what happens when He actually shows up? Would anyone in this cynical, jaded world believe it?
What happens to your social life if you decide to pursue a spiritual path? If you’ve made the decision to try and become a devotee of Krishna, for example, don’t you have to turn your back on the world and everything in it? What about your family, your friends? OR, what if your family and friends are already spiritually-minded people? What kinds of relationships exist between like-minded (or even unlike-minded) devotees of Krishna?
In this illuminating and entertaining series, Mahatma dasa asks a variety of Krishna devotees about their social lives. Real people, real situations, really good videos.
Krishna.com is proud to be associated with Friends of the BBT, a new organization established to help devotees of Krishna throughout the world become more directly involved in the work of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust.