Topic: Forms of God
Reading Complexity: Easy 
Devotees of Krishna worship Him in various Deity forms with the understanding that God is the source of all energies—the Absolute Truth—and can appear before us in any form He likes. Everything about the Supreme Person, including His form, is spiritual and worshipable.
Vedic scriptures first of all define who is Supreme and who isn't. They also describe the science of Deity worship in detail—...
Reading Complexity: Easy
Reporter 2: Your Divine Grace, the various scriptures I’ve read refer often to the life breath. They say the breath comes directly from God, so one path of yoga is to concentrate on the breath and then on God.
Srila Prabhupada: Yes. There are various kinds of air within the body, and the soul is within the heart, floating on those airs. So one preliminary form of yoga has to do with controlling...
Reading Complexity: Easy
Most of us from India, regardless of where we’re living now, at times go to a temple to see the Deity form of the Supreme Lord Krishna or Vishnu or one of His incarnations. We also many times see the deities of various demigods.
Perhaps on a few occasions, which we may remember as high points in our lives, we have gone with friends and relatives to holy tirthas, places of pilgrimage. We then...
Reading Complexity: Easy
A conversation with His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
Devotee: Srila Prabhupada, if material nature is the absence of Krishna, then what is material?
Srila Prabhupada: Nothing is material. If you continue Krishna consciousness, there’s nothing material. When we offer this flower in Krishna consciousness, is it material?
Devotee: No.
Srila Prabhupada: So how has it become...
Reading Complexity: Easy
Few things seemed more expressive of heathen idolatry to British missionaries in India than the annual chariot festival at Jagannatha Puri in Orissa. When the three great forms of Jagannatha (Krishna, “Lord of the Universe”), Balarama (His first expansion), and Subhadra (His spiritual energy) were pulled on towering chariots mobbed by ecstatically chanting devotees, missionary outrage knew no...
Reading Complexity: Easy
It’s natural for us to want to know what God looks like, just as it’s natural for a child who’s never seen his father to want to know what his father looks like. And just as such a child may imagine, “Maybe my father looks like this” or “Maybe he looks like that,” so we, too, speculate about what God must be like. The artist Michelangelo, for example, knowing God to be the original person,...
Reading Complexity: Easy
A prayer in Istanbul's Blue Mosque leads a young Christian to Lord Krishna.
John, a slight, fair-complexioned traveler who'd left home to broaden his perspective on life, found himself stranded in Istanbul. With nothing to do until money arrived from a friend, he'd gone to the magnificent Blue Mosque, an awe-inspiring monument with huge stained-glass windows, to offer a sincere prayer to God—the...
Reading Complexity: Easy
Mayavadis and atheists accept the forms of the Deities in the temple of the Lord as idols, but devotees do not worship idols. They directly worship the Personality of Godhead in His archa incarnation. archa refers to the form which we can worship in our present condition. Actually, in our present state it is not possible to see God in His spiritual form because our material eyes and senses...
Reading Complexity: Medium 
What is Deity worship? What makes it different from "idol worship?" How can anyone claim to have direct experience of the Supreme Being, who is beyond all material conceptions, and beyond everything "material?"
Here is an excerpt from an article on the subject of Deity worship—in our opinion, one of the most comprehensive and well-written in existence—by Ravindra-svarupa dasa (William H....
Reading Complexity: Medium
The following conversation between His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and several of his disciples took place in June 1974 in Paris.
Devotees: A man came to the temple a couple of days ago and argued that we really can’t say for sure that there’s life after death, so why worry about it? Better to build a more prosperous society. At least this we can understand, and it would...
Reading Complexity: Medium
We felt today's verse was one of the most scientific explanations we've ever heard of the difference between God and other living beings, why living beings wind up in a temporary world, and how the universes are created and maintained .
"Even if someone accepts the whole concept as 'myth,'" we reasoned, "they would have to admit that whoever came up with the idea must have thought about it from...