Leaving Toronto

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Our first son, Vrindavan, was born in Toronto on May 25 1976. Doing the math this means that Kama Nagari was pregnant almost immediately after we moved into our apartment. Without any birth control we were well on our way to a large “catholic” family. The three of us left Toronto on July 4 of that same year bound for Dallas, Texas. We moved to Dallas when Vrindavan was barely one month old. We had no place to stay and no job, but his time we had $5000 in our pockets. Again we were hoping that Krishna would provide.

From the day we arrived in Toronto our plan was to finish my final year at University, complete my degree, and then return to Dallas to become a teacher in the Krishna school (gurukula). Dallas was the only school in ISKCON. Temples from all over the world sent their children to Dallas for a Krishna Conscious education. I thought, “This was my place. There is no way I am going to chant on the street or work in a incense factory, but I can teach, so let me go there.” That was the general plan. Unfortunately there was one major hurtle to overcome before I could teach at the gurukula. I needed permanent legal status in the US. That was no simple task.

There was a time when all one needed to do was to marry an American. Those days were long gone by the 1970s. Marriage would help, but it was not enough. What was needed was a lot of money, some very specific qualification such as being a physician, dentist or lawyer, or to be sponsored by someone who would guarantee your maintenance in the country. Naturally, American did not want people coming into the country and going onto welfare. We had no money and I was not a medical doctor, so we asked Kama Nagari’s brother, Steven, who was an optometrist to sponsor me. He agreed and so after numerous medical exams, x-rays, police checks in both countries, finger printing, tax audits, registered letters of guarantee from Steven, interviews with US immigration officials and a small fortune in application fees I finally obtained a visa to enter the US. It was a very expensive and detailed process.

At the time it seemed overwhelming and unending, but looking back on it now, it was quick and trouble free. In our current terrorized world the process is much more time consuming and expensive. We even did it without a lawyer. Impossible today. I have to thank Steven for his help, without which it would have been impossible. We loaded everything we owned into our old Volkswagen Beetle and headed for the boarder at Detroit Michigan. The date was July 4, 1976, the two hundredth anniversary of the United States of America. It was a perfect day to join my new country.

Image taken from: http://us-flag.net/pictures/background/


The Demon Within

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Within the first week of living with Kama Nagari, after our Dallas Temple “noticeboard marriage,” I remember being wakened in the middle of the night by Kama Nagari. She was shaking in bed and making horrid gaging noises. I had no idea what was occurring. It was dark and I could only see her from a dim table light. I tried to wake her, but she was catatonic and not breathing. Blood and saliva was flowing from her mouth. Her complexion was blue and her eyes were bulging from their sockets. She was chocking to death! I was petrified. I had no idea what was happening or what to do. Before I could gather my senses and even begin to think what to do she relaxed somewhat and began to breath again, but she was still not conscious. Then with blood all over her face she started to get. She looked like a ghost and she was making haunted sounds. I was beside myself in terror. I tried to restrain her but she was much too strong. It appeared as if a demon was rising in my midst. I was in fear for my personal safety. I thought, “She might attack.” So I stood over her with my fist ready to smash her back if necessary. I was prepared to fight to the death if necessary. I had never met a person with that much strength and I was in real fear. I just did not know what was happening. In what seems like hours she finally collapsed onto the floor and fell into a deep sleep. I will never, so long as I live, forget this incident. I too passed out in exhaustion.

In the morning we woke up to the stains of blood, and when I told her what had happen, she said, “Oh, the demon must have attacked in the night.” “Demon? What demon?” I asked.

“Yes, I am haunted and every few weeks I get attacked by this demon who tries to take over my body. I guess you met my demon.”

I had never heard such a matter of fact reply to such an unsettling incident. This was beyond belief. Had I really faced a demon? It sure looked and sounded like a demon. It was almost a year until I finally discovered that I had witnessed a grand mal epileptic seizure. I knew nothing of epilepsy. I think I aged ten years in my first year of marriage to Kama Nagari. She must have had two dozen seizures in that time. What had I gotten myself into? But the situation was much worse than anyone could even imagine. In my mind there was the distinct possibility that it really was demon possession, for I lived in the medieval world of Krishna Consciousness. A demon attack was perfectly feasible. Anna, unless you have lived with this mind set, where you learned that the earth was at the center of the universe and where the sun was closer to the earth than the moon, you can not know the fear of this world and what I went through. I could talk to no one except other devotees and they, of course, only reinforced the demon possession scenario. I was beside myself in anxiety. Kama Nagari was never conscious for any of these seizures. She never saw what I saw. All she saw was the blood and her mangled bitten tongue. It was only after extreme hopelessness that I finally approached the Epilepsy Society of Toronto for help. I had been forced to reach out.

Chere Anna, I can not tell you how helpful the Epilepsy Society was for me. As I write this I almost cry remembering the support they gave me. And like anything I do, once I get focused, I go deeply into the subject. I read books on the subject and once I got a little knowledge I put all thoughts of demon possession out of my head. I found that as a child Kama Nagari had been fully examined and diagnosed at the prestigious Boston Children’s Hospital. I obtained those records and took Kama Nagari to a local physician to get an anti convulsion medicine. I helped myself immensely, but Kama Nagari continued to have seizures. She would not take the medicine. Why is it Anna, that all my women have this thing against regular doctors and their medicines? I always get involved with “new age” women who look at doctors as demons. For all the eleven years that I was married to Kama Nagari she continued to have seizures although, through various means, we did learn how to limit them to about once a month. I learned to cope. Kama Nagari’s ailment had a major effect on me and greatly affected our relationship. I wonder why I was not told of this problem before I married her? But would it have mattered? I doubt it.

My Need For Control

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Friday, August 5, 2005 7:28:34 PM

You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.*

If I flew to my parents home today I would find that they still live in the same house that I grew up in. The key to the house is the same. My room is still there with my original bed. I could sleep there tonight. In the kitchen I could fix myself something to eat and I would find all the forks, spoons, knives and plates in the same place as when I lived there 30 years ago. I would have no trouble finding anything. Even my parent’s phone number has been the same for 50 years. Right or wrong this is the environment in which I grew up. It was absolutely rock solid. Today, in my personal space (my apartment in the city and my apartment in the desert) everything has a place and I seldom change that position. I never have to think, “Where are the spoons? Where are the forks? Where are the cooking pots?” I could negotiate through my world blindfolded.

Anna, I come from a family of four: two parents and a brother. My brother is junior to me by four years which makes me almost an only child. Being an only child means that I am accustomed to being in control and having my own personal space. I grew up with complete privacy. In addition, I am protestant and Canadian. In general protestant Canadians have a subdued way about them compared to Americans. (An example of the protestant way is the groom’s family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding.) As I grew up my parents seldom had large family gatherings. Everything revolved around the nuclear family, never the extended family. Having joined Krishna Consciousness and immigrated to the United States changed everything in my life. I became a fish out of water. Joining Krishna Consciousness, with its denial of the use of birth control, destined me for a large family. I have nine children. Becoming American has given me two wives, ones Jewish and the other Catholic. In my new American-Jewish-Catholic world the family has always included the extended family; from my wives’ perspective happiness resolves around the family, and the more of it the better. But for me large families are loud, chaotic and boorish. I simply have no way of dealing with so many children and extended families. I hope you can now understand the extreme pressure I put on myself by changing my religion and culture and moving to a new country. I strongly advise anyone considering living outside of their natal country or marrying outside of their community to think long and hard about what they are doing. And above all never never change your religion. Such is the recipe for a difficult life. For better or worse this was been my way and hence my challenged, but intensely interesting life. Without all of these things I would have nothing to write about!

But Anna, there is even more. To make matters even more difficult I became a priest. This was the crushing blow that made my life almost overwhelming. A priest can have no privacy. A priest is owned by the public. His inside is the outside. Have I mentioned the members of my congregation who have walked into my bedroom at 4 AM demanding that I open the temple for them? Have I mentioned the ladies that have gone through my wife’s personal effects looking for her preferred means of birth control or lack thereof? A priest must also carry the burdens of the congregation. I can not tell you the stories that I hear from besieged wives or tormented husbands! For every one funeral that you attend, I attend 50 and every death carries a story of pain. Most people have no idea what suffering a priest bares! It is a miracle that I am still alive considering what I have put myself through. l find, therefore, a desperate need to keep just a few places in my life that are within my control. My personal spaces are my places of sanctuary and solace. I honor them.

My Kind of Priest

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Anna, an Australian man of India descent recently called to see if I would be able to perform his wedding. He wanted a specific kind of priest, and to use his words, he was not happy with the usual “run of the mill Hindu priest.” So he wanted to know my religious orientation. He had been interviewing various priests. In the course of his interview with me he told me that he was not very religious, and so I told him, “good, neither am I.” That stopped him cold. “What do you mean? You are a priest, you have to be religious!” I apologized, but restated my point, “I am not particularly religious. I used to be, but not anymore. I am more spiritual now.” This last statement, “I am more spiritual now” caught his ear. “Ah! I like that, you are my kind of priest. Please perform my marriage.”

To be religious is a stage of life. I went through that stage and I can tell you that it has a lot of offer. However, you eventually reach a point where religion falls away. Religion unavoidably leads to a crisis of faith. Anna, I remember walking done a country road in the dead of winter in West Virginia. It was late in the afternoon and getting cold and dark. I felt miserable, not because of the weather, but because my marriage was coming apart and for the first time I realized that nothing could stop it. I had tried and tried. Divorce was the worst thing that could happen, or so I thought at the time.

I remember praying, “Why me God? I have become your devotee. I chant your names everyday. I go to the temple. I bow down to You and I follow all the rules. I am a religious person.” Terrible doubts were entering my mind, “This should not be happening to me. I had done everything right. Why was God allowing this to happen”? This was an important moment for me. I was experiencing a crisis of faith. I questioned the value of my commitment to the religious life. I have had similar periods of questioning at other times in my life and I will write of them in due course, but each time I go through one of these periods, little by little, my religious nature gets stripped away.

The writing of my Ph.D was the most important event in my life. It was also the hardest thing that I have ever done. Anna, I did not undertake my dissertation to improve my academic position or to get a job, I did it solely as a spiritual quest. The official topic dealt with how traditional religious cultures (in this case Hinduism) change under the influence of modernity, (in this case 19th century European influence), hence the title, “Hindu Encounter with Modernity,” but the real essence of the work was how to survive a crisis of faith. How to pick up the pieces of a life when religion no longer works. To this day I do not think I can provide anyone with a set formula of how to do survive a religious crisis. Each case is unique, but I can say that as a result of my studies and soul searching I did find my spiritual grounding and have benefited ever since. My crisis of religious faith has landed me on the shores of spirituality. But without that dissertation and all the hard work that it entailed–the readings and field research–I may never have reached this shore. I have learned that religion can be the vehicle of spirituality, but that it should never be taken as spirituality.

On Being a Priest

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“In India, our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.” **

Dear Anna

I learned Hinduism first drinking at the fountain of academia and not while sitting on the lap of my grandmother. Academia taught me the classical forms of ancient Hinduism. Only much later did I learn the modern forms of Hindu culture through contact with real people, a congregation. The Hinduism of today and the Hinduism of ancient India would scarcely recognize one another. Anna, If you met a modern Indian Hindu priest, you would find that he probably falls into the mold of what you expect a priest to be more than what you find in me as you read these entries. I did not grow up in India, and so as you read these writings, I ask you to remove all conventional notions of what you think a priest is or what a priest should be, for I am no ordinary priest.

pastedGraphic.pdfAnna, did you know that that the Hinduism of today is more a reflection of the monotheistic traditions of the middle east projected through the lens of Islam and nineteen century European culture than the ancient Hinduism that I first learned? Indeed, most of the people with whom I deal in my present congregation are more Islamic and Christian in their outlook than truly Hindu. They hold the ethics and moral values of Islam and Victorian Britain and not of true Hinduism. They speak of heaven and hell, of good and evil, and of the soul and God in Christian and Islamic terms, not in the terms of their Aryan forefathers. And they do not even realize it! On the towers of the ancient temples that you still find in south India you can find our gods and goddesses performing all kinds of explicit sexual acts. Such images are carved right into the entrance ways for all to see. In ancient India sexuality was celebrated as a divine gift, for without sexuality there could be no life. These depictions are life affirming, not pornographic representations as Christians and Muslims interpret them. But it is impossible to imagine building a temple with these images anywhere in the world today? This could not be done even within India for India has lost its aryan roots.

In general I find modern Hinduism to be uninteresting, boring and cartoonish. It is a bastardization of its former self. Modern Hinduism has been stripped of its power by foreign monotheism. It now lacks pith. But my gods and goddesses still have life. Did you ever consider who the gods are? They are nothing less than the projections of the world around us and even of our own inner desires. The sun, the wind, the rain, and the wind are but gods all around us. Our lust, our desire for power and even our thirst for knowledge are divinities. They live in our hearts and mind and it is we who projection them onto the outer world. The Greeks had Cupid. The Hindus have Kamadeva. The Greeks had Athena, the Hindus have Sarasvati. Both cultures had much in common.pastedGraphic_1.pdf In fact, most ancient cultures had gods and goddess, the Nordic peoples, the Romans, and the ancient Chinese. Even the ancient Europeans had their gods and goddesses before they were consumed by the monotheism of the middle east.

A few years ago our temple community, which is mainly composed of north Indians, joined ranks with a south Indian community. South Indian Hinduism is interesting. It is more representative of its ancient sanskritic roots, the real Hinduism, because it was much less influenced by conquering Islam. The ancient Hinduism of north India was utterly destroyed by Islam. It is exciting to see a glimmer of the true Hinduism that still shines in this south community. As a priest I get to see the south Indian images of gods and goddess undressed. They embody extreme sexual beauty! Strong broad shoulders and thighs for the gods and large
pastedGraphic_2.pdfround breasts, thin waists and broad hips for the goddesses! All bodily parts are there. Occasionally I perform the weddings of our gods and goddesses. The ancient practice of polygamy is still a part of these south Indian traditions. We perform elaborate weddings with multiple wives. Such ceremonies reflect a completely different value system before it was ruined by the Muslims and the British.

And so if I do not appear to conform to how you think a priest should be, it is because I have a different religious model in my minds. The way I think and act is perfectly within the bounds of the way I see the world and my role as a priest within that world. I celebrate the glory of ancient India.

 

 

* Photograph by Aditya Kolli taken from http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/40-stunning-photos-of-beautiful-clouds/

** Schopenhauer

*** Photograph by Malati Marvin

Image sources: http://www.saisathyasai.com/india_hinduism_gods_goddesses/

http://enchantingkerala.org/gallery/displayimage.php?album=85&pos=26


Full Moon

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June 23, 2005

You can not imagine the full moon night that I am experiencing here in the desert. It is about 25 degrees, just perfect, and the sky is all silvery with the light of the moon. There is just a hint of smoke in the air from the fires burned during the day. But it is absolutely still and quiet.

The day was scorching hot, but now I am compensated by the cool light of the moon. If you have never sat in the light of the desert moon you can not know how enchanting it is. I try, but my words cannot describe this beauty.

The Honeymoon

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Coming to America was a watershed moment in my life. Since Dallas, my life has forever taken a different course. The shy introverted Canadian boy had entered a world that he could not imagine. Even though they are close neighbors, Canadians and Americans live worlds apart and it was taken me decades to understand how to live in this new land. In America three things happened to me: I fell in love for the first time, I took diksha and I married Kama Nagari. I am not certain which one of these events had the most impact, but it seemed that the moment I touched Kama Nagari everything in my life changed. Marrying her was like grasping hold of a tiger’s tail. Previously I had been in control, but now I began to spin out of control. With my marriage to Kama Nagari I moved into uncharted waters.

In August of 1975, Kama Nagari’s mother sent $1000 with which we were to purchase a car and come to Miami. This was our first car, a 1968 Voltswagen Beetle with 140,000 kilometers. This was one used “bug,” but it was ours and we loved her. The condition for getting the money was that we were to drive to Miami so that Bernadine and the rest of the family could meet me. A trip to Florida was not on my agenda when I decided to visit Dallas, but then again neither was marriage! I had just gotten my Canadian driver’s license a few weeks before I arrived in Dallas, and now I was going to head out across a foreign country? The adventure was to be a 2500 kilometer journey from Dallas to Miami to meet my Jewish mother-in-law. Yes, my Jewish mother-in-law. Kama Nagari was Jewish and I was about to be adopted into a Jewish family, which is a whole other story.

In our married life, which lasted eleven years, Kama Nagari and I never took a honeymoon. That would have been maya, so this trip was our substitute. The itinerary for our journey was that we would drive to Miami, spend two weeks with her family and then drive back to Dallas in time for her divorce hearing. Kama Nagari had a date in court set for August 20th. I never mentioned this, but Kama Nagari was married at the time when I met her. I never met her husband, he had long left the scene and she was in the final stages of divorce.

I am not sure why, but Kama Nagari and I got “legally” married while we were in Miami. I put quotation marks around legally because it turned out that we could not actually get married. Technically I could not marry Kama Nagari while she was still married in the state of Texas. Our Florida marriage occurred one week before Kama Nagari’s Texas divorce. This became a problem in later years when we applied for United States citizenship for our children who were born in Canada. We eventually solved the problem with the help of sympathetic immigration officer.

It never occurred to me at the time, but we could have avoided the problem by simply getting married after her Texas divorce. All we had to do was wait for a short period. I am not sure why this never occurred to us, or if it did I have no recollection of it. Perhaps we were just young, stupid and in love.

Image Sources: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/40-stunning-photos-of-beautiful-clouds/

http://www.florida.inetgiant.com

Life Affirmation

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I was recently reading Homer’s Iliad trying to pick up a better sense of ancient Greek culture and religion. My trip to Rome last year has encouraged me to have another look at the ancient Romans and Greeks. The grandeur of ancient Rome was overwhelming. Both the Romans and the Greeks remind me of ancient Indian. Of course, the Romans, Greeks and ancient Indians are just different branches of the same tribe of Aryans so it is not surprising that they have similar religions. What I most like about the Iliad is its life affirming religious perspective, and I think Wolfgang Peterson’s movie Troy has nicely captured this aspect of Greek culture. Of course, today, ancient Rome and Troy are long eclipsed and ancient Indian culture has moved into a completely different phase, but these three traditions in their earliest stages were life affirming cultures. By this I mean they had views of the world that were accepting of the world. They embraced the world as it is, with all its pleasure and pain.

In Peterson’s movie I liked Hector’s admonition to the Trojans, “Love the gods, love your women and love your country.” And then later Achilles tells his lover how the gods envy human beings. “Humans are mortal; they only live once and so every moment is special.” These are life affirming statements. Similarly, in the Bhagavad Gita the ancient Vedic sacrifice is called an ishtha-kama-dhuk, a “wish yielding cow of desire.” The sacrifice is described as the means to attain the bounty of the world. This is a statement that reveals a life affirming view of the world from much earlier Vedic time. It is not representative of the Gita as a whole, which represent a later phase of Vedic religion. The erotic stone images that adorn the ancient Hindu temples in the south of India are also life affirming testaments. So it is clear that the ancient Romans, Greeks and the ancient Indians had life affirming religious views.

Eventually the Greek religion and its Roman cousin gave way to the world denying asceticism of Christianity. Later phases of Hinduism, under the influence of the devotional bhakti traditions also evolved many world denying ascetic strains. In other developments, Hinduism spawned Jainism and Buddhism, which were, in their original forms, anti world ascetic religions. The four noble truths of Buddhism are completely anti world statements about the nature of reality, “The world is temporary; all is suffering,” is the first of these noble truths.

Religions that emphasize asceticism, fasting, vegetarianism, that view the world as illusory (maya), are life denying religions. This includes Jainism, Buddhism, much of Islam, modern Hinduism and Judaism, and the early forms of Christianity. Such religions disparage pleasure and worldly engagement. Later Protestant forms of Christianity and other religions developed “half way” views of reality. “The world is not perfect, so change it. Make heaven on earth.”

Certainly my years associated with Krishna Consciousness was an immersion in one of the life denying ascetic strains of Hinduism. In those days we were taught that the world was maya and that attachment for the things of this world was an evil. “Don’t see the beauty of the sunset, it is maya.” Or if you do see the beauty of the sunset, see it as God’s smiling face.” We were not allowed to see the sun for the real beauty that it is. Anna, it is a blessing of the nature that all things eventually even out. Water seeks its own level. So in recent years, I have shifted my personal religious views away from the life denying traditions and toward the life affirming traditions. To reach the middle I had to go to the edge.

Image Sources:http://www.wolfpackproductions.com/archive/troy.html

 http://vistawallpapers.wordpress.com/2007/03/09/vista-wallpapers-various-1/vista-wallpaper-boulder-sunset/

The Nature of Happiness

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“The more a man finds his sources of pleasure in himself, the happier he will be.”*

There is a famous Hindu book called the Vedanta Sutra. This a great philosophical and theological treatise that discusses the nature of reality. One topic is happiness. What is the nature of happiness in this world? There, an aphorism reads: anandamayo ‘bhyasat. which means that the nature of God is happiness. The Vedanta Sutra also teaches that the individual soul is a tiny “particle” of God and therefore has the same nature as God. Since God seeks happiness, so the soul seeks happiness. To state the matter in colloquial terms we are pleasure seeking animals. Our desire to find happiness lies at the core of our existence. All of life revolves around this point. Art, drama, food, economics, travel, sex, you name it, everything is about seeking happiness. And we have this nature because God has it.

A distraught lady who was having trouble in her relationships recently wrote a note expressing her opinion that men are pigs. So she asked me, “Why”? The answer is simple: since human beings are pleasure seeking beings some seek happiness in high places and others seek it in low places. The ones that seek it in low places are called “pigs.” In Sanskrit there are many words for happiness. The most common are sukha and ananda, but there is a world of difference between the two. Sukha is the happiness that is found in this world. Generally such happiness is achieved through contact with the senses and their objects. The ear, for example, hears a sound. That sound enters the ear canal and is ultimately translated into a sensation that the brain interprets as favorable, unfavorable or mixed. A favorable sensation leads to a pleasurable experience that we call happiness. The same applies to smells that enter the nose, light forms that enter the eye, sensations that touch the tongue or textures that touch the skin. Sense contact forms the basis of happiness. This is sukha. The problem with sukha is that it is temporary. The favorable sensations of sound, taste, sight, smell and touch come to an end. But the soul demands “an ocean” of happiness, yet the physical world can only supply a relative “drop” of happiness.

The living beings in this world seek sukha in difference ways. The ones that do it in high ways, so called cultured ways, we call connoisseurs; the ones that do it in less cultured ways we call “pigs.” But in all cases beings seek happiness. I have told you that this physical world is made of matter that is arranged in three modes or phases, goodness, passion and darkness. Happiness, the sukha of this world. is also classified according to these three modes.

Happiness according to goodness is light, subtle, and long lasting, happiness that comes from passion is intense but short lived, happiness that comes from darkness leads to addiction and suffering. Sometimes sukha is simply described as the absence of suffering, not a thing in its own right. My father used to tell the story of the man who constantly banged his head on the wall. When asked why he did this, he answered, “Because it feels good when I stop.” So in one sense sukha, the happiness of this world, is just the absence of suffering.

In contrast there is ananda. Sometime we translate this word as bliss, but what is meant is a positive of state of permeant happiness. Call this spiritual happiness if you will. Ananda is the “ocean” of happiness that that we all seek. If we can not find ananda, however, we settle for sukha, a mere drop of real happiness. One way or another our pleasure seeking nature drives us to seek happiness. Much of religion directs the soul to avoid sukha and to seek ananda instead. This is why sex is often shunned by many religions. It is the highest form of sukha in this world. It seems that it is not possible to have ananda and at the same time seek sukha. Such is the nature of happiness in this world according to Hinduism.

“The happiness that a person enjoys after long practice and that leads to the cessation of suffering–that in the beginning is like poison, but in the end is like nectar–is of the nature of goodness. It arises from the serenity that comes from perception of the soul.”

“The happiness that arises from contact of the senses and their objects–that in the beginning is like nectar, but in the end is like poison–is regarded as happiness characterized by passion.”

“The happiness that is self-deluding in the beginning as well as in the end–that arises from sleep, idleness, and intoxication–is declared to be of the nature of darkness.”

This is what the Gita has to say about the happiness of this world. I have told you about sukha and ananda, but there is another word for happiness, kama. Kama is generally regarded sensual happiness, hence the title of the Kama-sutra, the Hindu book on love. It is interesting that in the Gita, Krishna declares that he is kama. In other words, God is sensual love. Medieaval India and even modern India are extremely puritanical. This is due to Muslim and British influence. Topics such as sex are taboo.

Ancient India, on the other hand, had a completely different attitude towards love and sex. Sex was celebrated as one of the foundations of life. It was a positive experience. Sexual scenes were even carved into the towers of the temples. This is inconceivable nowadays. By depicting the gods making love all the world becomes happy. In my academic studies ancient India was the focus of my studies. My attitudes towards love and happiness have returned to this level of Indian culture. For a time my involvement with ISKCON was an immersion in mediaeval and modern Hindu culture which are completely against love and happiness in this world. But these ideas are fast evaporating from my life. They just lead to frustration.

  • Schopenhauer

Image Sources: http://www.flickr.com/photos/meladegypsie/523277391/in/photostream/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/meladegypsie/523277391/

http://counterlightsrantsandblather1.blogspot.com/2009/07/india-decriminalizes-gay-sex.html

Cultural Diversity

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Saturday, June 4, 2005 11:49:49 PM

Most Westerners see India as one. They fail to see the differences between one region and another. However, there are huge differences. Between Gujarat, a state in Western India, and Bengal, a state in Eastern India, the differences are greater than between England and Germany. The food, the language, the dress, the customs are all different. At least England and Germany use the same writing script. Gujarat and Bengal do not. And the differences between North India and South India are even more immence. Russia and France have more in common than these two regions. With such huge diversity it is a wonder that India can exist as a country. But, of course, the Hindu mind has no problem living with diversity and contradiction.

Anna, I have reached a point in my career where I can walk into a room of Gujaratis, Pujabis, Telegus, Bengalis, or any other group of Indians and immediately fit myself into their culture with enough understanding to feel completely comfortable and to be able to joke with the people about the finer details of their particular culture. On any given weekend I may find myself in the home of Gujaratis performing a religious ceremony according to their customs and then two hours later be in the home of Telegus working according to their customs and then later with a family of Punjabis and then with a group of Marathi speakers. I may go through a dozen regions of India in a single weekend. When I hear the surname of a family I immediately know the region of India they are from and their caste. I can tell what region a family is from just by seeing how the ladies tie their saris. Frankly, this is an amazing achievement. I know more about any given region of India than most Indians do. But this accomplishment did not come easily. It took me many years and much stress to come to this state of cultural immersion.