When I look into the world, and I try to see where the greatest vacuum is, I feel it is in the arena of preservation of spirituality and culture.
The United Nations has it’s commendable focus. It gets the most powerful nations to talk to each other so that conflicts can be resolved. The World Trade Organization has it’s commendable focus, the spreading of resources around the planet. But it makes me wonder, who is preserving the cultures around the world?

In achieving peace, the United Nations uses all means possible. A lot of them are commendable. The United Nations is against all things that are against world peace. But that is not always a good thing. I have observed people fighting to preserve the destruction of anything that they identify with. Sometimes they are fighting to preserve their family. Sometimes they are fighting to preserve their possessions. Sometimes they are fighting to preserve their culture. Sometimes they are fighting to preserve articles of their faith. If we seek to destroy everything that we fight for, we need to start with destroying ourself. After-all, every one of us certainly experiences doubts and conflicts within us, do we not?

Many things in our life we can earn. But there are somethings in our life are either given to us or we never receive them. Receiving our identity from our own unique culture is one of those things.

We started off talking about the United Nations interest in preserving peace. I was expressing that sometimes it seems that the United Nations is a lot more interested in preserving peace than in preserving culture. This is especially true of any culture that conflicts with the UNs peace-making process.
Unless each of us works to actively preserve our own culture, the message we are giving to our children is that they should identify less and less into the cultures they were born into. Why are we stating as an absolute that everyone has to embrace the unidentifiable….known as world culture? How is this imposition a solution to anything? Are we not basically watering down all the cultures of the world by not allowing any of them to remain unique?

Like I started off asking, “Who is working on preserving all the cultures of the world, including our own?”

We may have experienced how unquestioned and unabated corporate advertising has affected the cultures of the world. How much advertising is preserving cultural values that go against its product’s use is questionable.

What is the solution?
I strongly feel that it is time for all the cultures of the world to unite against all forces in the world that seek to destroy them by imposing their standards. Other people will never be as motivated in preserving our own cultures with the love and authenticity that we feel in our own heart. We each need to take the responsibility of conserving our culture with pride. It is time for all the cultures of the world to unite against those who abuse their power by pretending to love us. It is time for all the cultures of the world to seek friendship with each other and unite against any force that seeks to destroy our fellow brother’s culture.

I say that we let the United Nations remain our Sister’s responsibility. And let the World Trade Organization remain our Father’s jurisdiction. But, oh brother cultures of the world, I say, that we stand back to back with each other. I say that we stand like bulls with their horns facing out, but their backs to our brother’s back. And in this way, let us all be a circle so that our horns face out into the world. United, we will be a wreath of thorns, keeping a safe protective barrier from those who will be foreign to all of our cultural interests. Naturally the wreath will also be a safe barrier for those that are with our Sister and our Father who we may accidentally cause harm. I feel that this is in the best interest of the whole world. I feel that it is only in this way that Mother Earth would want us to live.

Only by recognizing our source in consciousness will our displacement reactions cease. This is where social/political movements, environmentalism, etc. tend to fall short, seeking only partial solutions due to their failure to address the dimension of consciousness. Something is better than nothing, of course, but to think that humanity’s greed will be addressed adequately (forget comprehensively!) based on morality (we shouldn’t be greedy because greed is wrong) or out of fear when faced with the eventuality of destroying the biosphere is naive. The center is still humanity, or the earth, not consciousness. Clearly then if we want to “save the world” in any lasting way only a perennial philosophy like Gaudiya Vedanta can offer real help.

In today’s world global markets and technology tend to unify the global village, while minority ethnicities and differences tend to pull it apart. The obvious problem here is that the unification derived from global markets and technology is nothing other than food for the fire of consumerism that it has created. Consumerism is one thing while the need to consume is another. The latter is a human necessity and the former an artificial creation, one that is from a spiritual point of view is harmful: fostering greed.

When this greed-fest is inhibited by ethnic religious minorities we try to educate them and invite them to the table. We (as postmodernists) are so kind (as opposed to modernists) in doing so as to allow them to continue with much of their rites and rituals as long as they understand them to be less than what they thought they were. Indeed, we may even see fit to fight for them and even partake of them and celebrate them as much as we find them useful in the here and now. This to me is a sham in the name of preserving diversity.

The heart of these religious traditions that often escapes many of their adherents also escapes their liberators. But it is their transcendent heart that offers a much deeper unifying force, one that in no way dismisses the traditions diverse approaches to it. The perennialist position is to unify the globe around the transcendent heart of the world’s religious traditions.

A Vedantist sees the culture of greed as a”displacement reaction,” to use a psychological term. A displacement reaction occurs when a normal need cannot be met and something else is substituted in its stead. Blanketing ourselves in consumerism add-ons obscures a deeper underlying malaise of an unfulfilled yearning that things and even thoughts cannot cure. This underlying need derives from the fact that we are three dimensional beings at present: physical, psychic, and ultimately spiritual. Consumerism is a displacement reaction that derives from a culture that underestimates our psychic and denies our spiritual dimensions.

Our displacement reaction of consumerism is fueled also by our anthropocentrism, the idea that individual human well-being is taken the measure of all things. But humans are not the center of all meaning and the source of all value, and material consumption is not all that being human is about. As different as it is from modernism, anthropocentrism and consumerism are the nonetheless the agenda of postmodernism’s new world order (or disorder), and this has been explained convincingly by a number of postmodern philosophers themselves. So here again Gaudiya Vedanta’s perennialism comes to our aid in its advocacy of a center-centered life rather than on off-center-centered life. And once the actual center is established, there is room for a broad circumference. To use Prabhupada’s analogy, if many stones of different shapes are thrown into a pond in the exact same place, the result is a broad and harmonious rippling effect.

At any rate, I was reminded of him, his life experience, all that he has stood for, and this review recently with the announcement of Smith’s latest book Tales of Wonder; Adventures Chasing the Divine, an Autobiography. I am not interested in reading this book, but again, Smith has lived a long life of personal conviction despite considerable opposition and held his ground admirably, and that is something I personally identify with.