Formalism may be favorable for devotion, but not always. The spirit is all-important, even when crossing every formality. What is required of us is our absolute attraction for service.

Modernity cannot reveal to humanity where we stand in what has been called existential space, in the hierarchy of universal existence. It therefore cannot provide “orientation,” for to orient our lives means to know where we come from, where we are to go, and most of all who we are.

Prabhupada Bhaktisiddhanta incorporated the Brahma Gayatri and sacred threads into Gaudiya practice in order to make an impression on the society in which those practices were significant. Now, in a different time and in different societies, are these practices still useful?

The line of causeless mercy is extending from the center, but the extension gets the more intense position. In this way we find the servants are more benevolent than even their Lord. It is inconceivable.

Many people don’t realize that science basically involves assumptions and faith. But nothing is absolutely proved. Godel showed logically that to prove something, there must be an overall set of assumptions, but that we can never prove that the assumptions are even self-consistent.

There is an old saying, going back to David Hume, that you can’t derive ought from is. And Hume was right! You can’t derive ought from is. Yet people insist on trying.

America, with its idealization of the rugged individual, is called the land of the free. The struggle between government intervention and individual freedom continues to be a hot topic in American politics, recently surfacing in the national health care debate. In such a climate, we tend to take our freedom for granted. But viewing our lives through the lens of the Bhagavad-gita, it is valid to question, “How free are we?”

“Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.”

The devotees serve Goloka Bihari Purusottama very happily in this month, the month when the materialists are very silent in their activities.

Everyone, every unit, even the smallest unit of the world is always hankering after rasa, happiness, ecstasy, and all possible phases of rasa are personified in Krishna.

Sometimes it is thought that the first chapter of the Bhagavad-gita is inconsequential, but intuition moves us to suspect that chapter one’s status as such is not without reason. Perhaps there is indeed more meaning to be drawn out than a superficial reading reveals.