ISKCON & Ethics 2, Why we need a moral philosophy, The Monk’s Podcast 131 with Rasamandala Prabhu

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This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna, Rasamundra Prabhu, welcome back to the Monks Podcast.
Hare Krishna, Shri Chandrachuram Prabhu, thank you for having me again. Not only am I honoured and grateful for you to be here, I was especially delighted that you took such an active interest in the last podcast that you also responded personally to comments on that podcast. It just shows that it really brings out the, you could say, the compassionate teacher in you, that you are really concerned that the subject be understood and if somebody has questions, the questions be addressed.
So I’m really grateful for that. Thank you. It’s my pleasure.
I’m not sure my motives are always quite as benign as they should be. But I, yeah, it is good to have that conversation and to promote constructive dialogue and I’m grateful to those devotees who took part in that, yeah, including yourself, yeah. Thank you.
So I thought that we could build today on the previous podcast that we had on ethics. And so I’ll summarise and then you can also add some things in the summary if you like. And then we will take it forward.
So ethics is a very important subject and we based our discussion using your paper and a broad discussion about why is ethics important? We have our philosophy but philosophy is more about, say, the ontology nature of reality. But how is that reality to be translated in our actions in daily life? this applies both to, as devotees, we have to make decisions in our devotional interactions. Sometimes we may, if we place spirituality above morality entirely, then spirituality becomes like a moral void and morality also becomes devalued.
So the Gita does talk about ethics a lot. It’s not just talking about spirituality. It’s an ethical discussion about the right thing to do.
And so devotees may sometimes devotee leaders, individual devotees also may, if they prioritise only spirituality, then ethical shortcuts may be taken sometimes intentionally, many times even unintentionally also. And also if customised ethics for different people in different roles are not recognised, then only generic spiritual ethics or spiritual values, not ethics values, if generic spiritual values only are emphasised, then say everybody should chant and everybody should do their sadhana and that will solve all problems. But then for specific roles in society, specific virtues, specific are required and the development of that, if it is not given adequate attention, then we may not be able to function properly as a movement.
So we talk about governance, how governance requires ethics and otherwise we cannot function well. And then apart from that also, we function in a world as devotees, we are not just living, interacting with each other, we are interacting with the world. And in the world there are many ethically complex issues in which we cannot just give black and white answers.
We have to understand the issues and then come up with tangible contributions. So right now, for the mainstream ethical discourse, we are largely irrelevant. We are often seen as irrelevant or even inconsequential.
So some amount of training in ethics and how to engage in ethics is required at least for those devotees in responsible positions. And this, of course, can be formed based on our own tradition, our resources from our tradition, but sustained attention is required for that to develop the ethics. Not simply that we quote verses to resolve as easy solutions to ethical issues.
So an ethical theory has to be built. So that was the broad subject that we discussed. You also mentioned something about the modes that goodness is also important even if transcendence is there.
And even passion is important. Passion is better than ignorance as Bhaktivinoda Thakur talks about it being material neutral. So these values, we cannot devalue them.
And that’s what will happen if we don’t give due attention to ethics. And by proper attention to ethics, not only can as a movement we function more harmoniously, but also we can as a missionary movement, we can also become more relevant and reach out to more people in the world. So any other points, Prabhu? No, I think that’s a great summary.
Thank you. Yeah, I did mention of course that there’s three areas we could apply ethical discourse. One is, which I liken to, just very briefly, I likened it to three values.
From the three values listed by Bhaktivinoda Thakur, I kind of extrapolated a little bit to suggest there are three arenas. So there’s the first value I think he gave is Nama Ruchi. So there is a moral dimension to our relationship with Krishna, if you like.
The second virtue he mentioned, and these are only, yeah, this is just a broad fit analysis. It’s not necessarily extremely tight where each virtue is restricted to that particular arena. But the second arena is and it’s mentioned in the first canto, second chapter, how the taste for the Holy Name is contingent on service to the Vaishnavas.
So that’s in the second chapter of the first canto, and I’ve forgotten the actual number of the verse. By service to the Vaishnavas, great service is done, and by such service one develops a taste for the Holy Name of the Lord. So the second arena suggested by Vaishnava saver is the community, the devotional community.
And then Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakur also mentioned a third value, which is Jiva Daya, and he suggests that without such compassion one’s bhakti is merely a semblance. It’s not authentic. So my conclusion was from this discussion is that we need to give attention to all three domains, to all three areas.
The relationship we have with the Supreme Lord, the relationship we have through other devotees and particularly in the, I think, the development and leadership of communities, and thirdly in our outreach and how we can actually effectively address moral issues in our outreach and make it meaningful to others. That’s true. So Professor, there’s something else just to add to what you said.
I didn’t discuss that. I found that particular analysis of the analysis of action is very striking, that as devotees, when we talk about Vaishnava Seva and Jiva Daya, we only talk about that in some stereotype activities. That okay, Vaishnava Seva means feed devotees or help them in some services or Jiva Daya means distribute books or invite people to temples.
But the way you explained it is that this means that we act in a way that is actually helpful for them and that involves ethical conduct. So it’s easy to do something like serve prasad to some devotees, easy. But in sustained relationship to act in a way that that relationship becomes sustained and healthy, ethics will be important.
And Jiva Daya also, I made a point last time also, how ethics permeates the entire ambit of Krishna consciousness. So we may be very compassionate in inviting people to come to Krishna and providing them facilities. But if they find that the conduct of devotees is not ethical, ethically upright, ethically sound, then the people may come but then they will get alienated and they will go away.
So that’s true. Also of course you discussed in the beginning about how knowing, doing and being, knowledge, skills and values and that also Prabhupada talked about in the Seven Purposes of ISKCON about imbalance of values has to be corrected by sharing knowledge. So in that sense Prabhupada also wanted to establish ethics.
Yes. So I thought today we could discuss, we could build on that subject and then our previous podcast is also available for participants to watch as well as a summary in that which will provide links for them. So now maybe if last time you mentioned this briefly that morality and ethics, is there a difference between those and how can that be say more clearly understood? Because also these words have connotations.
Sometimes the word morality has a little bit negative connotation, you are moralising or doing moral policing. Ethics seems to be something which is very accepted. There are corporate ethics, there is even sports ethics, there are political ethics.
Ethics seems to be a universally accepted almost necessity even in today’s world. So how do we differentiate between the two? Yeah, I think that’s a very good point. And perhaps that preliminary understanding is helpful to clarify even some of the discussions we had on your last podcast.
Some scholars suggest using the words morality and ethics and some of their corollaries such as morals or ethical, synonymously they have the same meaning. My own view on that is there’s a danger of somehow blunting our discernment by using the two words entirely considering them both coterminous, they’re synonymous. Any dictionary will give you several meanings of each of the words morality and ethics and their corollaries.
And some of them are synonymous but some of them are quite different. And the way that I like to define and for practical purposes I have defined it that way. I’m just trying to find my notes here actually which I will have to come to in a minute.
Is that morality is anything to do with the difference between right and wrong or between good and evil. And by the way those two ways of framing morality represent different approaches. The latter being more associated with virtue ethics as we’ll come to later.
But anything to do with right or wrong or good or evil or virtuous and vicious. The word ethics refers more, as I use it, to the more deliberate or conscious consideration and application of moral rules, principles and so on. In other words it’s kind of a step above.
And there are two specific meanings of ethics that indicate this. The first is the use of ethics to refer to moral philosophy which goes back of course to the ancient Greeks and according to modern scholarship now to many other pre-modern societies such as the African, the Chinese with their Confucianism, the Indian included. So there isn’t just that kind of rather too narrowly circumscribed understanding of ancient philosophy as being only Greek or having its roots only in Greek thought.
So ethics can mean moral philosophy which kind of more recently emerged as a distinctive discipline in Western academic space, in Western universities. The second meaning, as you alluded to, is when it refers to professional codes of conduct as referred to medicine, psychology, business, and you mentioned I think sport. Yeah, corporate sports.
Sport, for example. One would hope that chivalry was a virtue. And perhaps these days we might look to a little humility as well.
I don’t know whether that can be used to complement the one that’s obvious, which is courage, for example, in sporting activities. It’s very important. So it refers first to moral philosophy and then to certain professional codes of conduct, medicine, psychology, law, sport, as we mentioned, or to any kind of sub-genre of moral philosophy such as environmental ethics.
So that’s the kind of genre of moral philosophy that focusses on some specific issues to do with the environment rather than all the other issues that are there. Bioethics, recently been popular. That’s quite a good classification.
So when you’re saying as a philosophy and with Jandara’s within the philosophy, it’s more like a rationally developed system of thought which can provide subsequently directions for acting. Whereas in, say, in sports ethics or corporate ethics, it would also when you talk about code of conduct, it’s more of very specific directives also. It might not involve so much.
A code of conduct is not so. It also has some intellectual dimensions to it, but it’s not so much a well-developed system of thought as it is a specific set of directions. Well, I’m saying it actually belongs to the field of ethics.
It is more deliberate. It may not quite be so philosophical, but it certainly requires collaborative reflection. And therefore, whereas morality itself, morality pervades all aspects of life.
It’s all pervasive. And one sometimes has difficulty deciding what is a moral issue and what’s not a moral issue. It’s so broad.
Even though it’s so broad, we do have to differentiate. We can’t say morality is everything, but it does seem to pervade many aspects of life, somewhat depending on which approach to morality you take, of course. But one can have some kind of moral sense and sensibility without necessarily reflecting too much on it.
One may just simply use one’s moral sense to criticise others all the time. There may be some lack of reflection there. So ethics refers really more to that conscious, deliberate, and sometimes systemized reflection on moral issues.
So there’s morality and ethics. So in a sense, ethics stands a level above morality. It’s looking at it as a reflective approach.
The third term I want to introduce here is hermeneutics, which is the science of interpretation. In the Western academic space, it usually refers to the disciplines of law, where you have to interpret the law, to literature, and to religion. In our own tradition, the word mamunksa is often identified with scriptural interpretation.
So I don’t want to get too much into that term now, but because of certain practical issues within ISKCON now, and I’ll discuss this later regarding the interpretation of Shila Prabhupada’s books and some of his controversial statements — we’ll discuss it later — there are certain ethical dimensions to hermeneutics, and particularly something that Simon Blackburn, a well-known British moral philosopher, talks about, as do others. He talks about the moral climate or the ethical environment. It’s the kind of ethos and surrounding environment of ideas that we’re all susceptible to, and which somehow determine to a great extent our moral responses.
So the ethical environment has changed significantly from the 1960s, the era, the decade of ISKCON’s incorporation to the 2020s now, and where we’ve got a very — well, I won’t go into detail, but we’ve got a highly polarised, quite vicious debate or even by those who are suggesting they’re interested in virtue. So the quality of the debate needs to be looked at, and some of the moral insights, and perhaps more importantly, some of the moral assumptions that are made in particularly popular or populist discourse don’t always stand up very well to scrutiny, and scrutiny often reveals some inconsistencies in the moral discourse and in the moral perspective some people have. And that’s very useful, and I’ll come to that later by suggesting we need to have, all of us, whether we’re involved in the populist discourse or whether we’re members of a religious institution or whatever, it’s useful to actually move from having assumptions about morality, although personal insights may be important, person intuition may be important, and has been much discussed in moral philosophy, but also having that approach which gives attention to ethics rather than simply thinking we have our personal moral insight and that’s good enough.
— Okay. — So three terms, really, I’m defining them, morality, ethics, and I think we also need to look at the ethical dimensions of hermeneutics which are sometimes ignored, but I don’t want to get into that in too much detail at the moment unless you’ve got any questions about that, of course, that helps clarify. — Okay, I’m just trying to, if we consider this to be, it’s almost like if there is a building and there is a foundation to it, so it may not be a very precise metaphor, but in general the choices that we make, how should I do this, should I do that, that is reflected in the code of conduct, but the code of conduct is based on a philosophy that might not be very well examined, that we might not be even understood, but we all have some kind of philosophy, and when we even articulate or develop that philosophy, we have certain assumptions which are addressed by hermeneutics.
So in one sense we could say each of these three is like these three are interrelated layers, all of them are connected, quite, so if you want to discuss hermeneutics then probably we have to go much deeper when we want to discuss philosophy, then also we need to go deep, and then for most people it’s like sometimes we feel that this particular action is wrong, but we may not be able to explain why it is wrong, or we feel that something is right, so in one sense we have you could say, I’m not saying it’s always right, but we have a conscience or a because an intuitive ethical sense which tells us what is right and what is wrong, again this may not always be guiding us properly, but to understand or to articulate why something is right or something is wrong, we need to be able to have a well-developed system of thought, so I’m on the right track in understanding what you said? Precisely, and later I’ll come to this because you’ve mentioned rules and conduct or codes of conduct which are more or less rules, so you know how useful are rules, and what happens when rules break down? A kind of phenomenon for which the Bhagavad Gita is a prime example where Arjuna somehow was bewildered in trying to apply rules in the specific context in which he found himself, and all of us, if we’re just slightly reflective, and this will apply to all or at least most devotees, you know, we find that actually rules at times break down. If I’m walking in the… and I see a sannyasi, the rule is I should either pay my obeisances, my dandavats first thing, or fast for the rest of the day if I fail to do that. What happens if it’s raining? What happens if you know that the sannyasi in question will pay obeisances to us in return, as many will do in some context, and they’re in a hurry.
What do we do then? I’m just trying to give one example from my own life of when we’re faced with dilemmas, and when the dilemmas come, obviously rules very, very quickly break down, and I am going to later in this podcast give a kind of overview of what our moral philosophy may be with reference to rules and reason and going further as well. So perhaps I could discuss that or we could discuss that later if that’s possible. Yes.
So this also, I think it relates to the in our, in Upadesha Amrit, the nature of instruction, this is where the concept of niyamagraha comes in. Absolutely. Deciding what is a, when to stick to the letter of the law or when to focus on its spirit, that also requires ethical reflection.
Absolutely. Yes. So would that come at the level of philosophy? Can we come to that later? Because what I’d like to do is discuss that.
Perhaps it would be useful to move ahead, but hold on to that. I don’t want you to lose that question, but I think actually it would be probably useful to discuss it later. So maybe once you got this difference between morality and ethics clear, we discussed this briefly in the previous session, but why do we as devotees, or especially leaders, we need to focus on moral ethical issues and not just on spiritual topics? I think we discussed some things for both that when you talked about the ambit of Vaishnava Seva and Jiyudaya, but maybe some more specific examples would you like to give? I’d like to summarise, and I think it’s useful to summarise, without going into too much detail.
The first one, and by the way, in analysing these challenges we face, that prompted me to a large degree to differentiate between morality and ethics. And for my purposes, there were two main challenges, and the third one later arose. The first one I call moral challenges, and those are the incidents and perhaps sometimes the kind of confronting or shocking cases of moral turpitude both personally and societally for ourselves.
Sometimes we fail ourselves in the moral sense, and we have to deal with it. Sometimes we’ve seen that the society has been prone to some rather shocking and disturbing incidents of moral turpitude. So, in this case, by moral issues I’m referring to cases where our conduct clearly does not match our ideals.
And how do we deal with that both personally and societally? Because there will always be some kind of gap, and philosophers have noted this. You know, there’s one philosophy, Dorothea Friede, who writes on virtue ethics, and she said, naturally there’s always a gap between the ideal and the real. And I think it’s important to keep that in mind.
The question is how to address that perhaps most effectively to deal with those issues when we fail to live up to our own moral and spiritual standards or when the society does that. Those are moral issues. I won’t go into all the details.
The early days we use Sankirtan. Also, the rate of divorce within ISKCON didn’t match our standards regarding marriage being for life. There are issues to do with leadership, failure in leadership, even some accusations of corruption within leadership.
And these have naturally arisen within our society, within ISKCON. I won’t go into all the details there. Let me understand.
Let’s take one example, say. So, of a book distribution, if you take the example, so this is an ethical issue because of the presumption that the spiritual purpose, spiritual purpose that we are giving Krishna’s compassion to the world. Because of that assumption of spiritual compassion, many times we acted in, we mean some devotee book distributors, acted in ways that were unethical.
So, is that the reason why this is an ethical issue? Or for that matter, with respect to marriages breaking down. So, now this is a widespread phenomena, but maybe it is because householder life was devalued as being mundane. So, it is not just a broader sociological phenomena but it is because of the way we participated in, I mean again, devotees look at householder life and acted in householder life.
So, that made the things worse. Is that how this is an ethical issue? Well, I think we need to look again. I return to the moral discourse.
What is the environment of ideas and moral sensibilities in which we live? What are the kind of values we have? How do we view the Brahmacharya ashram? How do we view the Krihastra ashram? What are some of the possible, what are some of the philosophical truths and also some of the philosophical misconceptions that stand behind our practises and misplaced practises? Have we misappropriated truth sometimes? These are some of the important questions. They require a degree of self-criticism. And I think again, we must recognise, I mean there is always the chance of actually charges of hypocrisy and of course, you know, the Kali Yuga is known as the age of hypocrisy which kind of suggests that if we are to actually become influential and Srila Prabhupada has several statements on this, if we’re going to spread Krishna consciousness, we have to avoid hypocrisy.
And there are several discussions by leading moral philosophers on what has caused the decline in morality and not only that, the change in the quality of the moral discourse that accompanies changes in moral standing or moral status. Studies by such philosophers as Alasdair MacIntyre who suggests that we’ve moved away from a spirit of community towards this idea of individualism. We’ve lost and broken our links to tradition.
And he also says we’ve forgotten what is the nature of man as he could be rather than, and I’m sorry if I’m using just the masculine sense, man as he is. You know, we’ve lost that telos, that sense of purpose to human life. Others like Dorothea Friede, she actually points to some of the calamities that happened in human history.
And of course, the Second World War is one example because when, you know, the allied nations learnt about the Nazi atrocities, it had a huge effect on people. Of course, what is sometimes not mentioned is the fact that actually the anti-Semitism that was there within Nazi Germany was also quite widespread in other countries as well. That is sometimes neglected.
But it had a huge impact. And one of the reasons it had an impact is this, that actually for us who are perhaps more connected with history as connected with imperialism and colonialism, if we talk about people in other countries, there is this assumption, and we need to question that assumption, that they may not be civilised. So even the British were actually questioning long ago whether the Indians had any moral sensibility.
And that debate, by the way, goes on and on and on. It’s important we discuss that. The point I’m trying to make is if, if I just finish this and I’ll be very quick, if someone who is very distant from us or where we look down on is immoral, it becomes very difficult.
If, however, that immoral behaviour comes from a society that we consider to be civilised, and they’re cultured because they listen to Wagner or whatever, and they have many great German philosophers, the German idealists, for example, then we start to go, we start to ask, hold on, what happened there? Germany is not so far from us, geographically or culturally. So it raises difficult questions. And when moral issues happen within our own society, directly, and we include ISKCON in this, then those questions become so far more difficult to answer or to sidestep or to avoid.
Okay. So I’m saying the issues of moral turpitude are one example. I don’t want to go too long onto this because I think we need to, unless there’s something, unless there’s something you need to be clarified here.
And by the way, the point I’m trying to make is we don’t want to be, we want to avoid kind of what I call rancid finger-pointing and criticism, negative criticism. And these days, I think that goes too far. Generally, in populist moral discourse, we’re always looking for faults.
Certainly, we need to avoid that. Morality and moral reasoning is primarily for us, not for others. That’s one of my precepts, if you like, one of my principles.
It’s primarily for us. It’s for us first. But I would say, as it is for us, it may be for us personally, but it may also be for us collectively.
And we want to avoid the extreme where we’re denying there is any problem. There are some challenges for us. And we need to be courageous enough to look at them and to say to myself, Rassamandla, your moral behaviour is really falling far short of Aishnab.
And I think all of us, or someone who claims to be of Aishnab, we all go through that. And it should be expected. And we need to have some kind of positive discourse that allows us to move on from where we are to where we should be.
Okay. So, avoiding both what I call the rancid finger pointing, but also the denial that there are any challenges whatsoever. Yeah.
So, I’m just trying to understand that when you give practical examples, you started from the broad world and then you came to our movement itself. So, the issue here is that as devotees, in fact, one of the presumptions at least I have seen in the devotee outreach is that there is a presumption of ethical superiority that society is filled with immorality, society is filled with so much degradation and we as devotees are going to teach people how to correct that degradation. So, in some ways we could say as devotees when we start following the four regulatory principles some amount of ethical conduct does come up naturally.
However, there are many other aspects to ethical conduct which we may overlook. So, if I understand what you are saying is that within our movement because you also mentioned the word hypocrisy which is quite a strong word to use that we may not be acting according to our own standards and that may not be simply because say we lack the willpower but is it also we lack the clear understanding of how to act in that situation because my question over here is that if somebody is not acting ethically this normal understanding would be just need to become purified. So, if somebody is acting ethically because of lust, anger, greed and the solution to that is to chant Hare Krishna come closer to Krishna and lust, anger, greed will go away.
So, in fact that is what we often teach. We just see how society is degraded and if they start chanting Hare Krishna then they will become free from degradation. isn’t the purification that comes from devotional practises the solution to ethical ethical improper behaviour to unethical behaviour.
What is the need for ethical, specific ethical reflection or ethical philosophy and that’s one question and another thing is that you did quote a lot of if I can use some scorn terminology like mundane thinkers so when we have the resources to purify ourselves and purify others, why do we need to look at mundane thinkers to discuss about, to learn ethical values. I’m going to come to the question of why we some of us need to engage with western philosophers. I’ll come to that later if I may.
I think it’s absolutely necessary that we do that actually. Okay. And there are previous examples such as Bhaktivinoda Thakur and our own Shila Prabhupada who did so.
And I think it’s necessary for certain, not for everyone, but for certain reasons, for certain devotees it’s necessary and I’m going to come to that. And your previous point, by the way I’m not saying that any shortcoming between where we want to be and where we are is hypocrisy. But it easily slips into hypocrisy if we’re not careful.
And I think we need to be very, very aware of where we are in spiritual life individually as well as emphasising the goal. We need to know the ultimate tell us but we also need to know the next step. And actually it’s somewhat disconcerting if not at times down for painful.
We kind of experience this existential angst sometimes when we don’t reach our own values. That can be very painful. If we don’t reach the values of others that’s one thing but if we don’t actually maintain conduct that matches our own values or the virtues that we think are important then we feel somehow it can be quite distressing.
But that is also an impetus for improvement. Now regarding this, Shila Prabhupada does say very explicitly to answer your other questions, he says very explicitly in his purport to the 13th chapter verses 8 to 12 which lists a number of human qualities or virtues if you like. He does say there despite using the word automatically to infer that actually through the process of bhakti all the results of all the other yogas come.
I’m talking about Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga and Ashtanga Yoga which is normally, the last one is normally associated with yoga. Those results come automatically but he rejects the interpretation that automatic means or implies that we become automatons, machines that we’re non-conscious because he says that we should deliberate on these listed virtues regularly in order to assess how well we’re doing spiritually. That is there.
I don’t have the exact reference but if you look in the that purport the 13th chapter verses 8 to 12 shortly after using the word automatically, maybe 3 or 4 sentences later, he actually refutes the idea that automatic means unconscious. That is a deliberate reflection on how am I doing in meeting these virtues. So I’d say that the other point I’m going to argue about chanting Hare Krishna brings everything.
Yes, in a sense, the Bhagavatam asserts that those who are devotees develop all the qualities of the demigods. Now the demigods are responsible for universal administration. One would therefore imagine that if we develop all the qualities of the demigods we develop certain administrative qualities or the qualities that are needed for good administration.
I’m later going to discuss this because I think that some of the different aspects of ethics and morality whether it’s rules or reflection and reason or whether it’s virtue or so on I’d like to present some kind of systemization of those. Those various approaches tend to be associated with or linked to various kind of functional roles within society based on the system of four vanas and the Kshatriya class was particularly concerned with ethics and the moral status of their domain. And Srila Prabhupada mentions that Krishna and Balarama in the Krishna book he said because they were Kshatriyas they studied ethics.
That’s an explicit quote by the way. I may not have got the words quite right but he said very close to that because they were Kshatriyas Krishna and Balarama studied ethics. Now I’ll move to that because I’m not sure what word he the Sanskrit word for ethics is it may be dharma but we’ll come to that later.
So can I move on a little bit here because or do you want to because we’re discussing moral issues and moral turpitude and I want to come to that later if I can I’m just a little concerned for time make a note of any questions and perhaps come back to it. The second category is ethical issues. By ethical issues I refer to those issues where we’re not sure what right or wrong is.
With the moral issues we know there’s a shortfall. Yeah. But with ethical issues as I’m using the term.
I didn’t realise we’re differentiating analysis also so when you’re talking about moral issues then your point is that the process of bhakti will work but whether it is working or not we have to be introspective about that. So we have to look at these values and see okay in this cases it’s clear that these are the values I want to develop but am I developing it or not? So say for example with respect to the family say humility tolerance that can help in preventing the breakup of the family. So that was the issue which you mentioned.
So am I doing it or not? So the direction is clear and the expectation is that by our practise of bhakti we will be moving in that direction but what we require is introspection to see to check whether we are moving in that direction or not. And now we are going to the issues where the direction itself may not be clear. Yes, exactly.
So introspection may be of course part of the process of bhakti. Let’s look at that. It may not be separate from bhakti.
And Srila Prabhupada suggests that reflecting on those values which are in sense moral values depending on how particularly adopt the approach of virtue ethics but he’s saying they’re important for spiritual development. Not just moral development. So the virtues which for some philosophers are central to their moral philosophy and there’s not all philosophers in recent times the word virtue is kind of almost incomprehensible or unintelligible to some people these days.
They’re not quite sure what you’re talking about and we probably need to unpack the terms value and virtue. I think the word values is much more common in today’s world than virtues. Yes, well I think there’s a difference and I don’t think we have time to get into the difference but I think there’s a very interesting difference generally between the word and there are different opinions obviously and different meanings but again there is a kind of there’s an indication of a kind of evolution in our moral development inherent in the words value and virtue but I’ll come to that later but again I think we need to be careful in ISKCON about differentiating between cause and effect.
The cause of our moral development, the cause of our knowledge, the cause of our detachment is bhakti but the results must also be there if our bhakti is mature. If we’re mature we will have piety if we’re mature we will have jnana, if we’re mature we will have vairagya I’m sorry I’ve forgotten the verse but there is a verse that says that actually those will come automatically. They’re the main servants.
Yes, precisely. But we must be very careful not to because bhakti is the cause we shouldn’t think therefore we can avoid the development of jnana I’d say even mundane piety jnana knowledge and detachment we can’t ignore that they come automatically so if we are decrying those features of life So when you’re saying cause and effect that bhakti will lead to this so that doesn’t mean that these are unimportant just because they come by bhakti so the point is they are important and the glory of bhakti is such that bhakti will lead even to them but that doesn’t mean that they are important and if we decry or neglect them then that is definitely not the right thing to do Absolutely especially if we don’t have them Okay that becomes like sour grapes then Yeah possibly we’re all prone to the sour grapes phenomenon I know yeah that’s true yeah and I’ll come to that later what I call the tension between the romantic and the cynic but let’s leave that now but I don’t think we can avoid the need to develop virtues whether we consider it part of morality or part of spiritual life we cannot avoid developing the virtues so there are the moral issues there are those issues there are those challenges we have where we fall short quite understandably from our own standards individually and collectively then the ethical issues which are coming up whether it’s ethical to have women gurus whether it’s ethical to drink milk that is derived from commercially produced milk which is linked to violence like to violence so there’s even whether it’s sometimes right to wear non-devotional clothes or devotional clothes there have been some protracted discussions which I think are a little pedestrian and overworked personally and we need to address of course some of those issues as well particularly the underlying issues regarding western dress, eastern dress India or the West and the tendency if we’re not careful as I mentioned in the last talk to start to attribute moral status according to material designation moral status according to material designation that means that somebody in Indian dress that means they are morally superior or somebody is in a particular ashram that means they are morally superior or someone’s in a particular religion they’re morally superior or someone is a migrant in the country rather than one of the indigenous population and then what I’ve noticed is the tendency to define the English culture according as I would perhaps according to Shakespeare but someone told me the other day I thought English culture was fish and chips Really? Oh God and that is part of British culture as well in other words we tend to look at our own culture we judge our own culture according to its highest expression and we often judge other people’s cultures according to the lowest expression So how is this considered the highest? means English culture is? Shakespeare is pretty high I mean he has great insight into people’s into human nature I mean you can differ in your view but I’m not differing in that so you’re saying that equating all of English culture with him that’s what okay the point I’m trying to make and I’m probably not expressing it clearly enough is we often judge we judge our own culture by the highest aspects I got that English culture is what did you say English culture is? English culture is fish and something like that you said something fish and chips you know it’s a diet that’s quite common it’s a meal that’s quite common okay but what does that got to do with Shakespeare? Well the person the person I spoke to who was not of British origin he was from Europe somewhere as far as I remember said that he thought British culture was fish and chips So are you saying that he is demeaning it or he is elevating it? Are you just reducing it to one particular thing? It’s probably a little more banal fish and chips I don’t want to particularly decry fish and chips we’re vegetarian we don’t eat fish but it’s probably a little more banal banal expression because in any of course this is very sensitive today because in most cultures you have a high culture and a low culture this is something which is not very popular and people are trying to stop that they don’t like any hierarchy whatsoever but actually in most countries you will find and in cultures and ethnicities you will find I would suggest expressions of higher and lower culture that’s very sensitive when discussing in the contemporary context and according to the current moral environment as we discussed I’m getting clearly what you’re saying so in India also India is a very diverse country and in certain communities or certain states it’s thought that people of this place are stingy these people are dumb or these people are very self-centred so that is also like equating lack of moral virtue or moral status with a particular geographical designation geographical location I’m horrified sometimes by the kind of articles I’ve read from some devotees about how a person became interested in Krishna consciousness and they were a Muslim and therefore how great their conversion is that shows despite their perhaps noble attentions to praise Krishna consciousness but it may show a rather demeaning attitude towards a person just because they follow a particular religion in this case Islam so we’ve got to be very careful about how we judge other cultures it’s a big subject this I don’t think you’re putting it this way I wouldn’t necessarily if I would if I encourage some devotees from a Muslim background to write an article about how to gain Krishna consciousness I would definitely encourage them to write it but it is a remarkable human interest story it does not necessarily have to reflect that we consider a particular religion to be it’s not a statement about the moral status of any religion or people of those religion but I understand that it could be seen that way given the so I understand, recently I wrote an article not necessarily seen that in one or two instances I think perhaps the view of the writer or the speaker is that as well which I find unsettling, I may be judging wrong that’s okay but we need to be very, what I’m saying is we need to be very very careful about judging other cultures and there’s whole issues about moral relativism and cultural relativism here and they’re very important discussions to have because these the tendency to designate according to designation to ascribe a person a moral to evaluate their moral status by some designation is wrong by both current popular even moral sensibilities it is wrong and by our own tradition it is wrong because Lord Krishna answers Arjuna’s moral dilemma by expressing the metaphysical truth and there’s an ethical dimension there to it that we’re not this body therefore as soon as we lose that understanding which of course, for which ISKCON is well known, it’s almost our slogan many, you know we’re not this body and academics and others have noted how we use that phrase but it is the core, it is the beginning only of Lord Krishna’s instructions and therefore if one actually somehow or other ignores that then one is immediately not on the platform of morality, or to speak of spirituality, one is on the platform of ignorance there is a challenge here just quickly, and that is that according to some writers, McIntyre is one person who particularly makes this point can you divorce any system of ethics from its particularities in terms of a particular people, culture, ethnicity religion, can you have what I call a kind of disembodied culture what do we mean by a spiritual culture that is non-sectarian or transcends everything and yet there you are here am I with Tulsi Mala which I bought in India hmm so some and some writers I was reading something just a couple of days ago there was this author, there is a very good book called Branding Bhakti it is remarkably comprehensive informative and informative overview of what is happening very good book by a Greek scholar called Nicole Karapana Giotis my wife is Greek, she will hate the way I pronounce that but a very good book because she actually not only looks at what is called the Hinduization of ISKCON and the tendency to sometimes perhaps over identify ISKCON with a particular geographical region or ethnicity but she also criticises sometimes the strident voice of universalism which criticises Hinduism and any identification of ISKCON and its teachings with India so by the way there is a moral discussion about just briefly particularities and universal truths which is very complex and very relevant but I don’t want to get into it now but what I am saying is if you are actually on the level of morality that describes moral status or spiritual status or whatever according to designation you are immediately falling foul of Lord Krishna’s teachings and not just not the conclusion of his teachings but the beginning of his teachings so therefore this early instruction we are applying hermeneutics here because in the Vedic notion of hermeneutics whatever statements are made early on or at the end tend to have more importance than those in the middle I hear so immediately, I mean you know verses 2.12, 2.11, 2.12 2.13, 2.14 2.15 and then metaphysical basis in 2.16 and you know very important verses which bring together scripture and our own human condition, our own experience, you, me, these soldiers, Krishna’s adopting a pedagogical strategy that relates scripture to our own experience, very important but he also brings together the connection between moksha liberation and dharma, particularly in verse 2.14, I won’t get into it now but my conclusion is if we are based, I mean there’s different ways to look at morality whether it be rules or reason or virtues or some of the theories we have associated with them such as utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism or act utilitarianism, Kant’s deontology, the great virtue ethics and the moral and the more recent interest, the new versions of virtue ethics which are emerging today very significantly you know if we if we’re doing it on that basis of designation we really are at a low level it’s not we’re not one question if we see this sort of equating or assigning certain moral qualities or more specifically moral deficiencies to certain geographical or regional or cultural demographic that seems to be a universal human tendency for a large part of human history so that it has been increasingly recognised and critiqued in recent times does that seem to indicate some kind of moral awakening or a sharpening of a moral sensibility because say many even many jokes or satirical humour or comedy which was quite which would have been quite acceptable 20 years ago it is it is seen as very inappropriate now so is it the moral senses heightening or what is exactly happening I think that’s a very difficult question to answer because some would see us human beings generally if you look at the issue globally as a morality being rather regressive others would see it as actually being progressive I suspect it’s probably a mixture of both and it is useful to see where we’ve progressed but also to look at some of the regressive tendencies in human society and not only our morality but the nature of our moral discourse at the moment which is highly polarised as many of us whether we’re academics or whatever we recognise just by knowing something of the news for example I think that’s an important question I think it’s very difficult to answer for various reasons there’s so many variables involved including our own getting older so it’s difficult to actually come to answer that I appreciate the nuance sometimes you bring into the discussions so this one thing is true that what you said that even if there is a heightened moral sensibility but then along with that there is also you could say almost a heightened moral wrath that is for political correctness can go towards towards extremes severe extremes so it’s like don’t be non-judgemental and I will be supremely judgemental if you are not non-judgemental this is the long standing and quite broadly discussed but perhaps not discussed enough contradiction in being a liberal yes and it’s inherent how do you get round that and every society makes some kind of moral judgement particularly when it comes to the arena of law there are one or two theorists would say that the law has nothing to do with morality but I think more traditionally the insight is there and I definitely would share that is that the law should be based on our moral philosophy yeah philosophy may have a good pragmatic side to it I don’t doubt that but every society has to know who to exclude in one way or another and I think that’s important to recognise so yeah we’re raising a few difficult questions here and those difficult questions will also have to be asked with regard to ISKCON and whether we are criticising westerners or whether we are criticising Indians and Hindus or members of other nations there are some difficult challenges and please don’t tell me that those challenges are not there in ISKCON they are and we need to deal with them they’re difficult ones and they need to be dealt with sensitively but they’re there and personally I think if we go down that route of not recognising that we are to some degree ascertaining moral status according to designation I think we’ll be in trouble but equally we need to define how our culture is connected to some of its roots, geographical roots for example, how it’s connected to India. I have a particular stance on that which I’ll just briefly mention and that is well I think a couple of points, one is that Lord Krishna chose to appear there and I think Queen Kunti makes this kind of allusion by the way Queen Kunti was really in her prayers was looking at how the Lord embodies contradictions there’s a kind of you could say she’s adopting a highly philosophical dialectical approach there looking at apparent paradoxes you’re the unborn but you were born to Yashoda and then she says you’re known as a Yadava and the example is given just like just like Sandalwood Sandalwood grows everywhere or in many places but the best Sandalwood comes from the Malayan hills therefore you talk about Malayan Sandalwood he gives that example so Lord Krishna appeared in India so that should be perhaps the only cause for pride but pride also brings responsibility as Lord Chaitanya said if you’re born in Bharadwaj how can it bring responsibility so if we think we’re somehow privileged as we may be by being born in India I don’t necessarily question that but that privilege of course privilege is very much decried these days and I think we’ve got that wrong I think we should decry misuse of privilege I don’t think we should condemn privilege itself and and we see that you know this is also on designation these days so you’re a white heterosexual therefore your moral status is somehow suspicious or you’re somehow inheriting the sins of your forefathers anyway there’s a whole discussion there but yeah these are some of the discussions and they’re not easy ones to have because both rooting morality in a specific tradition in a parochial or narrow or selfish sense based on our bodily designations is wrong but there’s also some difficulties in thinking that actually the particularities of our tradition the connectant to India for example or its roots in a particular sampradaya is entirely meaningless and I think we need to negotiate that by the way I don’t think I’ve got a lot of answers for that I’ve suggested some things some ideas regarding the need to say that Krishna could have chosen anywhere but he chose India and therefore by Krishna’s presence and the presence of Krishna consciousness India is important and also to suggest that that should bring humility rather than a more ostentatious form of pride and that goes for all of us by the way whatever tradition we’re born in but those are long questions but anyway we’ve discussed here some of the moral issues that we have we’ve discussed some of the ethical issues where we’re unsure about what’s right or wrong such as as pertained to a hinksa milk for example and the third one is how the ethical environment as it is now tends to evoke perhaps more negative responses to some of Shiva Prabhupada’s statements in his books than they did in the 1960s when some of the questions about identity politics and sexual diversity when those questions were being placed on the table whereas nowadays many thinkers and social commentators and social activists would say that those questions are answered and I’d like to answer make one point here it will be useful if we recognise that many of us despite our diverse backgrounds ask similar questions despite the fact we may give different answers of course there will be diversity in the question we shouldn’t think we ask all ask the same questions I think that’s a mistake also but I will make the proposal that if we look at the questions there will be more commonality than if we look at the answers and we need to appreciate and my study in western philosophy has been quite exciting because I see that they ask the same questions that we ask interesting same questions the same the same moral questions for example and sometimes they provide similar answers for example you know the question and it’s one of the six questions in the Bhagavatam where does morality now reside now that Krishna has returned to his own abode accompanied by religion knowledge and so on do you know that question it’s one of the six main questions yes Krishna is so dharma that when Krishna departs what is going to where is he where has dharma gone to reside now yes well what about the conversation in the west about the death of God which was which was brought up by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and others and it wasn’t saying that God is literally dead the concern more was now that we’ve given up religion or we’re trying to give up religion as the source of our moral truths where are we going to anchor them reliably well this is so insightful I read about Nietzsche’s statement about death of God and I never correlated it with Bhagavatam it’s amazing but see the similarity to the questions I mean obviously they’re somewhat different oh yeah that’s a huge amount of similarity still yeah so so the human condition in fact Nietzsche in his passage also he talks about the social catastrophe resulting from the death of God and not just social catastrophe he says that you know the all the oceans will not be enough to cleanse the hands from this greatest sin of sins that we have committed so he’s talking about apocalyptic proportions of problems and the departure of Krishna and the advent of Kali Yuga is also at least a moral apocalypsy that the Bhagavatam talks about so it’s very similar yeah I think we need to be careful about attributing the loss of morality only to the as it were the metaphorical death of God or to the decline in religion I think we need to be careful about that personally because for various reasons one being that we may not define in our own tradition religion in the same way as most people do or more specifically as it’s defined by the Abrahamic traditions I think we need to be careful of that and I’ve even raised that question as I mentioned last time whether the word dharma which some writers have said is almost some have said it’s equivalent some say almost equivalent to the word ethics and that’s debatable it’s a very interesting debate but the question is is it more accurately translated as religion or is it more accurately translated as ethics and I’m suggesting that we need to actually be very very careful about identifying ISKCON as a religion particularly in the sense that it’s commonly understood and it might be better to identify it as an ethics or having an ethical culture if you like with an ethical philosophy that ultimately many aspects of that broad Vedic culture point towards two things one is the need for an absolute in order to actually make any kind of decisions although that absolute begins with the self not with God not with Ishvara and I think that’s significant I think we have to note the significance of that and secondly that that absolute is ultimately personal now there’s some very interesting discussions in Western philosophy and I’m particularly thinking of the discussions about relational ethics caring ethics in which many lady philosophers were prominent women philosophers but I think actually I detect that actually and some of those caring ethics and relational ethics sometimes they’re categorised as virtue ethics or virtue ethicists in that category and the idea there is that actually our virtues are not something that just belong to us individually but they’re something that are nurtured within and expressed within loving relationships so you’ve got the ideas of reciprocity give and take now if you start to think about Rasa theology you can start to see remarkable similarities so we at least can recognise that philosophers they have some insight they’re at least beginning to ask the right questions sometimes the questions may be wrong sometimes there may be a construction of an elaborate philosophy which is more or less an attempt to avoid morality in its true sense I think that has to be it’s a self deluding or self Iris Murdoch one Irish British philosopher talked about the way we use morality and moral philosophy for self-consolation instead of seeing the stark reality of life and for that reason I think her favourite play by Shakespeare was King Lear which by the way it’s brutally exposing about the realities of life and death and brutally exposing about some of our notions of love as King Lear as expressed by the three daughters of King Lear for the king and how Cordelia epitomised true love even though King Lear didn’t like her response anyway there’s a whole issue there but some of these philosophers are asking the right questions can we give and I think we can potentially at least give tenable answers useful answers for these some of these moral questions and can we address some of the practical issues that the world is facing and can we do that with authenticity and with insight with realisation which is by the way what carries forward our parampara parampara is not carried by literal truth it is carried by full assimilation of knowledge which we call realisation that’s interesting Prabhupada says this specifically that it is not carried by literal truth it is not carried by literal truth Prachila Prabhupada says he refers to the the karmakanda tradition karma yoga being inclined towards that literal interpretation and very rules based and you can’t go beyond the rules if you when you’re doing the yagya you have to pronounce the right syllables you can’t make a mistake otherwise you get the wrong result as expressed by certain stories of Indra and Vritasura and so on that’s interesting when you’re using the word literal truth you are using it more in terms of say like a ritual literalist in terms of literalist in terms of rituals you know absolutely I think we need to be very careful about that literal truth because yeah it’s difficult because there is something which is called metaphorical truth and I know you don’t want we don’t sometimes want to jump into assuming there’s a metaphor or allegorical story when there isn’t one I think we need to be very careful of that but the kind of more the approach to truth and factual knowledge as expressed through philosophers such as logical positivism and of course our late devotee His Holiness Bhakti Damodar Swami spoke to Sheila Praopad about logical we had a conversation about logical positivism yeah they don’t sit well with us there is a kind of metaphorical and using the term positively mythical approach to truth in our tradition by the word here’s another need for hermeneutics for some the word myth has now taken on a new meaning for example if I say Chaitanya Chandra told me we would be talking at ten o’clock but that was a myth in other words it’s almost been synonymous with lie it was a mistake with you sorry six myths about this thing six myths about India or five myths about so and so that yeah so myths is equated with falsehood but myth has a different connotation absolutely and you know we cannot think without metaphor I mean even you think about modern science and what about the whole narrative of the dinosaurs and Darwin’s narrative of evolution it is a narrative this is a big subject and maybe we should have a separate podcast on this metaphorical and mythical dimensions in Krishna consciousness it’s Bhaktivinoda Thakur talks a lot about this in Chaitanya Chikshamruta and Krishna Samhita and somehow we have overlooked it quite a bit so yeah I mean it does raise the question of the relationship between fact and value the relationship between ontology and ethics yeah but my but my one of my suggestions is that even though unlike Hume and some modern philosophers the non-naturalists they’re called I think there’s a strong connection between one’s cognition and one’s values how we actually understand and articulate that connection between our ontological beliefs and our metaphysics and the ethical dimensions of life is a big question and I think in our own tradition our Vaishnav tradition they are much more holistic however I will say I do think that many ISKCON devotees have given too much attention to the metaphysical discussion without understanding the ethical strands of thought or the ethical issues that are inherent within those the Bhagavad Gita is a moral text in many ways the question is how do the ontological truths such as the self and we may have time to discuss them we may have to do it in the future in another podcast how do those relate the idea that we’re not this body there is an eternal self how does that relate to our ethics but the danger is that we don’t we ignore the ethical dimensions and think that Krishna consciousness is all about a set of philosophical truths often more framed as beliefs which kind of infers a less reflective approach I think we need to be careful of that and we need to give more attention to the not only the ethical challenges we have but how whether or not we are sufficiently discussing ethics or more or less assuming we know about it decrying mundane morality or sweeping this discussion under the mat beautiful and I suggest we have to give attention and particularly those who are administrators must according to the Bhagavatam at least give attention to the moral ethos of their domain as there are many examples such as Maharaj Parikshit example those examples are there and therefore the reductionism that comes when we suggest that the chanting of Hare Krishna is the only solution needs to be looked at it needs to be examined there’s truth there here’s another challenge I think it’s an opportunity to express it.
Just one minute Roh if you don’t mind I just two three things came in my mind before you move ahead in this that this whole you mentioned that we emphasise the ontology a lot that we emphasise the philosophy as you said but how that philosophy is to be translated into action that is not so that is we don’t have so much guidance it’s more like black and white do this don’t do this but what about nuances so in some ways could we place this in terms of there is emphasis on Sambandha Gyan but Abhidheya in terms of how we are going to fix the mind on Krishna in this situation so that there is not sufficient education about that not sufficient direction about that so I mean that’s a whole different dimension and maybe we could discuss it separately but could the translation of say could Sambandha broadly be ontology and Abhidheya be a part of ethics this is the very important question you ask extremely important and I tend to agree with you I wouldn’t say the ontology is not important but certainly if we’re only at that I’m thinking a little more pedagogically and it’s interesting that when you come to the particular approach which was quite prevalent in many pre-modern societies including the Greek and I would probably say ours as well and that’s virtue ethics the kind of theories surrounding virtue ethics are very closely linked can you explain what you mean by virtue ethics because you use that term repeatedly in one sense isn’t ethics about virtue itself so it seems just ontological to some extent what does it well the debates are often very fractured and sometimes they’re very poor I think because they sometimes try to emphasise one aspect of moral sense or sensibility or different ways of improving our moral status individually and societally and sometimes those approaches become fractured in recent academic discourse in western academic space there is definitely a move to more holistic ideas of recognising that we shouldn’t just have these different philosophies which emphasise rules or reason or utilitarianism and the consequences of what we do or indeed the values but we need to come up with a more syncretic model that synthesises these and I fully agree with that but you could say that actually one model may give more attention to consequences and that is consequentialism we should think about the results of what we’re doing that stands quite strongly in contrast to Kant’s deontology just stick to the principles the rules have principles behind them we have to stick to those principles whatever the context most people think he was a little extreme there and I tend to agree and then others will say that it is virtues that really to different degrees are prominent and should help inform our reason and our rules and I personally feel very strongly on that now just going back to what happened with the enlightenment here in Europe when the revolutionaries in France tried to establish reason they even built often within the existing churches and cathedrals shrines dedicated to reason yeah I read about that I think it was 1793 was it in Notre Dame the whole altar was set up with a mountain and on that mountain which probably represented Olympus I’m not sure were busts of the different philosophers and then there was a opera singer dressed as the goddess liberty dressed in red, white and blue and there was this whole worship of reason and reason has been lifted particularly through in ethics analytic philosopher the analytic philosophers particularly Russell, Wittgenstein and others reason was going to guide us now that God is gone let’s rely on reason now that the clergy have gone let’s rely on our own reason now that we’ve got rid of the kings or at least just made them into more or less symbolic monarchs now let us as the people use reason to decide what are our moral principles but my question by the way I’m a great supporter of reason don’t get me wrong don’t get me wrong at all however my question is this have people become more rational more reasonable in their moral debate I obviously think that in many ways they haven’t and the question is why not can reason alone in one sense some of the dialogue about political correctness there is a significant dismissal of reason also that feelings are given far more priority than facts or reasonable discussion based on facts so that there are two things is reason worthy of becoming God and whether we are actually becoming reasonable so both questions are important yeah and there’s a huge leaning towards the idea despite some support for personal autonomy and I’m also a great believer in personal autonomy but I’m also a great believer in the respect that is given to elders also I don’t see necessarily a fragmenting tension between our own individual choice, our own free will and that need to defer to some kind of authority I don’t see that as a problem but yeah these days there are many who say that actually not only we’ve dismissed reason and actually in the name of personal autonomy and I guess our own personal sense of reason we’ve slipped in towards what is called emotivism emotivism yeah that’s true yeah emotivism and McIntyre that was his critique and actually now it seems that actually there’s very much the idea amongst many social activists that the world has to conform to our wishes but you know a mature person understands that while trying to improve society for example we have a responsibility to adjust ourselves to the realities of the world I think in America the coddling of the American mind and who’s that Jonathan Haidt he talks a lot about this micro aggressions and how these are actually making making they’re meant to make people safe but they’re actually making people weak so they’re making people more fragile students are becoming more fragile and that’s so true I mean you covered a lot of territory so my question was about virtue ethics so what you’re saying is that there are different different ideas of ethics so some is that like just rule bound some is consequence bound some is some are you could say like emotion centred so virtue ethics is one kind of ethics where the where the focus is on developing and expressing virtues in our actions that so consequences and emotions and rules are important but they are subordinated to the virtues is that what you mean by virtue ethics? Yeah I mean there are different philosophers and philosophers often a little too fragmented I was just reading an article by someone called Timothy Chapel who makes this point and very often certain questions are associated with the various approaches so the consequentialist approach we would ask the question what are the results of that action going to be and particularly with utilitarianism will it bring the maximum happiness for the maximum number of people and then with Kantian deontology we say yeah but what is the principle behind that what is the universal principle behind that that we have that we’re compelled to follow all of us irrespective of where we’re born or whatever or of the context and then the question is for virtue ethicists as is often placed is what would a virtuous person do under these circumstances so it’s often associated with role models we can ask what would my spiritual master do under these circumstances and certainly all of us use this when I was I’m studying now at Cambridge University and I was actually thinking maybe I should be a little go somewhere a little less expensive somewhere like Birmingham or somewhere else my own inclination largely because perhaps my sense of false ego was to go for Oxford or Cambridge and then I asked the question what would Sheila Prabhupada want and just knowing him he would probably say go for the best that’s my reading of Sheila Prabhupada that’s open to interpretation and others will disagree with me I’m sure but it’s a kind of natural process and many of these theories or these sensibilities if you like that we’ve built into elaborate theories are natural to us we ask them at certain times but I think that question or all those three questions are too limiting and Timothy Chappell makes those points I think there are more questions we’ve got to ask about values and virtues what does this virtue mean what conduct is expressed through that virtue can there be a kind of semblance of that virtue such as false humility rather than real humility and what does it look like or what do both of them look like how do we actually develop the virtues certainly the kind of repeated appeal as I could make to you Chaitanya Charan you’ve got to be humble be humble those repeated appeals even if maybe with more humility than I made the appeal may not really represent a real comprehensive strategy towards developing the virtues in fact it’s probably only the beginning so to actually keep reiterating certain truths through slogans such as books of the basis I’m not sure how much that’s going to be useful in itself I must say that’s my critique of I mean I think it’s useful for us perhaps to emphasise the centrality of the teachings we’re receiving through Srila Prabhupada and indeed the whole parampara I think that’s important but you know how we frame that and more importantly the question how do we become Krishna conscious and how do we develop all the virtues through that process I think very very important because Krishna consciousness is intimately linked I suggest to the virtues our self-realisation doesn’t mean we become at any point transcendental to the virtues I don’t see that we may be transcendental to mundane morality that’s fine I accept that but whether we can actually and if you try to define what is Krishna consciousness that actually makes it far greater than morality I suggest it’s hard to find an answer to that question without some resort to virtue albeit a Krishna conscious virtue such as Prema, love of God but I’m going off the point here and I think we should come back to our discussion actually I think we need to actually ask at some point, we may not have time now, how much time do you have? No, I’m okay usually our podcasts go for about a couple of hours we can go a little more also or we could discuss in future we could continue this in another discussion but I think at least some level of rounding up of the discussion should be there so I think one question that comes up is that whether we want to have a separate podcast for this because it’s going to take up a big point so once we understand the need for we could say addressing moral and ethical issues would there be a can we have a overall moral philosophy and how would we develop that that would be a question in itself because it’s one thing to like you said that repeating be humble is not going to make some humble similarly repeating we need to study ethics or we need to develop ethical behaviour that itself is not repeating that is not going to make somebody ethical so there has to be some both at the level of thought as well as the level of guide action there has to be some overall philosophy if I may use that word absolutely I mean moral philosophy is sometimes avoided these important issues the practical issues particularly the beginning of the 20th century in Britain with the emphasis on analytic philosophy in Cambridge and therefore people such as Bernard Williams saying ethics is actually no longer discussing the ethical issues it’s become really heady and is no longer addressing the real issues of the world and of course our tradition while favouring reason and nuance thought and the need for the Mooney particularly the Mooney then you know it’s also very practical it’s got to help people it’s got to be appropriate to the welfare of the world must be appropriate to the world’s welfare so it has to be practical but let me just address this I think there are some reasons we need a moral philosophy or at least some kind of broad framework that enables us to make moral and ethical decisions that go beyond the kind of emotivism that we discussed previously and the type of emotivism that is that is a threat if you like to religious communities is what I call personal opinion backed by Shastra or backed by scripture how do we know we’re not just presenting my personal opinion backed by scripture now I think I’ll just add a caveat that I think I’m not a great fan of what I call absolute objectivity when it comes to moral authority I think subjective opinions are important particularly when they’re enshrined in insight as we mentioned before but the danger is that actually we are merely expressing some of our emotional responses to an issue and looking for verses to substantiate that I’m guilty of it myself when I try to favour educations I’m always looking for verses on education and perhaps I reject those verses that say that logic is insufficient for spiritual life and indeed morality I would say so I think that tendency is there in all of us so I think we need a theory to which we’re accountable we’re accountable to our philosophy now haven’t we got it in our theology yes we have but we need an autonomous discipline and for a couple of reasons I’d say we need an autonomous discipline first the Vedic tradition has categorised the various scriptures it has categorised the various subject matters that each body of literature discusses we’ve got the Vedangas and the the Dharma Sutras and so on the epics I mean there’s divisions and those divisions are explained in terms of certain subjects that they address hermeneutics is also there so I think it’s there in our tradition but there’s one criticism of our tradition whereas it’s codified and very carefully analysed its epistemology and its metaphysics and so on it’s been a little less eager to codify its ethics in terms of a moral philosophy whether that judge you mean the Indian tradition or we as women I’m talking about the broader Indian and Vedic Indian Hindu Vedic traditions yeah but I mean they have done to some degree that there’s the Dharma Sutras yeah there’s the Manu Smriti other Smritis that are connected with that personally I think often they’re not fully adequate for today’s discourse and I favour the Bhagavad Gita and I can come to that probably on a next podcast because I think the Bhagavad Gita very much provides us with a framework for our moral philosophy it may not necessarily fill in all the details it’s more of a preliminary text and I think Chaitanya Mahaprabhu fills in some of the details as well to questions that are asked in western philosophy as well as our own but I think probably that’s one area where we haven’t quite got that kind of autonomous or semi-autonomous discipline that we need I mean devotees very often I think this is admirable since early on in ISKCON’s history they’ve collected quotes on certain subjects so you can find quotes on Varanashram you can find relevant quotes on marriage and a number of subjects through some initiatives like what is the initiative it’s not Veda base there’s another initiative led by the Vishnu yeah the Vani quotes yes very good initiative I think they’re important however I will say that a list of quotes and we’re drawing a little bit on hermeneutics here is not really a autonomous coherent theory on that specific subject we need to take it further in one sense I would say that we’re taking putting on my educational hat we’re taking a kind of pedagogical perspective we’re looking at and a practical perspective we’re looking at thematic learning you know we can start with scripture and we can come to some conclusions and we can also that theory can inform our practise of both morality and Christian consciousness our lifestyles as devotees but another way of approaching this pedagogically is we start with a dilemma an issue a need an opportunity whatever it is and then we go from that context in which we find ourselves by destiny perhaps we then go to scripture to find the relevant quotes so building on that if we want to if we want to for example and I think this is an important need related to devotee care if we want to avoid some of the tensions involved with counselling and giving counselling and bringing in useful sometimes useful insights from non devotee counsellors we really need our own system of counselling what is our own theory methodology and theory of counselling what is the Krishna conscious way to give counsel to others if we’re going to actually develop useful leadership we need a theory of leadership based on our own scriptures but which goes beyond the list of quotes there is a hermeneutical process of how they all link together and the implications of that they need to be they need to embody ultimately personal insight as expressed through our scriptures and as some devotees are also expressing into that particular field of service that some of us have namely administrative leadership or if we’re an educator do we really have our own philosophy of education do we have do we know what our pedagogy is besides decrying western education and their theories do we have a good alternative and by the way it’s there and I think it would be useful to discuss if you wish in another podcast because I see quite a close connection between our pedagogical processes and you referred to sambandha, abhidaya and priyojana and I think is a very useful framework for hanging the rest of our pedagogical theory on we need this we need this and Srila Prabhupada has given some quotes so that Krishna consciousness movement comprehends all sides of life it is not a stereotype churchianity weekly going to the church and coming back and doing all I guess Srila Prabhupada may be saying nonsense there no it is embracing all sides of our life Srila Prabhupada lecture on Srimad Bhagavatam 2 chapter 3 verse 19 given in Los Angeles on the 5th of June 1972 and one more quote Srila Prabhupada also writes human intellect is developed for advancement of learning in art science philosophy, physics chemistry, psychology economics, politics etc by culture of such knowledge the human society can attain perfection of life this perfection of life culminates in the realisation of the supreme being Vishnu from the Purport to the Srimad Bhagavatam canto 1 chapter 5 verse 22 yeah this 1522 is a very famous verse for the celebrated quote of Prabhupada what he was saying but it’s interesting the way you are reading it is slightly different so for example that 1522 is often used by devotees, scientists or that we should use science to establish the existence of God but if I understand you what you are saying is that these branches of knowledge in themselves if we learn them and if we apply them, we excel in them they can, their perfection is that through them itself we can realise God is that the direction you are taking in these two quotes? absolutely, we need a Krishna conscious society we can’t just have what I call before a disembodied spirituality I don’t think that Srila Prabhupada wanted that I think Srila Prabhupada wanted us, I think he recognised and I think if you read very carefully his instructions, he recognised the need for ISKCON but also the need for ISKCON to have an influence on broader society so that actually all our interactions and all these useful branches of knowledge lead us towards Krishna consciousness and if we try to present some kind of religious practise which I would identify with churchianity separate from that knowledge, that comprehensive knowledge that Srila Prabhupada has given us, we are making a mistake and it will not be helpful it will not help Krishna consciousness go forward as much as it could there will always be some benefit you know that’s so true if people think of us primarily as those people who dance on the streets or those people who hand out books on the streets it’s good that they know us but if that is what they think about us then we are not really representing our tradition, that is all that people think about us, we are not really representing our tradition at all properly and that’s not recognising the guidelines we’ve been given by Srila Rupa Goswami in saying that actually the goal of Prema starts with Shraddha How is that connected? Well it’s connected by the fact that there’s many, well recently I was having, there was some dispute about whether we’re teaching and it was a very, not a dispute it was a good discussion you know, open-minded discussion about whether we’re teaching about Krishna consciousness or we’re teaching about the environment and there was some idea well, teaching Krishna consciousness directly is better than teaching about the environment and my take on that is that the two can be brought together by understanding what our pedagogical, what our educational aims are if our aim is to build faith, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re directly teaching people to chant Hare Krishna or we’re telling them that we can be relevant to environmental issues now according to Rupa Goswami one’s got to go beyond just initial Shraddha building faith but still here is a framework that brings together some of our endeavours and therefore if people recognise that ISKCON devotees have something useful to say on the environment their faith in us will increase their trust in us will increase and that will help them come to Krishna consciousness so I don’t see that that idea that this is direct preaching we use this word bridging preaching which I think is misleading in some ways all our preaching is bridging it’s about me being on one shore of a river you being on another side of the river and somehow coming together as two individuals relationships relationships we have to build it I think we need to reframe some of these discussions because the way some discussions are framed is divisive and by reframing them we can see there is more commonality than we previously thought I don’t know whether that makes sense oh no this is lot of points I mean two points which struck me is that all preaching is bridging yeah it’s just we could say that this bridge is reaching some bridges reach people we could say that this is a river at this point the river is very narrow and this is straight forward bridge but some bridges may need to be very long and complicated to reach people who are far away from the point where we are but every preaching is bridging that’s remarkable we need to be careful about some of these distinctions I think the tension here is between those who would like to emphasise the goal and those who would like to emphasise the next step and we tend to find some probably the liberals tend to incline towards emphasising the next step sometimes those who perhaps if I could describe as a little more fundamental would be more inclined to you’ve got to keep the goal in mind but actually but if we draw a little bit from my own experience I will draw from my own experience in western education good education means you know the aim and you know the objectives both it’s not a question of one or the other and actually the question for us for ISKCON and one devotee was raising this I think the devotee involved in the conversation after our last podcast very nicely kind of alluded to this if not directly the need to have those pure devotees those who are really pure I agree with that but I think there’s another way of looking at this challenge is you know whether we’re highly advanced or not so advanced and there’s a case for saying there’s always going to be a mixture here and there’s probably going to be more of us who are less advanced than those who are highly advanced there’s always going to be less of us we’re going to be in the popular side we’re not very advanced but the question isn’t you know how advanced are we and which of these two we should emphasise and get into those fractured discussions but do we wherever we are situated do we exhibit integrity I may be a householder and maybe and that’s because I’m not advanced someone may be a sannyasi and it may be because he is capable of that but Lord Chaitanya seems to suggest in the story two stories that relating to Chota Haridas and that relating to Sivananda Sena when his wife gave birth to a child and Srila Prabhupada says explicitly I don’t have the quote here but it’s a very good one I can see if I can find it says explicitly it’s not a question of whether one is detached or less attached it is a question of integrity Lord Chaitanya wasn’t bothered I mean that child that Sivananda Sena’s wife had didn’t come it wasn’t a virgin birth to put it bluntly it wasn’t it wasn’t but he embraced him and Chota Haridas because of a little indiscretion so there’s some issues here about perhaps my feeling is and we could question that it is a subjective feeling and whether I’ve got insight or deluded here we can discuss is that we need to give more attention to integrity, acting with integrity again brings us back to the topic of ethics and authenticity integrity so integrity it also in one sense it is also you talked earlier about this beautiful point that are you focussing on the next step or are you focussing on the goal so we could if somebody asks that that I’m having this podcast so how many people became devotees because of this podcast or because of these podcasts in general well it’s like you build a temple and then new people come and become devotees that’s wonderful and we want people to we want everyone to learn to love Krishna but then wherever somebody is if we are helping them take one step forward from where they are that is also a service and in fact you can say that I think Krishna in 326 says that don’t push people to take like two giant a leap, help them take a step he says that don’t disturb the minds of people who are attached but encourage them to take a step forward from where they are so overall I never thought of framing the liberal conservative or that kind of debate in terms of the next step or the final goal and both are required we can’t just have as you said the aim and the objectives both are there and there will be some people who will focus more on one thing and some will focus on other things absolutely and teachers when you write aims and objectives you go into the lesson knowing your aim but you also know the objectives the next step and you keep both in mind and this false dichotomy between one or the other is useless worse than useless, it’s counterproductive you always need to keep in mind both of them why create that argument between those who actually propose one and those who favour the other it’s a false dilemma, it should be avoided as far as possible I mean recognise there’s a tension there that’s okay but use that tension constructively so that’s why we need theory again the other thing I’m going to say is you asked the question why do we need to dialogue with a western moral philosophy and I’ve got two reasons for that one is that much of our outreach is taking place in the western countries not all of it but we have to frame it according to what people presently understand their present knowledge and build on that secondly those of us who come from a western background our inner architecture will always be moulded by that background I’m never going to become Indian in this life, as much as I may like to, I won’t change my nature I’m always going to think in a particular way which may be somewhat different than the way you think, by the way I tend to think that philosophers when they’re more than those who are less philosophical will probably be able to see commonality rather than difference I think so but I think we’re always going to be informed by our upbringing and our cultural background I don’t think we can escape that context and we have to deal with it, we have to as much as we try and abandon our cultural baggage or what I’d rather call out more positively our cultural capital or our moral capital we have to somehow engage with and we have to start seeing the truths that we’ve inherited from our many gurus even our parents if we’re respectful to our parents we will see they’ve given us something including most likely some moral sensibility there may be some challenges there will be some shortcomings but we also have some moral capital we bring with us so I think we have to have that dialogue and show that Krishna consciousness is capable of having that authentic, well reasoned dialogue on moral issues rather than simply the imposition of some kind of rules or even possibly pre-digested conclusions we have to have that dialogue that debate is there in our own tradition, that culture of constructive debate is there of conversations conversations within conversations that’s what the Bhagavatam is about we have to have we have to have that so can we actually win kind of one of the again that’s why we need a moral actually what I’m doing here is starting to point towards why we need an autonomous moral philosophy so that it actually can be compared to and be in dialogue with the various forms of moral philosophy we have at the moment in the Western world, we need to be able to do that because if we’re going to whether we like it or not much of the moral conversation is still dominated by Western thought okay, we’re objecting to that issues of colonialism and imperialism but still that conversation is prevalent and we need to perhaps enter into that conversation with some humility rather than just barge into it that doesn’t mean we’re acquiescent we’re going to say no, you’ve got that wrong but we have to be able, as well as showing you’ve got that wrong, we have to be able to provide some and I think there’s one philosopher what’s his name? Billy Moria Purushottam Bill he writes extensively on Hindu ethics and Indian ethics he says that Western philosophers are now open to new insights from other traditions so can we actually provide some new insights and I think there are some very interesting concepts, whether they’re meta-ethical concepts or ontological concepts that we can bring to play and I think the tree gooner is one of them and I’m going to suggest as time is moving on that perhaps next podcast, if you’re amenable to that, of course we deal with some of the concepts that we have that could form the basis of a moral philosophy give us some broad structure at least Yes, that would be wonderful. I think we sometimes we may say that sometimes devotees make the grandiose claim that the Vedic scriptures have answers to all questions and okay, it’s good as a statement but okay this is the question I have, what is the answer that you have for this? We need to actually show how those questions are answered otherwise it just comes off as religious pomposity so what you are saying is when we enter into that dialogue it is we can’t, it’s not that we are simply going to let them tell us what is the truth but it’s not also that we are going to tell them the truth it will probably be like a discourse by which we understand how the truth we have can illuminate the situation we are in the issue that they are discussing Absolutely a great response a great heritage we may have some pride in that but it also brings it brings responsibility therefore in the Bhagavad Gita chapter 2 verse 14 when Krishna describes Arjuna’s parental background by calling him Kaunteya and Bharata I think, 240 yes he didn’t kind of insert those words because there was a lack of syllables and he had to keep the metre of the line the Lord is not subject to such constraints we could surmise but he did it deliberately according to Srila Prabhupada to tell Arjuna to inform Arjuna, to instruct Arjuna that a great heritage brings great responsibility in the execution of dharma Beautiful So this is just a couple of questions were remaining if you want to discuss them now or we could come to this a little later in our next podcast also you say the difference between virtues and values that the discussion of the absolute to start with the self and not God or the difference between right wrong and virtue wise these were issues which I think each of these will require time will they come up in the discussion of the moral philosophy we could discuss it next time then I think they will do but can you hang on to those questions just in case I don’t explicitly don’t answer them or don’t explicitly answer them and you can actually keep them for next time but I think they will all be discussed again perhaps you could send those to me actually at some stage if you don’t mind and I think we’ll then go on to ask, I think we’ve kind of reached the stage where we might be able to discuss what our moral philosophy looks like Yes it’s a I think it’s a it was a necessary build up before we could get into the subject so yes thank you so I’ll try to summarise it was a quite a quite a ride you can say the way we discussed today so broadly we started with the discussion of the difference between morality and ethics and then there are different ways in which sometimes these terms can be used as synonymous because same word can have different meanings also but we’ve differentiated in terms of the primarily it’s there is a code of conduct which is involved in various areas sports ethics or corporate ethics or something like that so which is more in terms of the way we function, guidelines for functioning then there is the aspect of philosophy which puts various moral guidelines into a holistic framework and it develops the thought systematically and within that we can have also some specific amount of specificity with respect to genres then you can do environmental ethics and there can be ethics about various areas and then there is also at a hermeneutical level and then we are building a philosophy which statement means what and which statement is more important which statement is less important that is also a part of the ethical discussion and then in that connection we also discuss that so why do we need to discuss that in our movement today instead of just focussing on spiritual topics so one reason for that is that we sometimes fall short of our own moral standards and there are issues where we know what is the right thing to do it’s clear but we are unable to stick to that so at one level by the purification that comes from bhakti that gap will be bridged but still it is not automatic it requires conscious observation and introspection so just because we say that bhakti will lead to gyana and to knowledge and renunciation and other aspects of dharma proper behaviour that doesn’t mean these are unimportant that means our bhakti practise should lead to those things and we need to be evaluating whether it is happening or not so that’s why you talk about the cause effect correlation which we cannot use that to minimise the value of the effects so then within that point itself we also discussed about how when there is moral shortfall far away from us then it is easy to just what you said rancid criticism or some finger pointing or something like that it is easy to dismiss that but when that moral shortfall happens close to us in our own culture in our own movement then what do we do do we just deny it or do we actually address the issue that is over there so that’s an important question and in that connection also with respect to ethical issues we may not even there are many issues about which we may not be sure what is the right thing so of course with respect to moral issues I think you started by mentioning some issues like why is there so much more divorce than what is expected in our movement or there are some issues with leadership with respect to distribution so all these are that is there could be certain presumptions of of spiritual of acting in a spiritual way because of which the ethical dimension may be undermined and that’s why we face more problems than we need to in those activities so with respect to ethics milk and several other issues whether we take that or not and how we what do we bring into those what do we as a tradition bring into those discussions so you mentioned that there is a systematic division of branches of knowledge within the Vedic tradition in general especially for leaders you quoted Prabhupada saying that because Krishna Balram were Kshatriyas they studied ethics so this is something which will help us to become a intelligible part of the mainstream discussion and that’s how we can broaden the reach that we have as a movement so it’s required for us both as so that it’s like all preaching is bridging that was a striking point and it’s just that for reaching different audiences we may need different kinds of bridges different lengths of bridges so rather than seeing the polarity between the next step or the ultimate goal we see that there has to be a synergy between both so liberals may focus more on the next step and conservatives or fundamentalists may focus more on the ultimate goal but while there is a tension between the two it can be reconciled by having both like in education there are aims and objectives both so just as there is for various areas for leadership, for management, for education what is our pedagogy, what is our philosophy, if we have that developed then we will be able to function better in these areas and then we also discuss a little bit about virtue ethics as contrasted with say deontological ethics or consequentialist or utilitarian form of ethics so broadly the Vedic or the bhakti world view the Bhagavad Gita’s world view seems to be important for seems to conform with virtue ethics to some extent and in that connection mentioned that as devotees we may contemplate what would a virtuous person do, what would Prabhupada do in a situation like this and that becomes a guidance for us to act so toward the end we discussed that I like that phrase you mentioned that we can’t change our inner architecture so why do we need to engage with mainstream thinkers in today’s world because their thoughts have to some extent shaped who we are so our past is not just a mundane baggage to be given up it’s a cultural and moral capital that can be utilised and that we can build on it and beyond that if we are going to if we are going to bring our scriptural light on this issue it has to go beyond just giving a set of quotes because that when we do that it could just be personal opinion justified by scriptural quotes and there might be a lot of emotivism like we all are human beings so we have gut emotional reactions to particular issues and we find so if you want to go beyond that to reason discussion then you also mentioned this point that just making reason as absolute also is not a solution because like reason was made into God in the post French Revolution time reason is important but we can’t make it all important so in one sense even reason has to be guided by virtues and the ultimate virtue we could say is Prema so Shraddha is important but different people will get Shraddha in different ways so Shraddha can come to somebody by just coming to a temple and seeing the devotees but Shraddha can come also by seeing that devotees are able to be a part of the be a respectable part of the mainstream intellectual discussion and contributing something so we both for our own practise you mentioned that we are not teaching a disembodied spirituality it’s very much society and then you mentioned about relational ethics and Rasa which correlates very much with that so virtues are not just in isolation they are actually manifested in the interaction and developed through the interaction through the relationships so in that sense not only is that true for our development but the Rasa theology also provides us a lot that we can contribute in this discussion so overall we need a moral philosophy which can be there was some amount of ethical we could say moral philosophy in terms of the Dharmasutras Dharmasastras, the Manusmriti Bhagavad Gita in today’s world could be more foundational and its Triguna framework could be used to offer some fresh insight to what a working moral philosophy would look like so any other points you would like to add before we conclude Prabhu? I think you got most of it, I am highly impressed how you managed to summarise that lengthy discussion so briefly, thank you very much Prabhu. Thank you Prabhu and thank you for this opportunity I must say because I am doing, because of the lockdown I am not doing a lot of teaching and I am doing a lot of studying but the opportunity to kind of be able to express some of my thoughts and to have this conversation is very helpful in me clarifying my own thoughts a little more and you know trying to test my own intuition to see whether it’s right or whether it’s wrong and to kind of yeah come to a better understanding so I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with you Prabhu in these difficult times so thank you very much for your time and having the patience to listen Thank you Prabhu, I also appreciate the opportunity to have these discussions you know, about 10 years ago my spiritual master Zoraj Radhanath Maharaj asked me to focus on western outreach so since that I have been reading a lot of western contemporary thinkers and western spiritually orientated thinkers so what it struck me is that that the kind of discussions that are going on there is a complete absence of any of those discussions in our movement so like we talk about privilege and privilege is not the problem abuse of privilege is the problem so you also address many contemporary issues and it would be fascinating to discuss what would be the Vedic perspective on contemporary issues so like you mentioned that one point I forgot is but very important point is that we cannot attribute moral virtue to material designation but at the same time we cannot say divorce the spiritual culture of Krishna consciousness from its Indian roots so that where that balance would be that is a discussion but you know you are not only what I found fascinating was that that how there are so many areas where the contemporary intellectual debates can interact with Krishna conscious tenets and that has not been done much or even at all I would say not at all but very little it has been done so I also found it very intellectually not just illuminating but also stimulating so I got light but also got ideas to further that thought so thank you very much for sharing your wisdom and investing your time in these discussions.
Thank you very much it’s really my pleasure thank you Prabhu and I look forward to perhaps another podcast if you are amenable to the idea certainly Hare Krishna