Shakespeare Revisited Universal Themes Spiritual Insight The Monks Podcast 126 with Hanumat Preshaka M

Podcast:

Summary podcast:

Video:

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna, Hanumath Prasad Maharaj, please accept my humble obeisances. Thank you very much for joining for the monk’s podcast today. It has been a long cherished desire to have your association individually as well as to share it with others.
When you had come to GEV and we had met, could say that was one of the most inspiring intellectual and spiritual discussions that I’ve ever had with anyone. So I pray you for it. I don’t know whether I have like lovely for Krishna, but I do have lovelier greed for association like you provide.
So I’m very immensely grateful, Maharaj. So, Sura Prabhupada said that too much devotion is a symptom of a thief. Well, I’m happy to be called a thief if that helps me get your association.
Yes, Maharaj. So, when I have heard, I’ve been following you on your blogs and I have heard some of your classes, you know, what I am amazed by is the intellectual width as well as the depth of what the topics that you discuss. So, since you mentioned today, I thought we could discuss about Western literature, maybe the foundation of Western literature, one of the founding figures of Western literature, we could say, one of the primary authors is Shakespeare.
So how somebody sees Shakespeare from a spiritual or a devotional perspective? Well, there’s a, well, let’s see where to start. You know, for us, books are the basis. When Prabha came to San Francisco, Berkeley, in 1975, I think it was, we just moved from the temple in San Francisco, which had been a mortuary, 455 Valencia Street.
We moved to San Francisco and it was Berkeley. It was a six city lots. It was a big building, Prabha pleased.
And I remember, I personally heard from the lips of my spiritual master, there were maybe five reporters there from big media, and one of them asked, Swamiji, what will happen to your movement when you die? And Prabha, and now you’re hearing from my lips. So, Prabha said very, you know, firmly, he said, I will never die. I will live forever in my books.
Okay, so then we have complete access to Prabha, you know. Of all this, of course, we have a separate little programme called the Bhaktivedanta Library, where we’re, you know, sorting Prabha’s books systematically and looking at their relationship. But, Prabha says, in the preface to Nectar of Instruction, that Upadeshamrit constitutes first instructions for neophyte devotees.
And we find it that way. It’s such a wonderful base from our side, you know, from our literature. And in there, Prabha says, he quotes, maya tatham idam sarvam jagat avyakta-murtena masthani sarva-bhutani natchaham teshpivasi taha.
And he uses it to to illustrate the point that everything is Krishna’s energy. He talks about using a microphone, a dictaphone, you know. So, yeah, and he says that devotees, they understand the way to use everything in Krishna’s service.
So, from that perspective, then, of course, some of us like books, somebody else likes paintings, somebody else likes gardening, you know, somebody else likes war, so fighting. Yeah, so everything can be used in Krishna’s service. So, I would say from that, you know, very broad perspective, okay, then utilising different literature, you know, of course, we approach it as, you know, world classical literature, world classical literature.
Okay. And within that, of course, we have the European, you know, traditions, English language traditions. And then these influence people, and this is how people identify who are we, you know, by their literary traditions, literary traditions.
In general, the principle of yukta-vairagya, of using everything in Krishna’s service, that is quite foundational for our movement’s spread and outreach. But somehow, when we bring it to books and thoughts and worldviews, there is a certain amount of hesitation or even aversion. Because, say, generally, if somebody’s going to use, say, somebody’s going to use a computer or a phone, yeah, those can distract us, but they don’t seem directly to be competitors to our devotion.
Whereas, when we say, like recently, I have started a group for encouraging devotees to write, and I quote from various contemporary authors about how to write well and how to get the motivation to write. So, one devotee asked a question over there, that I already don’t have time to read Prabhupada’s books enough, and how will I, how should I, should I make, how will I make time for reading other books or writing? So, then the answer I gave at that time is, if you see writing as a service, then, then, sorry, just let me complete this, sorry, that writing as a service, then that is service time. That is not, that is not your sadhana time.
If you are building a temple for Krishna, you’re learning to cook for Krishna, you may want to read some books for doing it better, and you wouldn’t put that time for those books in competition with your, your spiritual books. So, that idea of Yukta Vairagya, that we can apply it even in the intellectual domain to engage with books and ideas and world views, somehow that is not so, that is not so widespread or not so accepted. Have you also observed something like that, Maharaj? Well, very much, and I would say it’s because, you know, most people are not inclined towards books.
Most people are not literary, they don’t look at, look at them that way, you know. What’s it, what can you say is that, it’s just a fact, even, even, even in ordinary, any, any ordinary culture, people who were, sometimes, you know, what is it, when the Russians, Russians were conquering places, they would take anybody who had glasses and kill them. Yep.
Because, because that means they could read, you know, in the same way, probably, but books are the basis, you know. What, Bhaktivinoda Thakur, for example, we know him, right? You know, there’s a very famous document where he describes how we should, what mentality, what attitude, what bhava, what consciousness we should have, when we are in other people’s place of worship, at the time of worship. Yeah, very beautiful quote.
Yeah. Yeah, so respectful mood. And see that God is manifesting in a different way from what I know.
But yeah, yeah. Yeah, the same God I’m worshipping is being worshipped here, he says, and I can, therefore, I can, you know, steal, you know, a few, a few things from this process to, to enhance my, my own process of worshipping my deities, you know. But because I don’t belong to… Does he talk about stealing or that? No, I, I, I, I think he says just take some things.
Yeah, okay. Yeah. And it’s a fact, you know, I mean Prabhupada added the Sunday feast, there’s no Sunday feast in Indian tradition, you know, yeah.
And then, he goes on to say that Bhaktivinoda Thakura says, but because I don’t belong to this specific tradition, I won’t be participating in the details of the worship, you know. So same way, yeah, we, we adopt certain things, we can take, and if Lord Chaitanya, specifically, he, he, he took sannyas in a Mayavadi Sampradaya, right, to be able to establish his, his people appreciate his position to communicate. And then he sat there, you know, he had to have, he had to have known something of Shankara’s philosophy to be able to, to communicate with them, you know, his ideas and so on, you know, yeah.
And so for, for both reasons, to, to build bridges, so that we can take advantage of the different resources, and then, and then they can take advantage of our resources, and in that way, we can build a strong world, you know, to, to, to combat the basic principles of illusion. Can you just repeat the two purposes, Maharaj, to build bridges? Yeah, if we, yeah, if we build, for example, we’re, we’re especially focussing on Carl Jung a lot, but let’s look at Socrates, I mean, Shakespeare, you know, Han, I had so much association with Hansadutta, he would, he was our zonal acharya during the, you know, the guru era, and a lot, very nice, in many ways, very nice, you know. But I think it was he, he said that Prabhupada said, you can teach Shakespeare in the Gurukula, you know, and if you want to understand word power, then you should read Shakespeare, you know, yeah, and I have, I’ve seen that, I mean, he was, he was like an empowered person, there’s other discussions about this, but it seems that he was being empowered by some Gandharva or something, you know, even still, the potency of his words is so powerful that it communicates very deeply to people, and it’s not only just, just the words, because he has formed our perspective on certain iconographic issues, you know.
For example, you’ve heard of the movie, the movie, The Lion King, right? Yes. Yeah, by Walt Disney. The, the original investment was, was like 45 million dollars to make the movie, you know, yeah, yeah.
Do you know how much is made since it, how much money is made since it was first produced? No idea, much more than that, I think. 490 million dollars profit have been made so far, and it’s still going, and from the very beginning, there’s just no bones about it, they just say it, it is based upon Hamlet, it’s based upon Hamlet. You know, the, the evil uncle kills the father, the young prince has to fight, so it’s the same iconographic, you know, the same bhava is being presented, and it’s a big part, then, of our, our whole Western ethos of who we are, you know, what to speak of the, the contemplations, the introspection.
That’s what I would say, is that it’s an opportunity for us who are born in a certain culture to be able to take the Vedic perspective into our heart. Oh, that’s, yeah, that’s, I understand that, yeah, I know that, I grew up with that, you know, and then also to find the language to be able to express it from the other side, you know. Yeah, I can go on forever here.
So just to re-articulate the two points you mentioned, first is that, that we can get, we can build bridges by getting the language to communicate, as well as the way, what is influencing people today, we can, we can connect that with Krishna. So it’s both to reach them and to help them to reach, some, reach Krishna’s wisdom in some way, both ways. Yeah, it’s the same, dealing with this, for example, what is the most famous phrase in Hamlet? What is the most famous question in the world, the whole world? Yeah, see what I mean? Yeah, yeah, to be, okay, so we see Arjuna in the battlefield of Kurukshetra, and he’s sitting there looking at the Kauravas, looking at Bhishma and Drona and wondering, you know, to be or not to be, that is the question.
To take arms against a sea of Kauravas, to fight, pretend to die, to dream, ah, but there’s the problem. For who knows what dreams will come after we have shuffled off this mortal coil. I would count myself king of infinite space, bound up in a nutshell, if only I did not have bad dreams.
So you see, you’re coming out of it, but you’ve been influenced by this, you know, by the same, same culture. So it’s like, I had never heard Gita being presented in Shakespearean language. It’s quite a transporting experience just to hear a few thoughts presented like that.
I mean, it’s tough. You know, we, we started developing this. We have a, you know, a programme.
I sent you the PowerPoint show we were using. Yeah, and maybe, I don’t know, maybe, what is it, 20 years ago, 25 years ago. And there’s two major themes in Hamlet, that one drama.
It’s, people say that amongst all the works of Shakespeare, Hamlet is like the, the Himal, is like, you say this, Hamlet is like, like the Mount Everest amongst the Himalayan mountains. There’s also King, King Lear. There’s Macbeth.
And they’re all very intense. There’s the Taming of the Shrew. They’re all very appropriate for Western, or even like, you know, educated Indian audiences who are international.
Actually, people who grew up with the influence of the British Raja. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. You say, oh, now I understand our heritage. Now I understand how we got this.
Now I understand, sir, why you’re speaking British English, sir. Sir, I am speaking British English. That’s interesting.
I was preparing for this talk. I was looking at the influence of Hamlet or Shakespeare’s work in general in India. So it seems in the pre-independence and post-independence times, there were quite a few movie renditions of Shakespeare’s work.
Even Hamlet has been rendered in Hindi. But nothing in the last few decades. Not so much.
Yeah. Nothing is so much popular. So it seems that maybe as the world changed, but even in the Western world, I would say that in humanities, is Shakespeare that much of an influence now? Because it’s more of critical analysis and deconstructionist.
How many Indians have watched The Lion King? Oh, OK. But hardly anyone knows that Lion King is actually derived from Hamlet. The poison works no matter how you get it.
That’s true. That’s true. It’s the same story of young men.
OK, you know, I’ve got to fight my evil uncle, protect my father, whatever it is. Marry the pretty girl. So Maharaj, you mentioned earlier that those who are already familiar with Shakespeare, then if they can see it from a more spiritual perspective, it builds bridges.
So can you tell something about your journey, where you also like your journey, where you also are a reader of Shakespeare before you are introduced to Krishna consciousness? And did you make a conscious decision to revisit those literature at a particular time in your life as a sannyasi, as a devotee? I was growing up like most of us. I had a tail, you know, whatever. And when you go to school, they make you read, you know, OK, gosh, you know, I was doing it.
OK, it was boring. But then I discovered, you know, juvenile literature, you know, children’s children’s books in my local library, which is a really good library, big library. And then the whole world changed because here were books with adventures about boys, you know, being lost in the wilderness and having to survive.
And, you know, so many wonderful books about stories about children, which were interesting. So at that point, my whole opinion about literature reading changed. Then for my teachers, my family, there wasn’t much literary stuff going on.
My mother and something. But there wasn’t a lot. You know, my godmother was giving me some Christian books, but they were very, you know, ethical, moral type things.
They were nice. But in this public schools, there were some things there. Some stimulating things were there in the church, some things.
But then in high school, you started to get into the secondary and some people, one of my professors, Benjamin Leaf, very nice guy. He gave me just a fourth hand photocopy of the best literature in the Western world, classics, you know, Candide and Rousseau and this kind of stuff. So I started reading some of those and those were good, you know.
And then I think not so much the teachers, but authors would refer to other books and I would look for those. And I got into Albert Camus and so many things. And Shakespeare was really difficult because the language is difficult.
You know, it’s very, very, you know, it’s 500 year old language and stuff, you know, and the concepts. But then somewhere along there, yeah, after I became a devotee, I started like looking at the stuff. And one thing is interesting because a very big, big volume in the complete works of Shakespeare was the River Source, something or other thing.
But it was very attractive, you know, the complete works of Shakespeare. And so I remember I got that and that’s when I started to like, you know, begin to get back into the relationship with Shakespeare. But Shakespeare was just one of the people, like I mentioned, and others, such as, especially Albert Camus, Carl Jung, especially now, probably recommended.
One point here, you’re like this. I remember, I can remember it was in the quadrangle of the Gurukula in Vrindavan and Gopi Muranadana. We knew each other a little bit.
So we saw each other, we said, oh, hello, hello, you know, we’re talking. And I was talking about how I was having a success in preaching and even amongst devotees and stuff, you know, with classical literature and looking at Shakespeare and reaching out. We’ve had very good success with approaching very prominent people.
And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, he said one time, and I think he was there, he said Prabhupada gave an entire lecture on the Merchant of Venice in London one evening. Yeah. And then he said sometime later, he found, he stumbled in a bookstore in Calcutta on a book, I think it was called Venetiavonic.
And it was like a Bengali translation. It’s like you’re saying that sometime there during the Raja or after, you know, people, you know, people in India also were there. So it appears that, you know, Prabhupada, it’s like there’s so many things that Prabhupada wanted to do.
He gave us the basis. He’s the foundation. He’s the founder, Acharya.
And we’re building upon things that people have built on upon Prabhupada’s foundation. But I think there’s a lot of space in the foundation where nobody’s even started to build. Like, I mean, how many people do you know are working with Carl Jung? You know, it’s, but at the same time, some people, who’s our sanyasi from Russia? Yeah, I was just, I just met him in passing.
We’re both running a different direction in Mayapur. He said, What are you doing? What are you doing? I said, I’m working with Jung a bit. And he said, Oh, Jung is essential for our preaching.
Of course, he’s a Russian. He’s a Russian. You know, they’re very mental people.
In Russia, there are two options in the wintertime. When Russian devotee told me this, Vashishta, there’s two options in the winter in Russia time, you can drink alcohol, or you can read. And he said, most people do both.
So very intense, you know, profound literary tradition. Yeah. Yeah.
So when you said Prabhupada gave a lecture on Merchant of Venice, is that recorded? Or? No, the way Gopi Puranananda was talking about it was like maybe some, it’d be like there were six, 10, eight people there one evening and Prabhupada was giving his lecture, darshan thing, and he went into it. Because I think it’s a fact that I can, of course, many stories that Prabhupada specifically avoided dealing with certain things, because he was, and it was the acharya for common people. And therefore, you know, so people wouldn’t be confused.
He avoided bhata yoga. He wouldn’t associate in certain places. And some people, Bhagavata, there’s a whole story about how Prabhupada was talking so enthusiastically about Gandhi the evening before with Bhagavata on the rooms of the buildings in Bombay.
And they had those buildings there when they first took over. And Bhagavata said everybody had left, and Prabhupada started talking about Gandhi, and he was going on about him, how wonderful he was, and such a nice feeling and sentiment, you know. So next day, they were walking on the beach in Bombay.
And they went farther than they normally did. And then finally Prabhupada stopped and turned, you know, away from the beach and just folded his hands and did pranams, you know. And everybody was thinking maybe Narada Muni had come or something, because nobody could see anything.
But then Bhagavata was looking, and the distance was very, very nice, you know, little monument with a bust of Gandhi. And so he was thinking, wow, Prabhupada, my God. One, maybe Mr. Patel or somebody, started talking all about the glories of Gandhi, you know.
And he was on Prabhupada’s left, and Bhagavata was on his right. And Prabhupada was kind of tolerating for a while, but then he said something about, but that is not philosophy, you know, kind of minimising Gandhi to some degree, you know. But then he turned to Bhagavata and on his right side, and he winked, you know, at him.
You know how I feel about Gandhi, but here it is, I have to talk to these people and so on. So we’re going to, you know, carry on our role as the Acharya, you know, yeah. But different, and when they did it, if they did it properly, sometimes Prabhupada would stop, and other times he would say, yeah, okay, you’ve done it well, this is good.
It’s a good thing you’ve done. So that it is, you’re saying it’s a big challenge, not to get sucked up into the, you know, the passion of the Mahabharata, or the passion of Shakespeare, you know, and look for the spiritual advantage of it. It’s amazing, Maharaj, what you said, that there are dimensions of Prabhupada, which most of us are not aware of.
There are so many aspects. I recently came across a quote of Prabhupada, where Prabhupada is telling that if you are approaching educated people, then they will be puffed up, and he says, they have a right to be puffed up. And rather than telling, he says, you should learn the art of approaching such people and appreciating different points of view.
So that is quite amazing. So there is, so it seems Prabhupada was very multifaceted, and he used different approaches at different times. And sometimes we have reduced him to maybe one particular approach, or that is the prominent image of him in our movement.
So I would never have dreamt from what I knew that Prabhupada would give a talk on Merchant of Venice. But again, it was, you know, Gopi Paranadhana was there, small people in Bengal, sorry, in England, you know, so, you know, what better place? Yeah. What another devotee told me was that Bhadravardhana, he was there in Paris with Hansa Buddha, I think, or something like that, you know, Bhagavan.
And so Prabhupada came and, you know, French people are very, you know, very famous for being arrogant and everything else, you know, so on. Yeah. So it was a big hall, and they did good advertising, and maybe like, you know, maybe 400 people or something, you know.
And he said, you know, Prabhupada came up there, you know, very regally, and he could tell all the French people were immediately like, you know, very, very, you know, suspicious and everything else. So he started to introduce him, Kirtan, and he said, you know, Prabhupada said, he said, I hear that French people are very fond of revolution. So I propose a revolution.
He said, boom, and it was like, everybody. And then he finished it off, and he said, okay, so now we’re going to be installing these deities of Radha and Krishna. Krishna has his consort, his lover, you know, and we’re going to be installing our Radha-Krishna deities here, because we hear that French women are among the most beautiful in the world.
And he went on about, also, maybe a French girlfriend, you know, he finished off that way. And then, so you know, it’s exactly how to touch people, you know, and not in any way invalid. Yeah, yeah, I mean, Krishna probably did go to Paris because he’s looking for a French girlfriend.
I mean, I’ve seen these kind of things, I’m sorry to say. You’re worshipping a, you know, kind of a strange kid. This point about Merchant of Venice, I’m fascinated by that.
In today’s world, there is a whole series of books, which they call as popular philosophy. Oh, yeah. Blackwell, one of the publishers that published it, and they are, of course, mostly engaging it with contemporary culture.
So they have Star Wars and philosophy, Harry Potter and philosophy, and Doctor Who and philosophy. And it seems these books do quite well. And they, of course, they don’t do as well as the movies or TV serials.
But still, somewhere, it’s a way, just as there are science popularisers, there are scientists, and there are those who are popular science writers, they make scientific concepts accessible. So this is this whole genre of writers, they call themselves as popular philosophy writers. So, philosophy popularisers.
So, actually, once in America, also, when I was there, I gave a talk on Star Wars and Bhakti Wisdom. So, yeah, quite a lot of correlations. But I didn’t dare to put that talk online anywhere.
Because the first question would have come is what is the Indian Brahmachari doing even knowing about Star Wars? Actually, I found reading that book was very informative, because it just, I read the book about Star Wars and philosophy, popular philosophy. So, I found that these are very, these are ways in which we can reach intellectual people who will not directly read didactic or say a particular tradition’s books. No, it is.
And, boy, I mean, how long can you be fascinated by a godless display of energy? I mean, it’s probably science says, okay, you need to put mixed carbon, bicarbonate of soda and vinegar and pop the top off of your jar in your kitchen or something. Okay, you know, and so you have different effects. But everybody, you know, basically, Baba says, as soon as you have a human body, you’re interested in deeper questions about, you know, for example, Hamlet is, I mean, so many things.
Hamlet is full of this concept of betrayal. It’s there with his uncle. And it’s even, it’s also there with his mother.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so, the concept of betrayal and trust, you know, is extremely, who is trustworthy? Yeah.
And who is trustworthy with what? With our money or with the most confidential things within our heart? So, we learn different kinds of people to talk about these things. And that’s what, you know, influences the Baba, the advance. So, it’s a very, very, so, these people like Steven Spielberg and different people like that, the ones that become classics, world classical literature, it’s not that they say philosophy, dry, big, logical stuff.
Yeah, maybe they have some bigger logical concept in the thing. But it’s more, it goes beyond that to the iconographic level, the Baba. So, the Buddha, and it touches these iconic, you know, images, you know, the virgin shrouded in snow, the youth pined away with desire.
Beautiful. So, Maharaj, how are you connecting iconography? All these people. Yeah.
Yeah. How are you connecting iconography with bhava and buddhi? Are you saying that this iconography resonates with the deepest emotions in the human heart or the deepest longings of the intellect? Or how are you connecting the two? This is a whole section on Sankhya, this is the one we’re doing now. Boy, the mind is engaged in thinking, analytical process, mathematics, grammar, you know, according to Carl Jung, this all goes on pretty much in the head, you know, I’m thinking about these things.
In the mode of ignorance, I’m involved in the senses, I become absorbed in seeing something, I lose, I lose my intelligence by seeing an attractive, there’s a thing. It’s there, but it’s absorbed, you know, all the water is absorbed in the sponge, there’s no water anywhere, but it’s there. So, I become absorbed in this sensual experience.
And someone slaps me and says, come to your senses, man. So, you’re not absorbing the sense, you’re absorbing your senses. Okay.
And behind it, maybe a little bit of thought process running to be able to put your pants on properly, you know, and tie your tie. Okay. And then somebody else is more civilised, we call it Anamaya, Pranamaya, Manamaya.
Okay. He’s a dignified person, he plants, he thinks, he makes arrangements, has ethics, ethical and moral things. But this is where Jung was going beyond the manas, you know, indria, manas, you know, a whole big lecture.
And then buddhi, you know. So, the level of buddhi, introduction to Nectar of Instruction, Prabhupada says, Krishna consciousness depends upon the attitude of the follower. Attitude of the follower, yes.
So, your buddhi establishes your perspective, your attitude. Antarasthita, Sri Krishna, Bhavanamrita, Sangha. So, the word Prabhupada is using for consciousness, which matches the hippie word, which is coming from Carl Jung, is bhava.
So, what is your bhava? What is your attitude? What is your perspective? What is, and this is what Jung and other people are calling iconographic thinking, as opposed to this linear logical thinking, which is more in the mode of action, the mind. Iconograph is the mantra, the yantra, is something which we can take in all at one time. It’s, if you take the West to Muni, this is Nectar of Devotion, for Aristotle, the essence of the drama was the plot, you know.
One Manipuri boy’s sister is kidnapped by evil Burmese drug dealers. So, he gets some friends and they go and rescue his sister and blow up the drug factories. Kung fu killers of Hari Krishna Mountain, okay.
So, you see, it’s a plot. It’s a plot. It should go into one sentence.
This is a very important thing. You should be able to state the whole plot or the whole movie in one sentence, really, basically. Okay, but for Aristotle, it was a plot, but for Bharata Muni, it was the bhava, that when you come out of the movie, you should have a different perspective on things.
It should have touched your heart and changed the bhava. Your iconographic view of the world is changing. Yeah.
So, that’s how, using the word. So, is it something similar to, we talk about the brain polarity, the logical brain and the right brain and the left brain, one is more intuitive and the other is more rational and step-by-step linear? I would say it’s behind that. I would say the mind access, the mind uses the brain, but the brain is based upon the bhava.
And so, when we die, if a lot of the mind is based upon a certain kind of brain, then it gets lost in the process. But if it’s based upon bhava, buddhi, then it survives. It goes on to the next body.
We can carry mental substance with us. The physical body is gone. But yeah, some thoughts and complexes of thoughts, using Jungian terms and modern terms, those go with us.
And people, what do you call it? Child prodigies? There’s one. Just look up child prodigies on the YouTube and boy, you’ll find atom bombs for reincarnation. But then behind that, the bhava, the perspective, the attitude.
The bhava, the attitude, the perspective. And some babies are born with terror in their eyes and some babies are born with, you know, the world is meant to give me candy. Women know this, yeah.
But babies from the second day, in the womb, they got a different attitude, different bhava about things. So, the left-right brain, I think, is more dependent upon, you know, there it’s in psychology and it’s neurophysiology and also in the Vedas, devahu and pitruhu, whatever it is, yeah. One is more, I would say, yeah, one is more related to, you know, buddhi and one is more related to indriya, logical thinking.
But it’s a big area to try and connect these things because when you connect them, it’s like, you know, as soon as Prabha was able to start making movies, right, things changed. As soon as Prabha was able to get a, what’s it called? It’s called linotype machine. It wasn’t a Xerox machine, but it was similar.
Then he could start producing a magazine, you know. So, as soon as we have access to all of the Jungian language or Shakespearean, all the Shakespearean stuff, you know, we can start putting messages across like anything, you know, to certain communities. This is my icon.
This is my culture. I mean, what are the American icons? America, forget England for a while. Statue of Liberty? These are images, but personalities that Americans identify with and, you know.
Maybe Washington, George Washington? Something. How about James Bond? Okay, are you talking about that? Okay, yeah. James Bond, yeah.
This is what, yeah. Now notice, James Bond, I think, like something like, you know, over 2,000 people have tried to kill James Bond. Prabha was watching one of these things and he said, I’m still alive.
And James Bond has killed something like, I don’t know, 1,000 people. And he’s had, I guess, I’m not sure they’re illicit or not, but I guess they’re illicit. Illicit sexual relation with something like 178 women or something like that.
So, this is, you know, only God can do this. And if you notice, it’s gone on. I remember the first movie is when I was in high school.
You see, it’s gone on. It’s been a popular American iconographic figure since the very beginning of who we are. We are people who don’t necessarily trust our institution.
James Bond many times has to take things in his own hand and disobey his authorities. And Americans do that. British and Germans don’t do that.
Americans, you know, we have this whole thing of being rebellious against authorities. Now, Americans generated their consciousness of who they were out of revolution, right? They killed their relationship. They engaged in a little bit of patricide.
Canada didn’t. Canadians consider themselves a part of the Commonwealth. So, Americans don’t have any heritage.
So, you may notice that James Bond is an American icon, but he is a British spy. Okay. But still, he became an icon.
Yeah, we have to have, who are we? We have to have our parents and our ancestors, you know. So, Americans want this. They want to have the British heritage, but at the same time, too, they want to, you know, reject it.
And that’s why you’re going to get, you know, preaching to this kind of people, getting messages across, getting mass media messages across. You’ve got to realise these things. Yeah.
Yeah. So, I mean, these are many fascinating subjects and we would love to discuss these in future podcasts. If you come back to Shakespeare for now.
So, if I understand the flow, what you’re saying is Shakespeare’s works have contributed to many of the icons that shape Western civilisation. And that’s why we can connect, if we can connect with those icons, then our message will become much more accessible and relevant for people. And the other side of the coin is that people who have been raised up within this iconography, which is, you know, anybody who was a part of the British Empire, which includes America and includes India, then will be able to understand the messages in the Bhagavatam from the perspective, ah, now I understand.
You know, for example, it’s only basically through Shakespeare and things like that, that I can understand what a king is. We never had a king in America, you know, contemporary ideology. So, it has to go back to our cultural heritage for me to understand what is, you know, this whole idea of civilisation, of royalty, and that kind of reality.
But in India, you have that, you know, you have that heritage and stuff. And so, it’s British took, it’s very easy, he’s our king. In America, we don’t have kings.
We have exact opposite, we kill them, you know. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So, fascism, fascism didn’t take off well here. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. But in Germany and, and, you know, in Japan, it took off well.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they were.
Maharaj, for this level of engagement, I think the two things, like you first said, not many people read books. So, even those devotees who are going to engage in this level, they are not going to be many at one level. And another thing is that while engaging at this level, we may have to maybe refine our definition of preaching.
Because through this, it’s not people may immediately become devotees, but it says the bridges can be built and at least something which is incomprehensible, becomes intelligible. Okay, this is what you’re saying, this is what you believe is what you people do. Yeah, in one sense, it’s, it’s a more subtle, we could say foundational level of outreach.
Isn’t it? It’s, it’s, it very much has that aspect to it, I would say, very much. But on the other hand, yeah, I mean, if you can, I remember, there’s one big GBC controversy, but after Prabhupada left, then we had the, we made this big mistake about zonlacharyas and, and everybody, Hansadutta, Bhagavan, Jayadhira, we were very confused in many ways, you know, so also, okay, Prabhupada was our guru. And now, all of them have to be new Prabhupadas.
And that was, that was, you know, very simple understanding of the situation. So I went through it with Hansadutta in Berkeley, he was archarya. And when he had his, like, kind of fall down, and then they wanted everybody, all the disciples he had made, quite a few, you know, hundreds, to really take shelter, they had to have somebody, they had to be reinitiated immediately by somebody else.
And, and they were sending Rameshwar, Bhavananda, and Hridayananda were being pushed in there, so on. And, okay, they should do it. And some people were inclined to support this, some people weren’t, I wasn’t.
And so then I was just thinking that, what was it, that I was just mentioning, I just mentioned that, wow, the same thing in Hamlet, that is, he was very disturbed because his, his, his mother, you know, when her, his, her father, her husband, died. Yeah, yeah, then she got very quickly remarried. And he said, he told his friend Horatio, Horatio came and said, oh, I came to see your father’s funeral.
And he said, no, don’t say that. Say you came to see my mother’s marriage. And Horatio said, yeah, well, they, they came up a little quick one after the other.
And then Hamlet said, oh, no, no, we should be thrifty. The, the cold, the cooked meat at the funeral feast did but do double, double duty as cold cuts at the wedding feast. You know, she got remarried, she remarried so quick, the meat wasn’t even cold from the funeral, you know.
And that, it, I just saw it, wow, Atreya Rishi, Supadhamana Maharaj, Trivikrama Swami, they all went, yeah, if somebody’s been initiated by a guru, it’s a fact, this is a very deep personal thing. You can’t just go shoving them to be initiated by somebody else. It’s actually unchaste, you know, for us even to ask such a question.
So I saw the words just poom, you know, it was deep, it was even me, you know. My God. Yes.
The cold cuts from the wedding feast. The pulao, the rice from the Maharashtami feast was used as pulao for Bhagavan’s, you know, very cold feast. Yeah.
So, in one sense, just like, say, when we become Krishna conscious, we see Shastra and scriptural themes being reenacted, or scriptural points being demonstrated in the world around us. So, similarly, if somebody has read Shakespeare and has internalised it, then they will also see it. So, in a sense, that is also like a living text, which can enhance our vision.
Yeah. Yeah. And then we can, Hansadutta told us, the Prabhupada said, every single psychological circumstance you can encounter is in Srimad Bhagavatam.
And so, we’ll see it in these classical stories that people are kind of like using to decide who I am, and we’ll just see it in people’s dealings, and we’ll see, okay, this is what’s happening. I’m in this drama now, and the Bhagavatam tells me how to make this a wholesome drama, a healthy drama. It tells me what’s going to happen.
It tells me who’s going to make this out alive, and how to help them play their role properly. Yeah. So, Maharaj, continuing with this point now about, you know, how you were able to see, in one sense, a reenactment of the Hamlet in the situation in Iskcon at that time, what Gertrude did at that time.
So, when we were seeing, say, Shakespeare with, from a Krishna conscious perspective, so what all, so do we see that at one level, Shakespeare himself was a religious person, and he bore religious themes, or is it that by our Krishna conscious, we can see there are universal themes which we see over there, or is it, how do we, how does the Krishna conscious vision of such literary figures work? The ambience, can I share my screen for one second? Yes, please, Maharaj. So, here we have the gopis praying to Goddess Durga, and Prabhupada says, you know, we can use anything for Krishna, you know, it’s a motivation. Lord Chaitanya, you know, listening to Sarvabhauma, adjusting to Prakashinanda, okay, and here’s Hansadutta with Prabhupada, and there’s a brahmachari behind them there, you know who that is? No, it’s you? I forgot his name, Su something, that’s Bhakti Bhushan Maharaj when he was a brahmachari.
Okay, thank you, Shruti Priyadevi is his good disciple. And this is Shrubh Damodar, you know, Maharaj, you know, he’s dressed all up, you know, and presenting himself all within their language, within their perspective, quoting their authorities, and of course, I worked with the Bhaktivedanta Institute, it was very natural, you know. Okay, so here we have it, you know, so we have Rupa Goswami, 1489-1564, Narottam Das Thakur, 1530, and then we have Shakespeare, so you see Shakespeare’s, he was baptised 1564 and died 16, no, 1616, yeah, April 16.
And do you know Miguel Cervantes? Yeah, I’ve heard about him, yeah, I’ve read several of his quotes, I’ve not really read him directly. Don Quixote. Oh yeah, Don Quixote, yeah.
If you look at the best, yeah. In my childhood, I read a children’s retelling of that book, but I haven’t read in my adulthood, yeah. Well, if you look at, you know, contemporary, you know, every few years they have something, university does it, what are the 50 best books in the world, and Don Quixote always comes out in the top 10, and many times it’s considered the best.
And the difficulty is the translation, but now there’s a good translation of it, and this is another area. But you notice the dates of their death, the two of them? Oh, almost the same, it’s just one day apart. That’s a little spooky, isn’t it? So, and they are, you know, this is what’s happening on the continent, on the continent, you know, is in Spain, with a tremendous literary tradition, which influences all of South America, and so many people, you know.
My hypothesis now, Krishna consciousness was that they were both pets of the same Gandharva. Yeah. Oh, okay.
Yeah, one, I think a master’s thesis guy, he said, oh, Miguel Cervantes and William Shakespeare were the same person or something, you know, okay, it’s crazy. But then he went and did a computer analysis of the use of different kinds of metaphors and things like this. And as I heard, it came back, you know, far higher than would have occurred by chance.
They were using same metaphors and same things like that, and so on. So anyway, this is the ambience. And so from Cervantes, you can understand how things were in Spain at that time.
From Agatha Christie, you can understand how things were right after World War II, if you want, if you want to read some exciting, you know, detective novels, you know, yeah. So at that time of Shakespeare, basically there, I think as far Shakespeare was either in Shakespeare, you’ll find Christianity, and you’ll find Greek philosophy. You know, you’ll find Romans and the Latin and Greeks, the classics that carry right in in Oxford, they would study the classics, the classics, and that was a big deal of was learning if you knew Greek, if you knew Latin, if you knew the classics, you know, so they had Oedipus and things like this.
And, you know, what is it? How many of Shakespeare’s plays are basically, you know, Roman themes, you know, Julius Caesar? Yeah, it was powerful, you know, and Hamlet, Hamlet uses phrases, he uses the example of Caesar to emphasise one of his points, very important point, very nice point. So that at that time, there was a strong ambience of the Greek classics and classical Greek and Roman culture. And also, then the other traditions, you see these lines in our culture, which is the Judeo-Christian tradition, Judeo-Christian tradition, which had passed through Rome, but still was its own character.
And these were heavy things. I mean, yeah, you know, the Protestants versus the Catholics versus the, what do you call it? The Reformation. Yeah, they were killing each other like anything over one or two phrases, became so fanatics, you know, yeah.
And so he had access to these traditions. Now, Hamlet, if you’ve discovered this, Shakespeare didn’t invent the Baba, the motif, anything. It was coming from an earlier German story, history about this thing.
And the Lion King is based upon, yeah. And so if this goes back, I don’t know how far back this go. Do we know anybody, did we know any brother, younger brother who revolted against his older brother after he was gone and didn’t give fair treatment to the sons and the cousins? Well, Dhritarashtra was the older brother.
Yeah. And you can see this, wow, you know, and in Macbeth, oh gosh, you know, I mean, one time we were doing this Shakespeare thing, you know, in a big university, one of the biggest universities, one of the most powerful universities in Chile. What is it? Universidad Católica in the south.
What is it? Santiago. Santiago, I think so. Yeah.
Yeah. And we are Catholic. Okay.
Thank you. We have the voice from the sky. Universidad Católica in Santiago.
Very, very nice. Oh, yeah. Very, very, very nice.
It’s very respected. When you tell people that we’re doing programmes there in Chile, they go, oh, really? Wow. You’ve gotten in there? Yeah.
I’m respected. Okay. So anyway, I made my presentation of the ontology, which is where Hamlet describes, you know, what is the world, what happens when you die, how you go to different places.
And it’s such an identical, you know, cosmology with the Vedas in so many ways. And it’s presented in such an intense fashion, you know. But also the second theme, of course, is the fact about his mother’s remarriage, the second betrayal.
And he discovers that by, he does both of them. He tests them by presenting a drama. He has some people he knows.
He says, can you do this drama tonight before the king and the queen? Yeah, we can do that. And I want to rewrite some of your lines a little bit. Can you pick them up? Yes, sir.
Of course, we can pick them up. So he reenacts the murder of his father, the way the ghost told him it happened. And his uncle just becomes flipped out and goes out, you know.
He says, aha. This is confirmed. Ghost is not lying.
And then he has a scene where, you know, in the play, the older king in the play, he tells his younger wife, just like Hamlet’s father and mother, the old king says, you know, I’ll be dying soon and you’re young. So after I’m gone, you should. And she says, oh, no, never say remarriage like that.
She goes on talking about how, you know, let me be chained up in the prison with no hope and all these things. And let me suffer a thousand deaths, you know, rather than get remarried. And then she has a very, very nice line.
She says, uh, uh, they say a woman who kisses a second man in bed kills the first one twice. Yeah. So we, uh, was it Chris Unge? One of our, uh, I think it was Chris Unge, one of our disciples there.
She became a professional actress and we were just reading this in front of the class and everything else. And I was taking the point of the king and she was taking the point of, uh, what do you call it? Um, the, the player queen and she broke down and she could not handle it. It was just, it was so intense and stuff like that.
She started laughing at stuff, but she just couldn’t handle it, you know, the, the communication. So this is a big issue. I mean, are we, are we, are we dealing with the, with the issue of remarriage in Iskcon? Yeah.
Under what circumstances is a girl allowed to remarry? Yeah, in Iskcon. I can actually start getting into it more deeply now, but the Parashara’s Dharma Shastra talks about this, Prabhupada recommends. Parashara’s Dharma Shastra, he talks about this whole issue of remarriage.
And if you want to, and if you go through looking at it in terms of, uh, you know, how Hamlet’s dealing with it, he’s dealing with the whole issue like that and stuff. And you can see like, it brings it right to home about, wow, this is a, so for example, a girl thinking about remarriage and then she’s hearing Hamlet and she goes, Hey, this is, this is not just my life. This is my kids, you know? And I can see this is a big deal.
My getting remarried has a really heavy impact. I have a heavy impact on my children. So let me think again.
Let me wait. Let me not use the cold cuts for, let me not use the cooked meat from the funeral feast for cold cuts for my wedding. I mean, how long does Parashara recommend that the wife wait before she get remarried? I don’t think you know, but it’s right there.
Prabhupada recommends it, you know, he says six years, six years. He says first class is follow Vishnu Priya and husband takes sannyas, don’t get remarried. You become a sannyasini.
Second class, but still dharmic, is to get remarried, is to not get remarried, but enjoy life. You’ll become a sannyasini. And third class, but still progressive, third class, but still a dharmic lady.
Oh, okay. So if I understand right, Maharaj, what you are saying is that these, that Shakespeare’s plays have universal themes which speak to the human experience in general. So like you get the two points of a uncle going against his nephews after the, and then the other point of remarriage.
So in that sense, if we consider that even our scriptures, they’re giving spiritual wisdom, but also they’re addressing the universal challenges of human existence. And those have been depicted through stories. So in that sense, it’s not that we are say importing or imposing some Krishna consciousness, Krishna consciousness into Shakespeare’s writings.
It is, there are just universal themes and we are simply observing and connecting. Yeah, but, and again, the ambience is completely religious. There is an afterlife, there is a God who watches things.
People are punished for their sins. Baba and these higher sentiments, that’s, I think we’re going to find some of these within Hamlet and within Shakespeare’s works, but most of them are a lot just about the future, our future life and how it’s, yeah. After hearing, after seeing the play, seeing, what’s his name? His father, it was father Claudius, I guess, was it Claudius? Claudius, yeah.
Yeah, yeah. Even better than I do, don’t you think? After he sees it, maybe God’s doing this, he goes off and Hamlet finds him one quarter of the palace, but there’s a very nice soliloquy, as you saw it in our drama that we took it, and Claudius is talking to himself and he said, you know, my sin hath the primal eldest curse upon it, a brother’s murder. And that was the first sin, the killing of Cain.
It was Cain killed Abel, the two brothers of Adam. Now, this is considered the oldest and most reprehensible sin, to kill your brother. It’s one of the most horrible things that you can do in Christianity.
It’s a, what’s it called, a patricide, fratricide. Fratricide’s a deep thing. Yeah.
And he said, so he says, my sin has the most horrible, you know, curse upon it, the killing of a brother. I killed my brother, you know, and, but isn’t there enough, but isn’t there great force in prayer? Hey, we’re coming right to our Krishna consciousness, Bhakti Yoga. How much force is there in chanting the holy names and things like this? So he says, isn’t there a lot of, so much prayer, force in prayer, that it can keep us from falling down? And once we fall down, it can, it can raise us back up, you know? So this is exactly what Rupa Goswami discusses, right? In the beginning of, you know, it’s prophylactic and antiseptic.
Yeah. Yes, Maharaj. At that point, one more thing struck me, that at that time, holy names, and once we’re fallen, it purifies us.
So identical conception is right there. So he says, he says, okay, but let me kneel and pray and, you know, and I said, but how can I pray for forgiveness from God when I’m still possessed of those things for which I did, did commit the sin, my crown, my kingdom, my queen, I’m still hanging on to these things, right? So which offence is this? Offence and continuous sinful activities in the strength of the holy name, ninth offence. No, no, maintaining material attachments.
He even, yeah. Okay. He’s not giving up his attachments to, and he realises that I, it’s, I can pray to God, but look, how can I pray sincerely if I’m still keeping these things, which I know, which of which I wish to be forbidden.
He says, okay, trying to translate this into modern, modern Spanish was, oh boy, it was a trip. He talks about having stiff legs bend, you know, my bend down, old stiff legs and let me pray to God, you know? So he bends and he prays and he’s praying to God to be forgiven for his sins. And he said, maybe something will happen.
So that’s when Hamlet enters, you see a little dramatic thing in the PowerPoint show, you know, and Hamlet sees him and, and Hamlet says, yum, yum, boppy, smut. Oh no, Hamlet says, do it, do it pat. He pulls his dagger out and says, now let me do it pat.
And let me do it like precisely. I know he’s guilty. I catch him and I’m going to kill him.
And he thinks, he will go to heaven. Yum, yum, boppy, smut, yum, bop, yum, tiajiti antikalevra. Yes, that was the most amazing correlation.
There are many other correlations, but among everything I found in Hamlet, that thought was the most striking. Because it’s so clear that the moment of death, if he dies now, he will be praying, he will go to God. I don’t want him to go to God, so I would kill him now.
So he’s using a demoniac use of, of, of transcendental knowledge. Yeah. Yeah.
And he says, this is not, this is not revenge for my father. My father went to hell because he was, you know, caught full of bread and all of his simple reactions like, he has to purge his soul. I, his only son, send his, his murderer to heaven.
This is not revenge. This is salary and payment. Let me catch him in a moment when he’s not full of, you know, when he’s engaged in gambling and swearing or hunting or engaged in incest, twixt the sheets.
And then his heel, his heels, his heart will depart for that hell as black as itself. And his heels will kick at heaven. It’s intense.
Beautiful language. So maybe, yes, you see this and the Prophet told George Harrison, Bhaktivinoda Thakura said life is temporary, like a drop of water on the leaf, leaf of a lotus flower. You, you say it’s temporary like the drop of water on the leaf of a rose, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And a little bit modern language and people are going to start thinking about, start thinking about it. You know, yeah, it’s a fact. It’s not just getting the beer and the beer and the hot dogs.
I mean, what, what kind of consciousness am I, am I developing? Am I even, am I even a decent American? You know, what’s happened to my country? You know? Yeah. Yeah. Simhaji, just exploring this point a little bit deeper, what you said, you talked about the ontology being similar.
Yeah. Soteriology also seems to be similar. The way he’s going, where he’ll go after, toward the end.
Now, how do we understand this? Because in some ways, say the thoughts of Plato and Socrates seem to be quite similar to the Gita’s insights about the soul. So, so is it that while Shakespeare’s environment was mostly Christian, but he also derived some of his ideas from, from the Greco-Roman tradition? Because you see, Western civilisation has these two formative influences. It’s more like the religious part came from Christianity.
And the more the rational, reflective, philosophical part came from the Greeks. So. I will now, I will now quote Professor Ravi Gupta.
I will now quote Professor Ravi Gupta, aka Radhika Ramandas. No, no, no. He’s my, he’s my guru, sir.
Yeah. I, I, I, I, I’m in the relationship of him with the gopis. Okay.
Oh my God. I have a relationship with him. Yeah.
That’s, that’s going to freak him out if he sees this. Your humility is heartbreaking, Maharaj. Okay.
Yeah. I’m, I am Udaba. He is the gopis.
Yeah. That’s why when I was thinking of names, that’s when I was thinking of it, because he was so much involved in all this dry, you know, metaphysical stuff, you know, that’s why I even thought the name, name Radhika Ramandam, you know, it’s good to keep some perspective, you know. Yeah.
But he said, he said exactly that, that you’ll find in Judeo, Judeo Christian tradition, that Judah, there’s not much cosmology. You look in the Bible and everything else, there’s not much there. So it started becoming integrated with, you know, Emperor Constantinople and everybody else.
Then they adopted the, the Greco-Roman cosmology of what is the universe, what is the soul, what is life, this kind of thing. And now they’re starting to reconsider, hey, we don’t, we didn’t, we didn’t have to do that. That’s not really, you know, from our tradition.
So they’re, they’re looking at their own tradition, but yes, it’s more, like I say, Socratic, you know, view of the universe. And so Socratic view also seems to be quite similar to the Gita’s view. That’s also, there are many points, Socratic view seems to be quite similar to Gita’s view, like, especially when his friend dies, when his, I think, friend’s wife dies.
And he talks about the reasons for the eternality of the soul. And don’t lament because the soul, her soul is eternal. That’s very similar to Gita’s second chapter.
Oh yeah. Especially the Fado. Yeah.
You know, the Fado? Yes. Yes. Almost like if, you know, if you come to these, you know, come to these, this kind of atmosphere, and people are asking, you know, can you study this, this Indian classics a little bit, but have you ever compared this with other people around the world? You’re saying it’s so great, but do you know what other people have thought? Have you read the Fado? No.
Oh, forget it. Yeah. So, you know, Dorje Tanya is quoting, Jiva Goswami is quoting from all the different, you know, Mimangse Shastras and all these things.
And the Sundarbans, what I understand, he expects that you know all these things before he starts talking about it. He’s talking to postgraduate people. So the Fado, I think every, every devotee, was it the Benjamin Jowett translation? Yes.
It’s very stimulating. And what you see is many, many, many, many, many arguments or classifications that Fado was using in terms of, what is it called, efficient cause, ultimate cause, and material cause of things. What are these coming from? And then maybe, you know, maybe like 10, 12 years ago, these are Aristotle’s categories.
You know, the ultimate cause is God. The efficient cause is the father who gives the keys to the car to the boys. And the material cause of their problem is the beer.
So they were caught drinking after the game and pulled over, and they ended up in jail. And police called the father and said, hey, we got your sons here. They’re a little drunk, and we pulled them over, you know, found some beer bottles in the car.
So who’s the criminal? The ultimate cause is God. The efficient cause is the father, and the material cause is the beer. So do we arrest the beer? So these are Aristotle’s categories, you know.
And he’s, of course, a grand disciple of Socrates. Yeah. So Socrates, the Phaedo, you find, they’re arguing about the eternality of the soul.
And Socrates says, nobody can say, my greatest enemy, the comic philosophers, the greatest enemies, even they could not say I’m being speculative or anything else. The glass of poison is on the table, and I have a choice of taking it or not. So is the soul immortal? And then so many arguments.
You know, Alfred North Whitehead? Yeah, he was. I think he’s a prominent historian. Whitehead.
Yeah, a prominent historian, prominent historian. I think it was pure philosophy, but philosophy and history are tied together. Yeah.
I mean, in India, one of his quotes is quite prominently portrayed that he says, the chapter in world history, which had a Western beginning, needs to have an Indian ending, if it is self-destruction. So is that Whitehead or the other guy that Prabhupada met? Yeah, from Australia. Oh, Arnold Toynbee, sorry.
Yeah, Toynbee. I mean, Toynbee is also one of these super, super giants. Yeah, same way.
But Whitehead is from Harvard also. Oh, right. I got confused.
He says, the safest way to characterise all Western philosophy is to say that the entire thing is a footnote to Socrates. Dialectical spiritualism, Prabhupada liked Socrates, and he liked Carl Jung, and practically speaking, everybody in between. He was, you know, like, you know, yeah.
So the Fado is, like you’re saying, it’s one concept after another, you know, and yeah, so world classical literature, Hamlet, cosmology. So then, you know, there are two things we broadly discussed. One is with respect to seeing Shakespeare from a Krishna conscious perspective.
One is there are ethical dilemmas or life situations, which are universal. Yes. And then second is that for addressing those issues, he draws on worldviews and motives, which have significant similarities with the Vedic worldview.
Yes. So that means both ways there are correlations. Yes.
Yeah. One thing I noticed in almost all of Shakespeare’s dramas, the supernatural plays a significant role. Witches or the ghosts or something like that speaking.
Yes. Yeah. Every year, how many, you know, supernatural ghosts and goblin movies come out.
Yeah. It’s a continuous appetite for those things because they’re real. People experience these things.
They, you know, they know these things are real. Yes. Start with ghost stories now.
So in one sense, another way we could put it that if somebody is caught in a very, very scientific worldview, a scientism developed worldview, that you don’t believe in anything beyond the senses. And the Shakespearean stories also open the world to that there is some, there is a reality beyond the senses, even if there is no explicit picture of God there, but there is definitely a, that there is much more to, what is that? I think he says, Horatio, that there is much more in the world than what your philosophy can imagine. Yeah.
Yeah. There are many things in the world, which is neither your nor my philosophy. Yeah.
I should know it. Yeah. There are more things in this world than were ever conceived in your or my philosophy, Horatio.
Yeah. Actually, I also forgot. I quoted that in my book on reincarnation.
Aha. The starting word. Yeah.
Right. Yeah. So, so the, so now the supernatural, I was just trying to analyse that are there some things in Shakespeare, which we can say that they couldn’t have come from a Christian influence.
Like it’s not just universal religious themes. It’s a, that the idea of like a providence shaping the ends that we could say that is a general religious theme. It doesn’t have to be distinctively Vedic or, but the idea of where a person goes at the time of that, I don’t know whether it’s that explicitly mentioned in the Bible.
It does seem to be very strikingly Gita As you sow, so shall you reap. That is there. But the whole conclusion of Hamlet, he’s just like Arjuna.
He does not want to have to deal with this problem. He does not want to deal with it. But then his uncle tries to kill him, but the killers are killed.
He takes, he’s on a boat out of the country, but he’s tossed overboard. The ocean brings him back. His own investigation, just, you know, to see if the ghost is telling the truth, brings him back.
And so finally he’s there in the final scene and he tells Horatio, and this, I think is maybe one of the most key things in the entire thing. He says, all of us have a destiny, Horatio, even though it may be roughly cut, roughly hewn. It’s not like it’s tied down at every moment.
He says, but it’s there. You got your kind of limits, you know, and we can be good players, you know, accepting our destiny, you know, all the worlds, the stays, the men and women, and they’re in mere actors. They have their infances and their exits.
And the man in his life plays seven parts. And that’s, that’s romance as you like it. But that is just exactly according to Bhagavad Gita about, you know, a few hours ago.
Youth to boyhood to old age, you know, identical. Solomon uses the same example, King Solomon, I’ve heard. So, okay.
So the idea of, that we have a karma, you know, in America, you’re not going to say, oh, we have karma. Some people now will accept it, but the word America uses is destiny. All of us, it seems that many of us are destined to end up in a certain profession and certain position in life.
And so many people, a little more experienced, they’re going to go, yeah. That was how the Emperor of Japan stopped the Second World War. They wanted to fight on.
They were ready to fight on and cause America the death of two million people before they surrendered. Yeah, they were ready. Yep.
The American army knew it. They knew this was, if we invade mainland Japan, we’re talking about, look at it. Our plan is there, but it’s going to cost us about two million people dead before we can accomplish this.
And the other side is going to be something like 40 million. Divine wind has blown and there can be no reply. And after the two atomic bombs, that was their idea.
They would say, hey, we’ve just, he said, you know, destiny, divine wind, destiny is now on the side of the Americans and that’s it. You can’t fight it. And so they accepted it.
And so for 42 million people, lives were saved by the introduction of a poetic phrase and at the right moment. Yeah. The American divine wind has blown and there can be no reply.
Yeah. This is what the Japanese emperor said at that time. When he surrendered, he gave a surrender and he, he actually went against the military council and everything else.
It had to be, he recorded it separately in case they would put him under house arrest. So he couldn’t say it. So it could be broadcast to the people and stuff on national radio.
Yeah. Yeah. Very intense iconography.
Yeah. Okay. Yes, sir.
Yeah. So, so in one sense. Idea is destiny is there.
What I understand from the very beginning in Christianity, there was a St. Jerome in, in, in, in Rome with all the society people and good food and good drink. And there was a origin in the desert with the, the monks who were doing severe austerities and everything else. So origin was one of the first Christian fathers.
He had no trouble with reincarnation that was running around the whole thing like that through Socrates, everybody else, anymore Egypt. And he had no problem with reincarnation being a part of Christian philosophy, you know, but St. Jerome was off there in Rome with all where there was, which was actually their political centre. And as far as I understand that the basic point at the Christian fathers, that point was, Hey, if we tell these people, they got more than one lifetime, they’re never going to get serious.
You know, and we got to tell him you got one life and that’s it and you’re going to be damned to hell for eternity unless you get it together. So Tamasic Puranas, I think, present the same thing. You know, Tamasic Puranas also talk to that, you know, your soul will be damned forever if you do these things and so on.
Yeah. Yeah. Because that sharp, that sharp motivation is there.
So the idea of destiny and being born into a certain destiny, even if it’s not coming in Christianity, it’s not going to come from the previous life, your destiny so much. You have an afterlife, but there’s no previous life. But that’s what we need to stimulate these things and have these dialogues and, you know, find out if it’s a part of that tradition, how it’s the best yet maybe the other side interfaith dialogue, which is another, you know, maybe four major themes we’re trying to work on here.
We’re trying to consolidate all this into all the stuff we’ve been doing. I’m looking at my death, you know, I’m looking at 2024. What’s it called? Odanishasti.
So now I’ve been pushed to everything else, time to consolidate, you know, no new projects. When new projects come over, I just try and stimulate other people to take them up. Don Quixote and Arjuna or something like that.
Don Quixote and Epidura, you know, something like that. Something we got here, you know. But okay, other people can do that, you know.
So that’s what I’m trying to do, consolidate like with this programme today, put together the stuff we’re doing and this resources we have, and ultimately make one movie. We want to put it together, if we can, make one movie called, it’s called Iris’s Diary of a Travelling Creature, but we have Diary of a Travelling Creature, The Ultimate Trip. And then we’ve already got on the YouTube, we have the collection of the themes you want to deal with there.
And Interfaith Dialogue, World Classical Literature, Science in the Vedas, and the Bhaktivedanta Library. Those themes, you see how we look at them, and then we want to maybe have some dialogue, because all these people we’ve been contacting in the outside world, outside of ISKCON, our community, you know, people in the United Nations, people in very nice Jesuit, you know, such dialogues with religious people is just, you know, we stand shoulder to shoulder against abortion with a lot of people, you know. And secular leaders, at one point, I think it was Clinton, they decided, let’s give abortion on demand, make it available all throughout the world, easily, some easy process where women can then, you know, maybe before the third month, they can have a very simple process, easily available, and have abortion that will solve all the problems in the world in terms of hunger and, you know, this kind of stuff, poverty.
Okay, we’ll do it. So the secular leaders were in favour of it, and they were just shocked beyond belief, because all of the religious leaders in the world, said, normally, we’re trying to kill each other, we’re fighting amongst each other. But this is something we all agree that we’re going to put down fighting against each other, because this, what you’re proposing is so wrong, and so bad, that there’s no way on earth that any of us can even ever come close to being able to not fight to the death against this, you know, abortion on demand.
And so we’re going to stand against this and put all the strength we have, which is not so much, but we’ll do it. And it was so shocked that the world’s secular leaders, they were just shocked. They just, they backed down.
They said, wow, we don’t want to take on Jews, Muslims, you know, Christians, all these guys together, forget it. Yeah. So there’s an example that when interfaith dialogue, you know, but now we’re talking about, you know, literature, yeah, yeah, which, which is it, which is it’s all connected, of course.
Oh, okay. So these are very, very far reaching and foundational areas, what you’re saying, world classical literature, interfaith dialogue. And at least with this interfaith dialogue, our movement has done something, the Anuttama Prabhu has done some Christian Vaishnava dialogues and then Vaishnava Muslim dialogues.
There’s a huge area, at least something has happened. But I don’t think, hardly anything has been, science and the Vedas also, different devotees are doing something in a small way. But I think world classical literature is not, not been explored much at all till now.
I had a podcast with Hridayanath Maharaj, and he mentioned to me that, you know, he, during some of the traumatic times in our movement’s history, he found Jane Austen’s writings very helpful. Yeah. Yeah.
So that is. Also, in, in Spanish culture, Maharaj, Bhakti Sundar Goswami, did some things on, almost like inter-religious. It was more inter-religious.
Yeah. Because he did a thing, I think, on one, one very, very powerful Christian saint. And then, of course, Jayavati Maharaj did Ecclesiastes.
Yeah, that was a very good one. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yes, Maharaj. So actually, when I was introduced to Krishna consciousness, it was something, it was almost a little bit, very sectarian kind of worldview I grew in.
Because in one sense, I was quite, I read, I had read a quite a lot of book, Indian authors, Western authors before I was introduced to Krishna consciousness. But now, see, I can quote, in our classes, I can quote, say, George Bernard Shaw, or I can quote Oscar Wilde. But, no, no, but I’m saying that it’s difficult for me, in today’s, in today’s ISKCON, to quote, say, Rabindranath Tagore, or some of the other literary giants of the Indian, Indian history.
Because somehow, we may see that their philosophy is different from ours. And then, maybe they were slightly impersonalistic orientations. But independent of their philosophy, they have a legacy, which has influenced a lot of people.
And we can have a, we can use that for connecting with people. Just because we quote someone doesn’t mean we accept everything that they say. Like you said about Prabhupada, Prabhupada offering respects to Gandhi also.
Yeah, yeah. So, this is, I’ll, yes, sorry. No, Hansadutta, so I, somebody, a citation, somebody, one time Prabhupada said, I am Marx, you are Lenin.
Yeah. Because, because, because if we keep our Samsthapaka Acharya prominent in our lives, you know, in our, in our relationship with him clear, then I think we can do these things. Yeah.
And then people say that, okay, I can see that you’re, you know, whatever you’re saying, you know, is not going to be, it’s, you know, I can see you’re not going to budge an inch from what you’re a guru. What’s his name? Bhaktivedanta. You’re not going to budge an inch from him.
You’re a fanatic about that. And we’ll, and I can see, well, maybe it’s not fanatical, but you’re really attached to him and, but okay. You know? And so, so yeah, if I try and draw you off into something about Shakespeare, about getting into something else, we keep coming back.
Every morning we have Bhagavatam class, every evening we have Bhagavad Gita class. And it’s not just, you know, just mechanical. It’s also the taste is there.
The flavour is wrong. We see that Shakespeare, we see that Hamlet didn’t have, I mean, Shakespeare didn’t have it complete. And he was wrong in these areas, you know? And some things are, you know, are bad.
And, you know, we’ve got to, we’ve got to take the gold out of the, out of the excrement, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So continuing this point of world class, just two questions I had about Shakespeare. So one is, many of his, many of his most celebrated plays are tragedies. Yeah.
Yeah. Is there a reason for that? I mean, of course, you could say the world is Dukkhalaya and he’s doing that. But it does seem that all of his major stories, not all, but all of his major ones, they seem to end in, on a very tragic note.
Well, yeah, we have Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy. Yeah.
If I can think of any more, you know, I think also As You Like It is also a comedy. And what’s the one? Ah, The Tempest. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Do you know anything about science fiction, tradition, science fiction movies? Of course, you know, Star Wars.
Of course I do. I know a few things. Okay.
I saw one time on, I was looking on YouTube, it had maybe the 20 greatest science fiction movies, because you’re looking at traditions, and they’re going through this movie and that movie, and for different reasons, they’re coming up and they come up to number one. And the guy says, before he says this, okay, before I tell you what the number one, you know, the greatest science fiction movie of all time was, he says, I don’t even have to say it. You all know what it is.
In every single category we’ve listed before, in quality of direction, everything else, you all know it. It just went at 2001 Space Odyssey. Space Odyssey, yeah.
Even now, it’s incredible. It’s incredible. And it deals with very ontological questions too.
But the most original, first, what people would call, I think the first real science fiction movie where it has some real special effects and everything else. And I remember watching this as a little child. My parents took me there.
It was, what was it called? It was called Forbidden Planet. Forbidden Planet, with Robbie the robot and all this kind of stuff. And it was so exciting.
They fly to some planets, you know, where the scientists got all lost many years before, and the young girls there were this and that, and the monsters there were this and that. And it’s very good. It’s a very good movie.
Even now, I tell you the story would be like, look at all these, and hey, that’s a fantastic storyline and all the imagery and the relationships that you do with the king and all this kind of stuff, you know. And you’re looking at them and you say, don’t you recognise it? So what do you mean? It’s the Tempest. Oh, an island, not a planet.
Oh, yeah. It’s the Tempest. But I just put everybody with ray guns rather than boats and arrows.
It’s remarkable, isn’t it? Amazable. Yeah. It had a science fiction monster rather than a, you know, yeah.
So it’s the Tempest is, I think, I don’t know, I guess at some point, I don’t know why some, yeah. Yeah. I guess in the Bhagavatam, most of the stories are comedies or tragedies.
Comedies. Yeah. Indra acts sometimes and then he makes a fool of himself.
The word comedy, it’s a technical word. Comedy means where it starts out against the protagonist and ends up for him. A tragedy means where it starts out for the protagonist, ends up against him.
So it’s a technical thing. It doesn’t mean it’s funny. In classical language, it doesn’t mean it’s funny.
Comedy means where it comes out good. You know, the protagonist doesn’t end up dead with his wife, fiance, wife dead and everybody else dead. You know, everybody kind of takes arms and is happy and so on.
The Bhagavatam, I think, usually comes out with a positive ending in many cases, but not always. At least a spiritually positive ending because there is a clear description of the spiritual world. So in that sense, all the endings are spiritually positive.
Materially, like Sudama is materially positive. Sudama’s story, Dhruva’s story, some of them. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. So anyway, I don’t know why Shakespeare, I don’t know. I think he died prematurely because he got too drunk one night and got a fever.
That appears to be what happened. He and Ben Johnson overdid it a little bit and then they got really sick and then they caught some fever going around. So he died pretty young, 50 years old.
So it may have been, you know, he may have been a, you know, what do you call it, depressive, has some depressive personality. And also to the ambience in England at a time where it was a good reason to be depressed about things, you know. Yeah.
Yeah. And so the tragedy, okay, it’s a tragedy, but yeah, we get something out of it. So people, you know, life is tragedy, but we’re learning.
There is some contemporary thinkers who talk about the tragic view of the world or tragic view of life, where basically life is unfair. Resources are not distributed equally. And many of the unfairness of life, we just can’t, no matter how much we do, we can’t rectify them.
We have to live with them. So in some ways, that, like you said, acceptance of destiny, acceptance of distress in life, that is also depicted through Shakespeare. And that also is a theme which our Mahabharata, Ramayana talk about it, there’s a lot of distress and something just come without, without we being able to do anything about it, no matter how much we try.
Yeah. And also to my purposes, the Maya body is focused on the negative aspect of the material world. And then we focus on the positive aspect.
But we have to have both. The Sahajiyas focus on the positive aspect, the Maya body is focused on the negative aspect of spirituality. Okay.
So Yusupanishad says, you’ve got to cultivate both, understand the negative aspects and understand the positive aspects. But we tend to focus on the positive aspects. That’s our idea.
You know, enthusiasm is more important than patience. Yeah. Yeah.
But, but so yeah, that’s, there’s some, the, the Maya body philosophers, was it Bhritra Hari, that Maya body Brahmacharya, yeah, he is, was it Bhairagya Shataka or whatever it is? Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I don’t think there’s anybody on the face of the earth who’s ever, you know, bad-mouthed material nature better than he is. Yeah.
You know, and so, so yeah, that’s, I think, all of, even for example, all of these things, I’m trying to think now that Shakespeare’s plays, this is why it’s nice. But I think there’s a positive, Romeo and Juliet, they both die. And if her brother dies, there’s a whole thing of Gandhari, was it Gandhari and, was it Gandhari? No, what is it? Yeah, it was Dhritarashtra’s wife, Gandhari.
Okay. Yeah. It’s, I think it’s her, no, Rukmini, Rukmini, Rukmini, the kidnap of Rukmini and Romeo and Juliet and Rukmini and Krishna, you know, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it counts. But when Romeo and Juliet, when everybody’s dead and the two families who were engaged in a civil war for so long, they, having, the Count comes in from the county and chastises both of these two families and said, just see what this war has done, this civil war, your pride has done, it’s destroyed your most beloved children, now they’re dead because of what you’ve done. So, the drama, they look at each other and they go into the funeral thing, and instead of being, hating each other, they look at each other and they, the two leaders, they grasp arms and they go in holding arms like that.
Okay, we see that God’s going to teach us a lesson, that we have to give up this feud and this hate. And so that’s the thing, I think in all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, there’s a tremendous amount of lesson going on, on what is right and what is wrong and deeper values, deeper values. Oh boy, what is it, Lady Macbeth, oh, this is full of stuff, you know.
I mean, you know, Vitarastra, I mean, Macbeth, you know Macbeth, he has, in the end he has to, his wife goes nuts and leaves him holding the bag for the entire, she gets out of, she caused the whole problem of murdering his friend. Yeah. And then she escapes by going crazy, so now nobody can get after her.
His best friend is leading an army against him, the omens, the gods have turned against him, the Burnham horde has come to Dunsinore, you know. So, the very, very famous thing, he’s sitting there and seeing all his whole world is collapsed, like Vitarastra. So, here’s a perfect example of, you know, of Vitarastra, you know, and what’s his name, King Lear, Lear, Macbeth, Macbeth, you know.
Sitting there in his room alone at night, the battle’s going to happen the next day and the candle’s burning, and he says, life is a tale told by a poor player, poor actor, who fruts and struts his hour upon the stage and then is gone, who is heard no more. Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, you know, signifying nothing. Out, out, brief candle, you know.
Wind blow, storm crack, at least we’ll die with armour on our back. So, this is a perfect example of a Dheerah, no? It’s Dheerah, you know. All this stuff has happened, Vitarastra, everything else, and he becomes Dheerah, right? He just turns his back on everything and walks out and faces the enemy and faces his death, Baba says, like a good soldier.
So, this soliloquy is so famous, wind blow, storm crack, all this stuff happening, at least we’ll die with armour on our back. Yeah. So, that’s Dheerah.
He didn’t achieve Narottam, he didn’t achieve Vaishnavism. Yeah. In one sense, it’s not just tragedy, but it’s how the characters evolve in the face of the tragedy.
Yes. Even Hamlet does that. In the last play, Hamlet is quite, in one sense, stoic and resigned, precise and everything, but later on, he is, most of the play he is quite mad and he is almost seems incoherent, but towards the end, what he speaks and how he acts is quite, like you said, Dheerah.
Lucid. Lucid, huh? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I think Dheerah, like you’re saying, Dheerah is a big theme in Shakespeare, but for some people, that’s all they can do. That’s all they can accomplish.
Vitarastra, even though he had Vidura for a guru, he could not come beyond the level of Dheerah, but he was able to achieve that. That’s okay. So, Buddha was giving stuff much beyond the contemporary atmosphere.
Shankara was giving stuff much beyond the contemporary atmosphere, but only a few people were able to take it. So, what we’re able to give on the broad, global basis, what will that be? Sorry, how are you connecting Shankara and Buddha? Are you connecting them in Shakespeare? No, because Buddha, there’s a famous story about the bamboo leaves in the forest. Yeah.
Yeah. I can teach you many things, but I’m only going to teach you a few, but don’t think that that’s all. Same way, Bhajagovinda, Bhajagovinda, Shankara is attributed with saying these things, but there wasn’t that.
So, how much we have to adjust? Maybe we end up doing a lot of unlevel to people. We put position where are we and reach to people Dheerah, you know? Nityagarasundara Das, he was recently in Nashville. He’s in our institute.
We have a non-profit educational corporation, NEOS. You can go to our webpage, diorama, my webpage, diorama.us, my webpage, and neosnimbus.org is our exoteric organisation, NEOS. But he works, his job is, he’s head of geriatric psychiatry at the local psychiatric hospital, the place.
So, he’s dealing with all these people in their lives, you know? And because it’s Nashville, the Bible Belt, I would say, when he starts consulting with them and now starting to take them families to this, dealing with his old age problems, now dementia, he said the first question he asked him, one of them is, do you believe in God? In other places, you can’t ask that, but here, because everybody’s everything else is considered quite a bona fide question, and somebody, even if they don’t, they’re atheists, they’ll say, well, I don’t believe in God. But many people do. And that changes a whole lot in terms of the geriatric psychiatry and what they’re dealing with and stuff and how he’s dealing with them, you know? And talking to them.
It has to be pretty quick because it’s modern medicine, you know? But okay, so he can talk about God here and facing old age and these kinds of things, but he can’t talk about ghosts. And there were, I remember he was telling me when he was a young man here, maybe 30 years ago, coming as his residency, he said, so many of his patients were haunted by ghosts, you know? But he couldn’t talk about it because they put him in a mental hospital. One of the biggest battles in the entire Civil War was fought here.
I mean, if you come with me, get in my car, and in something like seven minutes, I can take you to a graveyard, which was just, you know, 10,000 gravestones, one after another, side by side, you know? They fought it out here, jabbing steel bayonets into each other’s stomachs, biting each other’s ears off, blowing their heads off. I mean, it was a let it go fella. And the way people died here, they just couldn’t give up the horror.
And so then, people with mental problems, they started to grab onto their bodies and stuff to try and like sort it out. So, you know, so anyway, cosmology and everything else, I would say it’s coming through Christian tradition. There was a lot of depression in the time of Shakespeare.
It wasn’t ever a nice place. But at the same time, too, there was also, you see a lot of beauty there, too. Yeah, there’s a lot of beauty and appreciation of nature and stuff.
And maybe people are, you know, dwelling on the tragedies more. But I showed The Taming of the Shrew. Do you know The Taming of the Shrew? Yes, yes, I do.
Okay. Do you know who the most famous movie presentation of that starring an actor and an actress? Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor did it. Oh, okay.
Yeah. And they say, you know, the parts they were born to play. It was like this, this was like who they were.
And they fit in there so well. So, I showed it and it had a Spanish captions in it. Spanish, Spanish.
So, we did it one night and I had to edit it down, you know. We did it one night as a programme in Chile. So, the audience should remember that.
And of course, it stimulated such discussion afterwards, you know. Because it’s such a comedy. And at the same time, too, it’s full of like, you know, very kind of deep things about what is, what are men and women, what are their relationships and stuff, you know.
And it stimulates these discussions. So, the conclusion is, in the end, Elizabeth Taylor surrenders and bows down to her husband and honours him in so many ways and accepts his authority, you know. And so, I asked in the end, well, what do you, this is a correct conclusion.
And some of the girls were like, you know. But I don’t think we would fully agree with it. But it definitely stimulates this question.
And it’s a comedy. And the conclusion is very nice, you know. So, let’s go on.
But there we have it. And it stimulates this whole discussion about Varna Ashram, Daivi Varna Ashram and these kind of things like that. Yeah.
Wow. Amazing. This is, yes, this is remarkable resourcefulness.
You know, I have sometimes used some sections from the Avatar movie to talk about Avatar or even the Matrix movie to talk about some higher things. But this is, this is remarkable. You’re taking off the shoe and using it to talk about gender roles.
And so, in one sense. But you’re also doing, you’re also doing, are you doing the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for your morality lessons? Oh, I’m doing both. I’m designing, I’m designing courses now.
Because not just books, but also make systematic online courses to talk about human values. You know. So, you use Indian classics, aren’t you? Using Mahabharata and Ramayana? Yeah, I’m trying to do that, Maharaj.
Yes. You’re doing the same thing, but it’s just, you know, because it’s from your culture, your perspective. And also too, I’m 72 years old.
How are you? How old are you? I’m around 45, Maharaj. Oh, young man, young man. Papa said 40, 50, young man.
Yes, I mean, I’ve been doing this longer, you know, and so on. So, by the time you’re, by the time you’re 72 years old, if you go on, Prabhupada is a big rock that hit the water. And when he hit the water and sunk, passed through the water, it created a wave.
But the waves that are going to come after are even going to be, you know, going to be bigger even. Yeah. I mean, influencing people like you and me for generations.
Hansadutta invited Prabhupada to Germany. He went there, it was a very incredible visit, and he asked him to come again. And Prabhupada said, Germans were the materially most intelligent people on the planet, you know.
And then Hansadutta invited him to come again. He said, no, I cannot go there again. There are people there who would kill me, you know.
And so, I think that the German demons would be the only ones maybe who were smart enough to figure out how dangerous Prabhupada really was, you know. This man is not because he’s taking some hippies and making them into a movement. This man is disseminating a cultural revolution on a very deep level.
And unless we eliminate this man, we’re going to have big problems, you know. So, that’s what I see. It’s just, you know, myself.
I’m just trying to go on. And I may take birth in our guru-kula system again. So, I’m trying to help the guru-kula system because I may read my own books and say, oh, that’s a good book.
It’s, you know, I feel that through this discussion today, you have opened so many horizons about how Krishna Consciousness can be made accessible to people from diverse audiences. And one metaphor which you used in the beginning, you just passed over, but Prabhupada laid many foundations on which we have not built. So, you know, some foundations we have worked a lot, like build temples, distribute books, and that’s important.
But Prabhupada also had discussions with, dialogue with many intellectual people. And that was not primarily for converting them in a sense. It is just to exchange thoughts and gain some, and help them appreciate Krishna Consciousness at some level.
When he has, you know, Toynbee, I remember, I think it was, I was listening to his dialogue with Toynbee, you know, Toynbee’s conclusion, his father was a gigantic economist, Toynbee’s conclusion was the history of international relations was the history of religion. Demetri Katsikas, big professor we were working with, said the same thing. The history of international relations, which was his job, is a history of religion, you know, different religions behind it.
So, when, but I remember the dialogue when Prabhupada was talking with Toynbee, the whole humour was, my God, I finally met a man with a brain. Prabhupada was like, because Toynbee was just right on top of all the politics and everything that was happening in India. And he asked something about why Indira Gandhi did this and that, and was it because of this? Prabhupada was going, yes, exactly, yes, that’s exactly why she did it.
And that’s the behind the thing. And so, the, again, Prabhupada told Shri Ramana Maharshi, Shri Ramana told me, the Prabhupada told him, every scientist you make a devotee is worth a thousand ordinary people. But my experience is that it takes a thousand times longer to make one scientist into a devotee than it takes, you know, to get ordinary people to become devotees and get involved in everything else, you know.
Scientists make that slow to come and slow to leave. When they’re convinced, they’re convinced on a really, on a jnan level, and that’s hard to shake. If you’re convinced on a karma level, oh, I like the rituals, I like the food, I like this, I like that, and some of the philosophy, you can be, you know, shaken, you know, and maybe out of a thousand people converted like that, one of them will become, you know, so it’s to have your choice, you know, convince one scientist to become a devotee or convince a thousand ordinary people to become devotees.
Look at the same amount of time and the same blood will have to be given to do it, you know. That’s an amazing thought. Somebody else may want to convince Vaishya to become a devotee, Henry Ford, you know.
Yeah, that’s an amazing thought actually. Intellectually orientated people do take time. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t immediately accept the party line or they don’t accept, they don’t accept easy answers to questions.
You know, it, I have seen in India, and no criticism, India, our preaching is flourishing a lot, and I can say that we are attracting intelligent young people, but not so many intellectual young people. That means intelligent, they are in, they are in engineering colleges and they are in the STEM fields, but they are very intelligent, but they are not really, they’re not really philosophically orientated, thinking about the big, big questions of life or even the big issues of life. So, they become devotees very easily.
But right now, for example, I’m one of the editors for Back to Godhead. So, we always run short of articles, because there are not so many devotees who are really good writers. So, I think that.
There was one indigenous person, Ishi, it’s a very famous thing. He was, because when, you know, when the Northern Europeans came to California, so many of the tribes were killed either by diseases or, you know, starvation, or they just merged in. And one whole tribe was just basically, some were actually killed, you know, for certain reasons in the conflict of the economic and everything else.
So, but Ishi was the last guy of one whole tribe that had been destroyed. I mean, there’s so many people, they just all died out, everything, and he was just hiding out with his mother and one woman who was like, it wasn’t his sister, but he also, I mean, finally when they died, you know, he just kind of just came out. And one cultural anthropologist at the University of California adopted him and got him a job as an assistant janitor, because he refused to accept charity.
And so, the assistant janitor, and he worked there, and then he would interview him, and his whole series of lectures on what culture was and before European culture came. And he took him places, and you can see the nostalgia was actually hurting him, so he didn’t stay long, but he was showing him where things had gone. He showed him how to start a fire with, you know, with the bow and the stick, and how to hunt and everything else.
And he was, you know, but you could see it was just too painful. So, they did some things. So many things, and in all this, he was realising that they had their view of the world, and he actually began to realise how Ishi was looking at Europeans.
And it’s the same thing that Carl Jung got. He said that they are like, his view was, they are like children, clever, but not wise. Yeah, so you become very clever with all these engineering abilities and everything else, but not wise.
Yeah. So, that’s a bad one. Yeah, that’s amazing, you know, Bhaktivinod Thakur also made a comparison that irked some of his more nationalistic colleagues.
He said that the western, say like if there is a father who has two children, two sons, and one of them is more evolved, more spiritually orientated, and the other is more interested in finances, management. So, both of them can work together, let the younger brother take care of the finances, and let the older brother pursue spiritual pursuits and share spiritual wisdom. So, he envisions that to be like the British and the Indians.
So, he said that we are all descended from the same stalk, and let the British manage the country, we will share spiritual wisdom. So, yeah, that’s very similar. Wow, we’re seeing the same truth everywhere.
Yes, that’s amazing. Basically, we can apply the same medicine then, which is to see these principles, you know, okay, this is the problem. And we can identify always people who are graduating from the universities are not universal men, they’re technicians, starting to turn out technicians rather than, you know, universalists.
Maybe we should take a pause here. Two hours. Yeah, thank you very much.
Toward the end, I tried to summarise. Of course, we had a very wide ranging discussion. Can I try to summarise briefly what we discussed? You can try.
You can try. Today, we discussed on the broad theme of seeing Western classical literature and specifically Shakespeare from a spiritual or Krishna conscious perspective. And then we started by discussing that there are, like Prabhupada himself, you give many insights about Prabhupada which you don’t know.
Prabhupada gave a talk on Merchant of Venice and Prabhupada talked about how there is this universal iconography, which catches, which connects with the heart and the deeper level beyond the brain. And if we can speak, so why do we, why at all we study Shakespeare? Just like Yukta Vairagya means we can use technology and other things in Krishna’s service. So even books, some people study books, they live with books, and books, ideas, worldviews, they can also be used in Krishna’s service.
So broadly two ways. One is that if they’re already familiar with those books, and then we build bridges by which the knowledge which we are sharing becomes accessible. And another point is that, because these books also talk about universal themes, so they can even guide us.
It’s not just sharing spiritual wisdom, but just the human journey can be guided. Like you mentioned how at the time when devotees are suddenly asked to take second initiation, you compare that with the Hamlet scene of Gertrude suddenly marrying again. So then we talked about the universal themes, like there is the betrayal and uncle betraying nephews and things like that.
So they are very common. And then we also talked about the philosophy, the ontology. So some cases, so the cases of, say, for example, praying as repentance and thinking that I cannot get forgiveness if I’m still holding on, and that Claudia is saying that.
And then especially very striking was Hamlet saying I don’t want to kill him right now because he will go to heaven. So those are very remarkable correlations. So it’s both ways, not just universal themes, but they’re also specific, not only universal human challenges, but also specific philosophical themes.
The idea of existence beyond death, the idea of ghosts, the existence of, as you said, destiny, a divine plan shaping human ends. So all these are very strikingly similar to the Vedic teachings, Gita’s teachings. And then there’s a source mentioned that in the Christian tradition, there is not much philosophy, but they often draw a lot of philosophy from the Greco-Roman worldview.
And that’s how, you know, Shakespeare was at a time, Cervantes and Shakespeare, remarkable correlation you showed. And so the idea is that the ambience was such that there was at one level, a lot of strife and a lot was going on at that time. It was a religiously surcharged and religiously polarised place.
But at the same time from there, he is not only drawing from Roman themes, like say Julius Caesar, but he’s also like explicit stories, but he’s also bringing in that wisdom and sharing it. And then you talked about how Prabhupada, two, three different metaphors, which I found very striking, but this was that Prabhupada laid foundations for many things which he wanted us to build on. So just like regard for intellectual engagement, you give the examples of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, you know, studying Advaita war to accept initiation, at least family knew about Advaita war to take initiation there.
Jiyu Goswami studied Mimamsa and other schools of thought in Sandarbhas. Bhaktivinoda Thakur also, that he engaged with other religious traditions. So he said that, you know, we can draw some things from them, we respect them.
And you also mentioned, I never thought of it that way from the perspective of Yukta Vairagya that in the Gopis’ worship Katyayani, they are showing that even other forms of worship can be used in Krishna’s service. So the scope of Yukta Vairagya is very huge. And for generally, there is some reservation for this kind of engagement with books and ideas.
The one reason is because most devotees are not so much into, most people in general are not into reading books and things. So books, so if they are anyway going to read limited, then better focus on direct pictures. But those who have an avid interest in books, instead of, once they are grounded in Prabhupada’s teachings, he said that then we can, if we are connected with Prabhupada, then we can actually bring connections and bridges with various other people.
You gave the example of Socrates’ Fido, that how well-read people, they may think that, you say your tradition is the greatest, but have you read other traditions? Can you bring about correlations between them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That will help them gain appreciation. And for this, one side is, for such outreach, we will need some, not everybody can do it, those who are already interested in reading and those who are, that orientation.
And then the outreach also will be little more refined in the sense that we may not have thousands of people becoming devotees, but their consciousness will rise. And that itself, like you mentioned, what Shankaracharya and Buddha taught was way more than what the people at that time got from them. So, we also have to see how much we can, from what we teach, how much people get.
And in that connection, when we present, that was a very striking point, that one scientist is equal to thousand devotees, ordinary devotees. Thousand ordinary people. Ordinary people, yeah.
But to make a scientist into a devotee, we may require a thousand times more effort. And you told about the American, Native Americans saying that these Westerners were clever, but not wise. So like that, we may be getting technicians, but we are not really getting thinkers.
So, if we expand our ambit of what we can, how we can serve Krishna, so then there are so many more avenues. So, you talk specifically about four areas you are working on, world classical literature, science and the Vedas, then interfaith, and then the Bhaktivant library. These are, I feel, these are very far-reaching endeavours.
And I know there are many other points, but I think I tried to summarise as much as I could. You want to add something in conclusion, Maharaj? No, I’m just amazed that you could remember everything. Pat, past 50 years old, your short-term memory starts to fall apart.
So, I have, I can remember. That was one thing I was going to say, when you said, if I am at your 70, if I am in a one-tenth of your energy or your clarity, I would consider myself extremely fortunate and blessed. It’s amazing.
Yeah. So, thank you very much for this opportunity. Also, we have some of our followers.
We had two university professors here on board, and cinematographers, and we call it graphic artists, and so many nice people also listening in our audience right now. And it’s been a motivation for me to have other people here with us, you know, being able to give us an impetus to talk, thinking, oh, these are the kind of people who can understand this and that kind of stuff. So, thank you very much for being able to participate here.
Thank you very much, Maharaj, for sparing your time and sharing your wisdom. I look forward to having some sometime again in the future to have further discussions, maybe on Kaalyan. Maybe on Kaalyan, we can go deeper sometime.
Okay. Wow. Okay.
Okay. Thank you very much.