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“Voice” is the aspect of a literary work which conveys the distinct power and flavor of the narrator’s personality. Voice is different from style, although it depends on style for its realization. Here is the writer Holly Lisle attempting to capture the idea of voice:

. . . .you have to put yourself on your page. This is what is known in the writing business as developing your voice. Voice isn’t merely style. Style would be easy by comparison. Style is watching your use of adjectives and doing a few flashy things with alliteration. Style without voice is hollow. Voice is style, plus theme, plus personal observations, plus passion, plus belief, plus desire. Voice is bleeding onto the page, and it can be a powerful, frightening, naked experience.

by Ravindra Svarupa das

In the last two postings we have been considering a letter Srila Prabhupada wrote in 1972 concerning the nature of power. A devotee had written Prabhupada with misgivings about competition in activities of preaching. To this apparently simple and down-to-earth question, Prabhupada gave a reply that rose quickly to ultimate philosophical principles. Prabhupada's presentation is brilliantly compact; I have been unpacking it somewhat.

"The weak must serve the strong, that we see everywhere, is it not? Who can deny?"

Well, true enough—we do see it everywhere. But is it right? Is it just? Is it fair?

In the letter before us, Prabhupada so far seems unfazed by such doubts. The domination of the weak by the strong is, in his eyes, dharma—part of the unalterable nature of reality, and he goes on to extol it as immediately beneficial: "So that competitive spirit makes us strong, otherwise it is a society of weak men only, and what is the good of such society?"

Were I to name the one human act most responsible for the wrongs in this world it would be, hands down, the abuse of power.

As far back as our history books can relate, the strong have exploited the weak. From time to time, the exploited, energized by resentment, rise up and overthrow their exploiters. In this way, the strong and the weak periodically exchange places. Even so, the principle of exploitation remains inviolate.

by Ravindra Svarupa das

The Sparks of God

The soul, or self (atma), is described as a separated, minute fragment of God, the Supersoul (paramatma). God is like a fire; the individual souls, sparks of the fire. As the analogy suggests, the self and the Superself are simultaneously one with and different from each other. They are the same in quality, for both the soul and the Supersoul are brahman, spirit. Yet they differ in quantity, since the Superself (param brahman—"supreme brahman"—in Bhagavad-gita 10.12) is infinitely great while the individual selves are infinitesimally small.

Prayer

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

John Donne (1572-1631)

Love

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

Romeo:
What shall I swear by?

Juliet:
Do not swear at all;
Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
Which is the god of my idolatry,
And I'll believe thee.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Austerity

The greater the pain, the greater the gain.

(pleeon kopos, polu kentos)
Ignatius of Antioch (35-110)

Prabhupada had confidently predicted an imminent nuclear war between the USSR and the USA. It did not happen. Prabhupada was asked why. He responded: Krishna had changed his mind.

Until I heard about Prabhupada's statement, I had never even entertained the notion of God's changing His mind. But prompted to think about it, how could I deny the possibility?

Our print and electronic media abound in forecasts—weather, economic, scientific, political, fashion, and on and on. There’s a demand for forecasts. It helps to know the future. Therefore, we seek eagerly the vision of experts, the adept. Among these seers we must note that special class called sages or saints. Their forecasts are accorded the upgrade to prophecy, to revelation, since the divine is alleged to enlighten their visions.

So the followers of Srila Prabhupada received his prediction, made on April 4, 1975, of the imminent outbreak of World War III. Taking his regular early morning constitutional, striding among an entourage of aides through the green fields of Mayapur, conversing about the delusions of modernity—of the “Western adventure”—Prabhupada suddenly said: “Now it will be smashed by the next war. Next war will come very soon.”

The devotees around him were shocked. It was hard to remember if this type of prediction had ever come from Prabhupada before. And the content of this prediction was especially alarming.

My first connection with the Hare Krishna maha-mantra happened during the "Summer of Love" in August, 1967 in the course of a wedding within a three-room apartment in Powelton Village, the budding hippie district in Philadelphia. The wedding epitomized the time and place.

The groom and I had become close friends during our travails as fellow philosophy majors at the nearby University of Pennsylvania. Thin, angular, his pale beak-nosed face densely hedged with a curly black beard, Steve presented "the Jew" with a delicious hint of self-parody. His bride Catherine was black and beautiful and very pregnant. Behind the altar—a massive wooden table, knobby legged and claw-footed—a goateed United Church of Christ minister of progressive views officiated. As recitations from the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tao Te Ching sounded out, a mottled cat manifested itself on the altar and began weaving balletically through a maze of objets, sacred and profane.

This article was originally published in Back to Godhead magazine in 1993. Edifying hyperlinks added.

The heroes of my youth were the great healers of humanity. While it's true that in those days I could be seen with other American boys paying homage to the likes of Elvis Presley and Joe DiMaggio, I rendered them only lip service. My real—if somewhat secret—devotion was reserved for a pantheon of great medical pioneers like William Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox vaccination; Robert Koch, who identified the tuberculosis bacillus; and Ignaz Philipp Semmelweise, who crusaded to save women from childbirth infection by teaching doctors to disinfect their hands. I avidly studied the life stories of these saviors and dreamed of becoming like them by slaying some modern scourge—leukemia, say, or coronary thrombosis. In my eyes there was no higher calling than to wage war on behalf of humanity against disease and death.

A group of us gathered in the bedroom after the wedding, and as the large reels of the tape recorder slowly revolved, the room filled with the sound of “the Swami” leading the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra. I sang in response, answering his call. Looking back, the chanting on that August afternoon in 1967 appears to me now as a rare moment in time, a kind of karmic singularity, like the pinched waist of an hourglass, into which my whole past poured and from which my entire future would expand.

The wedding took place in the same neighborhood my wife Connie and I had lived as students at the University of Pennsylvania. Now, after only a year’s absence, we’d returned. In 1966, after Penn had awarded us each a bachelor’s degree—mine in Philosophy and hers in English—we had gone off to Amherst, where I had enrolled in a Master’s program in English literature at the University of Massachusetts. We timed our return to Philly to make our friend’s wedding, which took place two weeks before I was to begin doctoral studies in the new religion department at Philadelphia’s Temple University.

It began with an answered phone in my office on an otherwise ordinary day in 1973. A woman addressed me in the distinctive vowels and consonants that revealed her to be a native of Philadelphia—or “Fluffya,” as it’s called in the local dialect. She asked if I were the head person of the Hare Krishna temple. She pronounced “Hare” as “hair.”

“Ha-ray Krishna temple,” I responded. “Yes, I am.” “Are you,” she continued, “a priest, minister, or rabbi of your religion?” She had a raspy smoker’s voice. “A priest,” I affirmed.

“OK, then. I’m calling you from the Philadelphia City Council, office of Councilman Kelly.” She paused while a phlegmy cough made its way up her bronchial tubes. “The council,” she resumed, “meets every week in its chambers on Thursdays, at ten a.m. The meeting always opens with an invocation by a member of the clergy, and the council members are responsible for inviting a clergyman on a rotating basis. In two weeks it will be Councilman Kelly’s turn. He is offering to you the honor of giving the invocation. Will you accept?” “Yes, I’ll be happy to,” I answered right away. But I was mind-blown, flabbergasted, gob smacked.

Any student of Srila Prabhupada will at once recognize the phrase “plain living and high thinking.” It occurred frequently and memorably in his discourse. It functioned as kind of motto or slogan to epitomize Prabhupada’s vision of a natural spiritual culture, an alternative to our modern, “soul-killing” industrial civilization.

The Control of Nature

Srila Prabhupada:

Can a living entity who claims to be as good as the Supreme Being control the material nature? The foolish "I" would reply that he will do so in the future. Even accepting that in the future one will be as good a controller of material nature as the Supreme Being, then why is one now under the control of material nature? The Bhagavad-gita says that one can be freed from the control of the material nature by surrendering unto the Supreme Lord, but if there is no surrender, then the living entity will never be able to control the material nature. (Srimad Bhagavatam 2.9.3, purport)

Hurricane season is nearly upon us. We in these disunited States have already endured a spring offensive of monstrous tornado-breeding thunderstorms, sweeping in waves eastward across the land. Depicted on the terrifying animated maps of the Weather Channel the storms resembled broad-fronted blitzkriegs on war charts. The channel treated us again and again to jumpy, rain-spotted videos that pan across jumbles of SUVs and pick-ups, crushed and flatten like beer cans after the bash, all nicely backdroped by heaps of gigantic splinters—the local shopping mall. One of these malls was less than fifteen miles from my mother's home in tidewater Virginia.