the more you associate happiness with curiosity the happier you'll be when your curiosity is satisfied welcome to the Happy Channel I'm assuming you grew up Christian yes um Christianity has a similar yet very different Outlook uh on God and Heaven like when you compare it to something like Hinduism um I have a few Christian friends where I've discussed Hinduism in detail with them and uh they're very open to learning about it but the fundamental question that they ask is also often related to demonology when you talk about deities when you talk about God uh versus
the Christian understanding of God where God is the almighty when I asked this question to the Tantra expert rajashi nandi he said that in tantras believe that parabram or Universal God Is So Advanced that it possibly almost doesn't even care about human beings but the deities are there to help you now you're someone who's raised as a Christian when you came to India did you have some kind of relearning to do in order to absorb this concept of what deities are and save there are Christians watching this what and how would you explain what deities
are and how is it related to God or are these uh sort of demons are they Angels is it a version of something related to demonology like how do you go about explaining this because I feel it's a fundamental philosophy that needs to be broken down in this episode as well I think to answer that question um I have to start off by saying that there is reality and there are structures that people create to assist them to connect to reality um so a religion a or um in in Sanskrit often we use the word
some pradaya so assem pradaya is a particular um a particular way of doing things there are particular rules there are particular attitudes um and like the pushdie sampradaya they follow what um SRI mahaprabhuji wallabacharya taught and uh following those rules means that you are part of that pushti sampradaya and the goal is always spiritual Evolution the goal is always spiritual Evolution now different people different sampradayas will have quite possibly different goals so the goal of the pushti sampradaya is is Lord Krishna bhagwan Shri Krishna uh the goal of the Shiva siddhanta is Lord Shiva um
the goal of the ganapatya sampradaya is ganapati so uh the goal of Christianity is Jesus Christa is Jesus there there are different there are different uh the different sects different religions have different goals do you think that within Hinduism there's actually multiple different religions as well absolutely and vimilananda himself never liked the word Hindu he said it's a Persian word and why should we be defining ourselves as you know in a Persian way um and Hindu of course is a corruption because the Persian ancient Persian and Sanskrit are close together but the Persians use H
whereas Sanskrit uses s so instead of saying Hindu Sindhu they said Hindu so the that word Hindu is really Sindhu that's the Indus River is the so the people who live around or beyond the Indus River they regarded it they called Hindus preferred to think of himself as a Vedic someone who was following in the the the the the path that comes originally from The Vedas so Agora for example um and Tantra they emerge from the ataravaveda they're four Vedas and the atarava Veda is the in some ways the youngest Veda but in other ways
it's even older than the other Vedas it comes from a it comes from uh uh uh paths that are not uh that are not Mainline to The Vedas so um a sampradaya is a sect a religion vimalananda believed as do I that um what's more important is reality the religion the sampradaya is important and if you're in a certain sampradaya and you're following it you should observe its rules but he always used to say that he personally did not believe in some pradaya he believed in some Prada and some pradha means incineration that you should
burn down all of your Concepts burn down all of the limitations you have in your mind and recognize that there is only one reality behind everything in The Vedas they say akum sat viprabhudavadanti truth is there is only one truth but those who know truth every one of those individuals will describe it in different ways because they have it each individual has a different perspective on Truth each individual has a different perspective on reality so when it comes to me for example um I I never you know the the CR the Christianity the religion with
all the restrictions and several I never had much of an affinity for that I had an a strong affinity for Jesus of Nazareth for the Christ and I always I developed at an early age a personal relationship at which I've maintained up until now you're still connected to Jesus Christ absolutely he's my cooler devata my Kula Guru Kula means family in this case Kula means many things but in this case it's it it was the the it is the religion of my of my cooler my family of of my physical uh uh ancestors and as
ramakrishna paramahamsa said uh once to somebody who was considering changing his religion he said can you change your father so it's like that's something that even if I don't even if I don't focus a tremendous amount of attention there that will always be present I will always acknowledge that and vimalananda himself was a devotee of Jesus Christ because he believed as do some other people here in this country that both Christ and Krishna were umshas were in were portions of the Rishi mayatreya and so that they're both avataras they're sort of like brothers or cousins
or something so for him worshiping Jesus and worshiping Krishna was almost the same sort of thing because he also did not regard sectarian worship of Krishna or of Jesus as being important he regarded having a personal relationship with both of those as being important I'm a part of something called yss the yogoda satsang society which is a school and we worship six gurus of which two are Jesus Christ and Lord Shri Krishna yes uh there's many Hindus who get offended that I place a photo of Jesus Christ next to Krishna and there's many Christians who
get offended that I place a photo of Krishna next to Jesus uh how do you explain it to people who get offended with these Concepts because everyone's kind of living in a world now where they think no my religion is superior to your religion without understanding what reality truly is would you like to dive a little bit um I mean it really does depend on who I'm talking to so if I'm talking to someone who is very much tied down to their sampradaya to their sect whether it's Christian or Hindu or Muslim or anything else
or part or zoroastrian I've spent a lot of time with parses and iranis um I recognize that trying to explain precisely how I see things may not get me anywhere so if they need to feel that I'm a gnostic or a coffee or a a a a heretic or something I let them feel that way but if it's somebody who seriously wants to understand that it I try to explain that you know Jesus made it very clear that there was one reality and Krishna also made it very clear that there was one reality Krishna and
even in this country there have been times when vaishnavas followers of Vishnu and shevas followers of Shiva have fought with one another have killed one another because each one of them said my devata is the most important it is what is most important in my opinion is to recognize that for every individual there is a particular path in a particular Incarnation that is going to work for them best for many people it is one devatar one one God one Guru one direct path for some people it is not so much one as having more than
one that doesn't mean having twenty and having your attention divided among those 20 that means having direct a direct connection to whoever it is you're having that connection to and if that connection is one that you can honestly say to yourself being very calm and very introspective that that is genuine for you then that is genuine for you and um for for for me if if I sincerely believe that the Supreme reality has ultimately no name and no form no qualities whatsoever that it can take on inequalities that it wants to then I can certainly
feel when I am worshiping Jesus that that I am indirectly worshiping whatever other devatas I may have a relationship with and if I'm worship and I have relationship with certain devatas like ganapati I lived here in Maharashtra for many years and and I have a a a direct and very genuine and sincere connection to gonna to ganapathy but I don't I personally they are different externally they are different in their qualities they're different in how you worship them but they are still manifestations of that one supreme reality which people refer to as God which people
refer to as God now the problem is sometimes that let's say Christians they refer to God as Abraham was thinking about God and so do the Jews and so do the Muslims and Abraham certainly to have created these religions that billions of people uh worship he must have been quite a guy but still that doesn't mean that he was perfect and he had his own limitations and partly they were the limitations of the time he lived in that was back in a time when sacrifices were happening sacrifices were happening in The Vedic religion also sacrifices
were happening everywhere and that's why Jesus came along and said I will be the sacrifice you forget about this all the sacrifice thing and Jesus defined his religion very clearly and easily and simply number one God is love and number two love your neighbor as much as you love yourself and remember that anything that you do is going to come back in your direction I mean he ex he called it the Golden Rule Rule do unto others as you would have them do unto you and remember he was explaining to people who did not have
the advantage of abstruse philosophical thought like the people here have had for thousands of years so he was he was trying to explain the law of karma to them if you do to somebody else something that is violent the law of karma is going to send violence back in your direction it may not be today or tomorrow it may be after one more Incarnation or ten incarnations but that's going to happen that's just that's the nature of the universe that's Newton's third law of motion action reaction so these are playlists made especially for you the
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