In2-MeC

IBSA (ISKCON Bhaktivedanta Sadhana Asrama), Govardhana, India
24 December 2003

Christians Should Chant

If you stop killing animals and chant the holy name Christ, everything will be perfect. I have not come to teach you, but only to request you to please chant the name of God. The Bible also demands this of you. So let's kindly cooperate and chant, and if you have a prejudice against chanting the name Krsna, then chant "Christos" or "Krsta"--there is no difference. Sri Caitanya said: namnam akari bahudha nija-sarva-saktih. "God has millions and millions of names, and because there is no difference between God's name and Himself, each one of these names has the same potency as God. " Therefore, even if you accept designations like "Hindu," "Christian," or "Muhammadan," if you simply chant the name of God found in your own scriptures, you will attain the spiritual platform. Human life is meant for self-realization--to learn how to love God. That is the actual beauty of man. Whether you discharge this duty as a Hindu, a Christian, or a Muhammadan, it doesn't matter--but discharge it! [Science of Self-Realization Chapter Four]

On the Jesus Prayer

from The Way of the Ascetics by Tito Colliander
(original title Asketernas Vaeg, first published in 1952;
translated from Swedish in 1960 by Katherine Ferre)

The saintly Abbot Isaiah, the Egyptian hermit, says of the Jesus Prayer that it is a mirror for the mind and a lantern for the conscience. Someone has also likened it to a constant sounding, quite voice in the house; all thieves that sneak in take hasty flight when they hear someone is awake there. The house is the heart, the thieves, evil impulses. Prayer is the voice of one who keeps watch. But the one who keeps watch is no longer I, but Christ.

Spiritual activity embodies Christ in our soul. This involves continual remembrance of the Lord: you hide Him within, in your soul, your heart, your consciousness. I sleep, but my heart waketh (Song of Solomon 5:2): I myself sleep, withdraw, but the heart stays steadfast in prayer, that is, in eternal life, in the Kingdom of Heaven, in Christ. The tree-roots of my being stand fast in their source.

The means of attaining this is the prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Repeat it aloud, or only in thought; slowly, lingeringly, but with attention, and from a heart freed as much as possible from all that is inappropriate to it. Not only worldly interests are inappropriate, but also such things as every kind of expectation or thought of answer, or inner visions, testings, all kinds of romantic dreams, curious questions and imaginings. Simplicity is an inescapable a condition as humility, abstemiousness of body and soul, and in general everything that pertains to the invisible warfare.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I've given a seminar a few times in the past year on Vedic psychology, or more properly the Vedic philosophy of mind. One of the questions that has come up from attendees is about the psychological phenomena known as deja vu, which means "already seen" in French.

I have to admit that until very recently I really did not know much about deja vu. I've never experienced it myself, nor do I recall anyone else convincing me that he or she experienced deja vu. Thus I've never had an inclination to take it seriously. Still, devotees ask about it. Is it because some have had the experience themselves? Or is it just one of those things we've heard about somewhere, wondered a little about, and when we attend a seminar on the philosophy of mind, we think it might be interesting to ask about it?

My guess is the latter motivation is most often behind such questions: idle curiousity. That is why I question such questions, and sometimes I become annoyed with those asking such questions. Imagine that a devotee, an expert cook, has come to teach a seminar on cooking for the Deity. In one of the sessions he demonstrates how to make carrot halavah. At the end of the demonstration he asks for questions. A hand goes up.

"Yes?"

"Prabhu, I've heard that carrots improve eyesight. What do you have to say about that?"

It's not really on the point. If the devotee-cook would ask back, "Why do you want to know this?", what would be the reply? I'm sure it would have to be, "Oh, I'm just curious. "

I personally think this is inquiry without discrimination.

Anyway, back to deja vu.

It is also known as fausse reconnaissance (false recognition). That indicates that the opinion of researchers is that deja vu is a kind of delusion. It is the sudden, powerful conviction that something that has happened before is happening again. There is a compelling sense of familiarity. There is a persuasion that one knows what is going to happen next. It seems, from what I've read of serious psychological studies into deja vu, that the awaited next event, in almost all cases, turns out to be something that did not happen before. So deja vu is not really the cognizance of "a repeat occurence"--like a realization of Nietzche's theory of eternal return, in that I suddenly see myself doing again what I did in my previous life. It is not a specific happenstance that is being relived. Deja vu has less to do with what is going on outside as it does with what is being felt inside a person. In healthy people deja vu is a very fleeting experience. It is stimulated by external impressions: something seen, heard, smelled, tasted or felt; or a combination of these impressions. It especially affects young people and seems related to states of stress, tiredness, or heightened sensitivity due to anxiety, etc.

Above I wrote, "in healthy people deja vu is. . . very fleeting"; in people with certain neurological disorders like epilepsy, deja vu may continue for hours and days. Such patients have major problems in dealing with reality. This is why many psychologists conclude deja vu to be delusional.

Psychologists of the Freudian persuasion offer the explanation that deja vu is the recall of a repressed dream or fantasy. But the repression scenario--that a person pushes unmanageable psychological experiences away from himself into some closed compartment of mind, from which they may in future suddenly escape as startling revelations--is open to doubt.

For a time in the 1980s to the 1990s, misuse of the repression theory reached sensational proportions. At least one popular book published by a psychologist claimed--on the basis of a patient's "hidden memories"--that many children were being subject to SRA: Satanic Ritual Abuse. It was a vision right out of a Hollywood horror movie; soon other books and media coverage were beating the same drum. Thousands of outwardly normal parents were supposed to be involving their very young children in unspeakable demonic rituals so shocking that the childrens' minds immediately repressed them. Only years later, in therapy conducted by expert Freudian consultants, could such horrible memories be brought to light. Naturally the police were obliged to investigate. After much publicized excitement, the SRA "boom" proved, under the scrutiny of authorities, to have arisen out of the psychodynamics of therapy, not out of the past experiences of the patients.

This shows that a conviction that something happened before is manipulatable. Deja vu can be induced by hypnosis. The Freudians use that fact as a defense of their repressed memory theory. A hypnotized patient is shown a photgraph, then told to forget it. He is brought out of hypnosis. A stack of photos is put before him; unknown to him, the one he saw under hypnosis is within the stack. He is asked to look at the photos. When he sees again the one he saw under hypnosis, often he'll have a startling sense of familiarity about it, without realizing that he saw the same photo a few moments before. Such demonstrations, the Freudians argue, indicate that a sleeping memory can be stirred up by reconnecting the patient to the object of the memory. But experiments also show that false memories can be implanted in a patient's mind by hypnosis and other manipulations. In short: the mind is not to be trusted.

The French psychologist Pierre Janet was one of the first researchers to investigate deja vu thoroughly. His findings brought him to the conclusion that deja vu is not an affirmation of the past at all, rather it is a negation of the present.

There is an theory about deja vu from cognitive psychology that is congruent with Srila Prabhupada's explanation of dreams. When it dreams, the mind freely combines memories, Srila Prabhupada said. We've seen gold and we've seen a mountain; the dreaming mind puts the two together to create the image of a golden mountain. Now, the mind can dream during wakefulness, especially when one is tired, stressed out, and hypersensitive due to nervousness. Cognitive psychologists say that memories are rapidly reconstructed by the present-aware mind which draws components of the remembered image from stored past impressions. This process involves elaborations, errors and omissions. Thus memories change. Another point, according to this theory, is that a memory that is called up into the present-aware mind is returned to the bank of impressions, where it is re-written over the previous stored impressions. This is quite like retrieving from your hard disk an email you've been working on, writing to the file, and saving it again. The file you save is not the same one you retrieved. I don't much care for computer analogies applied to the mind. But I know from my own experience that memories can change over time. So the cognitive theory applied to deja vu is that after a memory is retrieved and stored repeatedly, it changes enough so that its key components may seem to fit a new experience. Thus the sense of strong familiarity is awakened even though the new experience is not a repeat of the actual previous experience, which the memory is only approximating.

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