In2-MeC

Kolhapur, Maharastra, India
16 April 2004

Thinking about Dimensions
(continued from yesterday)

I'm using pizza as a mere symbol for something else: sex. Prakrta-sahajiyas like the Bauls are devotees of sexual pleasure. They suppose that the adi-rasa (original erotic exchange) between Sri Krsna and the gopis is of the nature of the human sexual experience. It is just wildly magnified and undiminishing--an incredibly intense, perpetual orgasm. The Bauls practice a sort of sadhana by which they hope to attain the same peak of pleasure they imagine the Lord enjoys all the time.

Readers of Srila Prabhupada's books know the retort to the sahajiya standpoint. So many quotations could be brought forward; I'll offer just one here that nicely covers the point. It is from Nectar of Devotion Chapter 16.

Great devotees up to the standard of Uddhava are very dear friends of the Lord, and they desire to follow in the footsteps of the gopis. So the gopis' love for Krsna is certainly not material lusty desire. Otherwise, how could Uddhava aspire to follow in their footsteps? Another instance is Lord Caitanya Himself. After accepting the sannyasa order of life, He was very, very strict about avoiding association with women, but still He taught that there is no better method of worshiping Krsna than that conceived by the gopis. Thus the gopis' method of worshiping the Lord as if impelled by lusty desire was praised very highly even by Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu. This very fact means that although the attraction of the gopis for Krsna appears to be lusty, it is not in the least bit material. Unless one is fully situated in the transcendental position, the relationship of the gopis with Krsna is very difficult to understand. But because it appears to be just like ordinary dealings of young boys and girls, it is sometimes misinterpreted to be like the ordinary sex of this material world.

Yesterday I wrote:

One consequence of this [understanding of dimensions] is that we ought not to anticipate the reality of spirit from the standpoint of the "reality" of matter.

The pleasure of sex felt in the physical body belongs to the mundane dimension of experience. The dimension of Krsna's experience of the adi-rasa is, like Krsna Himself, utterly inconceivable to the living entity in the mundane dimension. It is utterly inconceivable even to the liberated soul. (You may refer again to the two quotations cited in yesterday's article for substantiation. )

Now, if mundane sex pleasure does not exist in Krsna's personal abode--the dimension of ultimate reality--then ultimately it does not exist. It is maya through and through. In philosophical language, mundane sex is a "verisimilitude. " That means it has power to convince living entities that it is real. It has that power because of its superficial resemblance to the adi-rasa, which is real. But like a counterfeit hundred dollar bill, the verisimilitude is worthless.

A doubt can be raised. In Bhagavad-gita Krsna states in clear language that the physical sex act is to be engaged in His service; indeed He becomes that dharmic sex. Getting back to pizza, in ISKCON it's considered "an offerable prep. " So how can I argue that these things have no ultimate existence?

There is a principle called aropita (imposition) which Srila Prabhupada explains in his purport to Srimad-Bhagavatam 7. 1. 6. I'll just cite a segment of this purport; I recommend the reader to refer to the complete text.

So-called attachment, detachment and obligations pertain to the material nature, which is an emanation from the Supreme Personality of Godhead, but whenever the Lord descends and acts in this material world, He does so in His spiritual position. Although His activities materially appear different, spiritually they are absolute and nondifferent. Thus it is an imposition upon the Supreme Lord to say that He is envious of anyone or friendly to anyone.

Why does the Lord descend into our dimension and apparently accept its limitations? The well-known answer is given in Bhagavad-gita 4. 8. He descends to deliver His devotees and to annihilate the demons; and of the two, the first purpose is the decisive one. (The Lord doesn't have to come to kill the demons as they are killed in any case by His material energy. ) Thus out of loving compassion for His devotees the Lord seems to conform to the material nature, although personally He has nothing to do with that nature.

In Prema-Vivarta we find an explanation of a level of devotional service called aropa-siddhi. This may help us understand more fully the implications of the previous quotation by Srila Prabhupada. At the aropa-siddhi level, the consciousness of the devotee is still absorbed in the dimension inhabited by mundane objects and activities. But to that dimension he brings a devotional attitude. He tries to offer the best of everything to the Lord, considering low-class things to be not worthy for the Lord's service. Still, this devotee isn't clear in his understanding about what the Lord Himself enjoys. In other words, he conceives the Lord's enjoyment in terms of his own enjoyment. This is an aropita (imposition) as defined by Prabhupada above, but due to the element of bhakti it is an aropita that the Lord mercifully complies with for the sake of delivering His devotee. This aropa-siddhi is the level of devotional service on which the kanistha-adhikari functions.

So, in regards to sex, pizza, and so on. . . you do the math.

Surrendering to Krsna requires us to accept that there is a "dimensional gap" dividing the jivatma from Lord Krsna. This gap cannot be bridged. . . except by the Lord's mercy. Therefore it behooves us to be very cautious about easy chatter about what life in Goloka Vrndavana is like. It is not "like" anything we are experiencing now, for the reason that Krsna doesn't personally "like" our experience here in the material world. Otherwise, why does He come here to deliver us from that experience? Even though He enters this world, He does not partake in its experience. Now, certainly we have much sastric information that gives us--at our present lower-dimensional stage--a transcendental idea of what the spiritual world is like. But as Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura points out in Harinama Cintamani (where he explains the perfectional stage of chanting the holy names):

By the mercy of Radha one receives the mercy of Krsna, and thus quickly ones material body will dissolve and one will attain pure spiritual body in Vraja. There are even higher stages than this, but these are not possible to describe by mere words. These things will be revealed by the mercy of Krsna.

We find it mind-boggling to imagine what the corner of a room would look like if our consciousness shifted up into the next material dimension. We can't very well expect the supreme dimension of consciousness to be like a pizza picnic with our gal pal in the park!

There's another point I want to make along these same lines. Within the mundane dimension of consciousness, no proof of the reality of Krsna consciousness can be demonstrated. The very idea--that the supreme dimension of reality can be, or ought to be, put on display for all within the mundane dimension to see so that Krsna consciousness can be "proven at last"--is sheer blockheadedness. The supreme dimension eternally exerts absolute control over our dimension. How will the mundane dimension bring the supreme dimension into its range of observation? At the same time, Krsna reserves the right to reveal Himself to whomever He may choose. He reveals Himself under His own autocratic terms, by His own sweet will. His terms may conform to conditioned expectations (viz. the aropita principle presented above). Or they may not. It is entirely up to Him.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a novel about a very similar concept. It's titled Tloen, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. It's not about Krsna, of course. It's about Tloen, a place that exists as a myth within a higher-dimensional realm called Uqbar. In our world of 1937, interest in Tloen and Uqbar is excited when a mysterious book turns up purporting to be a volume of an encyclopedia from that dimension. However, a careful investigation "proves" that this book is an elaborate hoax. A plot is uncovered called Orbis Tertius. It was devised and financed by an eccentric millionaire named Ezra Buckley. Over a period of more than eighty years he had employed three hundred visionaries to produce, out of their imaginations, a vast "First Encylopedia of Tloen. " The 3-D evidence that Tloen is a fiction is absolutely incontrovertible.

That phrase I just used, "the 3-D evidence," is intended to signal that there's a big surprise around the corner.

There are always people who latch onto a weird idea as being true, even when it is "proven" untrue. Plenty of people believe a conspiracy killed President Kennedy even though the US Government "proved" that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. So in Tloen, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, belief in Tloen catches on with some people even after Tloen is dismissed as the fancy yarn of a rich crank.

It turns out that the nature of the dimension of Tloen is belief! And so, because there are people who believe in it, Tloen gradually manifests itself, the result being that more and more people take up the belief in defiance of "cold, hard facts. " At the end of the novel Planet Earth becomes Tloen. It would seem that the higher-dimensional intelligence of Tloen first generated faith in itself on earth through the fiction of Tloen, which was orchestrated from Tloen.

In a couple of essays published last January I told of a devotee of some sort who has a website that proclaims his faith in Darwinian evolution. He mentions there his appreciation for a book about Bhaktivinoda Thakura written by a scholarly Godbrother of mine. That book gave him the raison d'ętre for adapting whatever consciousness of Krsna he has to the "proofs" of modern science. He feels very comfortable now that his faith is married to "reason. "

Ha ha ha.

You can see from the above proofs of reason that from the standpoint of a theoretical higher dimension, his reliance on the "proofs" of our world is, philosophically speaking, a joke.

Since material philosophers are situated in the material prema of vilasa-vivarta, they are unable to realize the spiritual prema-vilasa-vivarta. They cannot accommodate an elephant upon a dish. Similarly, mundane speculators cannot capture the spiritual elephant within their limited conception. It is just like a frog's trying to measure the Atlantic Ocean by imagining it so many times larger than his well. Materialistic philosophers and sahajiyas cannot understand the talks between Ramananda Raya and Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu concerning the pastimes of Sri Radha and Krsna. (Sri Caitanya-caritamrta Madhya 8. 193p)

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