last updated 11th October 2010
 
 

Kazakhstani online petition

Kazakhstani online petition

By Radha Mohan Dasa

Please visit http://www.krishnatemple.com NOW and click the link to the new petition, or go straight to the petition webpage:

http://harekrishna.epetitions.net

Please sign it soon as you can, and please tell as many people as you can about it.

Background: Workers and police arrived on 15th June at the village near Almaty, Kazakhstan, where the embattled Hare Krishna commune is based to demolish twelve more Hare Krishna-owned homes. “The houses were literally crushed into dust. By ten o’clock it was all over,” said ISKCON spokesperson Maksim Varfolomeyev.

The temple, which the devotees have been ordered to destroy, has not been touched but the devotees fear it could be the next target. Human rights activist Yevgeny Zhovtis is outraged at the continuing destruction. “The authorities are showing that they will do what they want, despite the international outrage at the earlier demolitions of Hare Krishna-owned homes.” He believes the local administration chief “doesn’t care about the political damage to Kazakhstan’s reputation – or to its desire to chair the OSCE.”

ys Radha Mohan das

By Mushfig Bayram for Forum 18 News Service on 1 Oct 2010

In the wake of new visa regulations for foreigners working in Kazakhstan – which for the first time introduced a category of "missionary visa" – some religious communities have found it difficult or impossible to get visas for foreigners they argue they need to sustain their communal life, Forum 18 News Service has found. While the Catholics appear to have overcome their difficulties for foreign priests and nuns, Ahmadi Muslims have seen their two imams unable to remain, while the Jewish community fears no foreign rabbi will volunteer to work in Kazakhstan because only short-term visas are likely to be obtainable. Kazakhstan is "trying to force all foreign religious believers out of the country," one Ahmadi commented to Forum 18.

A representative of one faith, who asked not to be identified, told Forum 18 that they are afraid to apply for missionary visas for any foreigner that they would like to invite because they are almost certain that the application will be refused. "We wouldn't want to apply for someone who gets rejected and then gets problems trying to come in." In a comment echoed to Forum 18 by other communities, the representative argued that people who visit a religious community from abroad are not missionaries and therefore should not be required to have a missionary visa.

Isolation policy?

The new regulations appear to be part of a government policy of increasingly trying to isolate religious communities from fellow-believers abroad. In 2005, restrictions on missionary activity by both local people and foreign residents of Kazakhstan were introduced in amendments to the Religion Law, which required prior registration of missionaries with the authorities. It defined missionary activity as "the preaching and spreading by means of religious educational activity of a religious faith which is not contained in the statutes of a religious association which carries out its activity on the territory of the Republic of Kazakhstan".

Also amended at the same time was the Code of Administrative Offences to introduce punishment for missionary activity without permission from the state. For those who are not citizens, the punishment includes deportation (see F18News 15 July 2005 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=608).

Numerous foreign citizens legally present in Kazakhstan have been deported or forced to leave in recent years because the authorities have objected to their religious activity. A number of foreign religious leaders have been blacklisted for re-entry to Kazakhstan after being deported or because they have been blacklisted for entry to other former Soviet republics (see F18News 30 January 2009 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1247).

Read more: http://news.iskcon.org/node/3153#ixzz11l5tQWKl

 Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 12:43pm

There are all kinds of frequencies and vibrations all around us. There are frequencies we see (such as light waves), hear (sound waves), or feel, and others that are beyond our ability to sense, such as gamma rays, infrared, or radio and television frequencies. In fact, the ancient Vedic texts of India explain, in summary, that this whole universe is the production or manifestation from particular vibrations that cause a change from the spiritual energy into the material energy. And all these frequencies effect us in many ways. For example, we may hear music that can be soothing and peaceful, or that is abrasive and irritating. Or there may be frequencies that we have to deal with on a more regular basis, like the noise we hear when working in a factory, or the sounds of downtown traffic.
Walk through a factory. The noise and vibrational level of the frequencies that you hear and feel are not attractive. In fact, they may be damaging to your hearing and necessitate the need for wearing ear plugs. Being around that kind of noise, which are lower vibrations of themselves, can make you restless or agitated in due time, tend to pull your consciousness down in a way that makes you think in very basic terms. They can make your mind become absorbed in the lower modes of thinking, like simply desiring to satisfy your senses, wanting to go to the bar after work to drown your thoughts, or thinking of whatever will give you the easiest thrill. In other words, exposure to low vibrations tends to produce low consciousness simply by your exposure to them. Let's explain this a little more.

The science of vibrations and frequencies and how they effect people is something that has been around for thousands of years. We can still find evidence of this in the ancient Vedic texts of India. These explain not only the results of using the frequencies of words and mantras, but also supply instructions in some cases. The sages of ancient India used it to produce various results in the rituals they performed, and from the mantras they would recite. If the mantras were recited in particular ways, certain amazing results would take place, including changing the weather, producing certain types of living beings, or even palaces. Others used it to produce weapons, like the brahmashtra weapon, which was equal to the modern nuclear bombs. Specific mantras could be attached to arrows, with the sound causing powerful explosions when the arrow reached its target. Others used the science of vibrations to bring their consciousness to higher levels of perception, or to enter spiritual reality.

We can see the results of exposure to certain frequencies in other ways as well. Even now there has been research that has provided discoveries on the use of frequencies. They have worked with plants, exposing them to various kinds of music. Plants would thrive when exposed to classical music, while they would languish or wither when around heavy rock music. However, considering the nature of the mostly unenlightened society in which we live, some of these discoveries have not been for the benefit of the world and are quite scary to think of the results that may happen.

Nicola Tesla, the Croatian born inventor, had performed experiments at the turn of the century that revealed that air, at its ordinary pressure, is a conductor for large amounts of electrical energy over great distances without wires. This meant a few things: That electrical use for the purposes of man would be available at any place on the globe. And that electricity traveling through the air shows how frequencies and waves of powerful energy do not need wires to be generated at one place and received in another. Furthermore, it is of the opinion of some that the mathematics that provide the underpinning for Tesla's work also provides the basis for understanding telepathy. This suggests the openings of vast potentials for the human mind.

We could go on to suggest that this signifies that the whole universe is a vibrational generator, in some ways, in order for it to not only produce, send and receive energy at various points around the globe, but to also maintain such energy at all. Let's present some additional information in this regard.
Tesla proved the wireless transmission of electric power back in February of 1900. He sent signals of a very low hertz frequency by creating a conducting path between the ionosphere and the earth. Tesla found that the earth's surface could be used for a long circuit for very low frequencies. Thus, electrical energy could be transmitted world-wide from earth by going through the ground and using the ionosphere as a return path. The ionosphere is an electrical conducting spherical shell of ions and free electrons that surround the earth in the upper atmosphere between 50 to 200 miles high. It is important in radio transmissions in serving as a reflector of radio waves over a range of frequencies that permit transmissions beyond lines of sight and around the earth by successive reflections. This means that electricity and frequencies could be beamed to users and receivers without the need of power lines anywhere in the world.

However, it is understood that the effects these oscillations could produce in the ionosphere may not always be beneficial. For example, it was reported among the U. S. Intelligence that the U. S. S. R. had been engaged in large scale efforts for developing wireless radio transmissions that could effect the behavioral patterns of whole populations. The Canadian Department of Communications reported high powered, low frequency communication coming from the Soviet Union. Independent researchers verified the existence of these coming from varying sites within the Soviet Union. Among Intelligence circles, the radio waves became known as "Woodpecker" because they had a distinctive tapping sound over the airwaves.

There has been proved to be a psycho-physiological sensitivity in animals and humans to magnetic and electrical fields in extremely low frequencies (ELF) corresponding to brain waves. These ELF, which can penetrate anything, have made it possible for the military to have a world-wide communication system with its submarines, which can be situated in any part of the world.

However, in the late 1970s, there was widespread cattle deaths in Oregon. It was determined by research that the cattle had been killed by adverse ELF radio frequency transmissions from the Russians. It seems that man is a bio-cosmic transducer, a transmitter and receiver as well, and that somehow our brain waves can lock on and modulate with the earth's electromagnetic field, the Universal Magnetic Field (UMF), as Tesla called it. Research has shown that altering these electro magnetic fields can influence the brain waves of cats and monkeys. Humans are also affected.

Anything above eleven hertz produces a general range of agitation and discontent. High voltage power lines throw off 50 to 60 hertz, and there's been concern about what they can do to people who live near them. Some feel that such lines, or even the use of such items as electric blankets, can cause cancer because of the unnatural magnetic field to which the body is exposed. Researchers have concluded that humans are electrical people. For example, our hearts can start or stop due to appropriate electrical impulses. The use of pacemakers is an example of helping maintain a steady heartbeat. Thus, electro magnetic radiation could be the most harmful pollutant in our society. There is strong evidence that cancer and other diseases can be triggered by electromagnetic waves.

Some ELF broadcasts from the Russians were thought to cause depression in humans. When the Russians first started transmitting in 1976, they emitted an eleven hertz signal through the earth. This ELF wave was so powerful that it upset radio communications around the world, resulting in many nations lodging protest. The U. S. Air Force identified five different frequencies the Russians were emitting in a wild ELF cocktail. They never broadcast anything below eleven hertz, or anything that would be beneficial. They had more sinister things in mind. ELF penetrates anything and everything. Nothing stops or weakens them. At the right frequencies and durations, whole populations could be controlled by ELF, or even killed. Once the killing range of these frequencies is perfected, it could make nuclear bombs obsolete. It could kill almost immediately with powerful adverse frequencies. Whole populations could be killed indiscriminately from radio frequencies transmitted from the other side of the globe without damaging anything else. A conquering army could simply take over the land and buildings without a battle.

Thankfully, these potential weapons do not seem to have been perfected as yet, or such research is cloaked in the highest levels of secrecy. Appropriately, Tesla once said that peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment.

In light of this point, on the plus side, there are machines that use frequencies for beneficial use. There is a medical device called a Multiple Wave Oscillator, first developed by a French researcher and improved by solid state electronics. It used a miniature Tesla system consisting of two copper coils. When activated, a magnetic field is generated between the two coils and the frequencies can be adjusted for the electricity that flowed from one coil to the other. The result is multiple waves of inherently good frequencies to help heal various parts of the body. Sore knees or torn muscles can be placed inside the magnetic fields for a few minutes at a time, helping it to heal much faster than with conventional methods.

Researchers have found that frequencies under seven hertz create a general feeling of relaxation and well being, known as the alpha state. The most beneficial frequency on earth is said to be the 6.8 hertz frequency. Interestingly, the Pyramid at Giza has a constant frequency of 6.8 hertz running through it. Although researchers have studied it, they don't know where it comes from or why in such an ancient structure.

This points to the idea that the ancients knew the importance of frequencies and how to use them in order to provide an atmosphere for attaining a peaceful state of mind for entering higher states of consciousness and perception of spiritual reality. The use of yoga has utilized this principle for as long as it had been known--many hundreds of years. Concentrating on the steady breathing, as in hatha-yoga, is a means of leveling and harmonizing the electrical impulses of the body and the beating of the heart. Invoking the alpha state by a natural means allows one to also reach a vibrational state in which the consciousness can enter higher levels of being and perception. The body is not only conducting the more balanced frequencies, but it begins to generate them as well. It is as if the body and mind are creating its own atmosphere in which it can further its more spiritual development, with or without the proper atmosphere around it. Building structures, like the pyramids and pyramid-like temples, which are common in such places as India and Central America, may provide the assistance for doing that, along with the physical exercises of yoga and the use of prayers, mantras, or rituals. By implementing such things on a regular basis in one's life, it would increase one's peaceful existence, bring about a higher state of consciousness, and insights into a level of reality beyond ordinary sense perception. In other words, it would naturally take one closer to the Truth of our existence. It would, as Tesla was hoping, bring the peace that would come from a natural consequence of universal enlightenment

A key point in this regard is the ancient use of mantras, as already mentioned earlier. Not only could certain results be attained by the proper use of vibrations in sounds, but even today the use of particular mantras are known for calming the mind, lowering blood pressure, relieving one from unnecessary anxieties by changing one's focus in life, and so on. It is also understood that certain mantras and prayers, such as the chanting of the spiritual names of God, bring to one the transcendental vibration of the spiritual world from where it comes. This means it is like a conductor, bringing the spiritual energy and frequencies that come from the transcendental strata. One of the classic mantras for this use is the Hare Krishna mantra (Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare / Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare). Experiments have already been performed that show the changes in those who regularly use this mantra. Plus, sages of India have used this mantra successfully for centuries in order to reach spiritual states of being.

Thus, by absorbing one's consciousness in the sound vibration of these names of God, it will do several things, such as alter and improve the electrical impulses that are generated by the body, and help defend oneself from the negative impulses that one may encounter. In this way, it helps create a peaceful attitude within the individual and a healthier disposition. It also prepares one's consciousness for perceiving higher levels of reality, opens one up to the spiritual world, gradually reveals one's true spiritual identity, which would also allow one to see the unity between all people. It also harmonizes one's existence with nature, and even begins to rekindle one's real relationship with the Supreme Soul, God. Once the higher vibration of the spiritual realm is invoked on a regular basis in this way, and is opened for its use among the people in general, the chances for world change become enormous.

Naturally, this may not happen immediately. One needs to be able to concentrate on those spiritual sounds appropriately. This means to rid oneself of the clutter in one's mind. Only by purely focusing on the sound of the holy names can one truly feel its power, and open its potential. This is why there is a need for living a simple and honest life, and developing sincerity and devotion. It makes such a difference in being able to focus on the chanting of these spiritual prayers and mantras with feeling. Then one gives up that clutter which gets in the way of truly hearing the sounds and allows them to have a deep affect on one's life. That is when the deep changes and insights can begin to take place. When the general masses of people begin to participate in this process, that is when the collective vibrations around the world can begin to bring social changes that will help lead all people to a higher and more peaceful state of being. The general frequencies that we generate and receive will then naturally be of a harmonious and spiritual nature.

(This article is from: http://www.stephen-knapp.com)

NEW YORK, U.S., January 23, 2010: Kevin Salwen, a writer and entrepreneur in Atlanta, was driving his 14-year-old daughter, Hannah, back from a sleepover in 2006. While waiting at a traffic light, they saw a black Mercedes coupe on one side and a homeless man begging for food on the other.

“Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal,” Hannah protested. The light changed and they drove on, but Hannah was too young to be reasonable. She pestered her parents about inequity, insisting that she wanted to do something. “What do you want to do?” her mom responded. “Sell our house?”

Eventually, that’s what the family did. The project ­ crazy, impetuous and utterly inspiring ­ is chronicled in a book by father and daughter scheduled to be published next month: “The Power of Half.”

The Salwens offer an example of a family that came together to make a difference ­ for themselves as much as the people they were trying to help. Mr. Salwen and his wife, Joan, had always assumed that their kids would be better off in a bigger house. But after they downsized, there was much less space to retreat to, so the family members spent more time around each other. A smaller house unexpectedly turned out to be a more family-friendly house.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

In a move termed as ‘historic’, British lawmakers are in the process of amending equality laws to make caste-based discrimination illegal, following mounting evidence of the practice within the Asian community here.

Academics and campaign groups have conducted surveys that highlight the prevalence of caste-based discrimination among people with origins in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

After refusing to amend the laws for some years on the ground that there was no evidence of such practice, Britain has now accepted that discrimination on grounds of caste may be happening.

Baroness Thornton, a government peer in the House of Lords, said such evidence may exist and has commissioned the National Institute of Economic and Social Research to conduct research into the subject and present its report by August.

Based on the evidence and research present in the report, the government is expected to amend equality laws and initiate measures to prevent caste-based discrimination in the same way as discrimination on grounds of sex, colour, religion, age, sexual orientation.

The study says: “There is clear evidence from the survey and the focus groups that the caste system has been imported into the UK with the Asian diaspora and that the associated discrimination affects citizens in ways beyond personal choices and social interaction.”

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

UNITED KINGDOM, March 28, 2010: A survey of new street names shows they are increasingly being chosen to reflect councils’ interests in the environment, health sand safety and diversity. Experts said that local authorities were doing the same thing the Romans did 2,000 years: using names which reflected the nature of society around them.

Samsara Road, in Bromsgrove, and Karma Way, in Harrow, north London, both use phrases from Indian religions, dealing with concepts of reincarnation and cause and effect, respectively. Then there is Yoga Way, in Sutton, south London.

Dr. David Green, a geographer from King’s College London, said: “Street names reflect modern culture and society and preoccupations. They now also show a worldwide influence.” Among the new streets with an environmental theme are Eco Way, in Doncaster, and Sustainability Way, in Leyland, Lancashire.
 

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

UNITED KINGDOM, April 2010: Junk food may be addictive in the same way as heroin or cocaine, according to a study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, showing that laboratory rats will endure painful electric shocks to satisfy their craving for high-calorie snacks made from sausages, bacon and cheesecake.

The researchers found that rats offered junk food quickly became so attached to it that they would endure painful but harmless electric shocks to their feet in order to eat it. They would even prefer to starve themselves rather than eat the “salad bar option” of the typical rodent food eaten by rats that had never had junk food.

When the scientists analysed the brains of the junk-food rats they found that a key pleasure-reward system known to be involved in triggering drug addiction in humans was overstimulated, causing the animals to eat more and more food in order to enjoy the chemical “high” felt in their brains. “It presents the most thorough and compelling evidence that drug addiction and obesity are based on the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms,” said Professor Paul Kenny at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

KENDRAPARA, ORISSA, April 6, 2010: Sasana village in the Shyamsundar gram panchayat, which is inhabited mainly by brahmins, has a little over 32 households with 200-odd members. In all the households, one will come across Sanskrit pundits employed in government-run Sanskrit-medium educational institutions.

“We are proud patrons of Sanskrit. The ancient language is very much alive at the village,” 76-year-old Baishnav Charan Pati, a Sanskrit pundit who has retired from his teaching job, said. Pati said that they made sure for generations that at least one child in every household had been taught in the Sanskrit medium of education.

“Most of the Sanskrit-educated residents have found employment either in government schools or have taken up career as priests to preside over Hindu ceremonies,” Pati said.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

UNITED STATES, 2010 (By Rabbi A. James Rudin): Accusations that members of an Idaho-based Baptist missionary group tried to smuggle 33 Haitian children out of the earthquake-ravaged country have attracted wide media attention. The case, still pending in a Haitian court, raises serious legal, ethical and religious questions.

Missionary activity is not without its risks, or rewards. The New York Times described tensions between missionaries who have been active in Haiti for years and those who only arrived following the Jan. 12 catastrophe that killed more than 200,000 people. In another sign of religious friction, evangelical Christians have reportedly attacked a Port-au-Prince voodoo memorial service. Max Beauvoir, the country’s voodoo leader, accused evangelicals of trying to “buy souls” with the lure of needed food and medicine.

To their credit, Christian missionaries throughout the world have established hospitals, colleges and universities, medical clinics, training schools, hospices, orphanages and other institutions. For these Christians, the term “mission” is less about saving souls and more about saving lives. But while recognizing those humanitarian efforts, the term “missionary” triggers resentment, and even rage, among Jews. For nearly 2,000 years, zealous Christians in their quest for converts have assailed Jews with hostile proselytizing campaigns and forced conversions. There were also humiliating public religious debates in medieval Europe. Such rigged “disputations” sought to prove Christianity’s spiritual superiority over Judaism.

In recent years, many Christians have muted or even abandoned active missionary activities.There’s a difference between “mission” and “witness.” Mission is frequently an act of insensitivity, even coercion, directed to adherents of another faith community. Witness, meanwhile, is the living out of authentic religious beliefs without attempting to proselytize another person. In authentic witnessing, there are no hidden agendas, no strong-arming, and certainly no court cases involving alleged kidnapping.

By Gauranga Kishore Das for gaurangakishore.blogspot.com on 17 Jun 2010
From ISKCON News

With the recent announcement by the scientific community of the creation of a living organism using synthetic DNA many people are wondering about the religious implications of this achievement. Religion has long claimed that God created life. Will the developments of modern science disprove this crucial part of the religious worldview?

In response to the latest achievements of a group of scientists of the Venter Institute, headed by microbiologist Craig Venter, headlines read: Scientists Create First Self-Replicating Synthetic Life. Such headlines may have the religiously faint of heart amongst us worried that science is laying siege to the empire of theistic belief, the idea that life comes from God, the idea that there is more to life than physical laws, the belief in a soul that resides within and animates the body.

Should we be questioning our beliefs in light of this new discovery?

First, we should be clear on exactly what has been done because some of the headlines like the one above may be misleading. The scientists of the Venter institute have not created life, they have synthetically replicated the DNA sequence of a micro-organism, removed it's original DNA and replaced it with the synthetic DNA. The experiment was a success and the cell began to reproduce.

So what has really been done could be described as a DNA transplant, which is significantly short of creating life.

When asked in an interview on CNN whether he had created life Venter responded, "We created a new cell. It's alive. But we didn't create life from scratch. We were created, as all life on this planet is, out of a living cell."

Venter and his team did not create life, they implanted synthetic DNA into a living microorganism. Practically, this is a big breakthough in the field of microbiology that could have some very important implications in the future, but despite this new breakthrough in genetics, the core philosophical issues still remain untouched in regards to the fundamental nature of life.

The most fundamental question of religion and philosophy is: how did we get here? Until Darwin came along, there was no non-religious answer to this question. Darwin made it possible for a person to be an intellectual atheist, at least superficially. Darwin's answer was random variation or what we now call random mutation. Darwin's basic scientific idea of variation and natural selection was an amazing insight into how species can change and adapt over time, but huge questions still remain.

Is it really possible for one species to change into another? Up until now, there has not really been any evidence of this. The fossil record has not been unforthcoming in its support of Darwin's hypothesis. Species seem to appear in the fossil record fully formed and disappear the same way when new fully formed species take their place.

Genetic evidence seems to strongly confirm Darwin's idea of common ancestry. However, common descent doesn't prove Darwinian evolution to be true, because what really makes Darwin's theory controversial is not the idea of common descent but the idea that the primary force at work in the evolutionary process in randomness, not divine intervention.

All questions about evolution aside, there are still many questions about how the very first living organism arose. The Miller Urey experiment proved that amino acids could be randomly generated in a certain environment but this is far different from life. Even if it is someday shown exactly how life could have come about by totally material processes, and exactly which genetic mutations led to the creation of every organism on the plant, even if we could have a totally naturalistic explanation for all life, we are still left with the problem that these events are so highly improbable that a naturalistic explanation remains.

The odds are so stacked against the creation of life and the evolution of species by Darwinian processes that the generation of life from natural elements and the creation of new species requires a supernatural explanation. The esteemed Carl Sagan estimated that the possibility of human life being randomly generated at 10 to the 2,000,000,000. This number is so large it is practically impossible to fathom.

Borel's law states that any event with odds of less than one in 10 raised to the fiftieth power is impossible. This is because the number of atoms in the universe is only estimated to be ten raised to the eightieth power.

The odds against the creation of life are almost infinitely more than the number of atomic particles in the universe!

The improbability of life can be extended out further into the universe to include fundamental laws of nature. One example is the expansion rate of the universe in relationship to the forces of gravity. Stephan Hawking comments, “Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse form those that go on expanding forever, that even now, 10 thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in 100 thousand million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size. . .It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”

Even Francis Crick had to admit, "An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."

The huge improbabilities regarding the existence of life, ranging from the physical laws of the universe, to the creation of the universe, to the individual events in the creation of life, and the evolution of one species into another, lead me to believe there is a conscious force guiding the apparently random processes.

Although the latest achievements of molecular biology are amazing, which may have profound implications for the advancement of science and technology, they are still far short of creating life. And the creation of life in a laboratory would still be far short of life being randomly generated in a universe that is perfectly suited to support life.

I personally don't think that life will be able to be created artificially. BUT even if life is created artificially I don't think it weakens the theological position. Venter and his team spent the last 15 years and over forty million dollars to create and implant their synthetic DNA into a living cell. There doesn't seem to be anything random about that. Rather it only seems to strengthen the design hypothesis.

Rather than disprove the God hypothesis, the advancements of modern science only seem to strengthen it. The more we learn about the Universe, the more we learn about life, the less likely it seems that it could all just be an accident. The more we learn, the more we see the evidence for design, and the more we see the unseen hand of God at work in the universe.

I think Harry Rimmer said it perfectly: “I fail to see how the natural man can scoff at the faith of a Christian who believes in one miracle of creation, when the unbeliever accepts multiplied millions of miracles to justify his violation of every known law of biology and every evidence of paleontology, and to cling to the exploded myth of evolution.”

More on Science HERE

USA, August 20, 2010 (by Stafford Betty, professor of religious studies at Cal State Bakersfield): A recent poll conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life revealed that 28 percent of American Catholic adults believe in reincarnation. Why have so many adopted the belief? What attracts them to it? In the course of teaching Asian religions for several decades and listening to what students say on the subject, I’ve come to the following conclusions.

Many Catholics think that a single life of anywhere from a few seconds’ duration to 110 years is not enough time to determine the destiny of a soul for all eternity. They feel that God would be unloving if He (excuse the conventional pronoun) were to condemn a sinner to hell, but irrational if He rewarded a baby born dead with heaven. Some of these Catholics see the wheel of rebirth as a more plausible form of purgatory.

The other main reason that Catholics ­ and other Americans ­ adopt a reincarnational worldview turns on evidence. Much, perhaps most, of what passes as evidence comes from the popular media. Stories about people who have seeming memories of a previous life or mysterious phobias or obsessions or talents that cannot be explained by events in this life abound, and they often set people to wondering. The History channel serves up occasional stories of apparent rebirth, and these are based on research by paranormal investigators.

There is also some reputable academic research being done on reincarnation that trickles down into public awareness. This is the work of Ian Stevenson, the famous reincarnation researcher affiliated with the University of Virginia who died in 2007. Stevenson and his associates traveled over the world tracking down little children, usually aged between 3 and 5, who claim to have memories of past lives. In hundreds of cases from all over the world their memories would match actual events that happened to the adult they remembered being.

Most Catholics who believe in reincarnation for one reason or another just go on being Catholic. They are no more troubled by their departure from Church guidance on the subject than on birth control. But is reincarnation reconcilable with cardinal doctrines of the faith? Would Catholic theology break apart if it were officially tolerated? In particular, would Jesus’ role as savior be diminished if salvation were accomplished over several lifetimes as opposed to one? I don’t see why it would, though I would welcome correction on the point.

As I see it now, the goal of the Catholic, and of all Christians, is union with the Divine. [HPI note: We must point out that there is no union with God in the official Catholic doctrine, or in the mainstream writings of any Abrahamic faith: it is strictly a "pagan" concept. It is striking that the author goes so far as to see it as a common trait of Christianity "as she sees it now." Union with the divine is a modern development except in sidelined groups such as the Gnostics and the Sufis.]

If the process of salvation is a long one (as Catholic teaching on purgatory implies) then is it of any great importance whether the process is accomplished in purgatory or in successive lives on earth?

I hope the Church will do an exhaustive study of the reputable research on reincarnation before making any pronouncements on the subject. Perhaps one option it should consider is that the answer is indeterminable at this time and that Catholics who believe in it are free to do so without censure.

More HERE - Reincarnation pages

By TODD WOODY and CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: February 14, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO ­ If electric cars have any future in the United States, this may be the city where they arrive first.

Andrew Utter plugging his converted Toyota Prius into a charging station across the street from City Hall in San Francisco.

The first wave of electric car buying is expected to begin around December when Nissan introduces the five-passenger Leaf.

The San Francisco building code will soon be revised to require that new structures be wired for car chargers. Across the street from City Hall, some drivers are already plugging converted hybrids into a row of charging stations.

In nearby Silicon Valley, companies are ordering workplace charging stations in the belief that their employees will be first in line when electric cars begin arriving in showrooms. And at the headquarters of Pacific Gas and Electric, utility executives are preparing “heat maps” of neighborhoods that they fear may overload the power grid in their exuberance for electric cars.

“There is a huge momentum here,” said Andrew Tang, an executive at P.G.& E.

As automakers prepare to introduce the first mass-market electric cars late this year, it is increasingly evident that the cars will get their most serious tryout in just a handful of places. In cities like San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and San Diego, a combination of green consciousness and enthusiasm for new technology seems to be stirring public interest in the cars.

The first wave of electric car buying is expected to begin around December, when Nissan introduces the Leaf, a five-passenger electric car that will have a range of 100 miles on a fully charged battery and be priced for middle-class families.

Several thousand Leafs made in Japan will be delivered to metropolitan areas in California, Arizona, Washington state, Oregon and Tennessee. Around the same time,General Motors will introduce the Chevrolet Volt, a vehicle able to go 40 miles on electricity before its small gasoline engine kicks in.

“This is the game-changer for our industry,” said Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s president and chief executive. He predicted that 10 percent of the cars sold would be electric vehicles by 2020.

Utilities are gearing up to cooperate with the automakers, a first for the two industries, and governments on the West Coast are focusing intently on the coming issues. Price and tax incentives need to be worked out. Locations must be found for charging stations. And local electrical grids may need reinforcement.

The California Public Utilities Commission, whose headquarters are in San Francisco, has brought together utilities, automakers and charging station companies in an urgent effort to write the new rules of the road.

Much of the attention on electric cars has been on the vehicles’ design, cost and performance. But success or failure could turn on more mundane matters, like the time it takes car buyers to navigate a municipal bureaucracy to have charging stations installed in their homes.

When the president of the California Public Utilities Commission, Michael R. Peevey, leased an electric Mini Cooper, he said, it took six weeks of visits by installers and inspectors before he could plug in his new car at home.

“It was really drawn out and frustrating and certainly is not workable on a mass basis,” Mr. Peevey said.

Such issues are being hashed out here first. The San Francisco area is home not only to a population of early technology adopters but to companies like Coulomb Technologies and Better Place that are developing the networks and software to allow utilities to manage how cars are charged.

Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that makes electric cars, says it has already sold 150 of its $109,000 Roadsters in the Bay Area. One customer bought the sleek sports car on the spot after a test drive.

“We asked him how he heard of Tesla and why he bought the car,” said Rachel Konrad, a Tesla spokeswoman. “He said, ‘Well, three other guys on my block have them.’ ”

In Berkeley, a town known for its environmental sensibility, one out of five cars sold today is a hybrid Prius. If electric cars are adopted that broadly in the next few years, problems could ensue.

“If you just allow willy-nilly random charging, are we going to have neighborhood blackouts?” asked Mr. Tang, the utility executive. He said a single car could consume three times as much electricity as a typical San Francisco home.

Mr. Tang is working to make sure that does not happen by monitoring where electric cars are sold in Northern California. And later this year P.G.&E. will lead a “smart charging” pilot project, connecting 200 cars to special charging stations that let utilities control the electrical demand at a given moment.

Robert Hayden, the clean transportation adviser for San Francisco, said the city hopes to have 60 charging stations installed in public garages by year’s end, with a thousand more available across the Bay Area in 2011. And in Oregon, an advisory group is working on charging stations and related issues.

The Chevrolet Volt will be able to go 40 miles on electricity.

To avoid problems in areas with high car concentrations, utility executives said they would encourage people to charge their vehicles at night or to use smarter electric meters that help control demand.

“We are trying to be proactive about how to make sure that the transformers that serve these homes and neighborhoods are robust enough,” said Doug Kim, an executive at Southern California Edison, which serves Los Angeles.

Mr. Kim said the popularity of electric vehicles “will be a function of a lot of different things: the state of the economy, how many people can actually afford to buy the cars and the price of gasoline ­ how high does it have to be?”

Some transportation experts are skeptical that electric vehicles will catch on anywhere in the country, in large part because the batteries and the installation of home recharging units are expensive.

Dan Sperling, the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, estimated that a typical electric car battery would cost the automaker $12,000, and a 240-volt charging unit would cost a household at least $1,500.

Without huge subsidies, “the reality is, these electric vehicles are not going to sweep the industry and become a major share of the market for a very long time,” Mr. Sperling said.

Despite such skepticism, Washington is putting considerable money into the effort, including billions of dollars in loans to Ford, Nissan and Tesla Motors.

Under last year’s stimulus package, nearly $200 million will support Nissan’s introduction of the Leaf by permitting the installation of 13,000 charging stations around cities in Oregon, Washington, California, Arizona and Tennessee in the next year or so. (Nissan plans to build the Leaf in Tennessee eventually.)

If electric cars do take off, consumers and society could benefit. Battery-powered motors are more efficient than gasoline engines. They cost drivers on average only 2.5 cents a mile for fuel, less than a third of the cost for a highly efficient gasoline car, according to proponents.

The Energy Department says electric cars produce less of the emissions linked to climate change than traditional vehicles, though how much less depends on the source of power on the local electricity grid.

Before the first Nissan Leafs and Chevrolet Volts reach the show room, an electric car infrastructure is getting a test drive in the Bay Area, in a limited way.

Google, which is talking to automakers about using its PowerMeter energy management software, has already become something of an electric transportation hub. At Google’s Mountain View headquarters, a handful of employees drive to work in Tesla Roadsters, and more drive a fleet of modified Priuses that Google owns. The employees pull into carports that are covered with solar panels and plug their cars into the 100 available charging stations.

Nearby, in downtown San Jose, the city has reserved street parking for electric vehicles and installed charging stations. Nearby, at Adobe Systems’ headquarters, an executive showed off a dozen charging stations in the parking garage. Eighteen more will be installed this year.

“No one wants to be left behind,” said Richard Lowenthal, chief executive of Coulomb Technologies. “We’re preparing for an onslaught of demand.”

The Hindu - A vendor sells bhut jolokia, the world’s hottest chilli, in a local market in Guwahati. File photo

The Indian military has a new weapon against terrorism: the world’s hottest chilli.

After conducting tests, the military has decided to use the thumb-sized bhut jolokia, or ghost chilli, to make tear gas-like hand grenades to immobilise suspects, defence officials said on Tuesday.

The bhut jolokia was accepted by Guinness World Records in 2007 as the world’s spiciest chilli. It is grown and eaten in the northeast for its taste, as a cure for stomach troubles and a way to fight the crippling summer heat.

It has more than 1,000,000 Scoville units, the scientific measurement of a chilli’s spiciness. Classic Tabasco sauce ranges from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, while jalapeno peppers measure anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000.

“The chilli grenade has been found fit for use after trials in Indian defence laboratories, a fact confirmed by scientists at the Defense Research and Development Organisation,” Col. R. Kalia, a defence spokesman in Assam, toldThe Associated Press.

“This is definitely going to be an effective non-toxic weapon because its pungent smell can choke terrorists and force them out of their hide-outs,” R.B. Srivastava, the director of the Life Sciences Department at the New Delhi headquarters of the DRDO said.

Mr. Srivastava, who led a defence research laboratory in Assam, said trials are also on to produce bhut jolokia-based aerosol sprays to be used by women against attackers and for the police to control and disperse mobs.

Keywords: Bhut jolokia, ghost chilli, world’s hottest chilli, tear gas-like hand grenades, Guinness World Records, DRDO, Scoville units

Thursday, August 26, 2010
Rakesh Krishnan Simha

Krishna: History or Myth (A film by Saragossa Films Inc.)

A unique documentary which proves the existence of Krishna and shows the scientific proof of Mahabharata with exact year of Kurukshetra war.

The film is now online free. Kindly circulate widely.

"The sea, which had been beating against the shores, suddenly broke the boundary that was imposed on it by nature. The sea rushed into the city. It coursed through the streets of the beautiful city. The sea covered up everything in the city. Arjuna saw the beautiful buildings becoming submerged one by one. He took a last look at the mansion of Krishna. In a matter of a few moments it was all over. The sea had now become as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the beautiful city, which had been the favourite haunt of all the Pandavas. Dwarka was just a name; just a memory." – Mausala Parva, Mahabharata.

Does this account from the ancient Indian epic have a true historical core? Did Lord Krishna, indeed the favourite Indian deity, walk the streets of ancient Dwarka? Did Krishna, considered the Lord of the universe by a billion Hindus, rule the Yaduvanshi clan thousands of years ago?
Using archaeological, scriptural, literary and astronomical data, scholars and scientists are coming round to the view that Krishna was definitely a historical character.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
The Rosetta stone, or the key, to the Krishna story is Dwarka. The strongest archaeological support comes from the structures discovered in the late 1980s under the seabed off the coast of modern Dwarka in Gujarat by a team of archaeologists and divers led by Dr S.R. Rao, one of India's most respected archaeologists. An emeritus scientist at the marine archaeology unit of the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, Rao has excavated a large number of Harappan sites, including the port city of Lothal in Gujarat.
In his book The Lost City of Dwarka, published in 1999, he writes about his undersea finds: “The discovery is an important landmark in the history of India. It has set to rest the doubts expressed by historians about the historicity of Mahabharata and the very existence of Dwarka city.�
Conducting 12 expeditions during 1983-1990, Rao identified two underwater settlements, one near the present-day Dwarka and the other in the nearby island of Bet Dwarka. This tallies with the two Dwarkas mentioned in the epic. The underwater expeditions won Rao the first World Ship Trust Award for Individual Achievement.
Another important find by our divers was a seal that establishes the submerged township's connection with the Dwarka of the Mahabharata. The seal corroborates the reference made in the ancient text, the Harivamsa, that every citizen of Dwarka should carry such a seal for identification purposes. Krishna had ruled that none without the seal should enter it. A similar seal has been found onshore as well.
LITERARY EVIDENCE
The west coast of Gujarat was the traditional land of the Yadavs, or Yadus. According to the Bhagavad Puran, Krishna led the Yadavs thousands of kilometres west to establish Dwarka, so they could start a new life, safe from their many enemies in the Gangetic Valley.
The Mahabharata says, Dwarka was reclaimed from the sea. Rao’s divers discovered that the submerged city's walls were erected on a foundation of boulders, suggesting that land indeed was reclaimed from the sea.
One cannot separate Dwarka from Krishna. If the city existed, then it is true that Krishna ruled over it.
ASTRONOMICAL EVIDENCE
Dr Narhari Achar, professor of physics at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, has dated the Mahabharata war using astronomy and regular planetarium software. According to his research conducted in 2004-05, the titanic clash between the Pandavas and the Kauravas took place in 3067 BC. Using the same software, Dr Achar places the year of Krishna’s birth at 3112 BC.
Dr Manish Pandit, a nuclear medicine physician in the UK, after examining the astronomical, archaeological and linguistic evidence, agrees with Dr Achar’s conclusions. Dr Pandit, who is also a distinguished astrologer and has written several books on the subject, traced the route of Krishna’s journeys to shoot the documentary, “Krishna: History or Myth?�
Dr Pandit says there are more than 140 astronomy references in the Mahabharata. Simulations of the night sky have been combined with geographical descriptions to arrive at various dates. He says the chances of these references repeating are next to nothing.
According to historian S.M. Ali, the author of Geography of Puranas, “The geographical matter contained in the Mahabharata is immense. It is perhaps the only great work which deals with geographic details and not incidentally, as other works.�
WHOSE HISTORY?
Of course, none of the evidence is good enough for the ossified historians that lord over India’s academia, regurgitating the lies written by British colonial scholars, who were in reality Christian missionaries.
For the missionaries, destroying the historicity of Krishna was important if they had any chance of establishing their religion in India. Also, many European scholars were shocked to learn that Indian history pre-dated their world by thousands of years. By labelling as myth the Indian historical sources like the Vedas, Mahabharata, Upanishads, and especially the Puranas, which give exact chronologies of Indian kings including Krishna, the missionaries ensured that Indian history did not clash with their world view.
That tradition continues. Disregarding all new research, academics like Romilla Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib have consigned Krishna to mythology.
In his textbook for Class X, Sharma writes, “Although Lord Krishna plays an important role in the Mahabharata, the earliest inscriptions and sculpture pieces found in Mathura between 200 BC and 300 AD do not attest his presence.� What brilliant deduction. Going by Sharma’s logic, any fool can dig at a random site, and upon failing to discover an artefact, declare Krishna never existed. Sadly, millions of Indian school children are being taught such lies.
Thapar, in fact, says the Mahabharata is a glorified account of a skirmish between two “Aryan� tribes, with Krishna merely playing the role of an agent provocateur.
And what do they do when confronted with the new evidence? They withdraw into their parallel dystopian world and argue it is not clinching evidence. But, of course, they will accept as truth the myths of other religions.
Dr Rao says further digging and diving, in tandem with India’s vast treasure trove of historical facts will further corroborate key dates of our eventful and glorious past.
As the Upanishads say, pratnakirtim apavirnu – know thy past.<

(About the author: Rakesh Krishnan Simha is a features writer at Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.)

SCOTLAND, August 29, 2010: The warnings regularly given by all manner of experts had been ignored for decades. Because Pakistan’s irresponsible timber harvesting stripped the country’s forests at a faster rate than anywhere else in Asia, floods came. They are not acts of God, but man-made catastrophes.

As August began - that heavier than usual, but not unprecedented, monsoon rains fell on the largely forest-denuded northwest Himalayan, Karakoram and Hindu Kush mountains and foothills, swelling the mighty 2000 mile-long Indus river, originating in Tibet, and others such as the Jhelum, Swat, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, Sutlej and their many tributaries. What then happened, as Pakistani journalists and environmental campaigners have reported, was truly terrifying.

Trees felled by so-called illegal loggers - an infamous “timber mafia” that has representatives in the Pakistan Parliament in Islamabad and connections right to the top of government and the military - are stacked in the innumerable nullahs [steep narrow valleys], gorges and ravines leading into the main rivers. From there they are fed into the legal trade, earning the mafia billions of dollars yearly.

It is not only the mountain forests that have been devastated. When Pakistan became independent from Britain and separated from India in 1947, thick riverine forests lined the Indus on its thousand mile journey across the plains. “These forests used to absorb the ferocity of the floodwaters,” said Tahir Qureshi, a Pakistan-based forestry expert for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

BOSTON – EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 2007 Media Contacts: Angela Babb, (651) 695-2789, ababb@aan.com Robin Stinnett, (651) 695-2763, rstinnett@aan.com AAN Press Room HCC 203 (April 28 – May 4): (617) 954-3126

Drinking Heavy Amounts of Alcohol Shrinks Your Brain

BOSTON – Drinking heavy amounts of alcohol over a long period of time may decrease brain volume, according to research that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 59th Annual Meeting in Boston, April 28 – May 5, 2007.

The study involved MRI scans of 1,839 people from the Framingham Offspring study, ages 34 to 88, who were classified as non-drinkers, former drinkers, low drinkers (one to seven drinks per week), moderate drinkers (eight to 14 drinks per week), or high drinkers (more than 14 drinks per week). MRI scans were performed and used to measure brain volume, which can be thought of as a measure of brain aging.

The study found the more alcohol people drink on a regular basis, the lower their brain volume.

"Research has shown that there is a beneficial effect of alcohol in reducing incidence of cardiovascular disease in people who consume low to moderate amounts of alcohol. However, this study found that greater alcohol consumption was negatively correlated with brain volume," said study author Carol Ann Paul, MS, of Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. This cross-sectional study found people who had more than 14 drinks per week had an average 1.6 percent reduction in the ratio of brain volume to skull size compared to people who didn’t drink. In other words, brain volume decreased .25 percent on average for every increase in drinking category (i.e. non-drinkers, former drinkers, low drinkers, moderate drinkers, or high drinkers).

In addition, Paul reported the inverse relationship between drinking and brain volume was slightly larger in women than in men. Also, drinking heavy amounts of alcohol seemed to have the biggest negative impact on brain volume for women in their 70s.

In looking at the longitudinal effects of drinking, people who had a 12-year history of heavy drinking had less brain volume than those who changed into the high drinking group during those 12 years. Researchers are following up on these findings to make sure these differences hold up.

The American Academy of Neurology, an association of over 20,000 neurologists and neuroscience professionals, is dedicated to improving patient care through education and research. A neurologist is a doctor with specialized training in diagnosing, treating and managing disorders of the brain and nervous system such as Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and stroke. For more information about the American Academy of Neurology, visit http://www.aan.com.

By Antony Brennan on 2 Oct 2010
Facebook

Image: http://www.foxnews.com

There are now more than 500 million active users of the Facebook social networking service. A social networking service is an online website that focuses on building social relations among people who share interests and activities. Internet based social network services make it possible to connect people across political, economic, and geographic borders.

Discussing social networking in an article on Dandavats.com, Dushyanta Dasa said, “There is a high number of individuals aggressively seeking spirituality and genuinely seeking answers to unanswered spiritual queries.”

With so many people around the world using Facebook to communicate with each other it has become a natural field to engage people in Krishna consciousness.

In his article, Dushyanta says complacency in exploring the potential opportunity of outreach on social networking sites like Facebook could be to the detriment of the ISKCON outreach mission.

“Facebook has been a very effective tool for Krishna conscious outreach,” says Nityananda Dasa, a devotee at the Sri Sri Radha Kalachandji Mandir, in Dallas, Texas.

“Every year, I perform temple tours for thousands of college and high school students,” says Nityananda. “I invite these students to add me as a friend on Facebook and then I can continue to communicate with them in that way. I have over 100 contacts that are just from the tours alone.”

He continues: “Every week I post many things to my Facebook page: reading notes, Krishna conscious photos, quotes, links, and more. I also invite those friends to any events that I think would be great for them such as kirtan concerts and major festivals, plays, or seminars. The nice thing is that anything I post on my Facebook page appears on their page as well.”

Nityananda says he has found using Facebook as an outreach tool a lot more effective than sites like MySpace. “Anyone who is curious about Krishna Consciousness can follow along without even having to write,” he says.

The Facebook ‘Like’ button allows people to indicate they are interested in a message, or a photo with a single click. “The 'like' button is genius,” Nityananda says. “It is so simple, you don't have to write anything and it gives the writer acknowledgment and encouragement.”

Other devotees, however, have pointed out that there could be issues for devotees using social networking. In another article on Dandavats.com, Sridevi Dasi says there is evidence that shows social networking can be addictive.

“There are devotees already justifying their presence on these sites,” she comments. “We keep in touch with so many devotees worldwide; we know what’s going on in ISKCON worldwide, but at what cost?”

In a response to Sridevi’s article, Dhanesvara Dasa writes, “Some devotees on Facebook write about being very isolated­not having much association on a regular basis. For them Facebook IS their association.”

Although it can be said that the jury is still out on the true value of social networking, it has also been said that to ask if social media could be useful for religious organisations is like asking, 100 years ago, whether the use of telephones could be helpful.

Read more:http://news.iskcon.org/node/3156/2010-10-02/to_facebook_or_not_to_facebook_that_is_the_question#ixzz11iKqcPZm

Source: Religion News Services
LONDON, UK, October 4, 2010: Druidry, the pagan worship that has been practiced on these shores for thousands of years, on Friday gained recognition by the British government as an official religion after a four-year legal battle. The Charity Commission, established by Parliament to regulate charities in England and Wales, released a Sept. 21 decision that the worship by druids of spirits in the natural world could be viewed as a “religious activity.”

The decision means Druidry, often derided by some as the province of mystic crackpots, now has the status of a genuine faith in Britain, alongside more conventional religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In pragmatic terms, it also means the druids now qualify for valuable tax breaks, in the same way as the other, more established faiths.

Druidry in Britain lists eight major festivals a year, including worshipping of the summer solstice amid the ancient stone monoliths at Stonehenge.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

It's almost a done deal. We are about to see herbal preparations disappear, and the ability of herbalists to prescribe them will also be lost.

by Heidi Stevenson

12 September 2010Big Pharma Scores Big Win: Medicinal Herbs Will Disappear in EU

Big Pharma has almost reached the finish line of its decades-long battle to wipe out all competition. As of 1 April 2011­less than eight months from now­virtually all medicinal herbs will become illegal in the European Union. The approach in the United States is a bit different, but it's having the same devastating effect. The people have become nothing more than sinks for whatever swill Big Pharma and Agribusiness choose to send our way, and we have no option but to pay whatever rates they want.

Big Pharma and Agribusiness have almost completed their march to take over every aspect of health, from the food we eat to the way we care for ourselves when we're ill. Have no doubt about it: this takeover will steal what health remains to us.

If you want to skip the text and find out what you can do

It Begins Next April Fools Day

In the nastiest April Fool's Joke of all time, the European Directive on Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products (THMPD) was enacted back on 31 March 2004.(1) It laid down rules and regulations for the use of herbal products that had previously been freely traded.

This directive requires that all herbal preparations must be put through the same kind of procedure as pharmaceuticals. It makes no difference whether a herb has been in common use for thousands of years. The costs for this are far higher than most manufacturers, other than Big Pharma, can bear, with estimates ranging from £80,000 to £120,000 per herb, and with each herb of a compound having to be treated separately.

It matters not that a herb has been used safely and effectively for thousands of years. It will be treated as if it were a drug. Of course, herbs are far from that. They're preparations made from biological sources. They aren't necessarily purified, as that can change their nature and efficacy, just as it can in food. It's a distortion of their nature and the nature of herbalism to treat them like drugs. That, of course, makes no difference in the Big Pharma-ruled edifice of the EU, which has enshrined corporatism in its constitution.

Dr. Robert Verkerk of the Alliance for Natural Health, International (ANH) describes the problem of requiring drug-like compliance on herbal preparations:
Getting a classical herbal medicine from a non-European traditional medicinal culture through the EU registration scheme is akin to putting a square peg into a round hole. The regulatory regime ignores and thus has not been adapted to the specific traditions. Such adaptation is required urgently if the directive is not to discriminate against non-European cultures and consequently violate human rights.(2)

Trade Law

To best understand how this can be happening, one needs to see that trade laws have been at the center of the moves to place all aspects of food and medicine under the control of Big Pharma and Agribusiness.

If you've followed what's been happening in the United States regarding raw milk and the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) claims that foods magically become drugs when health claims are made, you may have noted that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been part of the process.

Rather than treating food and traditional medicines as human rights issues, they have been treated as trade issues. That makes the desires of large corporations the focus of food and herbal law, rather than the needs and desires of people. It's this twisting that has resulted in the FDA's making outrageously absurd statements, such as claiming that Cheerios and walnuts quite literally become drugs simply because of health claims made for them.

The goal of it all is to make the world safe for the megacorporations to trade freely. The needs and health of the people simply are not a factor in their considerations.

How to Fight This Encroachment on Our Health and Welfare

It's not a done-deal, at least, not quite. If you value your access to herbs, or if you care about access to vitamins and other supplements, please take action. Even if these issues seem meaningless to you, consider the people who do care. Should they be denied the right to the medical treatment and health maintenance of their choice?

The ANH has been active in fighting these encroachments. They are currently going to court in an attempt to stop the implementation of THMPD. We can hope that they'll succeed, but recent history shows that no legal maneuver is likely to stop this juggernaut. We cannot afford to sit back and wait for the results of their efforts. We need to see their endeavor as part of a whole, one in which each of us plays a role.

It's up to us­each and every one of us­to take action. If you live in Europe, please, send a letter or message to your Member of European Parliament. Go to this page to find out who is your MEP and the contact information. Then, send a letter that states, in no uncertain terms, that you strongly support the ANH's actions in trying to suspend the implementation of THMPD and that you hope they will also take a stand in support of the people's right to choose herbal treatments.

If you find it difficult to write such a letter, click here for a sample (in the universal .rtf format) suggested by ANH. Feel free to use it.

Denice Delay has kindly translated the letter into Spanish. Thanks!
 

Try to imagine facing your children or grandchildren when they ask why you didn't. How will you tell them that you really weren't that interested in their welfare? How will you tell them that it was more important to watch the latest fake reality show on television than to take the time to write a simple letter?

It is only by actively protesting that this travesty against our welfare can be stopped. If we sit back in apathy, then it will happen. Our right to protect our health and that of our children is hanging in the balance. If you care for your child's or grandchild's welfare, then you mustact. Speak out, for now is the moment of truth. You can sit back and do nothing, or you can speak out.

And then, once you have, talk to everyone you know. Tell them that it's time to act. There truly is no time to waste.

Source: HPI
KAUAI, HI, October 4, 2010: Yesterday’s article on HPI entitled “Being a Hindu in Indian Law” stated that “Nearly 15 years ago the Supreme Court had found it tough to define Hinduism.” That is not accurate. That particular decision embraced the definition by B.G Tilak, a concise and widely accepted formula:

“Acceptance of the Vedas with reverence; recognition of the fact that the means or ways to salvation are diverse; and the realization of the truth that the number of Gods to be worshipped is large, that indeed is the distinguishing feature of Hindu religion. (B.G.Tilak’s Gitarahasayal).”

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

NEW ZEALAND, September 5, 2010: Hindu Niwas, a new initiative at the Hindu Heritage Centre, is “a home away from home” that provides accommodation to seniors, at-risk women and children, socio-economically deprived families, and respite for caregivers, international students and visitors to Auckland, all with a Hindu twist. It is equipped with 63 beds, with common kitchen facilities.

Swami Vigyananand inaugurated this facility in a traditional Hindu way in May. In July, Maori elder Matua Pomare and staff members from Te Wananga o Aotearoa (The University of New Zealand) blessed the facility and the land.

Hindu Niwas works collaboratively with a wide range of Indian and other ethnic organisations to serve communities from a number of countries. It works with government service providers in social services and health sectors. Hindu Niwas was designed to provide respite services to make life easier for people in support roles, like caregivers. “We aim to provide culturally appropriate and quality services so that the residents develop good social networks,” said Sneh Prasad, volunteer of Hindu Council of New Zealand who helped set up this project.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

Firm fined after dead mouse found in loaf of bread

27th September 2010

A food production company was ordered to pay nearly £17,000 after a man found a dead mouse in a loaf of bread as he made sandwiches for his children.

Stephen Forse, of Kidlington, Oxfordshire, had already used some slices when he came across the mouse.

Mr Forse purchased the loaf online, through a Tesco branch in Bicester in January 2009.

Premier Foods was fined £5,500 and ordered to pay £11,109.47 in costs at Oxford Crown Court.

In July, the company, which makes Hovis bread, Branston pickle and Bisto gravy, admitted to having failed to maintain acceptable standards at its British Bakeries site in London.

Mr Forse said he had already used some of the bread when he noticed "a dark-coloured object embedded in the corner of three or four slices".

"Initially I thought it was where the dough had not mixed properly prior to baking," he said.

"As I looked closer I saw that the object had fur on it."

Mr Forse said he continued to prepare some sandwiches for his children and their friends from another loaf of bread.

"I checked carefully each slice in turn as I felt quite shaken," he added.

"As I was feeling ill I couldn't face eating anything myself. I sat with the children as they ate theirs."
Tail missing

Mr Forse contacted Cherwell District Council and environmental health officers visited the family's home to collect evidence.

During the visit one of them identified it as a mouse minus its tail.

"Her comments made me feel ill once again as there was no indication as to where the tail was," added Mr Forse.

"Had it fallen off prior to the bread being wrapped or had any of my family eaten it with another slice of bread on a previous day?"

A spokesman for Premier Foods said: "We apologise profusely for the distress caused as a result of this isolated incident.

"As soon as this complaint was made we stopped all bakery production at that site and appointed an independent specialist contractor to conduct a thorough investigation.

"They confirmed this to be an isolated incident, affecting a single product.

"There was no evidence of mice within the bakery and no history of any similar issues."

The spokesman added that the council had agreed "the bakery was a well-managed site and that Premier Foods took its obligations for health and hygiene seriously".

by Lakshman (das) Vrindavan (IN)

For Yamuna’s flood in vrindavan photos see the link…..

http://www.flickr.com/photos/48332942@N05/page2/

This year, Yamuna wanted to kiss Vrindavan with no miss. She swelled and swelled and expanded her reaches to embrace Vraja as much as she could. When alarm bells rang, those graced her ways dwelling on her sides moved on to safe elevations fearing her overflowing tears of love. Dear Yamuna was worried seeing the Vrajavasis pestered by the blistering heat of summer with acute water shortage. The whole of Vrajavasis worshipped Radha-Shyamsunder for relief. She, therefore, recharged her secret bellies in her far reaching embankments with ample groundwater and resourced the sinless bhaktas of Krishna to dwell in plenty in the years to come.

Yamuna swelled to astonishing levels this year 2010, a rarity unseen in the long past. Her previous grace of fury was 32 years ago in 1978, but this year she overlooked it. Although some were aggrieved, she stood still gracing the graze-lands of Vraja for a couple of weeks. Unable to find Krishna, Yamuna graced the holy dust of the feet of His dear bhaktas and circum-ambulated Vraja through the Pancakosh Parikrama Marg. At Barah Ghat, she stood 2.5ft above the Parikrama Marg, 4.5ft at Kaliya Daha, 5ft at Madan Mohan, 2ft at Imlitala and stood at the maximum stretch of her toe on high heels at Keshighat and overlooked all around and frantically searched to see her gracious lover in His temples of wisdom such as Madan Mohan, Radha Damodar, Radha Vinod, and Radha Vraja Mohan. Assured of the future of Vraja and her dear kamadhenus, she decided to return to her original fold. Thanks to Shrimati Yamunaji, Gaura-Nitai, Krishna-Balaram and Radha-Shyamsunder.

Originally. Yamuna was born as Yami, the daughter of Vivasvan (Sun-god) and his wife Samjna. She is the sister of Yamaraja and Shraddhadeva, the current Manu. According to Rupa Goswami, Vishakha-sakhi, one among the ashtha-sakhis of Radharani was none other than Yamunadevi. Srimati Yamuna always remembers the blissful pastimes of Shyamsundar. The Lord enacted wonderful lilas on the waters of Yamuna and her beautiful banks. The Lord danced on the hood of the demoniac serpent King Kaliya in her waters and played with Lord Balarama and the gopis and gopas of Vrindavan. Yamuna became blissful washing the holy dust from the lotus feet of the Lord and therefore Krishna bhaktas take holy bath in her divine waters and wipe off their sins. Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Nityananda Prabhu, Advaita Acarya, the Goswamis, Narottama Dasa Thakura, Madhavendra Puri, Prabhupadaji, and many other great Vaishnava Acharyas such as Ramanuja, Madhva, Vallabha, Nimbarka, Vishnu swami, Shankaracarya and many others paid respectful obeisance to Yamunadevi and showered their praise on her.

In Caitanya Caritamrta Madhya (3.28), Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu offered prayers to Yamunadevi :

cid-ananda-bhanoh sada-ananda-sunoh
para-prema-patri drava-brahma-gatri
aghanam lavitri jagat-kshema-dhatri
pavitri-kriyan no vapur mitra-putri

Translation by H. D. G. Srila Prabhupada:

“O river Yamuna, you are the blissful spiritual water that gives love to the son of Nanda Maharaja. You are the same as the water of the spiritual world, for you can vanquish all our offences and the sinful reactions incurred in life. You are the creator of all auspicious things for the world. O daughter of the sun-god, kindly purify us by your pious activities.”

Sripad Vallabhacarya sung in his Yamunastakam (sloka-3) :

bhuvam bhuvana pavani madhigata manekasvanaih
priya bhiriva sevitam shuka mayura hamsadibhih
taranga bhuja kankana pragata muktika valuka
nitamba tata sundarim namata krishnah turiya priyam

“O glorious Yamuna, you have appeared to sanctify earth and play with your lovely perching friends like parrots, peacocks and swans and enjoy with their enchanting pleasure games and melodious music. The waves of Yamuna giggle as though her clamour of glamorous bangles and her banks abound like pristine pearl belts around her beautiful waist, for she is the fourth blissful lover of Krishna in Vrindavana.”

Sripad Shankaracarya sung in his Yamunastakam (sloka-2) :

madhuvana-carini bhaskara vahini jahnavi-sangini sindhu-sute
madhuripu-pusani madhava tosini gokula bhiti vinasha-krte
jagadakha-mohini manavasayini kesava keli nidana gate
jaya yamune jaya bhiti-viharini sankata nashini pavaya-mam

“O Yamuna, you gracefully flow through Vrindavana beholding the brilliance of sun and you join the holy Ganga like her sweet daughter. You adore Lord Krishna and keeps Him always happy, and you remove the fear of Gokula. You are the eraser of sins of this universe and the sanctifier of humans, and you prepare wonderful playgrounds for the glorious lilas of Keshava. We hail you, O Yamuna, as the winner of glories, destroyer of fear, and vanquisher of grief, and may your pristine holy waters purify us.”

The holiness of Yamuna is great indeed and anyone touching her pious water will be absolved of all sins. Therefore, dear friends, come and see the overflowing beauty of Yamuna and touch her holy tears of love and help those who moved away mesmerised by her ecstatic swell in love of her beloved friend Krishna and chant to receive His bliss-

HARE KRISNA HARE KRISNA KRISNA KRISNA HARE HARE
HARE RAMA HARE RAMA RAMA RAMA HARE HARE

Read more on Chanting Hare Krishna HERE:

NEW ZEALAND, September 8, 2010: John Key, the prime minister of New Zealand, visited BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir and Youth Centre in Avondale, Auckland on Sunday September 5, 2010. On the occasion, the BAPS community donated $11,000 in response to the devastating earthquake near the city of Christchurch.

At the same time, BAPS volunteers pledged to continue with their support by collecting more funds from the wider community through an Earthquake Appeal Project. The prime minister appreciated the efforts of the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha in reaching out for the affected. He said, “I would like to commend BAPS for this generous donation. It will help enormously.”

The spiritual leader of BAPS, Pramukh Swami Maharaj, also sent a special message and prayers for the victims of the earthquake.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

By Mike Adams for NaturalNews.com on 29 Jun 2010

In its never-ending attempt to fabricate "mental disorders" out of every human activity, the psychiatric industry is now pushing the most ridiculous disease they've invented yet: Healthy eating disorder.

This is no joke: If you focus on eating healthy foods, you're "mentally diseased" and probably need some sort of chemical treatment involving powerful psychotropic drugs. The Guardian newspaper reports, "Fixation with healthy eating can be sign of serious psychological disorder" and goes on to claim this "disease" is called orthorexia nervosa -- which is basically just Latin for "nervous about correct eating."

But they can't just called it "nervous healthy eating disorder" because that doesn't sound like they know what they're talking about. So they translate it into Latin where it sounds smart (even though it isn't). That's where most disease names come from: Doctors just describe the symptoms they see with a name like osteoporosis (which means "bones with holes in them").

Getting back to this fabricated "orthorexia" disease, the Guardian goes on to report, "Orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating. Refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods is just the start of their diet restrictions. Any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives are also out."

Wait a second. So attempting to avoid chemicals, dairy, soy and sugar now makes you a mental health patient? Yep. According to these experts. If you actually take special care to avoid pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified ingredients like soy and sugar, there's something wrong with you.

But did you notice that eating junk food is assumed to be "normal?" If you eat processed junk foods laced with synthetic chemicals, that's okay with them. The mental patients are the ones who choose organic, natural foods, apparently.

What is "normal" when it comes to foods?

I told you this was coming. Years ago, I warned NaturalNews readers that an attempt might soon be under way to outlaw broccoli because of its anti-cancer phytonutrients. This mental health assault on health-conscious consumers is part of that agenda. It's an effort to marginalize healthy eaters by declaring them to be mentally unstable and therefore justify carting them off to mental institutions where they will be injected with psychiatric drugs and fed institutional food that's all processed, dead and full of toxic chemicals.

The Guardian even goes to the ridiculous extreme of saying, "The obsession about which foods are "good" and which are "bad" means orthorexics can end up malnourished."

Follow the non-logic on this, if you can: Eating "good" foods will cause malnutrition! Eating bad foods, I suppose, is assumed to provide all the nutrients you need. That's about as crazy a statement on nutrition as I've ever read. No wonder people are so diseased today: The mainstream media is telling them that eating health food is a mental disorder that will cause malnutrition!

Shut up and swallow your Soylent Green

It's just like I reported years ago: You're not supposed to question your food, folks. Sit down, shut up, dig in and chow down. Stop thinking about what you're eating and just do what you're told by the mainstream media and its processed food advertisers. Questioning the health properties of your junk food is a mental disorder, didn't you know? And if you "obsess" over foods (by doing such things as reading the ingredients labels, for example), then you're weird. Maybe even sick.

That's the message they're broadcasting now. Junk food eaters are "normal" and "sane" and "nourished." But health food eaters are diseased, abnormal and malnourished.

But why, you ask, would they attack healthy eaters? People like Dr. Gabriel Cousens can tell you why: Because increased mental and spiritual awareness is only possible while on a diet of living, natural foods.

Eating junk foods keeps you dumbed down and easy to control, you see. It literally messes with your mind, numbing your senses with MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. People who subsist on junk foods are docile and quickly lose the ability to think for themselves. They go along with whatever they're told by the TV or those in apparent positions of authority, never questioning their actions or what's really happening in the world around them.

In contrast to that, people who eat health-enhancing natural foods -- with all the medicinal nutrients still intact -- begin to awaken their minds and spirits. Over time, they begin to question the reality around them and they pursue more enlightened explorations of topics like community, nature, ethics, philosophy and the big picture of things that are happening in the world. They become "aware" and can start to see the very fabric of the Matrix, so to speak.

This, of course, is a huge danger to those who run our consumption-based society because consumption depends on ignorance combined with suggestibility. For people to keep blindly buying foods, medicines, health insurance and consumer goods, they need to have their higher brain functions switched off.
Processed junk foods laced with toxic chemicals just happens to achieve that rather nicely. Why do you think dead, processed foods remain the default meals in public schools, hospitals and prisons? It's because dead foods turn off higher levels of awareness and keep people focused on whatever distractions you can feed their brains: Television, violence, fear, sports, sex and so on.

But living as a zombie is, in one way quite "normal" in society today because so many people are doing it. But that doesn't make it normal in my book: The real "normal" is an empowered, healthy, awakened person nourished with living foods and operating as a sovereign citizen in a free world. Eating living foods is like taking the red pill because over time it opens up a whole new perspective on the fabric of reality. It sets you free to think for yourself.

But eating processed junk foods is like taking the blue pill because it keeps you trapped in a fabricated reality where your life experiences are fabricated by consumer product companies who hijack your senses with designer chemicals (like MSG) that fool your brain into thinking you're eating real food.

If you want to be alive, aware and in control of your own life, eat more healthy living foods. But don't expect to be popular with mainstream mental health "experts" or dieticians -- they're all being programmed to consider you to be "crazy" because you don't follow their mainstream diets of dead foods laced with synthetic chemicals.

But you and I know the truth here: We are the normal ones. The junk food eaters are the real mental patients, and the only way to wake them up to the real world is to start feeding them living foods.

Some people are ready to take the red pill, and others aren't. All you can do is show them the door. They must open it themselves.

In the mean time, try to avoid the mental health agents who are trying to label you as having a mental disorder just because you pay attention to what you put in your body. There's nothing wrong with avoiding sugar, soy, MSG, aspartame, HFCS and other toxic chemicals in the food supply. In fact, your very life depends on it.

About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health researcher and author with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, impacting the lives of millions of readers around the world who are experiencing phenomenal health benefits from reading his articles. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies' products. He is the writer and singer of 'I Want My Bailout Money,' 'Don't Inject Me' and other popular hip-hop songs on socially-conscious topics.

Read more: http://news.iskcon.org/node/2964/2010-07-08/choosing_healthy_foods_now_called_a_mental_disorder#ixzz15DbDdmi3

USA, August 11, 2010: [HPI note: The Washington Post's "On Faith" blog has started a discussion about Julia Roberts professing her Hindu faith. You can post a comment, and read other people's opinions, at the source above.]

Julia Roberts has long been called America’s sweetheart. But is America ready for a Hindu sweetheart? Roberts’ embrace of the faith that inspired the enlightenment of Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert puts her far outside the American mainstream in terms of religious affiliation: 78 percent of Americans identify as Christian; only about 2 million people define themselves as Hindu. But Roberts’ seek-and-ye-shall-find spirituality is actually quite reflective of American religious practice: 44 percent of Americans currently identify with a different religious tradition than the one in which they were raised.

[Here are some of the comments:]

“I think this is fantastic. Yet another reason for me to love her. However being non-Indian and practicing Hinduism is by no means a new thing” Posted By: Gsch216

“Dear Julia, You are an embodiment of Hindu philosophy and culture. Non-violent, non-oppressive without any demands of daily prayers and the like, Hinduism is a way of life that respects all forms of life. May your tribe grow.” Posted By: Shovandas

“People are free to change their religion. That is what America is all about.” Posted By: Ak1967

“Sorry if I find it hard to take her conversion seriously. Maybe if her announcing this did not coincide with a movie, I would find it more credible.It strikes me as an attempt to appear unique and get attention.” Posted By: Michele79

“Hinduism is immensely rich religion. The Upanishads and Gita are the ultimate in human intellectualism. To those who try to belittle Hinduism by citing caste and sati fail to understand that these do not reflect the soul of Hinduism.” Posted By: Centerglobal

NEW ZEALAND, June 17, 2010: Hindus and Maori find much to share at Matariki. Bowls of rice, plates of naan bread and dishes of vegetarian cuisine fill the table. Taking turns to help themselves are a group of Hindu elders, who are discussing plans to celebrate Matariki, the “Maori New Year”. Also joining them at their table are two Maori elders, who are working with the Indian community to bring greater understanding between the two cultures.

At its national conference this year, the Hindu Council called on members to embrace Maori culture in New Zealand.

Hindu elder Pravin Patel says there are many similarities between the two cultures, and both groups can learn from each other. “In Maori, mana means respect. In Hindi, mana means a respectful person. There are many similarities in our languages that surprise us.” Mr. Patel says the Hindu community wants to celebrate Matariki to give thanks to where they live. “New Zealand is our home, and we have a great respect for the people of this land.”

Read more about Maori Origins HERE

YOGYAKAKARTA, INDONESIA, December 24, 2009: The Yogyakarta Prehistoric Legacy Conservation Center has found a Ganesha statue and Siva linga-yoni structures at the site of a newly discovered structure believed to be part of an ancient temple. Head of the center’s protection working group Indung Panca Putra said the findings led the excavation team to conclude that the site, located in the Indonesian Islamic University campus on Jl. Kaliurang, Yogyakarta, was from a Hindu kingdom.

The Ganesha murthi was found facing west with an elevation of 17 degrees from the north. As of Wednesday the hands of the murthi were not unearthed as part of the body was still buried. The lingam structures were found near Ganesha. The excavation team have also uncovered 16 pieces of parts of a temple wall. “We will study the findings in order to decide how to proceed on this dig,” Indung said.

Compared to previous discoveries of Hindu temples in the region, this site is considered less elaborate. “The Ganesha, for example, is around 33 inches high while Prambanan Temple’s Ganesha is as tall as an adult,” Indung said. The ornaments, he added, were also simpler. These traits, according to Indung, show that the newly found temple served a smaller area. “If Prambanan Temple served an entire kingdom, for example, then this site would have served a village,” he said.

Indung, however, said his colleagues haven’t been able to estimate the age of the temple structure. He added that based on the existing discovery, the site dated back to the ancient Mataram period between the 9th and 10th centuries.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

Vedic World Heritage links:

See our pages supporting these views HERE:
http://www.hknet.org.nz/VWH.html (Vedik World Heritage)
Western Indologists been exposed page:
http://www.hknet.org.nz/WesternIndologists-page.htm
How British Misguided the World on Vedic History
http://www.hknet.org.nz/MotiveBritishRajMissionaries.html

By Yadhunandana Das for ISKCON News on 8 July 2010

Last Sunday, visitors of Moscow`s Russian Exhibition Center encountered an unusual sight: a richly decorated chariot moving around in the flowery central park. The previous Ratha Yatra took place here exactly fifteen years ago, in the summer of 1995.

This year, the ancient Indian Festival aimed to attract the attention of the people in Moscow to the importance of healthy life-style. The Italian guitarist Paolo Tofany, the band “Umbela”, popular singer Nikolay Demidov and other artists happily took part in implementing the idea of a sober society. The advantages of healthy life-style were also demonstrated by the performance of Moscow`s aikido club, the “Koynobory”.

The host of the concert “Common Cause: in support of healthy life-style”, popular singer Nikolay Demidov said: “I believe that the cause of the Russians` health improvement and of their deliverance from bad habits should widely involve religious people, for whom healthy life-style is natural state of consciousness. For example, the Hare Krishna people don’t smoke, don’t drink alcohol and don’t take drugs. If you see the good example it’s easier to give up your weaknesses.”

There were several senior ISKCON leaders participating at the festival, including Bhakti Vigyana Gosvami, Radhanatha Swami, Niranjana Swami, Srila Purnachandra Goswami and Srila Nitai Chaitania Goswami, who was initiated into the renounced sannyasa order of life the day before.

June 2010 marked the 40th anniversary of Europe's largest green field music festival. Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts was started from humble beginnings four decades ago and attracted mostly those immersed in the hippy culture and those seeking an alternate lifestyle. Back then, as it still is now, music was the inspiration and the main medium for conveying new ideas, concepts and emotions. As the British nation changed and evolved so too did the Glastonbury Festival. Surprisingly today in the midst of an economic recession, Glastonbury has now thrived as a monstrous money making event. The biggest names in world music are there every year and it is still as popular as it was in the past. However the people coming now are different to those who attended many years ago. The majority of festival goers at the Glastonbury Festival in 2010 are students and workers paying almost £200 for their ticket using their credit card online. Glastonbury has become a weekend of adventure for those living regular lives across Britain. Some are seekers or maybe just hoping to stumble on a new way of living, but most are looking for no more than a break from their regular routine.

However some things always stand the test of time, and if you attended Glastonbury in 1979, or in 2010 you will still see the Hare Krishna devotees wandering around the site singing Krishna kirtana.

Security around the festival is tight with a huge fence and hundreds of security and police personnel on site. So if you don't have a ticket you don't get in. The heavy security measures are in response to having over 150,000 extra people gatecrash the festival without prepaid tickets some years ago. Tickets for the festival are now in high demand and usually sell out on the Internet within an hour of being released. The organisers of the festival provide Iskcon with 12 free tickets, although some devotees purchase their own tickets at a cost of £195 in order to help out.

Iskcon has been involved with the festival since its early days and the Hare Krishna devotees are so much part of the festival that there is no question of them not being present. Strong relationships have been built with traders, security, and others working on and attending the festival. However the area and number of tickets being issued to the devotees has been reduced over the years to make way for other traders who pay large fees for a small spot at the festival. Unlike most, the Hare Krsna Tent is not there to make money but rather to provide a spiritual oasis to what can be a hectic and intense environment.

There is nowhere else on site where people can get a free meal and keep coming back for more. Parasurama and his team cooked continually for three days to provide festival goers with free meals throughout the day and late into the night. Devotees took turns to serve out the prasadam. Even young Savitri, who went with her mother, helped by serving out honey on top of the morning breakfast of porridge with fruits. "There is a great family atmosphere here" Raghunatha Dasa commented. "Everyone gets involved especially the youth and the children"

As people sat enjoying their meal, melodious kirtana played from a small stage at the back of the tent. Jayananda who came from Ireland with his sister Sita and father Manu, led kirtana while Jaggi Suta played mrdanga. Later Madhava took to the stage with Gopal as his mrdanga player, and a style of kirtana which has become famous at kirtana festivals worldwide was now thrilling the audience at Glastonbury. Many who were experiencing kirtana for the first time stayed for many hours. Those who were not eating clapped their hands or danced in front of the decorated alter, which housed the large deities of Gaura Nitai.

Occasionally Giridhari Prabhu, who heads the festival team in the UK, would host lively question and answer sessions. Maha Visnu Swami would also speak in between kirtana, explaining the philosophy and lifestyle of the Hare Krishna movement. As well as Barat Natyam, the small stage show included some magic tricks by Parasurama who has more tricks up his sleeve than a regular chef.

As Mohan adjusted the sound at the mixing desk he explained; "It would be nice to have more kirtana singers and performers as well as other devotees to speak to the guests in our tent, but we just don't have enough tickets to give out to everyone. Its a real shame because there are many devotees who were eager to help in different ways, but we can't get them in."

Moksa Laxmi and Gandharvika sat by a small book table near the tent which also had incense and blankets for those who came unprepared for the chill of the British summer nights. For 4 days the small team of devotees did what they have been doing successfully for decades now.

Many people commented favourably about the Hare Krishna Tent. Glyn from Bristol said, "I've been coming here for years now and you guys save me each year with your food." Mark from Canada revealed how he spent two days listening to the kirtanas. "I even got up and danced a little" he added with a smile.

While the organizers of the Glastonbury festival continue to spin what is now an entertainment machine worth millions of pounds, the Hare Krishna devotees continue to share and care for those at the festival in a way very few others can. Greatly appreciated, these simply acts of sharing food, kirtana, and a little knowledge will surely see devotees participating at the Glastonbury festival for at least another 40 years to come.

20 May 2010 23:51 UK
By Victoria GillScience reporter, BBC News

Synthetic cell (Science)

The synthetic cell looks identical to the 'wild type'

Scientists in the US have succeeded in developing the first living cell to be controlled entirely by synthetic DNA.

The researchers constructed a bacterium's "genetic software" and transplanted it into a host cell.

The resulting microbe then looked and behaved like the species "dictated" by the synthetic DNA.

The advance, published in Science, has been hailed as a scientific landmark, but critics say there are dangers posed by synthetic organisms.

Some also suggest that the potential benefits of the technology have been over-stated.

But the researchers hope eventually to design bacterial cells that will produce medicines and fuels and even absorb greenhouse gases.

The team was led by Dr Craig Venter of the J Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) in Maryland and California.

He and his colleagues had previously made a synthetic bacterial genome, and transplanted the genome of one bacterium into another.

Now, the scientists have put both methods together, to create what they call a "synthetic cell", although only its genome is truly synthetic.

Dr Venter likened the advance to making new software for the cell.

The researchers copied an existing bacterial genome. They sequenced its genetic code and then used "synthesis machines" to chemically construct a copy.

Source: Religion News Service
NEW YORK, U.S., 2010: For some clergy, it is the problem that dare not speak its name. Affected pastors say they cannot be themselves among their congregations or colleagues, sometimes even with their own families. It’s a huge and burdensome secret with the potential to destroy their careers, they say. They think they’re not the only ones, but feel terribly lonely. Their big secret ­ a loss of faith.

Daniel C. Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University outside Boston, and Linda LaScola, a Washington-based clinical social worker, researcher and psychotherapist,
are the authors of a recent study entitled “Preachers Who Are Not Believers” in the journal Evolutionary Psychology. They used an admittedly tiny sample ­ just five pastors, all Protestants ­ of clergy who tell their congregations one thing, but secretly believe another.

“One of the things that was striking was how much like gays of the 1950s these pastors are,” Dennett said.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

Hari Krishna! All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

Please take a look at the T.o.V.P site at http://tovp.org/ . The website is constantly being updated and has a new blog section full of breaking news, progress of building, and stories about life in Mayapur Dham while construction is underway.

We here at the Temple of The Vedic Planetarium would like to sincerely thank all of you who have donated to the Mayapur project! Your selflessness has not gone unnoticed in the midst of this massive undertaking. With your help Srila Prabhupada’s dream is now becoming a reality.
Dandavats.com and Mayapur.com have so kindly been reporting our donation list on their sites for some time now. These lists can from now on only be seen on the T.o.V.P website: http://tovp.org/en/donate/donors-list

So please take a moment to view our latest news, photos, and vision of the future of Mayapur.

Your Humble Servant,

Mandakini Dasi @ The Temple of The Vedic Planetarium.

Published: 2009/11/05 17:15:23 GMT

Feeling grumpy 'is good for you'
In a bad mood? Don't worry - according to research, it's good for you.

An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.

While cheerfulness fosters creativity, gloominess breeds attentiveness and careful thinking, Professor Joe Forgas told Australian Science Magazine.

'Eeyore days'

The University of New South Wales researcher says a grumpy person can cope with more demanding situations than a happy one because of the way the brain "promotes information processing strategies".

“ Negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world ”Professor Joe Forgas
He asked volunteers to watch different films and dwell on positive or negative events in their life, designed to put them in either a good or bad mood.

Next he asked them to take part in a series of tasks, including judging the truth of urban myths and providing eyewitness accounts of events.

Those in a bad mood outperformed those who were jolly - they made fewer mistakes and were better communicators.

Professor Forgas said: "Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, co-operation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world."

The study also found that sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Forgas said showed that a "mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style".

His earlier work shows the weather has a similar impact on us - wet, dreary days sharpened memory, while bright sunny spells make people forgetful.

We asked you for your views on this story. Please find a selection of your comments below.

Halleluiah! I intend to show this to everyone who's ever branded me with various epithets for being "negative". Marcy Sheiner, USA

Being grumpy raises my blood pressure and I usually make wrong decisions when I am grumpy. I usually sleep on it, relax and then make a decision which is usually the correct decision. I don't like grumpy people and I usually avoid them. Iftikharuddin Faruqui, Pakistan

Absolutely right. There is certainly no point that I can see in viewing the world through rose-coloured spectacles. Anybody who wanders through life in a continuous state of bonhomie either has no idea what's going on around them or simply doesn't care! All my close friends are similar in temperament. We would inevitably consider those who do not fit the criteria to be shallow and lacking in perception. And yes, I am still at peace within myself for all the reasons stated in the article. Dave Gordon, Exeter, UK

I am generally a very grumpy person, but I have definitely noticed my decision making and general awareness is far higher than that of my friends who are normally much happier, jollier and generally carefree. I love being grumpy, it's clearly an advantage! David James Keeves, Loughborough, UK

Ah! This study provides a plausible explanation of Schopenhauer's philosophical clarity and superb prose. And yet, paradoxically, the Great Grump has had a more profound influence beyond philosophy, in the realm of all those cheerful, creative artists. Cheryl F, South Kingstown, Rhode Island, USA

I find I am happier when I am just a little grumpy. The grumpy feeling seems to aid me in concentrating on menial tasks. Maybe in this stressful modern era a touch of grumpy is all that's needed rather than anti-depressants and other drugs. Derek Penn, Falmouth, Cornwall, UK

As a self-confessed misery, I work on the premise that "misery is the thinking man's happiness". With misery comes a distinctive humour and a more realistic outlook on life, that actually makes me a more rounded and "real" person than those around me with a painted smile on their faces. I enjoy being grumpy and wouldn't have it any other way. Dave Woods, Coventry, UK

Could it not also be argued or proven, possibly, that making decisions while grumpy can lead one to make rash decisions? Or is that only when you're angry - since angry and grumpy are not the same thing? Parker, Louisiana, USA

I'm often identified by friends as someone who can be pessimistic, sometimes without any real reason. I also tick the box of sceptic - which I guess goes under the category of being less gullible. I won't say any more about my intelligence for fear of immodesty! Chris Baker, Southampton, UK

I work with the grumpiest man in the world and he doesn't seem to be any more clever than me! Gary, Watford, UK

Being grumpy or depressed goes hand in hand with thinking. When you're continually happy you can just skim along on the surface of life and not examine anything too deeply. Which is cause and which is effect, I don't know. Amanda, Ely, UK

Story from BBC NEWS:

AHMEDABAD, INDIA, May 10, 2010: An 83-year-old Indian holy man who says he has spent seven decades without food or water has astounded a team of military doctors who studied him during a two-week observation period. Prahlad Jani spent a fortnight in a hospital in the western India state of Gujarat under constant surveillance from a team of 30 medics equipped with cameras and closed circuit television. During the period, he neither ate nor drank and did not go to the toilet.

The long-haired and bearded yogi was sealed in a hospital in the city of Ahmedabad in a study initiated by India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the state defense and military research institute. The DRDO hopes that the findings, set to be released in greater detail in several months, could help soldiers survive without food and drink, assist astronauts or even save the lives of people trapped in natural disasters.

“We still do not know how he survives,” neurologist Sudhir Shah told reporters after the end of the experiment. “It is still a mystery what kind of phenomenon this is.” “If Jani does not derive energy from food and water, he must be doing that from energy sources around him, sunlight being one,” said Shah. “As medical practitioners we cannot shut our eyes to possibilities, to a source of energy other than calories.”

Jani has since returned to his village near Ambaji in northern Gujarat where he will resume his routine of yoga and meditation. He says that he was blessed by a goddess at a young age, which gave him special powers.

UNITED STATES July 1, 2009: Study shows a whopping two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese, and obesity rates for children are at or above 30 percent in 30 states.

The percentage of adults classified as obese went up in 23 states, but Mississippi, with 32.5 percent, stayed atop the latest annual rankings by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Trust for America’s Health. The same survey put the state’s adult obesity rate at 31.7 percent in 2008. In addition, 44.4 percent of Mississippi children ages 10 to 17 are classified as overweight or obese, the study found.

Doctors have linked obesity to increased risks of a variety of conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, arthritis and heart disease. Wednesday’s study found the current U.S. economic slump could worsen the problem by putting more nutritious food out of the reach of struggling families.

Dr. Ed Thompson, Mississippi’s state health officer, said the state is taking steps to address what he called “a multifaceted problem,” targeting schoolchildren in particular. “We can’t tell our children to eat wise dietary choices and then provide them with little except for poor dietary choices in their school cafeterias,” Thompson said.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

Source: Religion News Services
(RNS) THE AMHERST, NY, USA: The atheist group Center for Inquiry has changed the name of its “International Blasphemy Day” to “International Blasphemy Rights Day” in a bid to show that organizers are not interested in “mocking religion” for its own sake.

Center for Inquiry representatives said the name change better describes the purpose of the event amidst criticism received after last year’s inaugural events. International Blasphemy Rights Day is part of a larger, national campaign for freedom of expression. The name change is meant to “emphasize the important connection that we think there is between blasphemy and the right to free speech,” said Ronald Lindsay, president and CEO of Center for Inquiry. Lindsay said some critics “interpreted blasphemy in its crudest form” but “blasphemy is a wider concept than that.”

Although many people scoffed at last year’s campaign, he said, the center believes religion is not, and should not be, immune from criticism. “Religious beliefs should be on the same level of political beliefs,” Lindsay said. This year’s events are scheduled for Sept. 30, the fifth anniversary of the publication of 12 cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper. Blasphemy is often, unfortunately, associated with crude criticism of believers. But our focus is on looking at the beliefs,” he said.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

He's accused of bringing 'religious workers' to U.S. and asking for money

By John Diedrich of the Journal Sentinel

Posted: June 21, 2010

The leader of a Hindu sect in Milwaukee has been charged with illegally bringing people into the U.S. purportedly as religious workers and then extracting money from them in exchange for his help, according to federal court documents.

Sagarsen Haldar, 30, leader of the Gaudiya Vaisnava Society, is being held by federal authorities pending a bail hearing Tuesday. He is charged with visa fraud, which could bring up to 10 years in prison.

No one answered the phone Monday at the society's facility, in the 2400 block of W. Ramsey Ave., or at a home number listed to Haldar.

About a dozen supporters of Haldar's were in court Monday.

The public defender's office, which is representing Haldar, declined to comment.

According to the complaint:

The U.S. government allows visas for "religious worker," defined as people who for at least two years prior to entry were members of the denomination. The visa allows a stay of up to five years.

Agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security received a tip that Haldar was arranging for such visas fraudulently. One so-called religious worker was employed at a convenience store. Another at a gas station.

As a "minister of religion," Haldar is able to sponsor religious workers. In exchange for arranging for the visas, Haldar forced the workers to pay him thousands of dollars. Haldar threatened the workers if they did not pay the full amount. Haldar arranged for fraudulent religious visas for at least eight to 10 people.

Amid uproarious scenes, Karnataka Assembly today passed the controversial cow slaughter ban Bill, which provides for stringent punishment for violaters and makes the offence cognisable and non-bailable.

After more than a four-hour debate, the Bill was passed by voice-vote as the entire opposition -- Congress and JDS -- trooped into the well of the House and shouted anti-government slogans, branding the BJP government "communal".

Leader of Opposition Siddaramaiah, who termed the legislation "draconian", "anti-secular" and "unconstitutional" tore a copy of the the Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Bill, 2010 -- and threw it in the air.

Earlier, Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa defended the Bill, saying it was aimed at protecting cows and preserve cattle in Karnataka. A number of states, including Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir, already had similar legislation, he added.

Cow slaughter ban is in force in Cuba and Iran, Yeddyurappa said, and highlighted the medicinal benefits of cow urine which have been proved by research.The bill prohibits slaughter of cattle, sale, usage and possession of beef, puts restriction on transport of cattle and also prohibits sale, purchase or disposal of cattle for slaughter.

The offence is punishable with imprisonment not less than one year which may extend up to seven years or fined between Rs 25,000 to Rs 50,000 or both; second and subsequent offence would attract a fine of not less than Rs 50,000 up to Rs one lakh along with imprisonment penalty.

The bill was intended to replace the Karnataka Prevention of Cow Slaughter and Cattle Preservation Act, 1964, to prohibit the slaughter of cows and calves of she-buffaloes, bull, buffalo male or female.It is also aimed at preservation and improvement of the breeds of cattle and to endeavour to organise agriculture and animal husbandry in terms of Article 48 of the Constitution.

The bill provides for stringent punishment for violation of the act, and also provides for powers to search and seizure of any premises including vessel or vehicle.
Home Minister V S Acharya said the bill was "in tune with the sentiments of the majority community", as per the election manifesto of the BJP, and the judgements of Supreme Court and High Court.

Siddaramaiah said such a bill can be enacted only in "Hitler's regime" and not in democracy. "Is yours a Hitler's regime ?" he asked.

The BJP Government, he charged, was thrusting "vegetarian culture" on the people, adding, if the bill was passed, the price of mutton per kg would shoot up to Rs 1,000 from the present Rs 260 or so.

By this act, those dependent on the products such as shoes, leather, belts, nail polish, films, buttons and other beef products would lose their jobs. "You are making their life miserable", he said.As several opposition members flayed the bill in the debate that saw sparks fly, Siddaramaiah cautioned it would create "disturbance" in society and have an adverse impact on harmony.

Defending the bill, C T Ravi (BJP) said there would be severe shortage of milk in Karnataka in future if the current rate of cow slaughter continued in the State.

JDS leader H D Revanna said the BJP brought the bill keeping in view its "vote bank".
Roshan Baig (Congress) expressed shock over the provision for a seven-year imprisonment in the act. "Don't try to implement hidden agenda", he told the BJP government, adding, the 1964 act was good enough.

Qamarul Islam (Congress) said the bill would create "hatred" among different communities, leading to "law and order problems". Several opposition members argued it poor eat beef as this meat is affordable and inexpensive at around Rs 60 per kg, compared to chicken and mutton. The choice should be left to the people, they said.

Link
:-http://www.deccanherald.com/content/58978/cow-slaughter-ban-bill-passed.html

Thanks & Regards,

PrafulKumar

The desire to eat meat has posed an ethical question ever since humans achieved reliable crop production: Do we really need to kill animals to live?

Today, the hunger for meat is also contributing to the climate-change catastrophe. The gases from all those chickens and pigs and cows, and from the manure lagoons that big farms create, are playing a part in global warming. So the idea of fake meat has never been more alluring. What if you could cut into a juicy chicken breast that wasn't chicken at all but rather some indistinguishable imitation made harmlessly from plant life?

This spring, scientists at the University of Missouri announced that after more than a decade of research, they had created the first soy product that not only can be flavored to taste like chicken but also breaks apart in your mouth the way chicken does: not too soft, not too hard, but with that ineffable chew of real flesh. When you pull apart the Missouri invention, it disjoins the way chicken does, with a few random strands of "meat" hanging loosely.

The vegetarian world is buzzing about the breakthrough in Missouri. "Along with ham, chicken has always been the holy grail," says Seth Tibbott, 59, the creator of Tofurky and the dean of soy-meat inventors. Tibbott's Oregon-based Turtle Island Foods has become famous for its surprisingly full-flavored fake turkey. But Tibbott says efforts to create a credible fake chicken have foundered because of chicken's unique lean texture and its delicate flavor. ("Turkey has a gamier flavor," he says, "and it's easier to match stronger flavors.")

Like his competitors, Tibbott is now investigating whether to buy the Missouri product. A meat analogue that not only looks like chicken but also works in your mouth like chicken has great market potential. According to the Soyfoods

Association of North America, a Washington-based trade group, annual sales of soy products totaled $4.1 billion in 2008, up from $300 million in 1992. But $4.1 billion is, to use a food metaphor, just peanuts. Americans spend something like half a trillion dollars on real meat every year. A meaty-tasting alternative that could capture even a tenth of this market would make someone very rich. The University of Missouri team may finally have cracked the code.

Read more:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,199388...

Read more:http://news.iskcon.com/node/2940/2010-06-30/tastes_like_chicken_the_quest_for_fake_meat#ixzz0sPR22JSg

By Mike Adams for NaturalNews.com on29 Jun 2010

In its never-ending attempt to fabricate "mental disorders" out of every human activity, the psychiatric industry is now pushing the most ridiculous disease they've invented yet: Healthy eating disorder.

This is no joke: If you focus on eating healthy foods, you're "mentally diseased" and probably need some sort of chemical treatment involving powerful psychotropic drugs. The Guardian newspaper reports, "Fixation with healthy eating can be sign of serious psychological disorder" and goes on to claim this "disease" is called orthorexia nervosa -- which is basically just Latin for "nervous about correct eating."

But they can't just called it "nervous healthy eating disorder" because that doesn't sound like they know what they're talking about. So they translate it into Latin where it sounds smart (even though it isn't). That's where most disease names come from: Doctors just describe the symptoms they see with a name like osteoporosis (which means "bones with holes in them").

Getting back to this fabricated "orthorexia" disease, the Guardian goes on to report, "Orthorexics commonly have rigid rules around eating. Refusing to touch sugar, salt, caffeine, alcohol, wheat, gluten, yeast, soya, corn and dairy foods is just the start of their diet restrictions. Any foods that have come into contact with pesticides, herbicides or contain artificial additives are also out."

Wait a second. So attempting to avoid chemicals, dairy, soy and sugar now makes you a mental health patient? Yep. According to these experts. If you actually take special care to avoid pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified ingredients like soy and sugar, there's something wrong with you.

But did you notice that eating junk food is assumed to be "normal?" If you eat processed junk foods laced with synthetic chemicals, that's okay with them. The mental patients are the ones who choose organic, natural foods, apparently.

What is "normal" when it comes to foods?

I told you this was coming. Years ago, I warned NaturalNews readers that an attempt might soon be under way to outlaw broccoli because of its anti-cancer phytonutrients. This mental health assault on health-conscious consumers is part of that agenda. It's an effort to marginalize healthy eaters by declaring them to be mentally unstable and therefore justify carting them off to mental institutions where they will be injected with psychiatric drugs and fed institutional food that's all processed, dead and full of toxic chemicals.

The Guardian even goes to the ridiculous extreme of saying, "The obsession about which foods are "good" and which are "bad" means orthorexics can end up malnourished."

Follow the non-logic on this, if you can: Eating "good" foods will cause malnutrition! Eating bad foods, I suppose, is assumed to provide all the nutrients you need. That's about as crazy a statement on nutrition as I've ever read. No wonder people are so diseased today: The mainstream media is telling them that eating health food is a mental disorder that will cause malnutrition!

Shut up and swallow your Soylent Green

It's just like I reported years ago: You're not supposed to question your food, folks. Sit down, shut up, dig in and chow down. Stop thinking about what you're eating and just do what you're told by the mainstream media and its processed food advertisers. Questioning the health properties of your junk food is a mental disorder, didn't you know? And if you "obsess" over foods (by doing such things as reading the ingredients labels, for example), then you're weird. Maybe even sick.

That's the message they're broadcasting now. Junk food eaters are "normal" and "sane" and "nourished." But health food eaters are diseased, abnormal and malnourished.

But why, you ask, would they attack healthy eaters? People like Dr. Gabriel Cousens can tell you why: Because increased mental and spiritual awareness is only possible while on a diet of living, natural foods.

Eating junk foods keeps you dumbed down and easy to control, you see. It literally messes with your mind, numbing your senses with MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. People who subsist on junk foods are docile and quickly lose the ability to think for themselves. They go along with whatever they're told by the TV or those in apparent positions of authority, never questioning their actions or what's really happening in the world around them.

In contrast to that, people who eat health-enhancing natural foods -- with all the medicinal nutrients still intact -- begin to awaken their minds and spirits. Over time, they begin to question the reality around them and they pursue more enlightened explorations of topics like community, nature, ethics, philosophy and the big picture of things that are happening in the world. They become "aware" and can start to see the very fabric of the Matrix, so to speak.

This, of course, is a huge danger to those who run our consumption-based society because consumption depends on ignorance combined with suggestibility. For people to keep blindly buying foods, medicines, health insurance and consumer goods, they need to have their higher brain functions switched off.
Processed junk foods laced with toxic chemicals just happens to achieve that rather nicely. Why do you think dead, processed foods remain the default meals in public schools, hospitals and prisons? It's because dead foods turn off higher levels of awareness and keep people focused on whatever distractions you can feed their brains: Television, violence, fear, sports, sex and so on.

But living as a zombie is, in one way quite "normal" in society today because so many people are doing it. But that doesn't make it normal in my book: The real "normal" is an empowered, healthy, awakened person nourished with living foods and operating as a sovereign citizen in a free world. Eating living foods is like taking the red pill because over time it opens up a whole new perspective on the fabric of reality. It sets you free to think for yourself.

But eating processed junk foods is like taking the blue pill because it keeps you trapped in a fabricated reality where your life experiences are fabricated by consumer product companies who hijack your senses with designer chemicals (like MSG) that fool your brain into thinking you're eating real food.

If you want to be alive, aware and in control of your own life, eat more healthy living foods. But don't expect to be popular with mainstream mental health "experts" or dieticians -- they're all being programmed to consider you to be "crazy" because you don't follow their mainstream diets of dead foods laced with synthetic chemicals.

But you and I know the truth here: We are the normal ones. The junk food eaters are the real mental patients, and the only way to wake them up to the real world is to start feeding them living foods.

Some people are ready to take the red pill, and others aren't. All you can do is show them the door. They must open it themselves.

In the mean time, try to avoid the mental health agents who are trying to label you as having a mental disorder just because you pay attention to what you put in your body. There's nothing wrong with avoiding sugar, soy, MSG, aspartame, HFCS and other toxic chemicals in the food supply. In fact, your very life depends on it.

About the author:Mike Adams is a natural health researcher and author with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He is a prolific writer and has published thousands of articles, interviews, reports and consumer guides, impacting the lives of millions of readers around the world who are experiencing phenomenal health benefits from reading his articles. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies' products. He is the writer and singer of 'I Want My Bailout Money,' 'Don't Inject Me' and other popular hip-hop songs on socially-conscious topics.

By Madhava Smullen for ISKCON News on 2 Jul 2010

What do you think of when someone says the word, “Doughnut”? Fast food chains? Cops in a car pretending to “stake out a joint” while guiltily putting on the pounds? Perhaps Homer from the Simpsons saying, “Mmmm… sugary, fried, greasy treats…”

Whatever your thoughts are, the words “healthy” and “spiritual” probably aren’t amongst them.

Yet Doughnut Plant, one of the trendiest and most popular doughnut shops in New York City, has managed to make these words synonymous with its fare.

“I never thought of doughnuts as junk food,” says Mark Israel, the Plant’s outgoing owner and mastermind. “We constantly put attention to quality, and carefully control the process so that they’re as healthy as doughnuts can be.”

This means buying seasonal and often organic fresh fruit and nuts to use in the glazes at the local farmer’s market. It also means using fresh fruit in the jam filling, which Doughnut Plant staff make themselves. And it means that every doughnut is free from eggs, trans fat, preservatives, and artificial flavorings.

“Our doughnuts are also not greasy at all,” Mark says. “People say that sometimes their stomach hurts when they eat other doughnuts, but not when they eat ours.”

Of course, when you buy a doughnut, you’re looking for deliciousness, not health­and sometimes the two can be mutually exclusive.

Not in this case.

Doughnut Plant’s doughnuts are light, fluffy, mind-blowingly good and come in an almost endless array of inventive flavors and styles. There are yeast doughnuts and cake doughnuts. There are Mark’s trademarked square jelly doughnuts with jam in every bite. There’s the Tres Leche, based on the traditional Mexican recipe in which cake is is soaked in three different types of milk­evaporated, condensed, and cream. There’s the decadent Blackout, covered in cake crumbs and filled with chocolate pudding. There’s the brand new Crème Brulee doughnut, bursting with rich custard and topped with shiny, crackling toasted sugar. And there’s an ever-changing roster of outrageous glazes, including pomegranate, apple cinnamon, mango, red raspberry, Meyer lemon, banana pecan, toasted almond, roasted chestnut, pistachio, blueberry, rose petal, and fresh lavender flower.

“But the most important ingredient in all the doughnuts is devotion to Krishna,” Mark says, probably the most left-field comment you could expect­or not expect­from a trendy, near-celebrity confectioner. “We offer them all to the Plant’s resident Deities of Gaura-Nitai and Jagannath, Baladeva, and Subhadra­and since the Lord should eat only the best, that’s what gives me the impetus to make them the best they can possibly be.”

So how did this New York entrepreneur come to not only be making such in-demand, unique doughnuts, but offering them to Lord Krishna too?

His story begins when he was a small boy.

A Higher Taste

Israel’s grandfather, Herman, passed away when Mark was only three years old­but he left an impression. Herman had begun working at his first bakery at 16, baked bread for the army during World War 1, and later opened his own pastry shop in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he made everything using his own inventive recipes­including one for doughnuts.

Mark grew up hearing stories about his grandfather’s shop, and would regularly visit his grandmother’s house to bake cookies and bread. It wasn’t long before he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life, and in 1981, at the age of 18, he moved to New York to start a career as a cook.

To find strength all alone in the big city, Mark turned to spirituality. His parents had been very God conscious, seeing God in every religion­after all, his mother was Catholic and his father Jewish, yet they had married anyway, even in the rigid 1950s­and Mark took their sensibilities with him, studying Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and any other religion he could learn about.

Then, while living in Manhattan’s East Village in the late 1980s, he began to meet a succession of people who seemed different, whose demeanor and spiritual qualities were especially attractive. Each time he asked, “Who is that person?” the answer was always the same: “He’s a Hare Krishna.”

“I had to go and see what it was all about, so I went to visit the New York ISKCON temple,” Mark recalls. “The first time I went, I was scared, because at that time I didn’t know what the Deities were, and idol worship is frowned upon in both Judaism and Christianity. I was waiting outside the temple room door, afraid to go in, when I noticed a devotee selling prasadam, food sanctified by being offered to God. I tried some, and found it was a style of cooking that I hadn’t experienced before­it was so alive!”

He laughs. “I have a very healthy apetite, and so I bought more and more prasadam and just kept eating it. The more I ate, the more courage I had, and finally, I was able to overcome my fear and go in to listen to the lecture.”

Mark soon found himself fascinated by Krishna consciousness. The devotees talked about things that he already believed in but that he had never heard a religion discuss openly before, like vegetarianism and reincarnation. They were able to answer all his questions, and everything they said struck home with him. He kept coming back, and has never stopped visiting the temple since.

Difficult Beginnings

By 1994, Mark was completely burnt out by over a decade of working for different restaurants and bakeries. Now 31, he didn’t want to work for other people anymore. But what could he do?

Then he had an idea.

A year ago, when he had been back home in North Carolina visiting his parents, his dad had been cleaning out the attic. Mark had gone through the pile of junk and old memorabilia, and nestled in the midst of it, he had discovered an old file box. Inside it was his grandfather’s original doughnut recipe­which struck Mark as both unusual and perfect for a vegetarian like him, since it was egg-free. On a whim, he and his dad had made doughnuts using the recipe, and they were delicious.

Now, he decided to call his dad for the recipe. Incorporating his own interest in organics and natural foods, Mark began making doughnuts in his apartment, and took them to a small coffee shop which bought them on the spot. This led to orders from another store, and then another and another. Nobody else was doing what Mark was doing­making gourmet doughnuts­and customers loved them.

“Soon it got too much for my tiny Lower East Side apartment­there was flour and sugar everywhere,” he says. “So I rented the basement of the apartment complex from my landlord, and converted it into a bakery.”

For five years, Mark made doughnuts all night and delivered them wholesale on his bicycle in the morning. “It was crazy­I was working for 14 to 20 hours a day,” he says. “I was exhausted, and there was no one to help me. It was just me and the doughnuts.”

Mark’s doughnuts began to slowly gain a higher profile, with more coffee shops and gourmet food stores such as Dean and Deluca and Balducci’s snapping them up. But with no staff and limited space, Mark found the growth of business stunted. Times were hard, and he couldn’t see much hope on the horizon.

Finding Sweet Success

Then, in 2000, his father Marvin and brother David came forward with money to invest in his project, and Mark finally moved out of the basement, opening Doughnut Plant at 379 Grand Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

“But I still didn’t have any staff,” he says. “So my dad moved to New York to help me­I cut the doughnuts while he fried. We bought a van for deliveries, so that I wouldn’t have to cycle everywhere anymore. And we began selling retail, which was wonderful­I really enjoyed talking to my customers and getting feedback from them.”

Gradually, Mark began to teach others how to make doughnuts, and to delegate. As the business grew, he hired more employees, and became free to relax from the exhausting physical schedule he had followed for so many years and to focus on expansion.

One day, a Japanese restaurant owner, Jun Goto, happened to try Mark’s doughnuts at one of the coffee shops that sold them. He liked them so much that he visited Doughnut Plant and told Mark he’d like to franchise the business in Tokyo. The two forged a partnership, and Mark helped launch the first Japanese Doughnut Plant in 2004. Today, there are twenty branches in Tokyo and a further twenty in Seoul, Korea.

In New York, meanwhile, Doughnut Plant has become a sensation. Everyone’s eager to get a taste of New York’s highest quality doughnut, and the Plant’s wildly diverse group of customers­from young to old, from hipster to businessman­are raving about it everywhere they can.

“Hands down the best doughnut I've eaten in my life,” wrote Jennifer from New Jersey on yelp.com, where Doughnut Plant has a 4.5 out of 5 rating. “Simply put, it’s pure bliss. It makes your mouth happy.”

Others agree. “This tiny little shop holds some of the most delicious and inventive doughnuts that I've tasted,” gushed Wing from Brooklyn; while Thompson from New York said, “I walked out of Doughnut Plant upset with myself that I couldn’t try all the flavors in one sitting.”

Doughnut Plant’s doughnuts are wholesaled to forty outlets across New York including gourmet food stores Dean and Deluca, Citarella, and Zabar’s. They’ve had rave reviews in the New York Times, Time Out New York, Vogue magazine, and The Boston Globe. They’ve appeared on TV shows such as the Today Show on NBC, Good Morning America, Regis and Kelly, and Martha Stewart, while Mark makes regular appearances on the Food Network­Doughnut Plant was recently featured on June 21st’s episode of The Best Thing I Ever Ate.

Just Add Krishna

It’s clear that Mark’s years of dedication have finally paid off­Doughnut Plant is a certified success.

And yet, Mark doesn’t take credit for any of it. “It’s all Krishna’s doing,” he says. “I see businesses getting successful or going out of business around me all the time, and I know that I have no control over such things. I just keep my head down and work hard, like everybody else at the Plant.”

Mark shows his understanding that all his success really belongs to Krishna by offering all his doughnuts daily to the Deities of Gaura-Nitai and Jagannath, Baladeva and Subhadra worshiped on an altar in the Doughnut Plant’s basement.

This practice isn’t whimsical­it’s a standard part of his staff’s daily work routine. “After I launched our franchise stores in Tokyo and Seoul, I also showed the staff there how to offer the doughnuts to Krishna, making it part of their day too,” he explains. “For me, to have my own business would mean nothing if the doughnuts weren’t offered. ISKCON’s founder Srila Prabhupada often said that just as six zeros mean nothing on their own, but become so valuable when you add a one in front of them, human civilization means nothing until you add God consciousness. So in the same way, I feel like all my doughnuts are like useless zeros­they’re even shaped like them­until you add Krishna.”

This attitude has yielded some wonderful results. “The second time I visited our first Tokyo branch, one of the staff I’d shown how to offer walked up to me and said Hare Krishna!” Mark recalls, his eyes lighting up. “He told me he had bought Srila Prabhupada’s books and had been reading them. On another occasion, a customer told me he had become vegetarian because of the Doughnut Plant. It was a very emotional moment for me.”

Mark feels strongly that his work at the Doughnut Plant is service to Krishna. “As well as offering our doughnuts and worshiping Deities of Krishna, half of the staff we employ are devotees and the rest are very favorable,” he says. “On top of that, many devotees of Krishna come to visit all the time, including senior Prabhupada disciples and gurus. So my job constantly reminds me of Krishna. It’s a very fortunate situation.”

With business thriving, Mark plans to open Doughnut Plant’s long-awaited second New York branch at the Chelsea Hotel on 23rd Street this October. Unlike the smaller Grand Street location, the new store will have a larger retail area and will be what Mark calls a “doughnut lounge.” “You’ll be able to sit down, relax, eat doughnuts and chat,” he says. “I’m very excited about it. The Chelsea Hotel is a landmark building, built in the 1800s, and it’s got a lot of character and personality. It feels like a good match for the Doughnut Plant.”

Once the 23rd street location is established, Mark plans to expand his business around the US, establishing branches in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles.

Yet no matter how big his business becomes, Mark is eager to keep Krishna consciousness close. “I’d love for as many devotees as possible to be a part of it, all working and serving together,” he says. “And they’d be sure to find the Doughnut Plant a great atmosphere. We’re always preparing food for Krishna and offering it to Him, so it’s easy to remember Krishna­you’re basically doing devotional service while you’re working.”

He smiles. “And that’s why I love it here.”

Doughnut Plant is currently looking for devotee staff to make doughnuts for both its Grand Street and 23rd street locations. Interested devotees can email Mark Israel at staff@doughnutplant.com.

http://www.doughnutplant.com

by Vijaya Gauranga das

I came into contact with the idea of vegetarianism at around age 14 when my brother’s fiancé at the time was one, though at that time I didn’t give it too much consideration but it did start me thinking that such a different perspective on life was completely valid. It wasn’t too much later that I learnt one of the main reasons people go vegetarian, that of the immense cruelty involved in meat production.

I learnt this initially from hardcore punk bands at the time such as Napalm Death, Conflict and others, whose song lyrics addressed the issue of meat being the flesh of sentient creatures packaged for our convenience. It seemed to make such perfect sense, and I was amazed actually that I had overlooked the fact that behind the various products of meat was the henious business that produced it: farm animals reared in confined situations, destined after being fattened up for a period of time to be cruelly slaughtered in abattoirs which resembled fearful factories of death such as Auschwitz, with blood stained walls and guts spilled out on the concrete floor.

Why hadn’t I been witness to this scene before? Why had neither schooling nor television not shared this reality with me, in order to allow me to make an informed choice at a time when I was really forming my own opinions for the first time in life? I understood later exactly why this was the case, yet at the time I was amazed to have discovered something most people seem either blind of indifferent to, almost as if a veil of illusion had been lifted to reveal what was to me so inherently wrong for anyone considering themselves human.

“Advertise the product you make, never give and always take, clingfilmed flesh and genocide, a contented life while millions die.

Instinct of survival.”

(Napalm Death ‘ Instinct of Survival’)

I never thought something could have sparked such an interest in me, and in the following years I dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy in educating myself about all the issues related to animals rights, and also attempting to educate others about what I had learnt – a task I was to discover was far harder than it was for me to see the truth myself and change my behaviours accordingly. Why were many people so opposed to a different viewpoint, even when the facts seemed to point strongly in favour of a diet that didn’t contain animal flesh?

I realised that the impediment in the way of learning and accepting the facts presented, was our own stubbornness in changing our eating habits, which for so long had just seemed ‘normal’ and ingrained in the consciousness. I also realised I was somewhat guilty of this paradigm, as I had to give up buying and consuming products which I had previously, in ignorance, purchased and enjoyed as my lunch, dinner or snack. Even products that seemed innocent, such as certain sweets which contained gelatine (a by-product of slaughter consisting of boiled down bones, sinew, flesh etc to produce a jelly like substance), had to be subsequently dropped from my increasingly strict diet.

Eating of flesh seemed quite obviously wrong, but scanning lists of ingredients in all foods whether sweet or savoury became an almost tedious daily ritual, especially when more often than not I discovered one or more ingredients that my newfound morality considered contraband. And this only increased more as I learned that not only meat and fish were the causes of suffering to other creatures, but also eggs and then dairy.

My attachment to chocolate such as Mars bars was cut out as I discovered they contained egg, which were from chickens confined in tiny cages like machines popping out eggs until the end of their miserable lives – which were probably best to be cut short by slaughter in such circumstances, as if a type of compassion like euthanasia. But compassion was not the concern at all, but merely profit… yet the sacrifice of giving up a foodstuff that gave a few minutes of pleasure to the tongue seemed insignificant compared to what millions of animals had to sacrifice in their very lives just to bring us things simply for convenience, when they could just as easily be manufactured without such abominable ingredients.

“The factories are churning out all processed packed and neat, an obscure butchered substance and the label reads ‘meat’, hidden under false names such as pork, ham, veal and beef, and eye’s an eye a life’s a life, the now forgotten belief.”

(Conflict ‘Meat Means Murder’)

However, I remember going on auto-pilot on a few occasions, going to buy something I liked, only to stop in my tracks and think ‘oh, no I can’t buy that, remember, I’m vegetarian now’. I think I walked down a London street from my grandmothers house to buy my favourite spare ribs from the Chinese takeaway, and it didn’t quite click until I’d set upon the journey that I could no longer enjoy that food. Not that anyone was forcing me not to buy and eat it, except for my own conscience and the knowledge I had acquired, and even if I had ignored that inner moral compass and eaten it anyway I doubt I would have enjoyed it with the understanding of exactly what it was and where it came from.

It seems that to be able to enjoy certain foods we mustn’t know too much about them, lest we wouldn’t wish to consume them, and people sometimes state that you shouldn’t think too much about it or ‘you won’t want to eat it’. But does that make sense? Close your eyes and chew to your hearts content. Yet that seems to be the paradigm, especially from mass media, as television advertising, posters and magazines show only the external reality never behind the scenes, as happy people continue to consume all kinds of products as if nothing in the world was wrong with them.

“Have I just realised that we are animals too? Yes, yes. Do I resent the torture of circuses and zoos? Yes, yes. Do I condemn the hunters? Yes. Do I condemn the butchers? And the murders too? Yes, yes. Am I opposed to vivisection? Yes yes yes yes. Is there another direction? Yes, yes.”

(Culture Shock ‘Twenty Questions’)

The next step was discovering exactly how our dairy products are brought to us, which was perhaps the most disturbing fact of all, considering how harmless milk seemed. It doesn’t take much thought to realise how ugly meat is sitting in the butchers window, not long after it was living flesh on a thinking, feeling creature, which ate and breathed and moved around just as we do. In fact meat is usually injected with chemicals and dyes to give it an appealing look and colour, lest it would be grey and lifeless and become more obviously a lump of dead flesh and hardly very appetising. But what about milk, that natural white substance which mother cow gave freely and in abundance to nourish both young calves as well as human beings?

That product lauded as being an essential source of vitamins such as calcium, from which so many tasty foods could be prepared. What could possibly be wrong with something that was delicious and nutritious, that seemed to be in just about every sweet food imaginable, from ice cream to chocolate to milkshakes? Would I be obliged to give up what since childhood I had relished in various forms, seemingly as naturally as one does ones own mothers breastmilk?

The answer lied not in the product itself as much as in the methods of obtaining it. After just a little reading on the subject of modern dairy production, shattered were the images of happy cows grazing in fields to their hearts content, calves sucking at the teat, and just as happily strolling to the milk shed to generously donate the surplus milk from her bags and relieve her burden further. An image that seems almost completely lost except for a very few rare farms left on the planet, mostly it seems outside of modern industrialised cultures such as ours. The reality though was almost diametrically opposed to that scenario, and was the stuff of hellish nightmares – yet was a daily reality in thousands of factory ‘farms’ across the country.

The idea of veganism is a relatively new one, and one that really occurred as a reaction to Western industrialised society in which animals were no longer seen as part of the greater family but as commodities. The idea of ending all animal suffering was the total abstinence from animal products, as in a centralised and mechanised agricultural system there can be no easy way to ensure the well being of the animals involved, so the best course of action would be simply be to eliminate all use of animals and thus eliminate the concomitant suffering.

While the idea of non violence has been with civilisations for centuries, this extreme measure was devised in the 1940’s by Donald Watson and his wife in reaction to what they saw as intolerable suffering on a massive scale, and the idea started to take hold by a small group of people increasingly more towards the end of the century.

“I know as well as anyone, that it does less good than harm, to be this honest with a conscience eased by lies, you cannot deny that…. meat is still murder, dairy is still rape, and I’m still as stupid as anyone, but I know my mistakes, I have recognised one form of oppression, now I recognise the rest, life’s too short to make another’s shorter.”

(Propagandhi ‘Nailing Descartes to the Wall: (Liquid) Meat is Still Murder’)

It’s not my specific intention to put anyone off their next meal, but some things just have to be stated plainly, so please excuse me to have to be another given the thankless task of revealing what most people would definitely rather leave unknown. Yet we have come this far, why stop now in the pursuit of truth of the reality that surrounds us.

It’s only logical to take further steps in enlightening ourselves in order to progress towards a better and more just life – for ourselves, the earth and all it’s inhabitants, yet the tendency to bury our heads like an ostrich in the sand or rationalise our behaviours with half baked theories is overwhelming it seems in this day and age. But bear with me and I’ll try to not only point out the problems but also present the solutions.

For those not yet aware of how milk comes into our hands in modern society it’s often a surprise because we’re never witness to the process at all. It’s common knowledge that any female human or animal, cow or otherwise, ‘lactates’ or gives milk when she’s pregnant, as part of natures way to prepare to feed the newborn before they grow enough to move onto solid foods (whether that means chewing grass or eating rusks…), and continues giving milk for a certain period afterwards to accommodate the process.

That, of course, is not rocket science. What we don’t think about though is the question of who the milk is meant for, or at least, who is the primary rights holder as a recipient of it. Naturally with a cow it’s the calves that require their mothers milk first, and in agrarian societies the calves are allowed their fill and the excess milk is obtained by hand, yet industrialised society seems to have ‘progressed’ to the point where the milk is seemingly exclusively for human consumption and at the denial of the calves whose birthright is (or should be) to have their fill.

But what happens in a factory situation where most cows are raised, is horrific, in that the calves are separated from their mothers with 24 to 48 hours – something painful to both the mother and calf, as cows are unusually conscious and sentient creatures with complex emotions not much different than ours. And that’s just the beginning…. depending on the gender of the newborn calves, they have different destinies which really just range between either torture, murder, or usually both.

The ‘bobby calves’, baby male cows, cute and cuddly to any child as their fluffy toys, are generally slaughtered almost straight away, seen to be ‘useless’ to the industry – save and except for a very tiny few ‘lucky’ ones who are kept alive to impregnate future herds (and even then it’s done artificially so their good fortune doesn’t stretch enough to allow them their natural propensity to mate and regenerate, and the female cows are housed in cages unable to move at the time of insemination and this device is appropriately named by the industry itself as the ‘rape rack’). The even more unfortunate ones are destined for the veal industry – an industry that is hand in hand with the dairy industry in that it is fed by the large amounts of calves born from cows who are kept in a cycle of continual pregnancy to ensure the milk supply remains flowing.

For a veal calf, life probably couldn’t get much more hellish, concentration camp victims notwithstanding, as they are put alone into small wooden crates with no room to move and deprived of nutrition such as iron which they then crave so much they try to eat their newfound wooden home. When it is deemed enough torture which in turn produces a soft and pale flesh considered by many (including, believe it or not, the Dalai Lama) a ‘delicacy’. No more hard and chewy meat with your veg, no…. nice soft, tender ‘veal steak’. Doesn’t sound too bad, as long as you’re unaware of the aforementioned process that is done on your behalf to bring it to your plate. Out of sight, out of mind.

“I swear I did to ensure that, his final moments were swift and free from fear, but consideration should be made for the fact that, Sandor Katz was my first kill, so I trust the reader will, understand that while his screams may have seemed like conscious objections, they were in reality simply a request to honour his strength and speed.”

(Propagandhi ‘Human(e) Meat: The Flensing of Sandor Katz’)

And as if all this isn’t enough, if anyone’s still with me, the method in which cows and other animals are slaughtered is far from ‘humane’ as is the propaganda everyone seems happy to believe, as much hidden camera footage available increasingly on the internet shows. Gone is the swift and painless process of slaughter for the most part, as the grisly business kept tightly behind closed doors and well out of sight from most, and it is increasingly harder to regulate with laws that attempt to bring at least some relative amount of humanity and compassion into the picture, and almost every corner ends up being cut to get the job done and bring in a tidy profit.

Animals which are supposed to be stunned with high voltage electric tongs which are designed to knock the animal out so they are completely unconscious when their throats are cut with a knife – either a machine or conventional one. Sounds humane doesn’t it? Well, not really, considering the fact that we certainly wouldn’t opt to finish our albeit temporary lives in such a fashion, and the only justification becomes the outright lie that animals don’t feel pain or have emotions that we humans do. Bull! (no pun intended). Anyone who has ever had a pet will testify to the fact that animals are conscious and have sensations of pleasure and pain as we do, as well as emotions like love and affection, fear, anger and all sorts of other similar characteristics. To depersonalise them and reduce them to simply biological machines is to deny the reality simply to justify our selfishness and greed and nothing more.

So even if the slaughtering process went strictly to plan it’s still far from humane for an intelligent and thinking person, and so often it goes awry and sees countless amounts of animals not properly stunned and as they regain consciousness suffer the agony of being killed alive, or worse dropped alive in boiling water to sear the hairs from the body. This and many other atrocities to the earth’s creatures happen on a daily basis, in all corners of the world, today and every day, and why? Because the demand for it perpetuates the cruel system, and the propaganda machine largely hides the reality from view and instead presents us the end product, disconnected from the process that brought it there.

“Now you’re at the table, sitting and grinning, sitting there eating never thinking of the filling, It’s served upon a sterile plate, you don’t think of the killing, the furthest your brain takes you, is it for frying or for grilling?”

(Conflict ‘ Meat Means Murder’)

I’m assuming most (if anyone is still) reading this, is probably already vegetarian, or hopefully soon on their way to be, so we’ll move along to things which are beyond those which are more commonly known to people in such social circles. One of the excuses meat eaters would sometimes give upon learning I was vegetarian, was ‘you’re killing plants though’. This objection was ironic coming from people who ate meat unapologetically, as if that was really their concern why would they feel fine to eat animal flesh, which of course would be worse than the killing of plants and indeed be guilty of both as the animals kill the plants to eat then we eat them.

So I never took this argument very seriously, that was until it came from people who were already vegetarian. Those people were the followers of an ancient Indian spiritual culture known as ‘Krishna consciousness’. More specifically, this idea was professed by the founder of the movement in the Western world, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, or simply ‘Prabhupada’ for short, who travelled alone from India in 1965 to New York City to spread the ancient and profound teachings of the ‘Vedas’.

The Vedas being Sanskrit texts dating back approximately 5000 years, translated by this elderly Swami who brought them on a steamship in the middle of the hippie era and tirelessly taught them for the next decade or so until his passing in late 1977. Amongst many other things, his teachings included the importance of vegetarianism, both for compassion for other creatures, health and spiritual progress.

Meat eating it was stated destroys compassion, one of the legs of ‘Dharma’ or the sacred path of a spiritually progressive human being, which along with truthfulness, cleanliness and austerity built a foundation for a person to grasp the higher truths of our existence. Gambling, Intoxication and illicit sex, respectively, were the ones that destroyed the other three. But it seemed apparent that being vegetarian was perhaps the first and foremost things to adhere to, and something that many people of the 60’s era had already grasped, even if their avoidance of drugs and free sex was hardly on the same level!

“There is no need for men to eat animals, because there is ample supply of grains, vegetables, fruits and milk. Such foodstuff is considered to be in the mode of goodness. Animal food is for those in the more of ignorance. Therefore, those who indulge in animal food, drinking, smoking and eating food which is first not offered to Krishna will suffer sinful reactions because of eating only polluted things.”

(Srila Prabhupada, Bhagavad-gita As It Is 6.16, purport)

The way I came into contact with such knowledge is a long story, stretching back to my teenage years when I was also formulating ideas about topics such as animal and human rights, and though took me longer to grasp, with a clear mind from years of avoiding animal products I began to think more about spiritually related subjects such as why are we here and what’s the purpose behind this creation and life itself?

These were far harder questions to figure out by myself, and though I was disdainful of religion in general especially due to it’s representatives always being meat eaters, I learnt that these devotees of Krishna were all vegetarian. That impressed me. More so as I learned that even Buddhism, which generally eschewed ‘Ahimsa’ or non-violence, didn’t seem to follow so strictly that principle in it’s diet, sometimes being vegetarian or vegan and sometimes not. I couldn’t reconcile the two, and still doubtful about the theory that whatever comes by the ‘grace of the Buddha’ is to be accepted. It seems that could justify almost anything really, and it’s we who generally order a particular food and it’s a rare circumstance that we are forced to eat whatever is available to survive.

I did learn that lesson whilst travelling around Asia for the first time, and my veganism gave way sometimes out of necessity but never did my conscious avoidance of meat, except over the years by little ‘accidents’ which are usually caused by misreading ingredient labels. The only time before that which I had really compromised my principles to now partake in any animal products for food, clothing, hygiene or otherwise, was accepting the eggs at my friends house whose pet chicken would roam freely and lay the unfertilised eggs which I considered would simply rot if I didn’t eat for breakfast when I slept over. Later I figured eating the ingredients of a potential chicken in the form of a liquid embryo isn’t in any way appealing, but the fact that no cruelty was there for me to support made it in line with my otherwise strict vegan vows, which I’m sure some would consider hypocritical though I never subscribed to dogmatic and blind following of any principle without understanding the reasoning behind it.

As restrictions on what I deemed fit to eat became narrower it seemed like the pursuit would never end, and I could be down to eating only fruit, the next only drinking water, breathing air – until I concluded the only way to eliminate being implicated in other’s suffering was to end my own life and solve the problem once and for all! Which of course is the ultimate extreme measure in dealing with the issue, though hardly a practical one.

“We strive for world peace, but the violence won’t decrease unless our murders cease, so understand in the slaughterhouse whose the beast, and I demand that the innocent be released!”

(Shelter ‘Civilised Man’)

And on that very point I questioned my long held belief in avoiding all animal products (including dairy, eggs, leather, wool, silk - you name it…). I began to wonder what real difference my actions were making. Sure, it made people think about their own actions, and many followed suit and became comrades in the fight against abuse of other beings, but was it the be all and end all I thought?

The point made by Prabhupada that even vegetables and other plants were living beings made sense. Of course they are, we can’t eat dead stone therefore we require some kind of organic matter to sustain ourselves whether that’s vegetation or animal flesh, but whether they were conscious as moving creatures was my doubt, which later I learned was proven by an Indian scientist Dr Bose who showed the reaction plants had to pain and distress, albeit unable to scream in the way an animal of human would.

Plus the idea that it was okay to take a life if it didn’t cause pain was erroneous as we can give anaesthetic to numb all sensation and kill a person without pain which is of course clearly wrong, as is the argument that the less intelligent species are meant as our food and I can hardly imagine any justification for eating less intelligent humans such as children or the mentally challenged, so another shallow theory bit the dust.

But of course any sane person can distinguish between the flesh of an apple and the flesh of an animal, the ‘blood’ of an orange as opposed to the blood of a cow, pig or sheep for example. Only a madman would put them on the same level, so the people that said I was just as guilty of killing by eating plant food rather than animals made fools of themselves, just as a person visiting the dentist considering that because not all pain and discomfort can be eliminated there’s no point in any anaesthetic at all!

The idea to make all viewpoints ‘one’ is a symptom of our impersonalistic mindset which is another malady of our times. The point being if suffering is going to be committed unavoidably, then at least the conscious awareness should be there to bring it to a minimum.

So avoiding meat and eating vegetarian foods did just that – minimised the suffering of other creatures even if it wasn’t perfect. And I was aware that even animals would be routinely killed accidentally in the harvesting of certain crops, which brings about another good reason to move towards more natural and organic methods of cultivating crops rather than industrial agribusiness and it’s big machines.

Yet again, I believed there was a difference in consciously killing something and accidental killing. After all, most of us drive cars or use other transport which kills untold amounts of animals on the road, not to mention the pollution indirectly slowly killing yet more living creatures…

“Take me away, because everything is wrong today.”

(Moby ‘Everytime You Touch Me’)

So I was aware that veganism was far from perfect and didn’t profess to be any kind of spotless moral saint, but it seemed about the last word in compassionate, responsible and conscious living, without getting into fruitarianism and raw food diets which although perfectly valid never seemed practical for me, and other issues that were equally important were to be dealt with not just this one, such as the avoidance of products of human exploitation by big business or items that were the cause of environmental neglect. The list goes on, unlimitedly.

What it seemed was needed was an over-arching principle that would bring everything slowly back into line with a natural and just world, I just didn’t really know what that was, if there even was such a thing. And if there wasn’t, was there any point in the relative moralities already mentioned, and was my focus on certain issues just a personal bias towards my chosen concerns and thus I’d be guilty of not addressing issues that others would hold as being of utmost importance – racial equality, sexual equality, class equality…

So it seemed that indeed there was an absolute morality that would solve all the singular issues, when I read books like Bhagavad-gita and other literatures based on the principles that had governed advanced societies such as in ancient India, which seemed amazingly well constructed and thought out, far from the primitive cavemen I learned in school were the only peoples who came before our ‘great’ technological civilisation.

And this principle of offering food in sacrifice to the Supreme, whoever that was I didn’t really know or even believe, still seemed to make some sense, given that there is a source of everything that is supplied to us, even if we just believe that to be material nature if not something more powerful behind the workings of the world we live in.

My own speculation had gotten me as far as considering there must be an energy or ‘force’ I called it behind everything we see, which I concluded after often pondering the night sky, probably influenced by one drug or another, and the seemingly great order to everything from the planetary systems down to the earth and all it’s necessities such as food from the earth, light and heat from the sun, water from the sea and rivers. Surely it can’t all be a ‘chance’ occurence, and if it was, then I thought there wouldn’t be any point at all in morality – may as well just enjoy this one life to the max with no restriction of moral concerns which seem to only restrict oneself. But that didn’t seem right, I had an innate sense there was a purpose and plan to it all and there was sense in living a life guided by an inner conscience.

So as far as my mind could reach in finding the ultimate truth, which admittedly wasn’t very far, it was a start, and I realised I had to gain knowledge from outside myself to get anywhere at all. I was quite averse to religion from many negative experiences, and reading these books of Prabhupada which had found their way into my hands via a very trusted and close friend was difficult at times when the language was close to what I had rejected almost wholesale with Christianity and similar traditions with their bigoted and judgemental leaflets coming through the door.

Words like ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ indeed made me cringe yet the universal truths I found in those books made me tolerate them with an open mind and I could see this was quite a different path, such as vegetarianism and drug free simple living, and I realised that words can be subjected to the burden of misrepresentation and thus conjured up the a different picture than intended. When I read ‘God’ I would think of the Judeo-Christian figure of a vague, almost faceless person who seemed to judge harshly anyone not towing the line and thus punish them eternally in ways a devil would be proud of conceiving of!

Krishna wasn’t like that in the least, and I realised that if someone said ‘Lord Buddha’ instead of ‘Lord Jesus’ it had a totally different ring to it, and religious traditions such as Rastafari seemed ‘cool’ in certain aspects, all mystical and much less dogmatic, especially when people involved with them were the sort of people you could relate to as a youth.

Growing up on a diet of hardcore/punk and it’s strong moral thread running through many bands lyrics, any band or individuals that shared similar views as me were greatly respected and listened to with rapt attention. Such an individual for me was Ray Cappo of the band Youth of Today, later forming the band Shelter amongst others. Here was a personality which since age 15 I had looked up to almost like God! With his charisma and bold speaking of the truth, whether it was ’straight-edge’ (drug free living) or positive thinking and compassion for others I was hooked on his every word he was screaming in the records I’d bought.

When I discovered he, amongst other role models, was vegetarian, that gave me great inspiration to follow suit, so it was natural that when he got into the philosophy and practices of Krishna consciousness I’d be intrigued, if not understand and adopt that immediately too. But the aversion to religion was deeply rooted in me and I remember a friend telling me the Krishna religion was ‘cool’ for being strictly vegetarian and my response was, ‘yes, but it’s still a religion and all religion is bad’.

“You say explosion started creation, and we’re just chemical combinations, but would you take the same stand of there was a gun in my hand, or would you beg for your salvation? We’ll see…”

(Shelter ‘In Defense of Reality’)

We say things with such absolute conviction at age 16, and later grow to find our world and our tiny experience have practically no authority on speaking about reality. Considering time tested traditions practiced by millions of people throughout the ages, who was I to state so boldly what was right or wrong, especially for others. Speak for yourself I say… And after years of thinking my path was so righteous and infallible I slowly realised I needed much more in life than had sustained me in my youth, and the sheer emptiness of a life of consumerism was becoming painfully more apparent.

Delving more into spiritually rooted books and music only proved that to be right, and the last attempt at enjoying the pleasures of this world, which I knew to be fleeting and temporary escapes from pain and misery, was in travelling the world. Which turned out to be not the ‘time of my life’ as hoped and promised by many, but the final straw in realising that it’s all very much the ’same wine in different bottles’ as I saw people around me struggle to squeeze enjoyment from the same things we’ve tried and failed for years, as if doing it in new surroundings with a different set of (fair weather) friends would be so much more fulfilling.

And so I embarked on a spiritual journey, a focussed one of discipline, study and the practice of mantra meditation. In the association of like minded people, my newfound friends who lived in the Sydney Hare Krishna Temple and practiced with conviction what they taught me, I started to feel a massive shift in my awareness almost so profound it was scary at times. What had I stumbled upon? Just what journey had I embarked upon here?? Yet it was too late to turn back now after all I’d learnt, far too late…. though I saw people try to revert back to their former lives and leave behind a life of facing reality, it seemed so futile to try to hide from that which is all around you – reality!

And that was what it was all about, facing reality as opposed to distracting myself with various illusions, and though it wasn’t perhaps necessary to live that lifestyle full time I’d had more than enough of living a materialistic life and wanted out fast! And so, moving into an ashram and living in a tightly disciplined spiritual community would be the path I would tread for the next five years. And did it ever teach me some life lessons, ones I’ll never ever forget.

“Community projects for the four orders of human society, combined with family welfare activities, as they are set forth by the institution of sanatana-dharma [eternal spiritual principles] or varnasrama-dharma [social and spiritual societal divisions], are designed to enable the human being to attain his [or her] ultimate salvation. Therefore, the breaking of of the sanatana-dharma tradition by irresponsible leaders of society brings about chaos in that society, and consequently people forget the aim of life – Vishnu. Such leaders are called blind, and person who follow such leaders are sure to be led into chaos” (Srila Prabhupada, purport to Bhagavad-gita As It Is 1.42)

Sadly, one of the lessons I had to learn the hard way was even though truth is there in every tradition, and this ancient culture of India was immersed in it more than any other I had even encountered, not everybody was necessarily a pure conduit of that truth which according to the teachings emanated from the original and supreme person, Sri Krishna, and indeed some people were in this world to take advantage of that truth and the power it gave not for the betterment of all people, but for their own self aggrandisement and personal convenience.

It’s no real secret the history of the Krishna consciousness movement, which after Prabhupada’s departure in 1977, fell gradually into disarray just as any spiritual tradition does when the powerful and empowered leader passes away and leaves often less than qualified people to carry the banner. That history is lengthy and complex and yet shouldn’t taint ones opinion of the tradition as it should be practiced. The people that misused and abused others and distorted the teachings were never the proper representatives of the culture, and one has to exercise great discrimination in seeing those who do faithfully represent it just as Srila Prabhupada did as the perfect example.

Often people fall into the trap of throwing the baby with the bathwater and rejecting a tradition wholesale, as I had with Christianity not understanding it’s roots and pure essence, which really just becomes an excuse not to surrender one’s own selfish pursuit in life and justifies in their minds that it’s okay to live in this world for our own sense gratification, never wanting to see the true proprietor of everything handed to us by fate.

“This world is made up of two classes of people: the cheaters and the cheated.”

(Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati)

When I was visiting the temple I was vegan, which meant eating only some of the delicious preparations at the ‘Sunday Feast’ and other times, avoiding the obvious dairy products though I wasn’t aware at the time that many preparations contained milk in the form of ghee (clarified butter), however I considered the compromise a worthy one for a higher cause.

Prabhupada had explained clearly that when food is offered to Krishna then everyone concerned would receive spiritual benefit, like being implicated even unknowingly in pious activity – even plants would benefit somewhat in future lives, and the philosophy seemed to perfectly reconcile everything I had tried to achieve by being vegan. The cows that gave milk would get benefit by having their milk offered to Krishna who was the all merciful one who would ultimately deliver, in due course, anyone that surrendered to him in loving devotion.

It seemed such a perfect system, nobody would be the loser, and not only would it go beyond veganism in helping other living beings as the food offered became spiritually surcharged (something you could certainly experience when eating) as ‘prasadam’ or literally God’s mercy and compassion, it wouldn’t be quite as restricting as having to avoid all animal products as milk was deemed fit to be offered. Eating it would purify the heart and mind and cleanse desires for material enjoyment and rid one of greed, giving one a deep inner satisfaction and bliss, along with other processes of ‘Bhakti-Yoga’ or devotional service.

So I bought the philosophy wholesale without thinking too deeply about it, since there was an incredible amount to learn in the culture besides just this aspect, but it was something I’d come back to and consider much more carefully in later years. I never doubted the fact that prasadam would transform people and literally melt the heart and open people up to becoming further enlightened. By simply eating, in sensible moderation of course, we could advance spiritually and become more compassionate and forgiving and loving – all the qualities that will bring about the greatly needed transformation of this planet which has for so long gone in the opposite direction of lust, greed, anger and exploitation of everything for temporary gain.

I experienced it myself and never felt so contented, and saw others benefit greatly too especially with a program to distribute prasadam in huge quantities and often for little or no cost – it was and still is the ultimate welfare program, along with the distribution of knowledge in the form of books and discourses and other methods, and the teaching of meditation and furthermore distribution of the sacred mantras to the public in general, despite many people not being receptive for being too absorbed in relentless consumerism.

In essence I believe it is the single most powerful culture I’ve encountered in teaching compassion and not only is it predicted to spread around the whole world but practically we see it happening despite the problems that individuals have brought upon the society by deviation from strict principles. But something happened that changed my mind on a point, which I consider to be a key point in further spreading the culture, and though there is agreement from certain members of the society there is also a strong opposition from others which potentially could divide people between those who want to make it more progressive into modern times and those who feel there’s no need to change the way we’ve done something for decades.

“Just as species that don’t adapt to their environment die out, cultures that don’t adapt to the changes in their surroundings die out… do we follow Srila Prabhupada by doing exactly what he did, or do we follow him by adapting to changing times just as he adapted?”

(lectures by Hridayananda das Goswami / Dr Howard Resnick PhD)

That issue is the ‘dairy issue’.

Almost like a taboo in some circles, talking about offering Krishna milk that has been obtained by great cruelty as even questionable has seen me personally humiliated, branded a deviant – someone in some kind of illusion or delusion, creating disturbance to the smooth running of the society, and has elicited anger even simply by posing the question!

What is it that is so radical as to elicit such a reaction from even senior people, as if to challenge the whole tradition? Why is is so wrong to speak the plain truth about something simply from a viewpoint of compassion for living creatures, and not just any creatures, but the cows that Sri Krishna himself holds so dearly?

Krishna has unlimited names which describe unlimited qualities, and a prominent one of which is ‘Govinda’ - the giver of pleasure to the cows (and senses/earth, in other more inclusive translations), and ‘Gopala’, the tender of the cows. Krishna, the supreme Godhead, is eternally engaged in pastimes of herding cows and looking after them in a loving way. Indeed, his planet in the spiritual world is named ‘Goloka’ - literally ‘the planet of the cows’! And when Krishna descends to this earth periodically as an ‘avatar’ the domain is named ‘Gokula’, again, the place of cows.

So Krishna loves cows, that much is certainly undoubtable. Indeed Krishna loves every single one of his unlimited parts and parcels, no matter what form or species they are in, yet still, he is a cowherd boy and the connection to the cows stands above his relationship with all other animals. A name for Krishna in his childhood is ‘Makhan-cora’ or the ‘butter thief’, as one of his loving pastimes with his mother Yasoda and the cowherd maidens of the village of Vrindavana, so it’s clear that Krishna likes butter too.

Yet Krishna is above simply enjoying sense gratification, a deeper understanding is that everything Krishna does is a pastime or ‘lila’ that enacts loving exchanges with his devotees, who surround him at all times whether as friends, parents, lovers, animals or plants – since in the absolute spiritual realm everything is fully conscious, whereas in this relative ‘material’ world the consciousness is covered to varying degrees so the awareness of a human being is slightly greater than certain animals and there’s a sort of hierarchy of consciousness through different species down through animals, birds, fish, insects, to plants and trees and microbes etc.

So Krishna isn’t just eating butter in the sense that we might lust after some food simply for our sense pleasure, yet he enjoys it undoubtedly. But this poses an important question, in fact, a crucial question in the light of the facts mentioned above in the horrific way cows are treated as milk machines. And the question is this: does God ‘demand’ the milk that He enjoys, even if it’s from a source that has caused so much pain and suffering to his most beloved creatures?

Is Krishna so callous a God that he just has to have his dairy, no matter what the cost, and if that means dairy from people torturing and killing cows on a daily basis, then so be it? I just fail to see how that could ever be the case – and after all, that’s just common sense isn’t it?

“We live in a world of selfishness, I do admit the crime, of living in this world considering all to be mine, so I contemplate, and dedicate, to getting myself out of this pathetic state… The greatest wealth has been lost, we’ve got to get it back at any cost, how dare we live in this world, without appreciation?’

(Shelter ‘Appreciation’)

It’s a complex issue indeed, especially when you consider the perspective that Krishna is the all-good absolute person, meaning everything that contacts Krishna gets unlimited benefit, as even the many demoniac personalities that tried to even kill Krishna when he descended just over 5000 years ago in India, being envious of his supreme position.

Such persons were considered fortunate to have even been killed by him as their ’souls’ or consciousness is understood to have been granted liberation from the cycle of birth and death (samsara) in this material world which forces the eternal living beings to move from one body to another through 8.4 million different species. Certainly attaining that is rare indeed, though the quality of that liberation is said to be impersonal as there is a higher realm in which personality is retained in full and is the goal of all aspiring Krishna devotees.

Still, if someone kills you as an enemy and you get such a benefit, that’s certainly extraordinary, and one wouldn’t expect God, the source of all wondrous creations, to be anything less would we? All this rests on the fact whether we believe in God or not, the endlessly debated question, but assuming here that this is true otherwise the whole debate becomes pointless, we’ll tackle the issue from this angle.

Outside the society of Krishna’s devotees of course people would completely fail to see how violence could play a role in a tradition with nonviolence as such a central point, which indeed is a great impediment to further spreading the culture, as a strict vegan and animal rights campaigner could not and would not support the use of modern factory farmed dairy with the reasoning that some relative metaphysical benefit is awarded to the cows from which the milk is from. They simply just won’t buy that philosophy, and rightly so, as we will learn, because it doesn’t add up even in terms of the internal principles of the society with people that accept Krishna’s supreme position and authority and the previously stated idea that everyone concerned is to benefit by any contact whatsoever.

“The animal killers do not know that in the future the animal will have a body suitable to kill them. That is the law of nature [karma]… one who, being fully satisfied by milk, is desirous of killing the cow is in the grossest ignorance… these two living creatures, the brahmanas [spiritually advanced persons] and the cows, must be given all protection – that is real advancement of civilisation.”

(Bhagavad-gita As It Is 14.16, purport)

Indeed, the standard justification for offering milk from cows and calves that are killed, or soon destined to be, is that offering their milk will ’save them’ therefore it becomes an act of mercy. We have to analyse that from various angles to see how it holds up in the light of knowledge. Firstly, we have to see if indeed the mood is there to help the animals involved, or if our main concern is to enjoy the milk products. There’s a huge difference between love and lust – between buying, say, an ice cream, and then ‘offering’ it sincerely or otherwise to God before we procede to enjoy it.

If we really are concerned with the welfare of the cows that suffered to bring the product, whatever it is, then why not pray for those animals and instead buy something to eat that doesn’t support further animals being killed to bring your food? When we buy something it’s exactly like giving a vote to whoever made it to ‘please carry on doing what you’re doing’, as this society is simply run by supply and demand – the real fault is with us who ‘demand’ something by buying it and therefore the supply is there, otherwise the supply would stop altogether if the demand went down to zero.

It’s basic economics, which is why boycotts work – the power the consumer has in choosing is incredible, and furthermore if shareholders of a company vote for a certain change then the company is obliged to make that change or lose it’s custom. So we have to be aware every time we buy something that we’re giving a ‘yes’ vote to it, and avoiding it is a ‘no, I don’t like or want this’ and even better is to tell others to avoid it for the same reasons. So from the angle of ‘helping’ the animals where there’s a will there’s a way, but don’t think that buying something to enjoy is doing that – that becomes simply delusional.

The second angle is from a more sincere perspective – that of offering something without expectation of return. Often in temples Krishna is worshipped and served in the form of a Deity, made of stone or wood or other elements, which are considered non-different from God since they are all his energies (a philosophy too complex to detail here), so in serving the Deity selflessly one can consider the personal gratification mentioned above to be absent, though of course it can still be there undoubtedly according to a persons purity of desire.

But for arguments sake, we’ll say the sincere devotee offers milk to Krishna and prays for the well being and even liberation of the poor cow (or cows) involved in bringing the milk products. An important consideration is what can and can’t be offered to Krishna, especially in the form of the Deity which is quite strict. Meat, fish or eggs cannot be offered as they are considered to be in the mode of ignorance and darkness – which is easy to understand as they are clearly products of violence.

What then of milk, which is a product of just as much, if not more violence, even than meat? That can be understood from the scenario mentioned earlier, and it’s a common phrase these days that ‘a glass of milk contains more suffering than a pound of steak’. So if we’ve replaced meat in our diet with an increase in dairy we need to seriously rethink that idea right away, sadly. So mode of ignorance foods are out, and violence is clearly a product of ignorance, so such milk seems to be as bad as offering meat – if offering such milk to Krishna helps the cows why not offer a chunk of meat?

‘But Krishna doesn’t accept meat.’

‘Why not? Is it the taste he doesn’t like, or is it the violence?’

‘Errr, I’m not sure, we just can’t offer it…’

‘Since meat eating destroys compassion, a leg of dharma, I’d say it’s the violence.’

‘Okay, I think I agree. We can offer a veggie burger to Krishna to sell in a restaurant so it can’t be the taste, must be the violence, right?’

‘Yes. So if milk has as much or more violence, can we offer it?’

I’ll leave the reader to conclude that one, but if you answer an unequivocal ‘yes’, you’re stuck in a circular argument.

The next point is pertinent. The majority of cows in the factory farm system have mastitis, a condition of the teats from overmilking (twice a day usually, by powerful machinery), which causes sores to develop in which cows feel pain and try to kick off the suction cups (which often then suck up waste from the floor). As if the pain issue isn’t again off putting, the sores exude pus, white blood cells that go right into the milk. Some countries have a limit to how many white blood cells are counted per litre – where I live in Australia they have no such standard yet and are trying to come up to par but haven’t succeeded. In any case, pus is abominable in a foodstuff, can be considered to be blood (and not just a transformation of blood as is milk, but more like blood itself), so can we, or more importantly, do we want to offer that to Krishna? Is there an alternative perhaps?

The answer is yes, but before we get there, we’ll consider the steps inbetween. Organic dairy herds, while still victims of more or less the same violence as already talked about, are free of the chemicals and hormones which factory dairy contains (again, neither good to consume or offer to Krishna), and the cows aren’t milked as intensively (usually just once per day) and possibly by hand in some smaller farms, as would be the case with raw milk which again is a step closer to the goal. The problem is still there with the violence issue, and buying ‘organic’ dairy sort of perpetuates the illusion that it’s indeed pure, just as buying organic meat seems to some people to be somehow ‘humane’, it’s all relative of course.

Being raised ‘organically’ or otherwise yet still killed in the end really doesn’t make that much difference, so apart from the fact that the end product of organic dairy is relatively purer in content than the standard factory milk, being tainted with violence even if not by blood itself, still makes it questionable in my mind whether it’s ‘offerable’ and therefore consumable since devotees don’t want to eat anything not first offered to Krishna.

Being freed from the karmic reaction to violence caused in obtaining our food is one of the important reasons food is first offered to Krishna in sacrifice, and by Krishna’s eating the foodstuffs it neutralises all effects for the person who then eats that food, otherwise the reaction is upon the persons who eat it and indeed the people implicated in the killing, transportation, selling, cooking or consumption – just as in a crime many people can be implicated besides the main perpetrator and accordingly punished.

So assuming we’re free from those reactions is a big assumption when the process given to us by the movement’s founder is offering milk from protected cows. And the benefit we talk about in offering milk for the cow is known as ‘ajnata-sukriti’ or unknown pious activity, which doesn’t mean the animal gets immediately liberated but accrues some spiritual benefit that carries into a future life. Considering how many cows contribute to the milk supply and any one bottle of modern milk could potentially come from many different cows, offering such milk seems to give only a small amount of benefit when shared amongst all concerned, and in the meantime our purchasing it keeps the violent cycle of death turning day by day and a perpetual cycle of slaughtered cows is what we have, the pious credit taken with them is a small boon weighed against the terrible cost of the mass murder of innocent creatures.

One could try to argue that they are not indeed ‘innocent’ since the killers become the killed in a future incarnation, and thus they are the ones previously guilty of the same crime, but this understanding of the complexities of karma simplifies it to the point where it destroys the compassion we should have for the animals instead of philosophical indifference. True, the perpetual cycle of killing is there because people have killed before and must in turn pay the price, and there’s seemingly nothing in our power to stop that complex chain of reactions save and except to plea with people not to kill or support killing in any way we can.

‘It’s just their karma’ people say and ‘everyone gets just what they deserve’, yet the deeper reality is that no living spiritual being belongs in this miserable material realm in the first place except for our determination to come here as a rebellion against the natural cooperative system of service in the spiritual realm. But since we don’t really deserve to be enjoying or suffering the good or bad effects of past karma (actions), we can’t be callous to any suffering and instead must elevate ourselves and others beyond the vicious cycle of pain and inevitable death. Rationalising our implication in any form of violence is dangerous and we risk remaining in that wheel that eventually crushes our every attempt to be happy and free.

lokah samasta sukhino bhavantu – “May every living being be happy and free.”

(Vedic aphorism)

So what’s still higher than that offering of organic and relatively less tainted milk? Well, now we’ve reached the pinnacle, which just so happens to have come full circle to what Srila Prabhupada set up in the first place, such was his broad vision for the future of society. That is milk obtained from cows on farms run by devotees, or people following the same strict principles of non-slaughter of animals (which includes not selling them to market as they must be looked after for their lives duration) – which are naturally ‘organic’ and not only do the cows not suffer violence and are allowed to live out their natural lives peacefully, the calves are never deprived of their share of milk and only the surplus is taken carefully and lovingly by hand, plus those cows are often purchased from farms where they would be destined for slaughter.

One could argue that purchasing such cows gives money to people who otherwise profit from killing cows and thus voting for them to continue, but I personally feel that in that case where the cow is ‘actually’ being saved and not just metaphysically then that is the greater good as opposed to giving money to cow killers simply to offer the tainted milk and let the poor cow still be slaughtered.

If I take your money, offer it to Krishna, and cut your throat, will you agree to the proposal? But that’s exactly the philosophy we’re propagating with ‘the cows get the benefit’ which seemed to come not from Srila Prabhupada, the most kind and compassionate soul this world has known for a long time, but probably from people with less than pure intentions and thinking who in the same way that the philosophy of selling practically anything other than Prabhupada’s books will benefit the buyer, yet His Divine Grace certainly didn’t cross the atlantic and suffer two heart attacks to distribute mundane bumper stickers! (to give just one example…)

“If all else fails, read the instructions!”

(Modern day aphorism)

So it seems the solution is indeed simple – go right back to the instruction that the Founder-Acharya of the movement stated unequivocally when he said that cows should be protected on farms that should strive for self sufficiency in ’simple living, high thinking’, and that milk should be distributed to the temples and restaurants to be used in prasadam distribution.

The question remains how practical that is at the present moment where few farms are able to provide such ‘ahimsa’ (cruelty free) dairy, so is the next option buying the milk we’ve talked about, or is it closer to the principle of cow protection and compassion to distribute vegan prasadam? The very fact that Prabhupada set up this system of cow protection which Krishna mentions as the occupation for farmers in the Bhagavad-gita, seems to defeat the philosophy of offering factory farmed milk for the benefit of the cows, since those cows are clearly suffering far more than the cows who are already saved more or less by living on a Krishna conscious farm.

If we did away with these type of farms more milk from suffering cows could be offered and that would surely seem more compassionate, yet exactly why Prabhupada set up cow protection renders that argument quite invalid and so when he talks about the benefit the cow gets by it’s milk being offered to the Deity of Krishna was he ever talking about the milk from cows going to be killed or did that idea creep in later for another reason? That remains to be seen.

A common reasoning heard is the idea that because of imperfection in implementing the varnashram system which solves all the problems of a society, we have to accept the next best thing. Granted, that’s logical and can gradually lead to an improvement in the situation, but is the ‘next best thing’ offering milk that heavily compromises our principles set forth in the Vedas or is it closer to that ideal to use non-animal foods instead.

It’s as if milk were 100% necessary in Vedic culture and we simply cannot live without it, which is absurd since many people can’t take it due to health reasons, and the main sacrifice in the Kali-yuga (current age of quarrel and hypocrisy) is the congregational chanting of the Maha-mantra (Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare / Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare) which doesn’t require it in the least.

And though the process of Deity service and fire sacrifices (offering food grains into the fire as ‘yagna’) seems to require it could those ingredients not be replaced with oils? Just because saintly persons in the past did things in a certain way doesn’t justify our blind following of tradition when situations change.

To illustrate this consider this hypothetical scenario: in the future all commercially grown palm oil necessarily causes the killing of orangutans in wild plantations (something which is already partially true in some areas). Now we could say ‘well, so and so saintly person used it’, yet we’d have to ask whether in that circumstance the same issue of killing was present, and how that same person would act now in consideration of a change in circumstances.

“In this chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra there is no impediment, even a child can do it or even a dog can do it [!]”

(Srila Prabhupada, lecture)

Prabhupada indeed used milk from other sources than ISKCON farms, but what he did in the earlier days of the society and what his vision and instruction for the future are two different things. Out of necessity Srila Prabhupada did many things to establish the society, but once it was established he would then add the principles which would be there for the duration of the movement. We wouldn’t suggest going back to the time when the four regulative principles weren’t yet established, as he clearly stressed their importance, yet we dare to say ‘Prabhupada did it’ in terms of using milk from outside sources instead of following his instructions how to progress.

The state of farms back in the 60’s and 70’s were also far from the situation today, so even at that time Prabhupada desired to have separate farms than ones that didn’t follow principles of a proper human civilisation, so what to speak of now when the industry has simply progressed further towards unnecessary cruelty? If we rationalise our position it means we don’t want to try to change it and assume it’s fine the way it stands, instead of at least being honest and admitting shortcomings that can pave the way for progress.

Those who don’t have much or any interaction with people living in the modern Western world, many of whom care deeply about animals and the environment and who have a growing interest in spirituality as the thread running through all these important issues, are not aware of their perceptions of our society and the glaring hypocrisies of supporting cruelty with half baked philosophies, and instead often demonise such people who in reality care enough about other beings to make a huge sacrifice in their lives.

And we dare to stand above such people and at the same time expect people to be attracted to our movement, as if we don’t want intelligent and caring people to come on board, some of the attitudes I’ve personally encountered are simply staggering! It all boils down to ignorance, which in turn can lead to arrogance and anger also which we must be careful to avoid the pitfalls of on the often precarious path of spirituality.

We may justify indulgence in yet another way that it’s ’sanctified’ therefore we need not be concerned with the origin of our food, ‘it’s Maha-prasadam’ (remnants of sacrifice from the Deity forms of Radha-Krishna) which can seem the unchallengable and final argument lest one dare to disrespect what is to be considered non-different to Lord Sri Krishna as is the communion wafer and wine in Christianity (the ‘body and blood of Christ’). But would a person avoiding all intoxication accept such an offering if it were presented?

How about meat from a Muslim that was ‘halal’ or from a Rabbi as ‘kosher’? Once as a vegetarian on an airline flight overseas I was offered yogurt as part of a lacto-vegetarian meal which contained ‘halal gelatine’ which the stewardess insisted was okay for me since it was ‘halal’. I gave up trying to explain how I couldn’t accept it and simply left it.

Now we’re putting a different perspective on things and making it interesting to think more deeply about… I personally have serious doubts that in any culture something that is clearly the product of violence (and not just incidental violence but conscious and intentional), could ever really become non-different to the body of God, the all merciful, but maybe I just lack that faith? But if that’s the case then meat could conceivably become similarly ‘blessed’ and thus fit to eat for any spiritual practitioner, correct?

We should know by now there’s not much difference these days between the two, and the strict avoidance of eggs by devotees yet open acceptance of modern dairy is exactly why this age is the age of hypocrisy. I’ve seen mistakes happen in offerings such as fish oil in milk or gelatine in yogurt getting right onto the altar, and begs the question – when we find out do we still consider it to be ‘offered’ and thus bona-fide and in line with being ‘vegetarian’ (a term which has to be qualified with the prefix ‘lacto’ or ‘lacto-ovo’ to include consumption of dairy and/or eggs respectively, since vegetarian means pertaining to foods of vegetable origin)?

I certainly don’t think so, and if avoiding eating it is offensive in God’s eyes then so would not eating food grains offered to the Deities on the Eakadasi fast day each fortnight of the waxing and waning lunar cycle, which deems grains and legumes to contain heavy karma – even after being offered to Krishna. Honouring the prasadam can be done with folded palms not simply by eating, and so doing eliminates the question of whether we’re eating it as an honouring of God’s mercy, or do we just enjoy the taste?

It can be painfully apparent what our motives are at times yet we must ask ourselves these questions to progress, and the same reasons that meat eaters can’t seem to give up flesh become the exact same ones lacto-vegetarians don’t give up dairy – ‘it’s too extreme’ (no, torturing and killing millions of animals for food certainly is though), ‘we need the vitamins and calcium’ (just as we need the protein from meat, right?), ‘everyone else drinks milk here’ (and practically the whole world eats meat, so is it safety in numbers, or just illusion in numbers?), ‘Prabhupada did it’ (no, he did not, that was then, this is now, we’re not Srila Prabhupada, and he was never callous to suffering). We can go on indefinitely making such comparisons, but I think we should have grasped this simple point.

“The problems of the world we bitch about will decrease when we stop contributing to them. If we scream for change we must be willing to make that change. As individuals take up responsibility for their lives society gradually changes. This is the panacea for our so called civilisation.”

(Ray/Raghunath Cappo, intro to Shelter’s ‘Mantra’ album insert)

Yet, there is great hope. Times are changing and the more progressive members of society are open minded enough to accept change when it’s required, just as Prabhupada made great changes despite criticism from conservative people who failed to understand the essence of the movement and what was required to spread it, and exploring those avenues instead of clinging to tradition is what is going to push the boundaries of the society and open up this revolutionary shift in consciousness to an ever wider audience.

With the push to make Food for Life vegan, the opening of vegan prasadam restaurants across the USA, and Ahimsa farms being established in the UK and other areas distributing dairy which has a gulf of difference to it, these are just some of the inspirational projects for the future of Krishna consciousness. Prasadam is the secret weapon of mercy to help uplift all fallen souls back to the eternal blissful position, and in an age where people genuinely care about animals and knowledge of their plight is no longer behind so many closed doors, vegan prasadam is a revolutionary concept and a healthier one too.

The idea that prasadam goes beyond mere veganism is something people will be able to grasp as long as hypocrisy isn’t present, as offering food in sacrifice to acknowledge and neutralise the violence there even in plant foods doesn’t quite add up when violently obtained dairy is present – sort of like one step forward two steps back I feel. First things first, to obtain products with a minimum of violence, then recognise that endeavour cannot be perfectly free from fault, yet by sincerely offering that foodstuff any discrepancies will surely be reconciled when Sri Krishna is pleased.

And as the demand for cruelty free dairy increases by people who become more aware of the facts, the supply can be funded more and more and pave the way for sustainable and ethical farms of the future of which ISKCON could be at the forefront in this crucial time. No devotee will argue that Prabhupada didn’t stress the importance of milk, and though the nutrients such as B12 and Omega that nourish the brain and maintain equilibrium aren’t exclusively contained in milk alone, it is a miracle food but only from a good source otherwise the bad may outweigh the good in terms of the heavy karma, additives and hormones, cholesterol etc.

And if we profess to have nourished the finer brain cells we should be able to grasp these points easily otherwise what’s the value of that nourishment? I became a devotee from a vegan lifestyle and didn’t have a problem understanding so we have to see these things in context and realise how much closer a vegan is to liberation than a meat eater and open up the options for such people instead of shutting them off simply in the name of tradition.

Certainly India consumes a lot of dairy but more recently many are becoming lactose intolerant, from the wrongly sourced dairy or from too much (isn’t the standard a hot glass of raw milk before bed, not every preparation soaked in so much dairy it triples our cholesterol?!), and since there is no impediment to bhakti if someone for health reasons can’t take dairy that cannot stop their devotion to Krishna one iota.

People in this century have become increasingly health conscious, so overweight devotees raised on ghee soaked pooris, halava swimming in butter, and a few too many ice creams, are surely not the example people are looking to be inspired by, and the threat of losing devotees to strokes and other conditions related to cholesterol is still worse. And it seems our only problem is an attachment to food ‘the way it’s always been’ yet periodically we have to step back and take a look and reassess things in the light of newfound wisdom, and not be afraid to criticise anyone least of all ourselves if it’s going to bring about a greater good.

“I am asking you to fight, to fight against their anger, not to provoke it. We will not strike a blow. But we will receive them, and through our pain we will make them see our injustice, and it will hurt, as all fighting hurts. But we cannot lose. We cannot.”

(Mahatma Gandhi)

The only thing remaining for me to say is what to do in the meantime with temples that are using products that compromise the philosophy? Far from me to say what direction anyone should decide to take but what I can say without doubt is that when we recognise anything that may be wrong and make even slow but certain steps to improve it, we allow ourselves to become empowered to do amazing things rather than remain stuck in a paradigm simply because for so long it worked for us even if it’s failing to do so now.

It certainly doesn’t seem absolutely necessary to even offer Krishna dairy if we can’t obtain the ideal produce, as shown by progressive centres in the US paving the way forward. Personally, if someone offered me a meal without dairy I’d be happier than accepting a maybe more palatable one with ingredients that I consider to contravene one of our basic principles, just as we sacrifice so many pleasures of this world for the greater good. And since Krishna is a person we should treat him as such and not offer anything substandard, but try our best to give the best we can and continually ponder the question that does Krishna love his milk more than his cows?

Peace, love and prasadam!

Your servant, Vijaya-Gauranga das.

TAKE ACTION:

• Refuse to buy factory farmed dairy and products derived from it and thus stop supporting the cow killers

• Find and support ISKCON and related farms that protect cows by purchasing their milk thus increasing demand for it

• Tell your local vegetarian restaurant or ashram to make vegan options available or use milk from cruelty free sources if possible

• Find alternatives to dairy in cooking and puja such as vegetable ghee if ahimsa milk isn’t available

• Tell everyone you know to make the next step towards a cruelty free world by shunning all cruelly obtained dairy products - start a blog, web forum, magazine etc or simply talk to people and inform them of the issues

• Host vegan dinners or feasts at your home to show the practicality of cruelty free food or distribute prasadam without factory dairy

Related articles and websites:

http://www.ahimsamilk.org

Food for Life dairy info page: http://www.ffl.org/ffl_pf_iskcon_milk.php

The Vegan and The Vedas: http://www.krishnacore.com/articles_interviews/articles/the_vegan_and_the_vedas.html

H.H. Hridayananda das Goswami on veganism: http://environmentkrishna.wordpress.com/category/veganism/

H.H. Sivarama Swami ‘Not Vegans, Cow Protectors’ article: http://www.dandavats.com/?p=4063

By Katja Thimm for www.spiegel.de on 19 Aug 2010
Image: gstuff.co.nz

Jonathan Safran Foer used to love his grandmother's chicken and carrots. But after his son was born, the bestselling American author decided to give up meat.
Like German author Karen Duve, who is also writing a book about eating ethically, Foer is trying to make the world a better place.

It was a magical moment when Jonathan Safran Foer decided to find out the truth about meat.

The author had just become a father a few minutes earlier, and now he was watching his son suckling at his wife's breast. The newborn's instinct to immediately recognize the correct food source filled him with an unfamiliar sense of reverence. Jonathan Safran Foer was a man with a new responsibility, and he was determined to do everything within his power to make sure that this child would eat the right kind of food in the future.

Foer spent three years researching the subject. He knew that he would discover a different reality than the one portrayed by the animals in the picture books he would look at with his son on the sofa. But the scope of the horror that reality had in store for him was unexpected. He decided that he would raise his child without meat.

Here are five examples, five of the hundreds Foer unearthed during his research:

Industrial-scale poultry farmers inject birds with "broths" and salty solutions, so that they look plump in the store and their meat is more flavorful.
Hog farmers cut off the teeth of piglets and rip out their testicles -- without anesthesia.
In tuna fishing, 145 other species -- fish, birds and mammals -- are also caught in the nets, where they die and are subsequently tossed back into the ocean.
Factory farming accounts for between 18 and 51 percent -- depending on the study -- of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest offenders are cows, which release methane during digestion. Methane is 23 times as harmful to the climate as CO2.
Some factory farms are so big that they produce more excrement every day than some major cities.

The Search for a Better Life

"As a father, I was confronted with realities that, as a writer, I couldn't keep to myself," says Foer today. The 33-year-old author wrote a book about the horrors of factory farming, which triggered passionate debates about food and nutrition in the United States. His son is now four years old and has a brother, and the rights to "Eating Animals" have been sold in 16 countries. The German-language version, "Tiere Essen," appears in bookstores in Germany on August 19.

Foer shocked hundreds of thousands of people with his book, and for a time the author received angry emails on a daily basis, from people calling him a jerk and complaining that they couldn't eat meat anymore after having read his book.

It's the author's first non-fiction book. Foer, who has published two novels, one about Jewish identity ("Everything Is Illuminated") and one about the 9/11 attacks ("Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"), is considered an exceptionally talented young writer in the United States. In "Eating Animals," he brings together anecdotes, facts, news coverage and correspondence. He describes breaking into a chicken farm, offers accounts of organic farmers and writes about how his inquiries to major meat producers went unanswered. It is an unsettling and moving document -- the account of a man's search for a better life.

Before long, Foer was thinking about more than just his son. He was thinking about the entire world.

Read more: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,71...

Read more:http://news.iskcon.com/node/3077/2010-08-27/eating_well_giving_up_meat_for_a_better_world#ixzz0xsQ12acT

UNITED STATES, April 2010: “Why do they have to stick ham on even a salad?!” lamented Ishani Mehta, daughter of Hindu American Foundation (HAF) supporters Bijal and Aseem Mehta, over the fact that healthy, vegetarian options were not available daily at her school cafeteria. Well, next week is your chance to speak up by urging your congressional representative to pass H.R. 4870, the Healthy School Meals Act.

Whether your family is vegetarian or not, a varied and balanced diet is essential to good health. If we do not take responsibility in managing the health of our children, they will be left managing their disease as adults. Especially for the South Asian community, a predisposition to insulin resistance, adoption of a western diet compounded by increasingly sedentary lifestyles leads to weight gain, higher prevalence of diabetes, and coronary heart disease.

H.R. 4870 aims to improve children’s eating patterns by encouraging the inclusion of healthful plant-based options in the National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs. This legislation will introduce plant-based foods to schools, increase the availability and affordability of these foods, and provide incentives for schools to provide daily plant-based options. Visit http://healthyschoollunches.org/ to learn more about the effort.

HAF is also proud to announce its recent partnership with the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) and bring to light the importance of a Hindu perspective on the ethical treatment of animals. The Foundation’s statement highlights the core Hindu belief that the Divine resides in all living beings, both human and non-human, and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.

courtesy of Hinduism Today  http://www.hinduismtoday.com

By Radha Mohan Dasa for Bhaktivedanta Manor Newsletter on 22 Aug 2009

Last May ISKCON Wales opened its new prasadam (sanctified vegetarian food) distribution factory, called Govindas Foods Ltd.

The factory produces a special vegan and gluten-free ‘cheesecake’, soon to be followed by quiche and lasagna - both vegan and gluten-free.

The ISKCON Wales project aims to increase the choice of vegan and gluten-free products available to consumers across the country. The cheesecakes will be available in 415 Holland and Barrett health food stores across the UK. The initial production will be around 6,000 cheesecakes a week.

In addition to investment from the Welsh congregation the project has been supported financially by the Welsh Assembly and Bhaktivedanta Manor.

NEW YORK (AFP) - In a television advert that could kill your appetite, an overweight, middle-aged man is seen lying dead in a morgue holding a half-eaten hamburger as a woman weeps over the linen-clad body.

McDonald's ubiquitous golden arches then trace the dead man's feet with the text "I was lovin' it," a stinging pun on the fast-food chain's long-running slogan "I'm lovin' it."

A voiceover says, "high cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart attacks. Tonight, make it vegetarian."

Produced by Washington-based health lobby Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the commercial is set to be aired in Washington DC during the popular The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Thursday.

PCRM says it is also considering running it in Chicago, Detroit, Houston and Los Angeles

The ad "takes aim at McDonalds high-fat menu, with the goal of drawing Washingtonians' attention to the citys high rates of heart disease deaths and its high density of fast-food restaurants," PCRM said in a statement.

Studies show that people who consume fast food are at a higher risk for obesity, a factor contributing to heart disease, it said.

But the ad enraged McDonald's.

"This commercial is outrageous, misleading and unfair to all consumers. McDonald's trusts our customers to put such outlandish propaganda in perspective, and to make food and lifestyle choices that are right for them," spokeswoman Bridget Coffing said.

PCRM said its survey showed that Washington has more McDonald's, Burger King, and KFC outlets per square mile than eight other cities with similar population sizes.

McDonald's, the world's largest restaurant chain, has nevertheless seen its earnings grow in recent months despite the global economic crunch, as it has wheeled out a range of alternatives to its famous burgers.
On Friday, the chain reported its same-store sales for August were up 4.9 per cent globally year-on-year.

3 October 2010

Christine O'Donnell is opposed to kindness to animals and sensible mathematics?

WILMINGTON, Delaware -- Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell once told a TV interviewer that she tried many religions, including Necrophilism, Cannibalism, and Voodoo, but skipped the Hare Krishna religion - a sect of Hinduism - because she didn't want to be vegetarian.

Bill Maher aired the clip of that July 9, 1999, interview with O'Donnell on Friday night on his show "Real Time with Bill Maher." The short clip was from an interview on the comedian's former show "Politically Incorrect."

O'Donnell tells Maher that she had dabbled in "every other kind of religion,” before becoming a Christian. She recited a list of religions she had tried, including Necrophilism, Cannibalism, Allaism, Jesusism, Voodooism, Voidism, Atheism, Agnosticism, Humorism, and Scientologism.

With a laugh, she said: "I would have become a Hare Krishna, but I didn't want to become a vegetarian. And that is honestly the reason why, because I'm Italian and I love meatballs." She went on to clarify, “In fact, I am firmly against kindness to animals. I pay the money to the grocer who pays the meat packing plant. He pays the butcher. So just see how many jobs would be lost if we become kind to animals?”

A spokesperson for the Hare Krishna religion said, “Killing animals, apart from being cruel, is also a great polluter of the atmosphere and environment. It’s wasteful, and makes no mathematical sense!” They went on, “Alright, listen up Christians. If you have X number of acres of land, and you cultivate 40 tons of soy beans, then you have 40 tons of edible protein, without harming anyone. But if you feed those 40 tons of vegetarian food to your livestock, then you end up with only 4 tons of ready-to-cook corpse-meat. Plus you have the extra expense of maintaining the animals prior to murder, almost always in extremely inhumane conditions. Do the math!”

It's the third clip of O'Donnell that Maher has shown since she won her state's GOP primary last month. Reached by phone, O'Donnell campaign spokesman Chris Motorola had no comment, but almost said, “Ms O’Donnell states for the record that she is opposed to kindness, and all for bloodshed in the name of commerce! Further more, and in view of her fetish, she has finally embraced Christianity because she thinks that the sight of a person nailed to a cross, covered in blood, is highly erotic.”

A spokesperson for the Hare Krishna religion simply concluded, “Well, she’s what we call a ‘meatball’!”

by Suzanne Rose

Restaurants have much to benefit from offering vegetarian meals.  Sometimes even offering just a single item can make a big difference.  They should consider the following advantages.

A vegetarian will come to your restaurant

If you offer nothing at all for a vegetarian, then you are obviously not likely to get many.  Even if they can offer side dishes such as potatoes, this is still not the same thing.  Many vegetarians will be frustrated by this and choose not to come back.  You can lose money on their business.

It is not just the business of the actual vegetarian that you will lose.   Let's say there is a big family of ten people that includes one vegetarian.  If you have nothing for them, then the entire party might not come there.  Thus it can impact your business far beyond the one person.

A lot of people like to eat vegetarian at times

Even if someone is not a vegetarian, they might still choose these menu items.  Some people eat less meat outside the house.  Sometimes the vegetarian meals are a healthier option that is good for someone on a diet.  For instance, a veggie burger is usually much healthier than a regular burger.  Some people just like the taste.

There are many that are easy to make

It is usually easy to adapt something you have to offer a vegetarian meal.  For instance, if you offer pasta, then you can just offer a meal that is pasta with a vegetarian sauce.  It is easy to get vegetarian burgers and just keep them in a freezer. You just need to heat them up and you can add them to whatever regular burgers you offer.  Some places that offer a lot of burgers will even let you change any of them for a veggie burger.

They are usually not as expensive as other meals

It is obviously cheaper to offer the exact same pasta dish without the meat added.  Many other vegetarian options are cheaper than meat as well.  Most restaurants do charge a little less, but you can oftentimes make a relatively large amount on these meals.

Offering a salad is not the same as offering a true vegetarian meal.  Just as most people would not consider a salad (without meat) as a meal, then many vegetarians would not as well. It can also be helpful to offer a vegan meal as well for those in that category.  Offering several vegetarian  meals gives people choices and might also be useful.  You might see the above advantages with these selections.

See similar articles at Vegetarianism & Beyond:
http://turn.to/Vegetarianism

A man once told his friend that sugar-cane tastes nice and sweet when you chew it up.  The friend did not know what sugar-cane was, and so he asked the man.  He was told that it was "just like a bamboo log."  The foolish friend then began to chew different kinds of bamboo sticks, but he could never taste the sweetness.

MORAL:  Similarly, materialists are trying to find happiness and pleasure by enjoying the material body, but they find no real happiness or pleasure.

See similar inspirational snippets HERE:
http://www.hknet.org.nz/parables.htm

The phaomnneil pweor of the hmuan mnid: Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig!
Mybae the I can sotp slpel ckchenig?

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Vegetarianism in the major Religions - All manner of religions
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The Peace Formula - (By HDG Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada) http://www.hknet.org.nz/PeaceFormula.html

.........many other articles - http://www.hknet.org.nz/index-articles.htm

and from there go to the Main Index http://www.hknet.org.nz/index.htm

Iskcon News Articles now available - many topical insights
http://www.iskcon.com/new/index.html

Paradigms - where things are not all they seem

 The Peace Formula
http://www.hknet.org.nz/PeaceFormula.html

The Real Peace Formula
http://www.hknet.org.nz/PeaceRealF.html

See more on Yoga and Meditation HERE:
http://www.hknet.org.nz/index-yoga.html

World Vegetarian Day October 1st yearly &
World Vegetarian Awareness Month of October yearly
...please visit our links and see what you can do to help

World Smoke Free Day
31st May Every Year 

http://www.be-free.org/b-media/market-bfree03/cinema.php

yeah kick the butt
...and remember from 10th December 2004 no more smoking in public places in New Zealand by law