Newsletter Archive

"The Bhagavad Gita says: “Like a man discards his worn out clothes and wears new ones, so does the soul discard this body and acquire a new one” (2.22). This makes it clear that the individual soul or jiva is different from this body....Inside the gross there is another body, known as the ‘sukshma sharira’. It is not visible to any of the sense organs....The subtle body does not die....Therefore, the jiva is different from both the subtle and gross bodies. Indeed, Avidya is the causal body since it is the cause of our falling continuously into the cycle of birth and death. Therefore, it is through overcoming our Avidya, the root cause of all our miseries, that we can ensure of never again falling into the clutches of the gross and subtle bodies..."

Maa Durga, the divine Mother Goddess, is worshipped as both a loving protector and a fierce warrior. Known as Shakti, she embodies cosmic energy and the power to destroy evil. From slaying Mahishasura to blessing devotees during Navratri and Durga Puja, her story reflects strength, devotion, and victory of good over evil. Maa Durga is revered as the universal Mother Goddess who nurtures and protects her devotees. She is identified with Shakti—the divine feminine energy that sustains the universe. As a compassionate mother, she grants blessings, strength, and guidance to those who seek her refuge.

"The source of all activity in an inert body is an animate free will....But why should one worship gods?....Can you spell out clearly what exactly is the mechanism between our puja and the fulfillment of our desires?....There is also confusion regarding the gods.....However, Rama and Krishna did not face any such situation.....Majority of the people indulge in idol worship; but some do not agree with it. Is idol worship right or wrong?....Suppose you bring home a person for whom you have great love and respect.....Such doubts may appear when we one worships God out of fear."

"Due to our deep-rooted ignorance, there is a wide gap between what we believe ourselves to be and what we actually are....What are the qualities in a guru which make us seek the science of salvation from him? How should we approach such a guru?....The primary reason why we are unable to obtain a guru like this is our inability to understand that there is no other path to Moksha than the one delineated in the scriptures....The service we are able to offer to our guru is the sincerest reflection of the genuineness of our commitment."

"Immense is Ganga’s mystique and sanctifying power....Ganga makes every Indian feel her presence in his ears....Represents Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva working as one unit in Ganga’s emergence on the earth....The world would be washed off if her current fell direct on the earth and asked him to persuade Shiva to hold her upon his head when she descended ....The river Ganges holds great cultural and religious significance in Hinduism, with the river personifying the divine feminine energy and representing purity and spiritual renewal. Despite facing environmental challenges, the Ganges remains an important lifeline for millions of people, highlighting the importance of preserving and protecting the river's ecological health and cultural heritage.

"He is known for observing complete celibacy so much so that the popular tradition in some parts of the country barred women from visiting his shrines....Brahma appeared and granted him the boon that he would not be killed by anyone exceeding the age of seven days....Filled with fresh hopes only the other day gods challenged demons for war....Once Indra received reports of the birth of a child who was as effulgent as the rising sun....She infused herself in all women with the result that in every woman’s face Karttikeya saw the face of his mother."

The depth of the faith people have in the Vedas is amazing. This is not restricted to India where such a faith is universal, expressed one way or the other. Even in foreign lands we see many men and women diligently trying to establish Vedic traditions in their native places. It is obvious that there is no penalty for them for not following the Vedic rules; even then, they continue to work hard to try and obey them. The roots of the Vedas are thus too deep and tenacious to be judged only summarily.

The Vedas are unanimous in declaring God as the Supreme Soul (Param Atma), who is infinite (ananta). However, the most potent Vedic statements also declare: 'You are That' (Tat Tvam Asi), meaning that the individual soul is none other than the Supreme Soul. This naturally presents a problem. The individual soul, as we know it, is inevitably linked to our physical body. Therefore, there is no way that it can exceed the size of the body and share God's infinitude. How then can it be equated to the Supreme Soul? This problem can perhaps be solved if we are able to pinpoint the exact size of the individual soul (jiva atma).

"Hearing these contradictory statements, the man concluded that the woman was very impatient....We therefore see that the scriptures have described God in both ways....We must realize that even though a wound is harmful for the one possessing it, it is not so for the worm who finds shelter and nourishment....We go to somebody and ask him what is gold?....This is the only faultless theory....Here we see that these are not different mantras giving contradictory versions, but same mantras presenting apparently conflicting perceptions of God."

"For the clear understanding of the nature of God, we have to filter out the camouflage....There are adjectives which qualify God using negative terms....God is Truth, Knowledge and Endless....., God, remains unchanged, even as the world changes every moment.....: When you eat food lacking in salt, you can immediately pinpoint its absence. What this means is that you can taste its absence....Prahlada the supreme bhakta had realized that the supreme God was present everywhere....We have now successfully filtered out God from this world."

"In the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna makes a promise to Arjuna....It is this Maya, which, during creation, takes on the form of the world....The Bhagavad Gita uses the word Maya four times, and its synonym Prakriti more than 20 times...... Inspired by these emotions, we perform more and more karma to bring that which we like near us, and push what we dislike away from us....Maya thus presents the cause as an effect having a nature different from the cause....Even if we have pondered on this question, have we still not failed to overcome our intense physical desires?....In India women are named after Maya, considering it to be sacred."

"According to the ancient scriptures, God is at once all the three causes of the world....This would amount to saying that Devadatta eats himself, which is obviously absurd....Therefore, your God is partial....When ornaments melt back into gold, their attributes do not contaminate it....For such skeptics, an example from modern science will suffice....Therefore, here we have an example where an effect doesn’t have a property existing in its cause..."

"Thus did the compassionate Lord grant the demon Moksha, exactly as He does to high-class yogis....Due to their intense love for Him, all the cowherds boys wanted to face Krishna.....Brahma is the master of intellect. That is why he is shown with a beard, which signifies his experience in worldly matters and wisdom.....Blessed are the ladies who taste the sweet nectar of His lips, the mere memories of which made the young gopis of Vrindavana faint with ecstasy....There is no use displaying one’s mathematical skills in front of a grammarian....Brahma jumped down from his royal chariot and rolled in the dust of Vrindavana, touching each of his four Vedic crowns one by one at Krishna’s feet.....The silence of the Lord speaks louder than His words."

"A myth is a broad truth in regard to an event or a set of beings, men, animals or others....This world does not accept dividers, those dividing man from woman, man from animal, or live from dead, nor accepts the scale of time fragmented into past, present and future....The legend of the Great Flood is a part of many other traditions of the ancient world....Virabhadra, Lord Shiva’s son born of his sublime wrath, and one of his guards and generals, is a rare character from Indian mythology in which a weakness, such as anger, sublimates into a divine form....Among traditions related to emergence of Devi a more popular one, perhaps as popular as the one that contends that Devi is beyond time and beyond form."

"Too independent to be in a wife’s frame, besides gender they have in them little which is consort-like....They are individualistic in nature, yet their identity better reveals as a group....The broad meaning of the term ‘Mahavidya’ is ‘great knowledge’. In its wider sense the term might be taken to mean complete, supreme, absolute, or ultimate knowledge....Ten mantras are ten manifestations of the deity – the Divine Female....As regards the origin of Mahavidyas, the tradition has five myths in prevalence....Frightened Shiva tried to flee from one direction to other but a burst of laughter obstructed him on every side, and dismayed and frightened he submitted. To further ensure that he did not slip the woman, obviously Sati’s transform, filled all directions around him with ten different forms....Not merely in the Buddhist myths that portray Tara as the goddess of tempestuous seas helping the masses wade their path to safety and redemption, even in Hindu and Jain traditions she is revered as the goddess who guides out of troubles and all kinds of turmoil."

"Dalai Lama, an epithet used for the first time in 1578 by the Mongol ruler Altan Khan for Sonam Gyatso, the Third Dalai Lama....The Tibetan mind was thus naturally inclined to the bodhisattva-cult....The first four Dalai Lamas represented only the preparatory stage in the growth of the institution which manifested fully in the Fifth Dalai Lama....Three reincarnate Dalai Lamas died very early, the Ninth dying at the age of just nine....The Thirteenth Dalai Lama, a leader greater than the great, faced the ever gravest challenges posed mainly by Russia, China and Britain designing to grab Tibet.....Dalai Lama represents the continuous flow of the being that the Buddhist tradition identifies as Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara....In the scheme of this essay a brief account of the historic deeds and the life of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, the One who benefits the world today with his divine presence, had to be its part."

"Rama instructed Hanuman to establish the mountain near the banks of the river Yamuna at Vrindavana, where in His Krishna avatara He would play with his bare feet....So than sprung from the feet of Govardhana, the river Ganga, known as Manasi Ganga....Krishna initiated one of the most fascinating of all His Lilas....Overflowing with emotion, the residents of Vrindavana rushed to Him. Many of them embraced Him....God’s Lila doesn’t fulfill only a single purpose....Krishna’s mother Yashoda too got wind of the conversation. Consequently, there started blowing in her mind winds of doubt....Krishna always lives in the eyes of the gopis of Vrindavana....God’s exceptional love for cows is made amply evident in this Lila."

"Beauty in context to art is a vision of the mind that the artist translates into a form, or rather into a transform beyond such form’s actual dimensions....The Indian maxim ‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram’ perceives beauty as the manifestation of the ultimate truth and the highest good, and at the same time conjointly all three are the attributes of the Supreme....Indian vision of beauty combining aestheticism with theology deifies beauty and perceives it enshrining all forms, divine or ephemeral, live or dead, or even those that common mind considers awful or ugly....The peacock’s legend is one of its best examples....This magnification of the cult of adornment is obviously metaphoric....Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra gave to the Indian art, especially temple-sculptures, across the land for many centuries its timeless imagery thriving with the vigour of life."

Sita, the term literally meaning ‘furrow’, the line made by plough, is the Vedic name of the goddess associated with the ploughed fields....It was for her emergence from fire that Sita is sometimes alluded to as Agnija....This gives Sita her name Raktaja, one born of blood.....Sita represents absolute devotion, unshakable faith, chastity, service, constant companionship and a desire to help accomplish his cause, besides her unique divinity with which blends the highest kind of womanhood....When Rama feared that the forest life, and that too for fourteen years, would be difficult for Sita, she relieves him of his reluctance by telling him that astrologers, considering the position of planets at the time of her birth, had predicted that she would pass a part of her life in the forest."

"Light is the endless celebration, the man’s as also nature’s....The so far known earliest text that alludes to celebrating a night with multitudinous lights – a kind of the festival of light, is the Kama-Sutra by sage Vatsyayana....Some astrological studies have established that the day of Rama’s return to Ayodhya was the same as the one on which Dipawali is celebrated....The Skanda Purana links Dipawali celebrations with the destruction of the demon king Bali and Vishnu’s incarnation as Vamana, the Dwarf....celebrations stretch into a group of at least five minor festivals and thus Dipawali is a festival of composite nature. The first of them is Dhana-Terasa....Lakshmi is unanimously revered as the presiding deity of Dipawali.... Dipawali begins its rituals with the joint worship of Lakshmi and Ganesh, one representing the primordial energy and the other who channeled it into creative process by controlling detriments."

"Barahmasa, is the ‘songs of twelve months'....Inter-action-reaction of nature’s phenomena and human emotions.... The classification of the annual cycle into six ritus was more sensitive and minute. It was around then that a kind of inter-relationship between the changes of nature and man’s emotional world was first recorded.....Whatever their source, the Great Epics are the earliest reported poetry to comprise season descriptions....The passage begins with the description of the river’s beauty to which is added the description of Basant and Rama’s love-longings....Nature description is the core of many of Kalidasa’s works – Kumarasambhava, Meghdoot, Raghuvansa among others; however it evolves in its fullest accomplished form in the Ritu-samhara.....Not only literature, miniature painting and even music have resorted to the Barahmasa model for seeking in it narrative continuity, vivid imagery, intense emotions."

"One should never cultivate the habit of receiving too much respect or honor....It was with reluctance that I gave away my delicate young daughter to him in marriage....Sati Devi, the wife of Shiva, observed numerous airplanes carrying heavily ornamented beautiful women along with their spouses....One should never go the houses of those who look upon the visitor with a frown and angry looks....She burst out into copious tears and with her body trembling looked askance at Shiva as if to burn him down....Concentrating on the lotus feet of her beloved Lord Shiva, she became completely absorbed and lost track of everything else....However the gods and sages were still fearful of facing Shiva....It will find rest only on the shore of absolute faith."

The Dashavatara, or ten avatars of Lord Vishnu, represent divine descents that restore balance in times of chaos. Spanning from fish to future warrior, these avatars mirror both cosmic cycles and human evolution, blending myth, moral insight, and spiritual depth. Each incarnation from Matsya to Kalki offers timeless teachings on dharma, transformation, and inner awakening. This guide explores their meanings, symbolism, and cultural relevance for today’s spiritual seekers and curious minds alike.

"The dark waters of the child Vishnu’s myth transform into the grown-up Vishnu’s ocean of milk abounding in unique radiance..... Hence, Vishnu is not a mere sanctum deity or worshippers’ idol but also a deep cosmo-metaphysical principle that defines on one hand the principle of evolution, and on the other, manifests the Rig-Vedic theory of God’s oneness and unity of the cosmos....He is the only divinity whom the Rig-Veda seeks to personalise....His seated postures are rare except sometimes as in his manifestation as Yoga-Narayana, or in shrines like one at Badrinatha....Vishnu is believed to have abandoned Baikuntha and migrated to Tirumala, a hill-range in south India."