Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #5 – Logos, Logic, and Prasādam

January 27th, 2025

Logos, Logic, and Prasādam[1]

Have you ever gone on a “word journey”? I made the term up, but I really think it is an apropos name for my engagement with the word “logos”. That journey began when I heard it used in a particular context in a lecture and was inspired to begin a search for the root of its meaning. I then began a correspondence about the term with a friend who is a professor of Philosophy. I thought a lot about it since and feel that I gained some very important and practical insights from that journey that I would like to share.

Here is the basic notion of logos, as my friend presented it in our conversation:

“Originally, ‘logos’ meant something like rationale, reasoning, or account. So if you gave a speech or made a case for something that would be your logos. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus adapted it to be the term for a divine world order, the ordering of the world around a rational principle. So, if you were in touch with the fundamental logos, then you could see the world in harmony. If not, it would seem confused and disjointed. Christian authors adapted this idea to say that the logos is God’s divine will that orders the world. And when they say, “Jesus is the WORD,” “WORD” translates “logos” from Greek.”

Now let me summarize what I learned from this journey about the meaning of logos.

  1. The universe is rationally ordered according to God’s plan.
  2. When you act according to His plan there is harmony.
  3. When you act against this order there is chaos and suffering.
  4. God’s rational plan for the universal order is expressed in words. Such knowledge is called Veda or based on śāstra (scripture.)
  5. Therefore the most important service in society is to create order by the clear conceptualization and expression of knowledge that creates peace and harmony.

Based on these principles I also came up with what I think is a reasonable definition of logos that I need to share before explaining my insights: the divine rational order of the world and the knowledge or words that express that. Now I will share the practical insights I gained from this study.

Every year I host a retreat in Puri, which is where I am writing this article now. I take pains to organize every detail of the retreat because I have the strong conviction that there is a way or “order” to do things and when executed properly there is harmony and ultimately happiness. While overseeing the retreat in this way I realized how connected this type of effort is to the concept of logos that I was meditating on. The activity of the retreat that best struck me as a way to highlight this correlation was the serving of prasādam. In that regard, I have made an outline below showing that correlation:

Prasādam Serving and Logos at the Puri Yātrā

  1. The universe is rationally ordered according to God’s plan.

There is a right way to serve prasādam that I learned by living in India for over forty years. I believe even practical details like this are ultimately embedded in logos or the divine rational order of the universe.

  1. When you act according to His plan there is harmony.

The prasādam was served properly and people thus enjoyed the prasādam without anxiety in addition to feeling served or loved in the process.

  1. When you act against this order there is chaos and world suffering.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen, but just one person who serves improperly would have impeded the quick and gracious flow of serving and caused anxiety.

  1. God’s rational plan for the universal order is expressed in words. Such knowledge is called Veda or based on śāstra (scripture).

There is a proper way to serve prasādam that is carried down in word or oral tradition in India that I learned from observing the beauty and efficiency of the process by living there for over forty years.

  1. Therefore the most important service in society is to create order by the clear conceptualization and expression of knowledge that creates peace and harmony.

Before we began I personally instructed the servers on the proper method to serve prasādam. I then carefully supervised the serving to make sure they understood how to do it properly. Notice that we have used language and verbal directions inspired and directed by divine order to create harmony and peace.

Below are just a few of the main principles I emphasized.

  1. The cook will instruct people how much to serve of each item and in what order.
  2. The servers will carefully and quickly place the modest amount directed by the cook on people’s plates in a pleasant mood of service and move on to the next person.
  3. Ideally the servers should move in a way so they can serve quickly. Best therefore if they can remain bent at the waist so they can proceed without having to bend again and again slowing and impeding the serve out. At all costs they should not put the bucket down to engage with any person disrupting the flow of service.
  4. If people sitting are not conversant in the culture of prasādam serving and demand huge helpings when we first go around, politely tell them that seconds will come, or if they insist just give them a little more and move on.
  5. Remember that the joy of prasādam is not just the sensual experience but also the exchange of love that people feel when being served nicely, which means efficiently and graciously.

The result of following guidelines in serving prasādam is that it is served quickly, graciously, without waste and peacefully. Doing it with these principles in mind not only pleases the devotees but also invokes Krishna’s grace on the assembly. Of course this is just one example, but the principle remains in all activities – that if things are done properly reflecting an order that is imbedded within the universe by God there will be harmony.

Conclusion: By tapping into the proper ordering of things, and by properly instructing those who are willing to learn about the proper ordering of things, we can be centered on the Lord’s will in any activity and create harmony and joy for our self and others.
 


[1] Please excuse me for the second reprint in a row, which is very rare for me. But I am fully immersed in leading and teaching in our 19th annual Puri retreat and don’t have a minute to spare. One additional service I have is that at the retreat I personally take charge of serving the prasādam in a more traditional way. This article explains why and is distributed to anyone who wants to assist me.

 

Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #4 – Believers and the Elephant in the Room: Tackling the Challenge of Evil

January 20th, 2025

Believers and the Elephant in the Room: Tackling the Challenge of Evil [1]

At the age of twenty-one Jeff, my youngest cousin, was mercilessly beaten to death by the local police in a Midwest jail for no reason. His crime: He had asthma and was Jewish. From what the family could gather, it was Jeff’s first day of law school and due to his asthma, he sat near the window in the library to help with his breathing. When the school librarian told him to move because the window seats were reserved for upperclassmen, he refused due to his health and out of principle; the place was nearly empty. When he repeatedly denied the librarian’s demands she summoned the local police. They eagerly hauled off this city boy from Los Angeles to jail, and unfortunately he never again saw the light of day again. He died in jail. His parents and his three older sisters, who loved Jeff practically more than their own lives, were devastated. This sort of suffering and loss is all too common in this world. And it leads us to consider the elephant in the room for theistic belief, sometimes called the problem of evil. If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent, why then when He knows about it, has the power to do something about it, and is supremely good does he allow such cruelty to continue? The existence of evil thus logically contradicts the existence of God. Or does it? Below is my attempt at theodicy: answering the challenge that if God exists, why does He permit evil?

 

Explanation I: One good argument doesn’t necessarily prove one’s point. One must weigh the cumulative evidence or arguments.

 

There may be very strong evidence or argument that one has committed murder, but that is not enough to convict a person. There also may be very strong arguments that one is innocent. The jury must come to a fair conclusion based on the cumulative evidence. Similarly, the argument against God from the reality of evil is a strong argument, but to come to a fair conclusion one must weigh the cumulative evidence. I would posit that the arguments for God’s existence are very strong, stronger than the problem of evil. Just one of the arguments below called “Monkey on a Typewriter”:

 

It is more probable that a monkey on a typewriter by chance produced the complete works of William Shakespeare or the Encyclopedia Britannica than this world happens by chance. And if you think about it, as I write this very article, every word scribed that fits into a sentence, or anything in the world that moves with reason or order, at every second increases exponentially the improbability that this world has happened by chance. And if the probability of the world having arisen by chance is as close to nil as mathematically possible and ever increasingly so, then the account of the world wherein God creates it has far more power to explain the nature of the world than the denial of God and its consequent randomness. Therefore, the argument by evil, although strong, cannot in itself establish the verdict that God does not exist.

 

Explanation II: The argument for evil itself proves the existence of God.

 

By recognizing the existence of evil we are acknowledging that objective moral values exist, which seems to far more point to the existence of God than to deny His existence. If everything ultimately is just particles of matter moving randomly then on what basis can any action be judged moral, and if everything is deterministic how can anyone be held morally accountable? In other words, our capacity to deem something genuinely good or morally evil requires an acknowledgement of something transcendent that is morally meaningful (God), otherwise moral judgments, even concerning the most horrendous actions, become reduced to subjective expressions of cultural conditioning or personal preference simply based on chance and consequent evolution. Even the most hardened atheists shudder to fully embrace the consequence of atheism where even the most horrendous actions are deterministic and not objectively wrong. Therefore the existence of evil, rather than denying God, points to His existence.

 

Explanation III: The acceptance of free will includes the choice for evil.

 

Love, which is the supreme ethic, requires freedom and thus the possibility of wrong choice—even evil. Thus rather than evil negating the possibility of God, evil affirms God’s existence because it is a world of humanity and not compliant or forced “good”. Simply put, God allows sin (moral evil) at the cost of freedom and that is His perfection. There are many reasonable arguments, both simple and complex, by substantial religionists and philosophers that deal with this train of response to the problem of evil. They are a little beyond the scope of this paper, but I recommend researching them. [2]

 

Although there is some weight to the argument of free will, I can also conceive some challenges to the argument by a conception of an all-powerful God who somehow is able to create a free choice and consequent love without the possibility for evil,[3] which is why I like the argument given by Leibniz as a complimentary one. It follows.

 

Explanation IV: The world God created is the best possible of all worlds.[4]

 

Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura gave a similar reason to one posited above by Leibniz. He argued that God would not be complete as the enjoyer of all energies if He didn’t also have the experience of exchanging with the material energy. On the surface, this argument may make God look self-serving or callous, but I think there is a sense to it that I would purport as follows: The material world allows for the beauty of compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and the special flavor of a soul’s personal triumph over suffering that enhances God’s manifestation rather than contradicts His existence.

 

Explanation V: Soul-making theodicy and the law of karma. [5]

 

Evil only negates the existence of God if you look at the world from the very selfish perspective of affirming God’s goodness only when it serves our enjoyment and control. Judging God in that way is like a spoiled child evaluating his parent’s character based on the rewards and punishments he receives. In a similar way, evil and suffering is best understood by looking at the world from God’s perspective, which judges what is ultimately good, not what superficially rewards or punishes. In traditional Indian thought this perspective falls under the conception of the law of karma, which sees and even tries to prove that whatever happens to one, even if painful, are perfect conditions created by God to rectify one’s behavior for the purpose of everlasting joy. At least one serious about spiritual life should be able to connect the trials and tribulations in one’s life to his or her personal growth and then to project that onto the world. Evil does not therefore a priori negate the existence of God’s benevolence. It is a tough pill to swallow, but all traditional Indian philosophies, even if they disagree fundamentally on many core points, agree on this one: There is a moral force called the law of karma that is Absolute and ultimately good, even when one is on the receiving end of cruelty.

 

Explanation VI: Humility

 

It is one thing to equate suffering with growth and renewal, but what about pointless suffering? Does not pointless suffering challenge the existence of God? Bhīṣmadeva answered a similar question when enlightening Yudhiṣṭhira. I like his answer from a traditional Indian philosophical perspective: “No one can understand the inexplicable will of the Lord.”[6] As we have been entangled in this world since time immemorial, it is not possible to estimate our level of misconception and what it takes for the Lord to enlighten us. I think anyone on a genuine spiritual path cannot help but be amazed at the sheer number of constant and unending painful life lessons that one has endured that have helped expand one’s present awareness, lessons that one had absolutely no ability to comprehend at the time they occurred. So basically the answer to seemingly pointless suffering is to humbly accept that we lack the capacity to understand what we need, or to fully ever understand God’s will.

 

The elephant in the room—the problem of evil: Acknowledge it. Confront it. The theistic conclusion still stands.

 

 


[1] I have been busy organizing our 19th annual Puri retreat. Please enjoy this article originally posted on March 26, 2018.

[2] Alvin Plantinga’s summary of his argument for free will: A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can’t cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren’t significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can’t give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God’s omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.

[3] In Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism we have the concept of Śrī Rādhā and her eternal associates, who are the embodiment of the highest love, but have no choice of choosing evil.

[4] Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz, 17th century German Philosopher

[5] John Hick developed what is called “soul-making” theodicy in which he argued that God allows evil and suffering in the world in order to develop humans into virtuous creatures capable of following His will.

[6] Bhāg. 1.9.16

Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #3 – Do You Believe in Miracles?!

January 13th, 2025

Do You Believe in Miracles?![1]

 

When something miraculous happens, we have two mutually exclusive choices to explain it. Either its cause is supernatural or within the scope of known natural laws. For example, the famous magician David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. His audience was blown away, but when later it was discovered how he did it, it was clear that it was just a brilliantly orchestrated stunt.

 

But does that mean that all “miracles” have an explanation within the laws of nature? In this post I will explain at least some miracles in my own life that don’t seem to have a natural explanation. You can be the judge about which approach provides the best way to understand them: Are they miracles, events not explicable by scientific laws, or just natural occurrences?

 

The mystic jaundice doctor

 

In Vrindavan, there was a simple sādhu named Shyama Sakhi who cured jaundice by chanting mantras and pouring water over the afflicted. As the water turned yellow, the jaundice would wash away, so he claimed. Many people I knew gave testimony backing his claim. Despite their claims, I remained skeptical until a visit to Bangalore one summer when I completely lost my appetite and began to sleep all day. I was forced to immediately accept medical help because in three days I had a non-refundable ticket for the forty-eight-hour train ride back to Vrindavan for an extremely important meeting. The doctor checked me thoroughly and pronounced his diagnosis: “You have a very severe case of jaundice and must rest for a minimum of three weeks!” I wasn’t happy when he also nixed my travels plans. The train ride was much too dangerous for someone in my condition, he emphatically informed me. By providence, that afternoon I met a local person visiting our ashram who was informed of my condition. He told me of a simple middle-class housewife who could cure jaundice. I was desperate and I made an appointment to see her that afternoon. I remember this very ordinary housewife splashing water over my eyes. The water turned yellow, and soon I was free of jaundice. Within a day I was eating samosas and was able to return to Vrindavan as scheduled! Seems like a miracle to me.

 

The mystic rasagullā

 

In 1974, my college roommate invited me to visit him at ISKCON Dallas during my summer break from graduate school. We had met devotees four years earlier together. While he immediately joined, I hesitated. Despite my own conviction in bhakti, I was unable to make the decision to become a “devotee.” In those days, for a man that meant shaving up and moving into the ashram. By fortune, however, just a week after I arrived in Dallas, Śrīla Prabhupāda was also visiting the temple. He invited all the devotees to his room to distribute prasādam to them. I remember waiting on a long line for my turn to enter. The whole time I was fervently praying for the strength to fully surrender, but still the obstacles seemed insurmountable. I concluded that despite my desire to join, that there was just no way I could become a devotee. When my turn came, I walked respectfully into Śrīla Prabhupāda’s room, paid my obeisances, stretched out my hand and received a rasagullā directly from his hand. The minute I bit into it, all doubts were gone and I decided to stay and move into the ashram. I was shocked. How did that happen? Certainly, those without my faith could offer so many natural explanations based on their study of psychology. I know my mind, however. The change was just so sudden, so beyond my reasoning at the time, and the transformation so timed with that one bite, that the only plausible explanation is the inconceivable mercy of God’s devotee.

 

The miracle of coincidence

 

I have written about this several times. I met devotees at a Sunday feast in Los Angeles, became inspired, and the next day with my friends headed up to San Francisco on Highway 1 singing Hare Krishna. Our first stop was a Chinese restaurant. When we left the restaurant, the devotees were right outside chanting in a lively kirtan. We joined in. That evening the only place we could find to sleep was the parking lot of a football stadium adjacent to Golden Gate Park. There was only one Hare Krishna Center in the whole city. Somehow the back door of that storefront temple opened to that parking lot and by coincidence we parked our car directly under their window! The rest is history, so to speak. I became a devotee.[2] An excerpt from an article where I describe this incident:

 

“Basically, I argue that if one carefully studies his own life he will find a synchronicity between certain events, or ‘meaningful coincidences’ as Carl Jung defined it, whose probability of occurrence was so small that it was far more likely that the cause of those events rests beyond any random occurrence under the laws of nature. What makes those events even more improbable is the link between those external events and our inner life, as if those events were personally directed towards helping us grow.”

 

In summary, the best explanation for the preponderance of the occurrence of mutual coincidences in my life, and a devout life in general, is so far beyond the explanation of chance, that the best explanation for them rests outside the laws of nature.

 

The miracle of fine tuning

 

This is a big topic and a more general one, but it involves a miracle in our life, nonetheless. Basically, the universe is extremely fine-tuned for the appearance of life. Many favorable, but unlikely, conditions, are met. The probability of all those conditions happening by chance is likely under 1 in 10120. The conditional probability of life arising by chance should be set close to zero. So yes, the existence of a fine-tuned universe supporting our existence itself is just a miracle. And the best explanation is God.

 

Do You Believe in Miracles?!

 


[1] This is a relatively famous quote spoken in 1980, but perhaps not for someone born after 1965 not in the USA. Anyone in my audience also know the source?

[2] https://wavesofdevotion.com/2016/06/13/an-original-argument-for-the-existence-of-god/

 

Monday Morning Greetings 2025 #2 – How Intellectuals Found God

January 6th, 2025

In my senior year of high school, Joseph Zogby, my English teacher, asked the students to write an essay on Voltaire’s quotation, “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” Looking back, it seemed Mr. Zogby wanted to indoctrinate us with his own values. I fell for the bait. I wrote what I thought was a brilliant essay showing how God was a concept born of convenience. It all but reconfirmed in my heart the intellectual ethos of the ‘60s—religion was just the opiate of the people.

 

It appears that times have changed. People are again turning to God. From 2019 there has been almost an eighty per cent increase in converts to orthodox Christianity.[1] One of the largest Christian revival meetings in US history took place just recently at Ashbury University in Kentucky and it was led almost entirely by young people.[2] It has also been my own experience that more and more people are turning to God after years of turning away.

 

What convinced me of this revival more than anything else was my observation that even many modern intellectuals, those who were previously against God, were turning to Him. This was confirmed for me by a very interesting article I read in The Free Press titled “How Intellectuals Found God”[3] which told the story of prominent intellectuals coming into the theistic fold.

 

Matthew Crawford is a best-selling author and respected philosopher. At the beginning of his career, he seemed to be the typical American academic who in his own words “was impressed, as a young man, with Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity.”

 

Thirty-five years later, however:

 

“I liken it sometimes to a psychedelic experience. You feel like you’ve gained access to some layer of reality, but you just weren’t seeing it.

 

“A lot of very thoughtful people who once believed reason and science could explain everything—why we’re here, what comes after we’re gone, what it all means—are now feeling a genuine hunger for something more,” he said.

 

“There has to be a larger order that comprehends us and makes a demand on us,” Crawford added. “It’s clear that we can’t live without a sense of meaning beyond ourselves.”

 

The article also charted other prominent intellectuals’ spiritual growth:

 

Johnathan Haidt, New York University psychologist and best-selling author, although perhaps not a convert, reaffirmed this phenomenon in his own way. “There is a God-shaped hole in every human heart, and I believe it was put there by evolution.”

 

Jordan Peterson, world renowned academic, philosopher and biblical scholar, and author of the New York Times’ recent best seller We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine, never directly declared his faith in God, although he was pressed on the matter several times. Recently, however, in an interview, he finally acknowledged it: “I would say God is hyper-real, God is the reality upon which all reality depends.”

 

In this way, the article traced the way of ten prominent thoughtful people, previously agnostic at best, who have “reasoned their way to God”.

 

At this point of the Monday Morning Greetings, and near the deadline to get it to my editor, a question arose in my mind.  “What’s the focus here and how is it relevant to your audience, those of the path of bhakti?” My take:

 

It is always edifying when reading a well thought out piece that confirms an observation of one’s own—in this case, that the Western intellectual world is more and more turning to God. I am not surprised. The Western world has increasingly descended into chaos under the direction of atheistic and post-modern thought. It has become increasingly obvious to thoughtful people that such chaos and suffering are caused by straying from a rational order represented by the teachings or words (logos) of God-centered wisdom traditions. Reflecting on that idea—and I am sure that they are not unaware of the harm also caused by religious fanaticism—they looked back at a prior world which in many ways had more of a semblance of order and harmony.

 

This revival should also give solace to those following the bhakti tradition. We are taught that even at the stage of perfection, when one no longer has personal suffering, we will still suffer, but only for the suffering of others. It is thus good news to hear that especially in the West, where society has been increasingly deprived of the experience of God, with secular reasoning taking its place, that more intellectual leaders are finding God. And perhaps we can all even become brothers-in-arms “to deliver the Western countries, which are filled with impersonalism and voidism,” which is our spiritual master’s stated mission.

 


[1] https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1722890523/saintconstantineorg/wwfz57wzdrdkx7tj1xu1/ConvertstoOrthodoxy.pdf

[2] https://www.thefp.com/p/why-students-in-kentucky-have-been

[3] https://www.thefp.com/p/how-intellectuals-found-god-ayaan-hirsi-ali-peter-thiel-jordan-peterson