Unflinching Faith in the Spiritual Master

The Vedic injunction is that one should have unflinching faith in the words of one's spiritual master. This is stated as follows in the Svetasvatara Upanisad 6.23:

yasya deve parā bhaktir
yathā deve tathā gurau
tasyaite kathitā hy arthāḥ
prakāśante mahātmanaḥ

"If one has unflinching faith in the Supreme Lord and the spiritual master, the essence of all Vedic knowledge is revealed to him."

This faith means that we trust the correctness of his teachings and instructions. Why do we put such faith in him? Because he purely presents the teachings of Krishna without any adulteration.

Worshipping Srila Prabhupada in Vrindavan
4:12 am--10 November 2011

Answers by Citing the Vedic Version

Question: Does God Exist?

Please accept my humble obeisances and attempt to understand the truth. All glories to Srila Prabhupada! All glories to Lord Caitanya!

I'd sincerely like to understand how is it possible to believe in something other than matter. My conviction is that:

- mind and intelligence and the concept of God is nothing else than vibrations of elementary particles in my brain;
- mind and intelligence and living organisms are the result of random collisions of elementary particles;
- I certainly believe that there exists the Absolute Truth, because it is not possible to state otherwise (but I believe that it is very difficult to attain at the current speed of development of the modern science based on the five material senses);
- I also tend to believe that the practices described in Vedic sastras are the perfect methods how to optimize the material life.

But my questions are: What are the arguments that there really exists the non-material Supreme Person? What are the arguments that there exists something else apart from the material world?

Submissively inquiring,
Jānis

Answer: Reactivate Your Consciousness & Meet God

Modern science is based on the assumption that objective reality is limited to those things that are empirically verifiable with our gross senses and the instruments created by our gross senses. But I ask you, "Is this assumption empirically verifiable?" The answer is, "No. It is not." Therefore the entire foundation of your empirical view of reality is very flimsy at best. Indeed, it is built upon sand.

The fact is that right now you are dreaming. You falsely take your dream as the waking reality because it is all you know. But if someone wakes you up, you will see that what you thought was real was only a dream, and then you will be able to perceive things as they actually are.

Your gross empirical view of reality is in fact a dream. The Vedic science will awaken you and enable you to personally associate with that Supreme Person, who is the source of all existence. But you have to be willing to perform the scientific experiment of being awakened. Otherwise you will remain asleep. If you, like the owl who refused to open his eyes to see the sunlight, refuse to come into the laboratory of consciousness to perform the ultimate scientific experiment, you will never realize the Absolute Truth. This Absolute Truth is fully realizable through the ancient science which is perfectly taught in the Vedic literatures, especially the Bhagavad-gita and the Srimad Bhagavatam.

So in the final analysis, God is empirically verifiable. You just have to reactivate the now dormant scientific instrument that can directly perceive Him. That instrument is consciousness. At the present your consciousness is only 1% per cent activated. Now you have to activate the other 99%. This reactivation process is called Krishna consciousness.

Sankarshan Das Adhikari