Preface 1
When one sees a book or weblog about Lord Jesus Christ, it is natural to assume that it is written by a Christian. While I am certainly a Christian, I am a Christian of a very different sort than most readers may have encountered. Let me explain.
I grew up in a conventional Episcopal church and was very active as a choirboy, acolyte and lay reader. However, almost from the beginning of my childhood I could perceive profound differences between the principles and actions of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospels, and the behavior and attitudes of all but a few rare Christians. After all, Jesus Christ was a strict renunciant, but almost all Christians today, including the clergy, are householders with no taste for celibacy or austerity.
He had no home, and eschewed the comforts of family life for the rigors of traveling and preaching; but today’s Christians prefer to live in luxurious houses with all convenient amenities. Jesus dedicated his life to healing people and preaching the message of God, traveling on foot throughout the ancient world; whereas most of his modern followers drive expensive late-model vehicles on missions of economic aggrandizement and personal pleasure. Instead of making regular retreats to the wilderness to fast and pray, today’s Christians spend their annual vacations at expensive luxury resorts.
Jesus Christ, as the leader and messiah of the Essene sect of Jews, was a strict vegetarian; yet his contemporary professed disciples eat any kind of meat, even unclean foods like pork, and veal, which requires extreme cruelty to young calves to produce. Lord Jesus was the perfect example of unconditional spiritual love and sacrifice, but it was obvious to my vision even as a child that selfish materialistic interests motivate most modern professional clergy and laymen. Lord Jesus Christ willingly accepted death in the prime of his life to serve the desire of his Father the Lord, whereas the Christians I knew fought death with every weapon of medical science and technology, delaying the inevitable as long as their health insurance paid the bills.
These observations, and many more like them, led me at a tender age to conclude that most ostensible Christians were actually followers of Jesus Christ in name only; and that the church and its ministers edited and diluted the message of Jesus Christ to cater to the understanding and expectations of the majority of their congregation. For example, when was the last time you heard a sermon on the verse: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God”? Does anyone really believe the fashionable ‘abundance theology’ preached in most churches today is authored by Jesus Christ, the son of man who had no place to lay his head? The Lord does indeed promise to grant all the desires of His devotees, but why should we approach the Supreme Godhead in fervent prayer and invoke His solemn promise, merely to beg selfishly for money and other transitory material blessings? Why not ask Him for really valuable things that only He can provide: eternal spiritual benedictions like unconditional spiritual love, transcendental wisdom and pure devotional service? And when was the last time you went to church and encountered an ecstatic crowd, dancing and chanting psalms and the Holy Name of the Lord with drums, high-sounding cymbals and trumpets as in the days of King David? All the best traditional spiritual practices are recorded in the Bible, but how many Christians actually perform them? Have the exalted teachings of Jesus Christ become merely a prop for our unfettered material greed? And will we vainly try to make the Supreme Lord the servant of our gross desires, instead of actually following in the footsteps of Jesus and sacrificing everything to worship and serve the Lord as the Supreme Master?
Whether this materialistic degeneration and theological distortion occurred deliberately or accidentally, consciously or unconsciously was and is not the issue. It is not my purpose here to cast blame for this situation; that will not benefit anyone. Nevertheless, recognizing the unfortunate materialistic trend in the Christian religion was by far the most significant event of my formative years. This realization inspired in me an intense search for others who had made similar observations and attained similar insights, in the hope that I could find an association of the faithful who followed the teachings of Jesus Christ without attenuation or adulteration by the ideas of the world. This search soon led me beyond the sectarian borders of Christianity to the more inclusive monastic and philosophical traditions of the East—not the watered-down ‘New Age’ versions popular in the West, nor the materialistic polytheism now known as ‘Hinduism’ (a term of Muslim origin), but the original Vedic Vaisnava tradition. I accepted an exalted spiritual Master Teacher, studied in traditional monastic communities in India, earned advanced initiations in these traditions, and found in them a philosophical rigor and strict adherence to the universal fundamentals of religious life— truthfulness, purity, nonviolence, simplicity, austerity, devotion and careful discrimination among different levels of spiritual Truth—qualities that were very attractive to my mind and pleasing to my heart.