Krishna Salvation Flashcards
How does ISKCON view salvation?
ISKCON Accepts the doctrines of karma and reincarnation, meaning that a person’s actions during the present life affect future rebirths. ISKCON defines karma as the universal law of cause and effect. Good actions lead to good reactions, and evil ones lead to evil reactions.
When does Karma take place?
Many of these reactions or effects occur during an individual’s lifetime.
Why doesn’t ISKCON eat meat?
One common example ISKCON gives is eating meat, a violation of the movement’s vegetarian principles. ISKCON teaches that meat eaters inculcate a sense of violence, uncaring, and anger around them because of their choice to eat meat, resulting in their own development as more violent, uncaring, and angry individuals. Furthermore, other people respond to that negative energy in equally negative manners, beginning a chain reaction of bad karma.
How far does Karma go?
The Hare Krishna movement teaches that a person’s karma determines their future rebirths. To continue the example of the meat eaters, such individuals’ karma would lead them to rebirth in states of violence, uncaring, and anger. They might be born as animals on factory farms destined for a lifetime of suffering and death, but it is also possible that they would be born as a carnivore or even as a human being destined to work in a slaughterhouse.
You cannot foretell the Law of Karma
For this reason, it behooves a person to avoid the vagaries of karma through appeal to the master of karma, Krishna. ISKCON devotees believe that living a life of devotion to Krishna not only means that one does not accumulate karma but that through his mercy and grace, Krishna removes the karma of his devotees. In this regard, ISKCON stands with the more theistic branches of Hinduism that understand the divine as above the law of karma.
Past Karma defines earthly rebirth.
A devotee who dedicates his or her life to a relationship with Krishna is reborn into Krishna’s divine realms. ISKCON understands these realms as spiritual planets that exist on a higher plane of the universe. Numerous such planets exist, and all serve as eternal abodes of Krishna where devotees can experience the peace of rejoining their creator.
ISKCON’s highest form of worship.
Devotees who engage in the highest forms of worship and love experience rebirth into the highest of Krishna’s spiritual realms, Goloka. ISKCON looks to the Bhagavata Purana, particularly the commentary written by Bhaktivedanta, to describe the nature of Goloka. Bhaktivedanta explained it as a heavenly realm of perfection. Its inhabitants are eternal, content, and always at peace. In Goloka, Krishna exists in his form as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krishna the young prince who frolicked in the forest of Vrindaban. Devotees born into Goloka engage in the highest rasas, or modes of devotion (bhakti), frolicking alongside Krishna as his friends, playing with him as the love-struck gopis, or caring for him as parents.
ISKCON who engage in lower forms of bhakti.
Shanta rasa, the rasa of reverence, and dasya rasa, the rasa of service, experience rebirth on the Vaikuntha planets, the other spiritual realms for devotees. On such planets Krishna appears in his various cosmic Vishnu forms, displaying his majesty to the devotees. ISKCON teaches that these planets, as spiritual realms, exhibit numerous heavenly qualities and none of the negative ones normally associated with materiality. On them the devotees engage in eternal service and adoration of Krishna.
ISKCON’S spiritual realm
Eternal tranquility and the opportunity to rejoin Krishna, to go back to Godhead, ISKCON also accepts the reality of numerous other material planets throughout the cosmos, some better and some worse than the earth.
Rebirth of a non-devotee
A non-devotee might be reborn onto such a planet due to their karma.
What do these material planets look like?
Some of these material planets exhibit characteristics similar to the spiritual heavens, such as physical beauty and spiritual tranquility, but none offers either eternal life or a true return to Godhead
Hellish places of torment.
Others are hellish places of torment, pain, and suffering. Individuals with particularly good karma might be born into a heavenly material realm, while those with exceptionally poor karma may experience a lifetime on a hellish planet.
Both rebirths fail.
Yet neither sort of rebirth offers eternal solace or eternal damnation, for at the end of the reborn individual’s (perhaps very long) lifetime, he or she experiences another transmigration. For a Hare Krishna devotee, only the path of bhakti offers a chance for everlasting rebirth onto a spiritual realm of Krishna.
ISKCON-Three central concepts
ISKCON places three central concepts at the heart of its understanding of suffering and the problem of evil: maya (illusion), kali yuga (the present age of decline), and karma (the law of cause and effect). These three concepts combine to form an understanding of suffering as embedded within the present material world, caused by illusion, misunderstanding, and the poor choices born of such a condition.
Back to Godhead
The sacred narrative of ISKCON is best encapsulated in the name of the movement’s official magazine: Back to Godhead. Hare Krishna devotees believe that Krishna created all life, and that human beings innately desire to return to Krishna, to return to God. ISKCON members believe that the world’s religions all attempt to do this, but they maintain that their own Vaishnava tradition offers the best method to do so, since only it teaches the supreme personality of God.
