Imagine this: One morning you wake up, brush your teeth, have breakfast, go out, walk across the street and continue with your exciting new day plan. However, everyone around addresses you as you were a person 30 years ago — a person from another time. You begin to notice that in conversations, as people seem to disregard all the accomplishments, all life’s experiences, new knowledge, wonderful new thoughts and all new personal qualities you have achieved in three decades. Despite all good attributes you know you posses, people turn a deaf ear and approach you as you were a problem, spoiled child who sees everything black & white. After few months, how would you feel?
Now imagine this: How a sense of a divine creative principle, or Demiurge people call God since time immemorial, must feel when people approach him-her in the same manner as people 2,000 or 5,000 years ago, thinking and believing he-she is the same scary and petrifying one as people believed then, unreservedly neglecting his-her life since, his-her new ideas, newly discovered possibilities of existence, imaginative advanced ways of communication with him-her and remarkable experiences he-she had to share during the last several millennia? And imagine him-her living that ‘Groundhog Day’ movie with humanity on the planet of Punxsutawney (sometimes referred as the planet Earth) every day, every month, every year, for thousands of years …
This is just one of many answers to the question “Why Universalist Radha-Krishnaism?”
— Zvonimir Tosic
Excellent analogy. That’s why process theology is such an important part of Universalist Radha-Krishnaism. In his _Jesus Through the Centuries His Place in the History of Culture_, Jaroslav Pelikan reveals how the image of Jesus created by each successive epoch—from rabbi in the first century to liberator in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—is a key to understanding the temper and values of that age. Or looking at it another way, how each age shapped the image of Jesus. We see Jesus much differently today than a first century Jew would have.
While there are many Christian conservatives who strongly resist change, there are also many strong voices calling for change. I come from a reformed tradition that believes in on-going reform, although some would disagree.
There are many Christian groups I could work with quite harmoniously. However, I find no Chaitanya Vaishnav groups that I would feel comfortable with. They are closed minded and living in the past. I probably have more in common with the Unitarians I’ll address Sunday than I do with most Krishna devotees.
As we used to say, a progressive Protestant has more in common with a progressive Catholic than with a conservative Protestant. A Universalist Radha-Krishnaism practitioner will probably have more in common with progressive Christians, Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Pagans, or Taoists than with most Chaitanya Vaishnavas. We walk a new way for a new day and do not care to repeat the past.
Ultimately at the center is divine love no matter how the externals present themselves. The externals are always associated with time, place, circumstance, culture, ethnicity. All very transitory concepts.
As the Beatles so eloquently sang “All you need is love!”
Much of the world is so hung up on these externals that if you don’t look like them and submit to their institutions they think you are not on their path, and when I look where their path is heading that gives me re-assurance!