Answers
to a Constructive Critic
By
Bhakti Ananda Goswami
In the below letter I have arranged the writer's paragraphs to respond to them in a certain order.
****
Subject:
Your Various Articles
Dear
Maharaja,
It
was extremely good of you to send me all this material and the notes about
yourself. I have read everything with great interest. Now I have some comments
and questions.
I
don't wish to appear critical, believe me. But I am looking for some logical
reasoning based on empirical evidence. So much religion is based merely on the
human imagination, I am looking for some clear sign that there is more to it
than this. I am sick and tired of people telling me what God's plan is for the
human race, as if they have a direct line to the Divine and receive this
information in confidence. Alas, such is not the case and I have yet to see any
evidence that God exists and, if he does, that he has any special interest in
the human race.
If
this sound heretical, I'm sorry. My intuition tells me that there is some power
outside myself that is somehow related to the whole of creation. But so far I
have found nothing that supports my belief with conviction.
****
Reply:
You are just honestly revealing your concerns.
****
I am
not interested in opinions and supposition. I'm looking for clear, acceptable
evidence that says 'this is so.'
Maharaja,
you may feel, after reading this, that I am wasting your time.
If this is the case, please say so, and we can end this correspondence
now without further to do.
On
the other hand, if you think you can tell me something that may bring clarity to
my thinking, I am eager to hear more from you.
In the meantime, I remain,
Your
servant,
...................DAS
****
I
will try to tell you something about my own concern with clarity of thinking and
clear, acceptable evidence regarding these issues.
The
ultimate proof of God's existence is in a direct experience of him. If one has
had a personal experience of God, then no other proof is needed.
If, however, one has had no experience, or has rejected or ignored
experiences of God or the divine, then no one else can offer convincing proof of
the existence of such divine realities. 'It is easy to wake someone who is
sleeping, but difficult to wake someone pretending to sleep'.
So I cannot prove to you the existence of God, but if you are open
minded, it is possible to prove to
you the existence of God's worship as a global tradition, which is at the core
of human language and introspection, high civilization, literature, art, etc.
I
am pleased that you want proof. I
also wanted proof to give to persons such as yourself, which is why I took such
great effort for so many years to collect such proof from so many fields.
Regrettably
my work is unpublished, so I cannot just give you it as an indexed, foot-noted
multi-volume set of books with bibliographical references.
But if you sincerely want proof of these connections, you have a
computer, and you can in seconds verify much of what I have said for yourself.
In addition, in my few Internet postings I have given the names of some
critically important texts and other sources of evidence.
If these texts do not satisfy your need for proof, then you are
unreasonable and need some kind of therapy.
If however you are a reasonable person, then my efforts to serve your
needs will not be a waste of time. However
if you are not reasonable, and are pretending to sleep, it will be just a waste
of my time to try to wake you.
To
get you started....test my assertions and you will find them to be true.
Assuming
you are a reasonable person of goodwill, here are some of the major points of my
thesis, which you can easily test to confirm, as well as directions on how to
confirm them.
The
fact that ancient sacramental social organization in African, Semitic and
Indo-European cultures was all related to Purusha / Polieus worship can be
studied in numerous ways. Using my
Purusha cities chart and saragrahi.org article on the same...test my assertions.
Regarding the cities of these Asyla federation religious alliances, I
have only given a tiny fraction of the examples which could have been cited.
Per / Yir is used for the sacred cities of Eli-Yahu more than a thousand
times in the Old Testament alone. You
can easily confirm this with any Hebrew Old Testament concordance by looking up
'city' or cities'. Per is
used countless times in Egyptian Hr-Asu (Heri-Osiris) related sources.
In Mesopotamia the variants Qir and Kir were common.
Pol was used by the Greeks to translate both the Semitic Per / Yir etc.
city names of Eli-Yahu and the Egyptian Per city names of Heri-Asu.
In northern Europe, the Greeks translated Bur town names as Pol.
So I am not speculating that these words have the same meaning.
Centuries of history tell us that they do. The northern European word
Bur, Sanskrit Pur, and Sumerian-related Ur were likewise used countless times
for ancient sacred theocentric city name designations. These cities were
generally members of religious alliances or federations of Asyla worshipping the
same Godhead in various local forms. They
shared numerous features of sacramental social organization which can clearly be
identified with the worship of Purusha in 'the three modes' of sattva, rajas and
tamas...goodness, passion and ignorance.
Specific evidence of these alliances is still available in many ancient
literary sources like the Old Testament and Apocrypha, and the
extant body of Greco-Roman literature, and in inscriptions, coins,
treaties, the amarna letters of Akhenaten, etc.
If
one understands Radha-Krishna Vaishnavism, Rhoda and Kouros Helios on the Island
of Rhodes can easily be understood as Radha and Krishna just by studying Rhodian
mythology and J. E. Harrison's work on the Cretan hymn to Meghistos Kouros, who
was considered the origin of all the Gods.
Helios was always worshipped as the Meghistos Kouros, and his original
'consort' was Rhoda. Everything
that I have said about the sources regarding their Worship can be confirmed on
the Internet.
The
Shaivites have done a lot of research on Dionysos as Shiva. What they don't
understand is the connection between Baladeva as Shiva and Dionysos. In
Vaishnava tradition, the forms of Shiva are all forms of Lord Baladeva, who is
also called Sankarshana. All Vishnu
manifestations are from Baladeva, as are all Shiva manifestations.
Thus in Vaishnavism, as in the ancient Jewish and related Mediterranean
Heliopolitan tradition, and in Pure-land Buddhism, the benevolent forms of
Vishnu and the wrathful destructive forms of Shiva are both considered forms of
the same deity. This is why Hebrew, Greek and Egyptian names of Eli-Yahu /
Helios / Heri-Asu include both names of Shiva and Vishnu. The universal incarnating, dying and rising Savior Lord
as the 'Second Person' of the Godhead can be traced back to Eli-Yahu as Baal (Balu
etc.) in the Semitic traditions. The
Semitic Baal was associated by the ancients with both the Afro-Egyptian Asu
(Osiris) and Greek Dionysos. The
Shaivite scholars are correct in identifying Dionysos with Shiva, but because
they are focusing only on the tamasic Tantric interpretation of their Shaivite
tradition, they miss the bigger picture, which can be understood by comparing
the Pure Land Buddhist, Jewish and sattvic Greco-Egyptian traditions of
Baal-Dionysos-Osiris with Baladeva as the source of both Vishnu and Shiva.
A study of Eli-Yahu as Baal will reveal many detailed connections to
Baladeva. That the Jewish deity Eli-Yahu was once called Baal is also confirmed
in Keel and Uehlingers' authoritative book on
the miniature artifacts of ancient Israel. Dravidian Hindu scholars have
also done a lot of research connecting Shiva to the Jewish deity.
There are sites about this as well on the Internet.
Again they make the connection between Shiva and Baal-Yahu, especially in
his wrathful form associated with Exodus, and the Jewish sacrificial system.
This is another major point that I insisted on over 30 years ago.
Eli-Yahu was once called Baal before the great Baal-Set and Anat
left-hand tantric related heresies. In
fact a number of major points that I insisted on decades ago have now been
accepted by the top academic authorities in each field.
These scholars have come to their present realization after long and
meticulous study. So if you want to
challenge my veracity about these things, you will have to take on such scholars
and the entire disciplines that they represent now. So-called
'Aryanist' or Indo-European Shaivite
and marugan scholars have connected Dionysos and Shiva and Dravidian
scholars have connected Baal-Yahu and Shiva.
The field of Heleno-Semitica, in the line of research from Cyrus Gordon
has established the Greek and Semitic links, and finally the new computer
assisted field of linguistic super families has numerous scholars comparing
Nilo-Saharan, Semitic, Indo-European, Sumero-Akkadian,
Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic and even Amerindian languages for a primal human
tongue (look up the nostratic linguistic super family).
My own work simply confirms that there are common names of the one
supreme God embedded deep within our major language families.
Now black studies scholars, such as Martin Bernal (Black Athena), have
confirmed many of the assertions of the Heleno-Semiticists and Dravidian
scholars regarding so-called Aryan and black, Aryan and Semitic and Aryan and
Dravidian connections in extreme antiquity.
My own work on the religious side of all these connections is being daily
more and more supported by the findings of all these other scholars.
From
age to age the Hebrews, Israelites and Jews were members of Helios-worshiping
federations. Such alliances are
even mentioned in the Old Testament and Apocrypha and other ancient Greco-Roman,
Egyptian and Mesopotamian literary sources. But I have not simply relied on such
textual evidence, I have actually studied and viewed enormous amounts of
interdisciplinary evidence for these Helios-worshiping religious connections.
Any honest person seeing the evidence I have presented would have to
admit to the obvious connections. In
2000 I took a group of Vaishnavas through the "Pharaohs of the Sun"
exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
This exhibit is the premier collection of later 18th dynasty
Egyptian artifacts ever displayed anywhere.
This collection is particularly important to my work, because it focuses
on the era of the famous monotheistic 'Sun King' Akhenaten.
30 years ago I said that he was not an innovator, but that he was
reviving the much earlier monotheism of Heliopolis in the north, establishing it
first in the southern capital of Thebes, and then building a new capital for it
at Amarna. I also said that this
same Heliopolitan monotheism in its Semitic form was the religion of the
Hebrews, Israelites and Jews. At
the exhibit I was able to show that the top scholars who put it together agreed
that Akhenaten was a Heliopolitan revivalist, just as I have always said.
This conclusion was even stated in no ambiguous terms in the exhibit
publications. At the museum I
pointed out numerous connections between the Heliopolitan religious symbol
system of Akhenaten and that of Vaishnavism and Pure Land Buddhism. Then in the
slide lectures I gave on the West and East coast of the USA following the exhibit, I showed these same symbols on the
Keel and Uehlinger University of Fribourg collection of 'Jewish' artifacts from
ancient Israel and Judah.
I
presented my two papers related to these lecture tours at the World Association
for Vedic Studies Conference in 2000. The
largest of the lecture halls was packed for my presentation and no one, not the
session moderators or a single other scholar challenged a single bit of my
evidence or my conclusions. In fact
many scholars stayed after the session and even into the night and some even
after the whole conference to discuss my findings with me, and not one
challenged the reliability of my evidence or reasonableness of my conclusions.
In my posts I have mentioned the most
important work available on these Semitic and Jewish artifacts (by O.
Keel and C. Uehlinger), which is
the text I was given permission (by the copyright holder) to make slides of and
to use in the companion booklet to my lectures.
If the supreme Semitic, Nilo-Saharan Egyptian and Greek (Indo-European)
deity is the same deity, then all the interdisciplinary evidence should support
this fact, and it does. The
Semite’s high deity 'L is the Afro-Egyptian’s high deity 'R , the
Vaishnava high deity Hari, the Shaivite high deity Hara and the pure land
Buddhist Adi Purusha as HRIH. This is the Greco-roman high monotheistic 'solar'
deity Heli or Sole. I am not just
basing this assertion on some superficial word similarities. There is a vast
amount of evidence in different fields to prove these assertions.
Please
read the key Johns Hopkins University press text by the Edelsteins on Asclepius.
I have given the references to this text elsewhere on this site. Read
about the Indian tradition of medicine from the Ayur Veda, and about the legends
of Ananta Baladeva’s incarnation as the wandering mendicant healer Charaka.
Sometimes these are cited in introductions to the Charaka Samhita.
Compare the traditions of the biblical Old Testament exodus story healing
seraph-staff (Nahustan as the 'type' of Christ) , the serpent-staff (caduceus)
of Iimhotep-Asclepius-Serapis and the Nagakal of Baladeva as the Ayur Vedic
Ananta Shesha Naga. Compare all of
these medical traditions with the pure land Buddhist worship of Yakushi Ji at
Nara, Japan. The vast range, depth
and detail of these medical savior connections will take an entire new academic
discipline to explore. All of these
traditions have been connected to so-called 'solar monotheism'. Asclepius was in fact considered the divine son of
Helios born of a mortal virgin. The
basic history of the God-man Asclepius is the life, death and resurrection of
the Apostolic Catholic Jesus Christ.
This fact was recognized in early Christianity.
These things are discussed in the Edelsteins' standard reference work on
Asclepius. In Egypt Asclepius
was associated with the great physician Imhotep and all the various forms of Asu
or Osiris and Heri-Hap (Serapis), who among the Israelites was called Eli-Habha.
Both his Egyptian name Hr-Hp / Heri-Hap / Serapis and Hebrew Elihabha
mean 'God Hides' or 'God is Hidden' (compare Hebrew Chaba-Yahu meaning 'Yahu
Hides' or 'Yahu is Hidden').
If you don't think my word etymologies have any substance, you can look them up in any good biblical concordance or lexicon, Sanskrit-English etymological dictionary, English-Egyptian dictionary etc. Not only do my cognates obey the linguistic rules of sound-shifting etc. but I have taken pains to verify the connections with non-comparative linguistic (non-philological) evidence as well. Thus I have comparatively studied the Jewish and Egyptian interdisciplinary evidence of the worship of Hp. Hp was also called Hp-Amn and Hp-Atmn (called Aten by Akhenaten) in Egypt over the centuries, and was always considered the all-pervasive form of the deity Heri. By such in-depth study, I have confirmed that the Semitic 'hidden' all-pervasive deity Eli-Habha / Chaba-Yahu (also called Adon-Yahu) is the same as the all-pervasive aspect of the high Afro-Egyptian deity Heri-Asu as Hp-Amn or Hp-Atm.
****
Critic:
I find much of your material hard to follow because it leaps from concept to
concept, century to century, religion to
religion with sometimes no apparent link other than a similarity between words.
To me, some of this material appears to be no more than mere flights of fantasy.
****
If I
see that the worship of a specific historically identifiable deity survived for
thousands of years, or that it has waxed and waned, appearing and disappearing
over time in various forms in various places,
I report it. It may appear fantastic to you because you are completely
unfamiliar with the evidence for it. However
I am very familiar with the evidence, and I have summarized it carefully,
presenting you with a well considered rational conclusion.
As I have stated elsewhere, the
existence of God or a specific 'God' cannot be proven except by a person's
direct experience, but the existence of a major religion in history can be
proven through numerous and interdisciplinary means.
My work has always focused on real-world history, As presented by the
evidence, not on some fantastic speculation of my own. I have always desired to
be as objective as humanly possible, and thus to allow the
evidence to 'speak for itself'. Thus
my work has never been like the fanciful or sentimental writings of persons like
H.P. Blavatsky, E. Levi, Joseph Smith, Spencer Lewis,
Nicholas Notovitch, Szekely,
A. Bailey, Edgar Cayce,
Louis Jacolliot, P.N. Oak or any of the other popular Old 'esoteric' or newer
'new age' Aryosophists, channelers or fantasy-as-history enthusiasts.
I have never considered anyone of their ilk as authoritative and
completely reject their work as a disservice to the Truth (God) and humanity.
For decades I have fought to expose the plagiarism, fraud and inaccuracy
of their bogus histories, concocted
and redacted 'scriptures' and the lies and distortions and utter nonsense of
their entire genre of fantasy-as-history literature.
I have even endured death threats and actual physical attacks from some
of their fanatical followers because of my commitment to exposing the lies and
distortions of these purveyors of fantasy as historical fact. I take the truth
very seriously. So be assured that
if I state that there is solid-real-world reason to believe that there is some
connection between a Vedic 'God' and an Egyptian and Jewish one, there is. I totally reject ‘channeling' or 'esoteric tradition' as
sources for anything other than the study of arrogant self-and-other deluding
nonsense. In my research I have always and only used the best possible and
non-controversial, academically accepted sources of evidence.
I have strictly practiced proper scientific methodology in the
collection, treatment and testing of my data.
My
passion may be religion, and the worship of Godhead, but my education and working life has been well-grounded in
bona fide research, science, medicine and other exacting disciplines.
I am a very rational person, not a sentimentalist given to flights of
fantasy. Fundamentally the God of
my heart is the God of real world history.
He is the God of things exactly as they were and are here in this
temporary but real world. I cannot prove to you his existence in some other world
beyond our immediate experience, but if you will test my assertions, the results
can prove to you his influence in the history of this planet.
Therefore I am primarily interested in discovering the truth about his
worship in this real world. In one
sense, I worship this God of history as the great reality of Truth itself, and
therefore I have no desire to bend or twist Him to my little will.
Thirty
years ago I was pretty much alone in some of my assertions, but now many of my
claims have been backed up by the meticulous work of the most highly respected
scholars in various fields. You
don't have to take my word for anything. If
you knew my integrity and competence as a person and as a scholar, you would
trust my observations to be accurate, my presentation to be honest and my
conclusions to be reliable. However
not knowing me, and misperceiving me to be living in a religious fantasy, you
are not inclined to accept my accuracy, honesty or the relevancy and validity of
my conclusions.
Thus you will have to read for yourself these sources that I have
recommended, to grasp what I am trying to communicate to you.
Instead
of challenging the veracity of my assertions, why don't you just read the books
that I have recommended in my posted letters, and look up the general references
I have provided? If you do, you
will find things to be as I have presented them. There are entire fields of study now devoted to some of these
areas of evidence I have presented. So,
appropriately I have given reference to these fields for the further
investigation of doubters like yourself. Don't
demand from me, served on a platter, what you are unwilling to look up and read
in the sources yourself. Not
valuing my integrity or scholarly discipline and accuracy, you would not believe
me if I quoted something anyway. Thus
I have given the general sources for evidence and specific texts when these are
especially helpful, but I cannot convince you with my own words when you do not
accept my veracity. You will have to look these things up, or go to where they
are and experience them for yourself.
****
Critic:
You provide no facts to back up your assumptions. If your realizations are
based on 40 years of research, as you say, where is the evidence on which
they are based? I am a cynic who accepts nothing on faith. I was
excited by what I read because I
thought you would be able to provide facts to support my beliefs
that I have arrived at purely by intuition.
****
When
I write someone a letter summarizing decades of interdisciplinary research, of
course I use broad strokes because I am painting a very big picture.
How else can I tell anyone about the mega-trends and great commonalities
that I have seen ? Houston Smith,
Eliade, Zaehner, Frazer, Graves, Campbell and others also painted with broad
strokes in their summarizing works. They
presented very general conclusions based on their years of study. They all became influential even though there were some
misunderstandings, important
omissions and even glaring defects in some of their works.
My work has been at least as thorough as theirs, and they were primarily
textual scholars. Then I have gone
the additional 'extra mile' and more to verify my literary evidence with
in-depth study in and evidence from many other fields.
In doing this, I have done what no one else has done before, so of course
I am presenting a vast amount of information Summed-up in a few words.
However those few words are fully pregnant with great meaning that has
profound implications. Therefore if I say that the Greco-Egyptian winged cobra
is the Jewish seraph and these are related to Baladeva as Ananta Shesha Naga and
Garuda, and to his medical cult as the Ayur Vedic Charaka, who is
Jesus-Asclepius-Serapis, then you can be Absolutely sure that there is abundant
interdisciplinary evidence to back-up these assertions. Test what I say....it is
real. I invite everyone to do it.
I don't expect anyone to accept something because I have said it.
I have not presented anything that is a product of my imagination. If it
doesn't have a real-world existence, I am not interested in it except to expose
its falsity myself !
****
Critic:
Do you have anything meatier than this?
****
If you don't accept the veracity of my statements then you will have to look up these things yourself. What more proof do you want ? For instance in my Hare Krishna World posts on Pure Land Buddhist and Vaishnava connections I directly compared specific parallel Sanskrit verses from the Vaishnava Bhagavad-Gita and the Pure Land Buddhist Saddharma Pudarika. I gave the exact Japanese names of Brahma, Surya, Chandra and Lakshmi / Sri, etc. I cited the Tibetan Buddhist Sanskrit names of the lila avataras of Lokesvara, which are the lila avatara forms of Vishnu. I have shown Kushite and Vaishnava icons of the Supreme Lord as the Leonocephalous (lion-headed) form of Time side-by-side. I showed pictures of the sacred circle dance across Traditions, and I sent you a chart showing the ancient names of sacred Purusha worship-related cities. On this site I also showed the traditional form of Helios Kouros from Rhodes, and the two common forms of Asclepius-Christ. With my major assertions, I have given enough information about the connections for you to verify them yourself if you really want to.
These
connections are huge, and the evidence is not contained in one scholar's
citation in one book. Thus the evidence is not hard to find. Whole fields are
pervaded by it. So for
instance you need to compare the language of the Greek Septuagint and Apocrypha
(Greek Jewish Old Testament) to that of the Sanskrit of the Vaishnava scriptures
like the Bhagavad-Gita. If no one else has written about this, how can I cite
them ? All I can do is to
state the truth. Read the Greek
Jewish scriptures and the Sanskrit Vaishnava scriptures and see for yourself how
many cognate Greek and Sanskrit names of God and common specific cult terms you
will find ! It is astounding and
proves a close relationship between Vaishnava Krishna-centric, Greek and Jewish
monotheism. Then compare the
Sanskrit Pure-Land Buddhist scriptures and you will find the same astounding
connections. You don't even have to
read the Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew or Egyptian scripts to confirm what I am
saying. All of the relevant works
are available with Roman transliteration, and often one can even get
inter-linear translations of them. In addition there are study guides like
biblical concordances, etymological dictionaries and lexicons, works on the
theophoric names in the Hebrew Bible and numerous other ways to easily verify
what I have said. Instead of
challenging my veracity, why don't you just look these things up for yourself ? Enter the key words in your Internet search program and enjoy
! The evidence is there.
It won't prove to you that God exists, but it can certainly prove that
his worship exists !
Speaking
and hearing the truth is never a waste of time. I pray that you will find the truth that finally satisfies
your soul.
Your aspiring servant,
Bhakti Ananda Goswami