Source: www.hinduismtoday.com

KAUAI, HI, USA, September 1, 2010: The October-November-December edition of Hinduism Today magazine has been released, both in printed and digital form. You can read it online here or see the visually rich digital edition.

The magazine is now available for free on your desktop. This issue of Hinduism’s flagship spiritual magazine brings you an unusual mix of stories, from the latest and controversial animated film to coping with “cabin fever,” that real-life ailment faced by those living in the tropics who suddenly find themselves living in cold climates where people stay indoors all winter.

The 2010 Kumbha Mela in Haridwar was no less intense and is the subject of our 16-page, photographically stunning feature. Mark Twain wrote of his 1895 visit to the Kumbha Mela, “It is beyond imagination, marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.” We follow humankind’s greatest festival to its source, focusing on the devotional trials and tribulations of ordinary pilgrims–there were some 50 million there this year–and let our photographer, Dev Raj Agarwal, tell his story of trekking along the river Ganges from its source, and all of the changes it makes along the way.

The issue also contains articles on a US initiative to take yoga back from those who have abducted it from the Hindu cultural and spiritual repository, an online debate between two teenage friends, one an evangelizing Christian, the other an articulate Hindu who doesn’t think she or other nonbelievers are destined to go to a very bad place for a very long time. There is Arvind Sharma’s lofty defense of his choice to be a Hindu, a detailed story on the predictions of 2012 as the End of the World, and Ravi Grover’s take on why it’s not really right to put animals in captivity and use them as entertainment.

Our center section this time explores a new trend in matchmaking. The two models that once clashed–arranged marriage and do-as-you-please dating–are merging into something that can be called “arranged dating.” Parents meet and approve a daughter’s suitor, and then the couple embarks on the Western dating path, with all its implications and hazards. Plus we take a look at online resources for finding a life partner.

Our publisher, Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami, has a fresh take on the old adage “You are what you eat.” He suggests “You are whom you meet,” and guides us in our discovery of the importance of friends and companions, diving less into the ordinary reasons of business contacts into the mystical effect people have on our aura, our psychic energies and karmas.

In “Sita Sings the Blues” New York correspondent Lavina Melwani interviews the amazing film-maker Nina Paley. Remember how long the credits roll on a Pixar or Dreamworks animated film? Into the hundreds. Well, Ms. Paley made a full-length film all by her lonesome, a feat that took seven grueling years and resulted in a charming retelling of Sita’s story in the Ramayana, all from the woman’s point of view. Sure, a few Hindus called her take on Rama irreverent, while the tough critic Roger Ebert couldn’t find enough adjectives for this film (”wonderful, enchanted, astonishingly original, alive with personality”). The story of Sita’s story is itself quite a story and you can read it in the current issue.

Inside there is much more: humor, book reviews, scriptural excerpts from the Agamas that reveal meditation’s ultimate goal, digital resources and engrossing tidbits of Hindu experience around the globe. Hinduism Today is proud to be the place you go to learn about the entire Hindu family in the 21st century.

Source: newsweek.washingtonpost.com

USA, September 1, 2010 (By Loriliai Biernacki): As we move into the 21st century, with a shrinking world, an entangled economy, and instantaneous communications with the other side of the planet, religious life is changing as well. Religious groups are able to meet the needs of adherents far away and minister to communities separated spatially from each other. For Hinduism, this has meant especially that a diasporic community has been able to reconnect with its roots far away. An engineer living in Denver, Colorado in the U.S. can offer a puja online at the famous temple for Venkateshwara and receive his or her prasad by mail from the temple in Tirupati. Hinduism is becoming global.

Hinduism’s philosophical underpinnings — the ideas of karma and rebirth, notably — are increasingly pervading American consciousness, and this spread of ideas will increase in the future.

In some sense, the trace of Hinduism as it moves across the globe in the future is as a kind of meme (an idea that spreads like a virus and affects, to some degree, the minds of those who get in touch with it), a conceptual and evolutionary hypothesis. As meme, this spread of Hindu conceptual tenets augurs a more healing and soulful alternative to the mechanization of our lives, our bodies, our minds.

The future of Hinduism suggests a kind of opening to a global world in a way that sidesteps the vision of a one-world government or one-world ideology. It proposes instead a world model without hegemonic center, linked by a thread of cosmology, multiplicity instanced as network, a seamless interconnectivity that echoes a conceptual cosmology from Hinduism’s past into our own global and glocal future.

Source: www.newsindia-times.com

USA, September 1, 2010 (by Francis Xavier Clooney, S.J., a professor and a Roman Catholic priest) I recently came across a column by Loriliai Biernacki [HPI note: see previous post]. A friend of mine, she is a professor of Indian religions at the University of Colorado, and a specialist in the study of Hinduism. She suggests that Hinduism today is becoming much more widely established in different parts of the world, and it is flourishing in many parts of the U.S., both among Americans of Indian ancestry, but also among many converts to Hinduism.

I am tempted to confirm her insights out of my own experiences. But my thought now goes in a different direction: If there is truth in Biernacki’s insights, and there is, then what does this say about Christian identity in the U.S. now? Catholic identity?

Just think of the example of the growing comfort of a wide range of Americans - surely including Church-going Catholics - who accept reincarnation as a good spiritual possibility. This is no small change in the way people think.

If our neighbors are practicing yoga (even Christian yoga), meditating, visiting gurus, and enjoying the prospect of multiple deities and multiple births - then we have to bear down, and think more deeply about who we are and how we speak, act, live.

It is not enough to broadcast our faith without listening, or to insist with open mouths and closed ears that Jesus is the way and that Christian faith is superior to religions such as Hinduism, when we - the Church - seems not understand Hinduism except in a most superficial way, and have no clue why Americans might embrace reincarnation.

Source: www.hinduismtoday.com

A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him.
   Swami Chinmayananda (1917-1993), Hindu writer, lecturer and founder of Chinmaya Mission International

Source: www.nytimes.com

USA, August 27, 2010 (By Lisa Miller, the religion editor for Newsweek): According to data released last year by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, a quarter of Americans now believe in reincarnation. (Women are more likely to believe than men; Democrats more likely than Republicans.)

At Cannes in May, a Thai film about reincarnation, “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” won the highest prize. And Julia Roberts recently told Elle magazine that though she was raised Christian, she had become “very Hindu.” Ms. Roberts believes that in her past life she was a “peasant revolutionary,” and said that when her daughter sits in a certain way she knows “there’s someone there I didn’t get the benefit of knowing … It’s an honor for me to continue to shepherd that.”

In religious terms, the human narrative — birth, life, death and rebirth — has for millennia been relatively straightforward in the West. You were born. You lived. You died. After a judgment you went to heaven (or hell) forever and ever. Eternity was the end: no appeals allowed.

But nearly a billion Hindus and a half-billion Buddhists — not to mention the ancient Greeks, certain Jews and a few Christians — have for thousands of years believed something entirely different. Theirs is, as the theologians say, a cyclical view. You are born. You live. You die. And because nobody’s perfect, your soul is born again — not in another location or sphere, and not in any metaphorical sense, but right here on earth.

Gadadhara Pandit Dasa, Columbia University’s first Hindu chaplain, called it “a re-do,” like a test you get to take over. After an unspecified number of tries, the eternal soul finally achieves perfection. Only then, in what Hindus call moksha (or release), does the soul go to live with God.

Spiritually-minded Americans have had a love affair with Eastern religion at least since the Beatles traveled to India in 1968, but for more than a generation, reincarnation remained a fringe or even shameful belief.

“I can remember, 30 years ago, if a person wanted to learn about reincarnation, they would go into a bookstore and go into a very back corner, to a section called ‘Occult,’ ” said Janet Cunningham, president of the International Board for Regression Therapy, a professional standards group for past-life therapists and researchers. “It felt sneaky.” Now the East is in our backyards, accessible on the Internet and in every yoga studio.

At the same time, Western religion is failing to satisfy growing numbers of people — especially young adults. College students Mr. Dasa encounters, most of them raised as Christians or Jews, “haven’t given up on the idea of spirituality or religion,” he said. “They’re tired of the dogma they grew up with.” According to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, 15 percent of Americans express no affiliation with any religious tradition, nearly double the number in 1990.

On the fringes of legitimate science, some researchers persist in studying consciousness and its durability beyond the body. Dr. Jim Tucker, who directs the Child and Family Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Virginia, is committed to the scientific study of what can only be called reincarnation.

He is carrying on the pioneering research of his mentor, Dr. Ian Stevenson, who beginning in the 1960s collected more than 2,000 accounts of children between the ages of 2 and 7 who seemed to remember previous lives vividly without the help of hypnosis. Dr. Stevenson did most of his casework in Asia, where belief in reincarnation is common.

Dr. Tucker studies American children and in one case found a young boy who started to say, around the age of 18 months, that he was his own (deceased) grandfather. “He eventually told details of his grandfather’s life that his parents felt certain he could not have learned through normal means,” Dr. Tucker wrote, “such as the fact that his grandfather’s sister had been murdered and that his grandmother had used a food processor to make milkshakes for his grandfather every day at the end of his life.”

Dr. Tucker won’t say such cases add up to proof of reincarnation, but he likes to keep an open mind. “There can be something that survives after the death of the brain and the death of the body that is somehow connected to a new child,” he said. “I have become convinced that there is more to the world than the physical universe. There’s the mind, which is its own entity.”