The Blanket of Mayavada, Covering Us All

Like a thick blanket of undefined, homogenically impersonal, all-loving, all-embracing, and all-accepting poison, the dogma of global oneness is covering the original individual nature of the soul. Dictators use it, claiming to shelter us; cheaters use it, claiming to serve us; opportunists use it, stealing what was given to us; altruists use it, serving all the above-mentioned culprits so they can create even greater damage; humanists use it while acting in the most inhuman way; victimized fools use it without understanding their own words.

Why? Because such illusory oneness does not require any use of intelligence, as intelligence enables us to discriminate between good and bad, useless and useful, spiritual and material, and poisonous and nourishing.

None of the preachers of this global and universal oneness follow their own words. They always avoid specific questions about differences in quality and quantity. Such hypocrites are actually proposing that we are all one—some just a little bit more and some a little bit less. :-)

Dedicating their lives to fighting these Mayavada doctrines, appearing in forms of plain sentimentalism or brutal dogmatism, all the members of our Vaishnava guru-parampara opposed these poisonous ideas with great vigor.

Why? Because they knew that the idea of oneness ultimately aims to establish the part of God as God Himself. The part can never become the whole, and thus the Mayavada doctrine is the greatest offense to the Supreme Personality of Godhead.

But things can always get worse.

There are those who claim to be Vaishnavas, worshipers of God, externally worshiping His personal form, but due to their negligence of the principles upon which such worship is based, they declare us to be automatically part of God and therefore in no need to follow any principles, as “love” is not based on principles but merely on feelings.

Mistaking their mind for their heart, such rascals teach their followers to “love God” without any specific requirements. And so their sentimental idea of “love of God” occasionally results in unplanned pregnancy or abortion.

Such “seers of oneness with God” ignore the rules and regulations put forward by God Himself, actually introducing us to the kingdom of God without God.

As one of these rascals finally declared, the highest love is love of oneself.

This is how spiritualism degrades into humanism. This is how even those dressed as sannyasis end up opening hospitals where karma-ridden, conditioned souls can repair their bodies so they can go out and commit more sinful activities.

In the hands of such rascals, the process of bhakti-yoga becomes a merely mentally prefabricated image, where a stupefied audience is made to believe that God can be reached as easily as any grocery shop around the corner.

In the hands of such rascals, any deviant is instantly considered bona fide to reach God without any specific qualification.

It is for this reason that, especially after the departure of Lord Caitanya, so many sahajiya sects appeared—only imitating Him, but not following Him in terms of the principles He established.

As His most empowered preacher, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, used to say, “If I were to initiate followers without demanding that they follow the four regulative principles (no meat-eating, including fish and eggs; no intoxication of any kind; no gambling; and no illicit sex), I would have millions of disciples.”

But the preachers of oneness go on, initiating indiscriminately unqualified disciples, turning the movement the Founder-Acharya started into an embarrassing assortment of pseudo-Vaishnavas, while the truly serious devotees retreat, embarrassed, into the background—praying for the day when Srila Prabhupada’s movement may shine in its original glory and his words, clearly defining right and wrong, may be accepted without interpretation.

It was Srila Prabhupada who taught us the art of discrimination, awakening our intelligence and urging us to vehemently oppose the doctrine of oneness. Being himself accused of not being “sama-darshina”—a seer of equality of all beings—he even more vigorously fought this kind of pseudo-spirituality preached by pseudo-paramahamsas in the garb of renunciates.

The consequences of such pseudo-oneness Mayavada doctrines are so detrimental to the original process of bhakti that the most merciful incarnation of God, Lord Caitanya, taught us that it is better to be in the same cage with a tiger than in the association of such Mayavadis.

Regardless of institutional status or the number of followers such deviants may have, one should renounce the association of such compromised preachers and allow them to merge with the mass of karma-dominated conditioned souls. One should avoid “oneness in stupidity” and instead seek association where dignified intelligence is cultivated.

Many such universal-love-preaching Mayavadis have come and gone. The real followers of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami do not allow their chastity to his words to be compromised. They remain sheltered at the lotus feet of their teacher while encouraging others to join them—learning daily to discriminate between the spiritual and the material.