Spiritual-Bypass on Light of Dharma Publishing

The Cliff Made of Good Works

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 19:36:00 +0530

Gauranga das had given Krishna everything. Forty years of book distribution, ten thousand mornings of walking up to strangers in parking lots and airports with Prabhupada’s books under his arm. He had raised funds, trained crews, weathered the politics of three different temples. And now, in his sixties, he had started his masterwork: a campaign to place Prabhupada’s books in every public library, school, and university in the region, standing orders and donated sets that would sit on shelves for generations, so that long after he was gone some student would pull down the Bhagavad-gītā As It Is and never be the same.

The Russian Vaishnava Who Speaks Like a Dostoevsky Character

Tue, 26 May 2026 21:33:00 +0530

The old man sat on a low cushion in a seminar room somewhere in the Russian winter, a microphone clipped to his sweater, and said the thing that froze everyone listening. Almost fifty years of chanting. Decades of service. And looking back, he said, it was all nothing. Imagination. A long, elaborate self-deception. When that realization came, he admitted, it did not humble him into peace. It pushed him to the edge of taking his own life.

It's His Karma

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Lakshmi had been driving for forty minutes when she pulled into the friend’s driveway. She had come for one reason. A visiting sannyasi was speaking in the living room tonight, and she had decided, somewhere between her son’s last appointment and now, that she was going to ask him for help.

She had not told anyone what she was carrying. Six months ago her son, thirty years old, was diagnosed. The treatment had been brutal in the way these treatments are. He had survived it so far. What he had not survived was what it had done to his ability to be in the same room with her. He had stopped picking up the phone past nine. He had stopped finishing meals when she was watching. He could not bear his fear in front of her, and so he had begun, quietly, to make her absent from the parts of his life where the fear lived.

Divine Will as Spiritual Bypass

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:45:00 -0500

Madhava walked past the homeless man every morning on his way to the temple. The same corner. The same cardboard sign. The same hollow eyes. His temple friend Karuna once suggested organizing food distribution there. Madhava’s response came quickly, almost reflexively: “The world doesn’t need reform. Everything is under God’s control. That man is getting exactly what his karma dictates. We should focus on our own purification.”

It sounded sophisticated. It felt transcendent. Karuna couldn’t argue with it.