Allen Ginsberg and Prabhupada Discuss Kali Yuga

Transcript Preview

Lecture with Allen Ginsberg at Ohio State University — May 12, 1969, Columbus 690512LE-COLUMBUS [37:10 Minutes] Lecture_690512LE-COLUMBUS Allen Ginsberg: The amazing thing was that everybody was able to shake their own ass and get up and dance after..., a long time, and not knowing what to do. When ancient rhythms were floating through, everybody thought and certainly everybody desired to dance and sing rather than be frozen. But such is the nature of our conditioning, in this, which is called the Kali-yuga, according to Hindu fairytale, Hindu mythology, Hindu religion, Hindu belief, Hindu metaphysics, Hindu cosmography, probably corresponding to what in our Western tradition we know as the gnostic tradition, through [indistinct], [indistinct] and William Blake. This is a Orient version of what may be the same tradition, suppressed in the West when the CIA took over religion in 313 A.D. [laughter and applause], when Constantine, Caesar, made a deal with the Church to suppress all alien thoughts and heresies and to formulate a square Western version of heaven and hell. [laughter] The Kali-yuga concept is one that you can now, in a sense, interpret ecologically.

If you've been following the scientifical pronouncements of doom possibility coming over television, radio and slick magazines, as well as from the underground press, you will notice that there's increasing attention to the fact that our own fecal material, the waste products of our robots, have now so polluted Lake Erie that it's a great lake of green goo slime, biologically dead;. That our atmosphere, the planetary atmosphere, is increasingly polluted with carbon wastes; and that we are so sunk in our attachment to automobile exhaust fumes, to sulfur wastes from great steel factories producing metals that can be sent flying to explode on the other side of the planet with the collaboration of the science faculties in such universities as this, [applause] so that we find ourselves increasingly sunk into what is called a materialistic habit, like a junky stuck on his junk. People are hooked on matter, and on their own identity in matter, taking their own identity from their faces, nose, bodies, and immediate physical city-complex around them, and not realizing another sweeter, deeper but wilder, or "transcendental," identity than the identity of the one-dimensional man that Marcuse has talked out. So what we are proposing here is a modern-minded view, or some indications of a modern Western, i.e., gnostic, Marcuse view of Kali-yuga, as applying to our own situation, rather than being an Oriental fairytale. As it stands, I read in the paper today, the prognosis for our... According to U Thant in today's paper, according to the head of the U.N., mankind has only ten years to reverse the political, social, moral, emotional, bhakti course of the planet, and alter our technology, alter our consciousness radically enough to preserve human existence on the planet. [applause] So this is not only the official U.N. pronouncement; it's also the pronouncement of most of the ecologists, biologists and ecosystemic students of the planet that are presently considering the ecological disruption that we have caused through our greed and destructiveness. The Oriental tale, or analysis, has it, however, that we have a good deal more time.

The Kali-yuga, or age of heavy metal entanglement, iron age, lasts 432,000 years, and we're only 5,000 years into it. So there is 428..., 427,000 years to go. In a conversation with Swami Bhaktivedanta today, I was inquiring more about the details of the mythology, which are found in a book called the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. He explained that according to Hindu analysis we are five thousand years into the descent from a lighter age, the age of brass, the disappearance of Lord Kṛṣṇa, an aspect of the Hindu Deity Viṣṇu, preserver, or perhaps the supreme form of the preserver aspect of the universe, of ourselves, or of Viṣṇu. This appearance of Kṛṣṇa, mythologically or historically, is five thousand years ago.

We're five thousand years into the age of iron, and we have ten thousand years in which to chant Hare Kṛṣṇa, which is to say, repeating the name of the aspect of preservation, hope, that particular vibration of dancing joy, transcending our cosmopolitical words. We have ten thousand years for that play before there is a total descent into one-foot-tall monsters who eat each other up for meat because all the vegetables have disappeared, because DDT has completely cleared out any biological life form except mammals who go around eating each other at that point. For... I've known Swami Bhaktivedanta for about three years, since he settled in the Lower East Side in New York, which was my territory and my neighborhood... [applause] It seemed to me like a stroke of great intelligence of him to come not as an uptown swami [laughter], but as a real down-home street swami, and make it on the street in the Lower East Side, as in..., as also opening a branch on Frederick Street in San Francisco, right in the center of Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, so that people who were tripping in Haight-Ashbury several years ago, coming down, wanting some, quote, "permanent—eternal reassurance," formula, ritual, magic, hope, feel, one truth, if you wish, okay, zeroed in on the Frederick Street rug'd, perfumed, incensed, āśrama, where chanting would be heard at dawn as they were coming down off a trip all night. A great many people who were hung on acid or other varieties of chemical psychedelics found it much more stable to practice a prolonged ritual, or sādhana, following the instructions of Swami Bhaktivedanta, which are old, classical, Indian-style instructions for both ritual, daily living, diet, sexuality, thought consciousness, apparel, hand gestures—in other words, a very complicated ritualized yoga, a very ancient one also. I thought Swami Bhaktivedanta made a great move in coming to the Lower East Side and to Haight-Ashbury.

And then, naturally, because people dig chanting, centers formed in other parts of the United States, so that there are small street-level houses or storefront centers in Vancouver or in L.A., in Montreal, up in Buffalo, down in... There's some Buffalo chanters here. And "chant" comes from the word enchant, by the way, which means to make oneself into..., to make a magical spell about oneself. So there are Santa Fe centers also. In other words, the indigenous..., the importation of a very strange Oriental form, almost a hard-shelled Baptist Oriental form, in the sense of its traditionality and its fundamentalism, its reliance on ancient texts and interpretation of ancient texts by a long tradition of teachers—it's strange, it's so far-out and ritualized an Indian form should take root in the United States a little more naturally than the more Protestant Vedānta Society or the extremely rigorous Zen groups that have taken root. I think partly it's due to the magnanimity or generosity or the old-age charm, wisdom, cheerfulness of Swami Bhaktivedanta, his openness of heart, his willingness to come down onto the street, and his sense of his own divinity and the divinity of others around him that it's been possible for the bhakti-yoga cult of India to be planted very firmly here in America, so that now there are communes, or āśramas, functioning on the basis of the Kṛṣṇa rituals, which are, in some respect, a model for all those anarchists and political people who are interested in establishing indigenous American communes. The regulations on food, on sexual relations, which generally cause much confusion in mutual-living health pads; the regulations on sleep and thinking process are, like, an interesting model to study for those who are interested in forming affinity groups or large family communes. I will have my turn at language tomorrow, because I'm giving a poetry reading at the Student Union somewhere—I'm not sure where—which is my regular thing, which is why I was invited here by the Student Activities Committee.

So I will cut myself off now and be brief and leave the rest of the evening to Swami Bhaktivedanta, who will give a language explanation, or whatever he wants to say, of the cultural or metaphysical or religious roots in... Pardon me? Student: What time? Allen Ginsberg: I don't know. Any time now. The time now... Hayagrīva: Mention we'll have more chanting. Allen Ginsberg: Yes, I will.

So the rest of this evening will be..., Swami Bhaktivedanta will explain his divine self. Then we will continue chanting. Swāmījī. [applause] [12:46] Prabhupāda: oṁ ajñāna-timirāndhasya jñānāñjana-śalākayā cakṣur-unmīlitaṁ yena tasmai śrī-gurave namaḥ [Gautamīya-tantra] [I offer my respectful obeisances unto my spiritual master, who with the torchlight of knowledge has opened my eyes, which were blinded by the darkness of ignorance.] My dear boys and girls, I thank you very much for your coming here and participating with this saṅkīrtana function. The saṅkīrtana function, or...

Continue reading full transcript in the app →