Hello, my name is Chris, and I'm a recovering conspiracy theorist.
With your help, maybe, just maybe, I can return to a world free of cynicism, paranoia, and outlandish, highly speculative fairy tales. I'm serious!
I guess I'm not exactly rolling with the popular tide here, as this article from the Las Vegas Sun details.
I find my experience as an bumbling, stumbling, highly conditioned aspiring devotee to have at least a few positive side-effects that my old habits and mental misconceptions can't quite cover up. One of these positive side effects is that I am finding my personality far more grounded and practical.
The strong sense of satisfaction I find in trying to practice a Krsna Conscious life means I'm no longer waiting for the world to end so that all my mundane problems will be solved.
To be honest, I'm not quite jumping right over to the other side of the fence, proudly singing the "Star Spangled Banner", "Kumbaya" and "Purple Haze" and saying everything is dynamite...the facts do remain...there's a lot of evidential discrepancies to the official account of 9/11, plenty of sane and sound people have seen UFOs and have had encounters with their occupants, the Federal Reserve isn't exactly accountable to "We The People", and you can even taste the fluoride in the tap water, but...
...our duty as devotees of the sankirtana mission of Lord Caitanya, in my humble estimation, is to acknowledge the truths and un-truths, the info and disinfo, as yet another virulent symptom of the Kali-Yuga, but we shouldn't become so absorbed that we become cynical in our outlook on life and in our presentation of Krishna Consciousness.
Hollow-eyed cynicism doesn't make anything attractive, least of all our own spiritual message of eternity, knowledge, and bliss.
This is my whole "funda" (fundamental knowledge) realization at the moment on this topic. Cynicism is death to my spiritual aspirations, and the only way to cure this disease is to loosen the ties that bind me to fanciful and darkly horrific ideas that are the very model of "mental speculation".
Again, this is not to say there is not validity to what lies behind the veil of our mass-media, government-funded outlook on the world. Vedic history makes it very clear that demonic influences have infiltrated and influenced this lonely Planet Earth, and are doing so now in many dynamic, subtle ways.
And when I say subtle, I mean that I don't quite think George Bush, the Queen, and Tony Blair are literally evil reptilian beings in disguise.
But if you find yourself worrying a bit too much about the coming global changes of 2012, or whether Obama is actually legit or not, or whether one of the Rockefeller kids will call in a stock-market collapse, I say step outside, take a deep breath, call out "Gauranga", and remember that, in the Holy Name, we actually have a more powerful weapon than microwave guns or nuclear warheads.
We're working on the level of the soul, where by raising people's awareness of their own spiritual nature, we move very far beyond any temporary political half-truths and speculations. We must each do our humble and patient part without getting too entangled in the various vagaries of this world.
