A beginner's guide to contemporary spiritual life

His Holiness Revatinandana Svami, a frequent contributor to Back to Godhead, is traveling throughout Great Britain lecturing about Krsna consciousness to college audiences.

Jayadvaita dasa is Associate Editor of Back to Godhead

WE SOMETIMES HEAR the complaint that there are so many religious and spiritual groups with so many different teachings that it has become difficult to distinguish among them. People sometimes throw up their hands and drop spiritual life altogether, protesting, "How can I decide what's true and what's not? It's too confusing!" The revealed scriptures of the world, however, confirm that by the grace of God one who seeks a true spiritual life will find it. But to avoid confusion, one must use careful intelligence to discriminate between the saints and the swindlers, the incarnations and the imposters, the holy men and the hypocrites.

Perhaps the revealed scriptures of the world will afford us some help in this matter, if we can find some common ground among them. After all, they are the ancient, accepted sources of understanding about God and spiritual life for countless millions of people, and they may provide us with at least a beginning.

All the world's major scriptures, such as the Bhagavad-gita, the Holy Bible and the Koran, agree that God, or the Supreme Truth, is one, and that He is the cause or creator of everything that exists. This simple information in itself will help one settle the confusion about whether God is a void, God is a divine light, we are all God ourselves, or just who or what God is. Let us therefore examine these different philosophical ideas according to logic and according to scriptures.