Monday, January 3, 2011

how not to talk about religion, a 1-part series

But Stuart is right that this was a very cohesive community, and the women I met there seemed to acclimate fully to those Vedic scriptures, to all the injunctions, some of which did seem kind of absurd. Like the ones about cows, the ones about dress ... I never could quite understand and I used to ask Stu, why do they have to wear the fuckin' 2,000 year old dress? How does that bring them closer to God? Again, I'm not sure of the fine print in the scriptures, but ostensibly the rationale is simply "we want to be close to the original goatherds and Gopis that loved Krishna, because by emulating them, we, by some sort of symbiotic identification, will advance closer to Krishna himself." Krishna, by the way, might be a fictitious being, but that's another story.



Everybody else looks identical, perfectly homogeneous. And Stuey and I are sitting with them, but in jeans and Pink Floyd T-shirts.

Text provided by Stuart Resnick 
Photo by Svetlana Larina

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