Question: People are tired of religions. How to present Krsna consciousness without making people feel that there is one more religion on the market?

Jayapataka Swami: We need to know, what is the purpose of life. Why we are here, where we are supposed to go? Srila Bhakti Vinoda Thakur said that each religion enfolds themselves up like a fortress. But the vaisnava tradition, we are open, and we are willing to discuss with any religion or any philosophy, and we try to understand a more complete understanding of the Absolute Truth. So people may get tired of the very restrictive fortress of different religions, but Krsna consciousness is different, we are opening the doors. We are saying that there are principles which are universal and that all religions should accept that. Just like the Bhagavatam is spoken of things that happened in different planets and different universes. So one of the Deans of the one of the American universities, asked a religionist at some World Congress Symposium and Synthesis of Science and Religion. He asked the following question at the World Congress Symposium and Synthesis of Science and Religion. We had a World Congress on the Synthesis of Science and Religion. He asked that ‘the other religions are only talking about this planet, what if we discover that there is life on other planets?’, And they said, ‘then we will be finished! Because we don’t have any concept outside of this planet.’ But in Krsna consciousness, we have chodah bhuvanas – 14 planetary levels. In the higher levels we have Bhur bhuva sva then we have Mahar loka, Jana loka, Tapa loka and then Satya loka. So we are saying that there is life on all planets, but they may be in different dimensions and different ecological situations. Like in the sun planet, there the entities have bodies of fire. So if you go to the moon, we only find rocks, rust! But according to the Vedas the moon is a heavenly planet. The people there live on another dimension and we are not able to see that. So like this in the Vedas, it is described that universe is fully occupied by different entities. So it is very interesting and I don’t  see any difficulty to interest people in this very descriptive explanation of the universe.
20-JULY-2019 CHENNAI, INDIA