FinalDraft_v1.9.indd english conversation for all occasions. Metaphor in conversation. 300 Pages20123.95 MB303 Downloads. This thesis on Metaphor in Conversation was written as part of a five-year research project. Ab surd to the point of cra zi ness, you will guar an tee eter Adobe Photoshop PDF edi surds. A long time ago, on a platform far, far away, Mac OS was the branding Apple used for the software that ran on all of its computers. Then came the. Photos can now edit Live Photos and create Memories, which pulls together people and places to serendipitously remind you of the occasions that mean the most.

Prologue: You Are What You Have Read Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved.

Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished.

He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination. Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post. First, he compared a few sentences from two published versions of “The Great Gatsby,” Takashi Nozaki’s 1957 translation and Haruki Murakami’s more recent iteration, with what this new Google Translate was able to produce. Murakami’s translation is written “in very polished Japanese,” Rekimoto explained to me later via email, but the prose is distinctively “Murakami-style.” By contrast, Google’s translation — despite some “small unnaturalness” — reads to him as “more transparent.” The second half of Rekimoto’s post examined the service in the other direction, from Japanese to English. He dashed off his own Japanese interpretation of the opening to Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” then ran that passage back through Google into English. He published this version alongside Hemingway’s original, and proceeded to invite his readers to guess which was the work of a machine.

1: Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude. 2: Kilimanjaro is a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. The summit of the west is called “Ngaje Ngai” in Masai, the house of God.

Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude. Even to a native English speaker, the missing article on the leopard is the only real giveaway that No.

2 was the output of an automaton. Their closeness was a source of wonder to Rekimoto, who was well acquainted with the capabilities of the previous service. Only 24 hours earlier, Google would have translated the same Japanese passage as follows: Kilimanjaro is 19,710 feet of the mountain covered with snow, and it is said that the highest mountain in Africa. Top of the west, “Ngaje Ngai” in the Maasai language, has been referred to as the house of God.

The top close to the west, there is a dry, frozen carcass of a leopard. Whether the leopard had what the demand at that altitude, there is no that nobody explained. Rekimoto promoted his discovery to his hundred thousand or so followers on Twitter, and over the next few hours thousands of people broadcast their own experiments with the machine-translation service.

Some were successful, others meant mostly for comic effect. As dawn broke over Tokyo, Google Translate was the No.

1 trend on Japanese Twitter, just above some cult anime series and the long-awaited new single from a girl-idol supergroup. Everybody wondered: How had Google Translate become so uncannily artful? Four days later, a couple of hundred journalists, entrepreneurs and advertisers from all over the world gathered in Google’s London engineering office for a special announcement. Guests were greeted with Translate-branded fortune cookies. Their paper slips had a foreign phrase on one side — mine was in Norwegian — and on the other, an invitation to download the Translate app.

Tables were set with trays of doughnuts and smoothies, each labeled with a placard that advertised its flavor in German ( zitrone), Portuguese ( baunilha) or Spanish ( manzana). After a while, everyone was ushered into a plush, dark theater. Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, outside his office in Mountain View, Calif. Credit Brian Finke for The New York Times Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, stood to make a few opening remarks. A friend, he began, had recently told him he reminded him of Google.

“Why, because I know all the answers?” the mayor asked. “No,” the friend replied, “because you’re always trying to finish my sentences.” The crowd tittered politely. Khan concluded by introducing Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, who took the stage. Pichai was in London in part to inaugurate Google’s new building there, the cornerstone of a new “knowledge quarter” under construction at King’s Cross, and in part to unveil the completion of the initial phase of a company transformation he announced last year. The Google of the future, Pichai had said on several occasions, was going to be “A.I.

First.” What that meant in theory was complicated and had welcomed much speculation. What it meant in practice, with any luck, was that soon the company’s products would no longer represent the fruits of traditional computer programming, exactly, but “machine learning.”.

The phrase “artificial intelligence” is invoked as if its meaning were self-evident, but it has always been a source of confusion and controversy. Imagine if you went back to the 1970s, stopped someone on the street, pulled out a smartphone and showed her Google Maps. Once you managed to convince her you weren’t some oddly dressed wizard, and that what you withdrew from your pocket wasn’t a black-arts amulet but merely a tiny computer more powerful than the one that guided Apollo missions, Google Maps would almost certainly seem to her a persuasive example of “artificial intelligence.” In a very real sense, it is. It can do things any map-literate human can manage, like get you from your hotel to the airport — though it can do so much more quickly and reliably.

It can also do things that humans simply and obviously cannot: It can evaluate the traffic, plan the best route and reorient itself when you take the wrong exit. Advertisement Practically nobody today, however, would bestow upon Google Maps the honorific “A.I.,” so sentimental and sparing are we in our use of the word “intelligence.” Artificial intelligence, we believe, must be something that distinguishes HAL from whatever it is a loom or wheelbarrow can do.

The minute we can automate a task, we downgrade the relevant skill involved to one of mere mechanism. Today Google Maps seems, in the pejorative sense of the term, robotic: It simply accepts an explicit demand (the need to get from one place to another) and tries to satisfy that demand as efficiently as possible. The goal posts for “artificial intelligence” are thus constantly receding.

When he has an opportunity to make careful distinctions, Pichai differentiates between the current applications of A.I. And the ultimate goal of “artificial general intelligence.” Artificial general intelligence will not involve dutiful adherence to explicit instructions, but instead will demonstrate a facility with the implicit, the interpretive.

It will be a general tool, designed for general purposes in a general context. Pichai believes his company’s future depends on something like this. Imagine if you could tell Google Maps, “I’d like to go to the airport, but I need to stop off on the way to buy a present for my nephew.” A more generally intelligent version of that service — a ubiquitous assistant, of the sort that Scarlett Johansson memorably disembodied three years ago in the Spike Jonze film “Her”— would know all sorts of things that, say, a close friend or an earnest intern might know: your nephew’s age, and how much you ordinarily like to spend on gifts for children, and where to find an open store. But a truly intelligent Maps could also conceivably know all sorts of things a close friend wouldn’t, like what has only recently come into fashion among preschoolers in your nephew’s school — or more important, what its users actually want. If an intelligent machine were able to discern some intricate if murky regularity in data about what we have done in the past, it might be able to extrapolate about our subsequent desires, even if we don’t entirely know them ourselves. The new wave of A.I.-enhanced assistants — Apple’s Siri, Facebook’s M, Amazon’s Echo — are all creatures of machine learning, built with similar intentions. The corporate dreams for machine learning, however, aren’t exhausted by the goal of consumer clairvoyance.

A medical-imaging subsidiary of Samsung announced this year that its new ultrasound devices could detect breast cancer. Management consultants are falling all over themselves to prep executives for the widening industrial applications of computers that program themselves. DeepMind, a 2014 Google acquisition, defeated the reigning human grandmaster of the ancient board game Go, despite predictions that such an achievement would take another 10 years. In a famous, Alan Turing proposed a test for an artificial general intelligence: a computer that could, over the course of five minutes of text exchange, successfully deceive a real human interlocutor. Once a machine can translate fluently between two natural languages, the foundation has been laid for a machine that might one day “understand” human language well enough to engage in plausible conversation. Google Brain’s members, who pushed and helped oversee the Translate project, believe that such a machine would be on its way to serving as a generally intelligent all-encompassing personal digital assistant. What follows here is the story of how a team of Google researchers and engineers — at first one or two, then three or four, and finally more than a hundred — made considerable progress in that direction.

It’s an uncommon story in many ways, not least of all because it defies many of the Silicon Valley stereotypes we’ve grown accustomed to. It does not feature people who think that everything will be unrecognizably different tomorrow or the next day because of some restless tinkerer in his garage. It is neither a story about people who think technology will solve all our problems nor one about people who think technology is ineluctably bound to create apocalyptic new ones. It is not about disruption, at least not in the way that word tends to be used. It is, in fact, three overlapping stories that converge in Google Translate’s successful metamorphosis to A.I. — a technical story, an institutional story and a story about the evolution of ideas. The technical story is about one team on one product at one company, and the process by which they refined, tested and introduced a brand-new version of an old product in only about a quarter of the time anyone, themselves included, might reasonably have expected.

The institutional story is about the employees of a small but influential artificial-intelligence group within that company, and the process by which their intuitive faith in some old, unproven and broadly unpalatable notions about computing upended every other company within a large radius. The story of ideas is about the cognitive scientists, psychologists and wayward engineers who long toiled in obscurity, and the process by which their ostensibly irrational convictions ultimately inspired a paradigm shift in our understanding not only of technology but also, in theory, of consciousness itself. The first story, the story of Google Translate, takes place in Mountain View over nine months, and it explains the transformation of machine translation. The second story, the story of Google Brain and its many competitors, takes place in Silicon Valley over five years, and it explains the transformation of that entire community. The third story, the story of deep learning, takes place in a variety of far-flung laboratories — in Scotland, Switzerland, Japan and most of all Canada — over seven decades, and it might very well contribute to the revision of our self-image as first and foremost beings who think. Advertisement All three are stories about artificial intelligence. The seven-decade story is about what we might conceivably expect or want from it.

The five-year story is about what it might do in the near future. The nine-month story is about what it can do right this minute.

These three stories are themselves just proof of concept. All of this is only the beginning.

Part I: Learning Machine 1. The Birth of Brain Jeff Dean, though his title is senior fellow, is the de facto head of Google Brain. Dean is a sinewy, energy-efficient man with a long, narrow face, deep-set eyes and an earnest, soapbox-derby sort of enthusiasm. The son of a medical anthropologist and a public-health epidemiologist, Dean grew up all over the world — Minnesota, Hawaii, Boston, Arkansas, Geneva, Uganda, Somalia, Atlanta — and, while in high school and college, wrote software used by the World Health Organization. He has been with Google since 1999, as employee 25ish, and has had a hand in the core software systems beneath nearly every significant undertaking since then. A beloved artifact of company culture is, written in the style of the Chuck Norris Facts meme: “Jeff Dean’s PIN is the last four digits of pi.” “When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he saw a missed call from Jeff Dean.” “Jeff Dean got promoted to Level 11 in a system where the maximum level is 10.” (This last one is, in fact, true.) Photo.

The Google engineer and Google Brain leader Jeff Dean. Credit Brian Finke for The New York Times One day in early 2011, Dean walked into one of the Google campus’s “microkitchens” — the “Googley” word for the shared break spaces on most floors of the Mountain View complex’s buildings — and ran into Andrew Ng, a young Stanford computer-science professor who was working for the company as a consultant. Ng told him about Project Marvin, an internal effort (named after the celebrated A.I. Pioneer Marvin Minsky) he had recently helped establish to experiment with “neural networks,” pliant digital lattices based loosely on the architecture of the brain. Dean himself had worked on a primitive version of the technology as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota in 1990, during one of the method’s brief windows of mainstream acceptability. Now, over the previous five years, the number of academics working on neural networks had begun to grow again, from a handful to a few dozen.

Ng told Dean that Project Marvin, which was being underwritten by Google’s secretive X lab, had already achieved some promising results. Dean was intrigued enough to lend his “20 percent” — the portion of work hours every Google employee is expected to contribute to programs outside his or her core job — to the project. Pretty soon, he suggested to Ng that they bring in another colleague with a neuroscience background, Greg Corrado.

(In graduate school, Corrado was taught briefly about the technology, but strictly as a historical curiosity. “It was good I was paying attention in class that day,” he joked to me.) In late spring they brought in one of Ng’s best graduate students, Quoc Le, as the project’s first intern.

By then, a number of the Google engineers had taken to referring to Project Marvin by another name: Google Brain. Since the term “artificial intelligence” was first coined, at a kind of constitutional convention of the mind at Dartmouth in the summer of 1956, a majority of researchers have long thought the best approach to creating A.I. Would be to write a very big, comprehensive program that laid out both the rules of logical reasoning and sufficient knowledge of the world. If you wanted to translate from English to Japanese, for example, you would program into the computer all of the grammatical rules of English, and then the entirety of definitions contained in the Oxford English Dictionary, and then all of the grammatical rules of Japanese, as well as all of the words in the Japanese dictionary, and only after all of that feed it a sentence in a source language and ask it to tabulate a corresponding sentence in the target language. You would give the machine a language map that was, as Borges would have had it, the size of the territory. This perspective is usually called “symbolic A.I.” — because its definition of cognition is based on symbolic logic — or, disparagingly, “good old-fashioned A.I.” There are two main problems with the old-fashioned approach.

The first is that it’s awfully time-consuming on the human end. The second is that it only really works in domains where rules and definitions are very clear: in mathematics, for example, or chess. Translation, however, is an example of a field where this approach fails horribly, because words cannot be reduced to their dictionary definitions, and because languages tend to have as many exceptions as they have rules. More often than not, a system like this is liable to translate “minister of agriculture” as “priest of farming.” Still, for math and chess it worked great, and the proponents of symbolic A.I. Took it for granted that no activities signaled “general intelligence” better than math and chess.

An excerpt of a 1961 documentary emphasizing the longstanding premise of artificial-intelligence research: If you could program a computer to mimic higher-order cognitive tasks like math or chess, you were on a path that would eventually lead to something akin to consciousness. Video posted on YouTube by Roberto Pieraccini There were, however, limits to what this system could do. In the 1980s, a robotics researcher at Carnegie Mellon pointed out that it was easy to get computers to do adult things but nearly impossible to get them to do things a 1-year-old could do, like hold a ball or identify a cat. By the 1990s, despite punishing advancements in computer chess, we still weren’t remotely close to artificial general intelligence. There has always been another vision for A.I. — a dissenting view — in which the computers would learn from the ground up (from data) rather than from the top down (from rules). This notion dates to the early 1940s, when it occurred to researchers that the best model for flexible automated intelligence was the brain itself.

A brain, after all, is just a bunch of widgets, called neurons, that either pass along an electrical charge to their neighbors or don’t. What’s important are less the individual neurons themselves than the manifold connections among them. This structure, in its simplicity, has afforded the brain a wealth of adaptive advantages. The brain can operate in circumstances in which information is poor or missing; it can withstand significant damage without total loss of control; it can store a huge amount of knowledge in a very efficient way; it can isolate distinct patterns but retain the messiness necessary to handle ambiguity. Advertisement There was no reason you couldn’t try to mimic this structure in electronic form, and in 1943 that arrangements of simple artificial neurons could carry out basic logical functions. They could also, at least in theory, learn the way we do.

With life experience, depending on a particular person’s trials and errors, the synaptic connections among pairs of neurons get stronger or weaker. An artificial neural network could do something similar, by gradually altering, on a guided trial-and-error basis, the numerical relationships among artificial neurons. It wouldn’t need to be preprogrammed with fixed rules. It would, instead, rewire itself to reflect patterns in the data it absorbed. This attitude toward artificial intelligence was evolutionary rather than creationist. If you wanted a flexible mechanism, you wanted one that could adapt to its environment. If you wanted something that could adapt, you didn’t want to begin with the indoctrination of the rules of chess.

You wanted to begin with very basic abilities — sensory perception and motor control — in the hope that advanced skills would emerge organically. Humans don’t learn to understand language by memorizing dictionaries and grammar books, so why should we possibly expect our computers to do so? Google Brain was the first major commercial institution to invest in the possibilities embodied by this way of thinking about A.I. Dean, Corrado and Ng began their work as a part-time, collaborative experiment, but they made immediate progress. They took architectural inspiration for their models from recent theoretical outlines — as well as ideas that had been on the shelf since the 1980s and 1990s — and drew upon both the company’s peerless reserves of data and its massive computing infrastructure. They instructed the networks on enormous banks of “labeled” data — speech files with correct transcriptions, for example — and the computers improved their responses to better match reality. “The portion of evolution in which animals developed eyes was a big development,” Dean told me one day, with customary understatement.

We were sitting, as usual, in a whiteboarded meeting room, on which he had drawn a crowded, snaking timeline of Google Brain and its relation to inflection points in the recent history of neural networks. “Now computers have eyes. We can build them around the capabilities that now exist to understand photos. Robots will be drastically transformed. They’ll be able to operate in an unknown environment, on much different problems.” These capacities they were building may have seemed primitive, but their implications were profound. Geoffrey Hinton, whose ideas helped lay the foundation for the neural-network approach to Google Translate, at Google’s offices in Toronto. Credit Brian Finke for The New York Times 2.

The Unlikely Intern In its first year or so of existence, Brain’s experiments in the development of a machine with the talents of a 1-year-old had, as Dean said, worked to great effect. Its speech-recognition team swapped out part of their old system for a neural network and encountered, in pretty much one fell swoop, the best quality improvements anyone had seen in 20 years. Their system’s object-recognition abilities improved by an order of magnitude. This was not because Brain’s personnel had generated a sheaf of outrageous new ideas in just a year.

It was because Google had finally devoted the resources — in computers and, increasingly, personnel — to fill in outlines that had been around for a long time. A great preponderance of these extant and neglected notions had been proposed or refined by a peripatetic English polymath named Geoffrey Hinton. In the second year of Brain’s existence, Hinton was recruited to Brain as Andrew Ng left.

(Ng now leads the 1,300-person A.I. Team at Baidu.) Hinton wanted to leave his post at the University of Toronto for only three months, so for arcane contractual reasons he had to be hired as an intern. At intern training, the orientation leader would say something like, “Type in your LDAP” — a user login — and he would flag a helper to ask, “What’s an LDAP?” All the smart 25-year-olds in attendance, who had only ever known deep learning as the sine qua non of artificial intelligence, snickered: “Who is that old guy?

Why doesn’t he get it?” “At lunchtime,” Hinton said, “someone in the queue yelled: ‘Professor Hinton! I took your course! What are you doing here?’ After that, it was all right.” A few months later, Hinton and two of his students truly astonishing gains in a big image-recognition contest, run by an open-source collective called ImageNet, that asks computers not only to identify a monkey but also to distinguish between spider monkeys and howler monkeys, and among God knows how many different breeds of cat. Google soon approached Hinton and his students with an offer. They accepted. “I thought they were interested in our I.P.,” he said. “Turns out they were interested in us.”.

Advertisement Hinton comes from one of those old British families emblazoned like the Darwins at eccentric angles across the intellectual landscape, where regardless of titular preoccupation a person is expected to make sideline contributions to minor problems in astronomy or fluid dynamics. His great-great-grandfather was George Boole, whose foundational work in symbolic logic underpins the computer; another great-great-grandfather was a celebrated surgeon, his father a venturesome entomologist, his father’s cousin a Los Alamos researcher; the list goes on. He trained at Cambridge and Edinburgh, then taught at Carnegie Mellon before he ended up at Toronto, where he still spends half his time.

(His work has long been supported by the largess of the Canadian government.) I visited him in his office at Google there. He has tousled yellowed-pewter hair combed forward in a mature Noel Gallagher style and wore a baggy striped dress shirt that persisted in coming untucked, and oval eyeglasses that slid down to the tip of a prominent nose. He speaks with a driving if shambolic wit, and says things like, “Computers will understand sarcasm before Americans do.” Hinton had been working on neural networks since his undergraduate days at Cambridge in the late 1960s, and he is seen as the intellectual primogenitor of the contemporary field. For most of that time, whenever he spoke about machine learning, people looked at him as though he were talking about the Ptolemaic spheres or bloodletting by leeches. Neural networks were taken as a disproven folly, largely on the basis of one overhyped project: the Perceptron, an artificial neural network that Frank Rosenblatt, a Cornell psychologist, developed in the late 1950s. The New York Times reported that the machine’s sponsor, the United States Navy, expected it would “be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence.” It went on to do approximately none of those things. Marvin Minsky, the dean of artificial intelligence in America, had worked on neural networks for his 1954 Princeton thesis, but he’d since grown tired of the inflated claims that Rosenblatt — who was a contemporary at Bronx Science — made for the neural paradigm.

(He was also competing for Defense Department funding.) Along with an M.I.T. Colleague, Minsky published a book that proved that there were painfully simple problems the Perceptron could never solve. Minsky’s criticism of the Perceptron extended only to networks of one “layer,” i.e., one layer of artificial neurons between what’s fed to the machine and what you expect from it — and later in life, he expounded ideas very similar to contemporary deep learning. But Hinton already knew at the time that complex tasks could be carried out if you had recourse to multiple layers. The simplest description of a neural network is that it’s a machine that makes classifications or predictions based on its ability to discover patterns in data. With one layer, you could find only simple patterns; with more than one, you could look for patterns of patterns. Take the case of image recognition, which tends to rely on a contraption called a “convolutional neural net.” (These were elaborated in a whose lead author, a Frenchman named Yann LeCun, did his postdoctoral research in Toronto under Hinton and now directs a huge A.I.

Endeavor at Facebook.) The first layer of the network learns to identify the very basic visual trope of an “edge,” meaning a nothing (an off-pixel) followed by a something (an on-pixel) or vice versa. Each successive layer of the network looks for a pattern in the previous layer. A pattern of edges might be a circle or a rectangle. A pattern of circles or rectangles might be a face. This more or less parallels the way information is put together in increasingly abstract ways as it travels from the photoreceptors in the retina back and up through the visual cortex.

At each conceptual step, detail that isn’t immediately relevant is thrown away. If several edges and circles come together to make a face, you don’t care exactly where the face is found in the visual field; you just care that it’s a face. A demonstration from 1993 showing an early version of the researcher Yann LeCun's convolutional neural network, which by the late 1990s was processing 10 to 20 percent of all checks in the United States. A similar technology now drives most state-of-the-art image-recognition systems. Video posted on YouTube by Yann LeCun The issue with multilayered, “deep” neural networks was that the trial-and-error part got extraordinarily complicated.

In a single layer, it’s easy. Imagine that you’re playing with a child. You tell the child, “Pick up the green ball and put it into Box A.” The child picks up a green ball and puts it into Box B. You say, “Try again to put the green ball in Box A.” The child tries Box A. Now imagine you tell the child, “Pick up a green ball, go through the door marked 3 and put the green ball into Box A.” The child takes a red ball, goes through the door marked 2 and puts the red ball into Box B. How do you begin to correct the child?

You cannot just repeat your initial instructions, because the child does not know at which point he went wrong. In real life, you might start by holding up the red ball and the green ball and saying, “Red ball, green ball.” The whole point of machine learning, however, is to avoid that kind of explicit mentoring.

Hinton and a few others went on to (or rather, reinvent ) to this layered-error problem, over the halting course of the late 1970s and 1980s, and interest among computer scientists in neural networks was briefly revived. “People got very excited about it,” he said.

“But we oversold it.” Computer scientists quickly went back to thinking that people like Hinton were weirdos and mystics. These ideas remained popular, however, among philosophers and psychologists, who called it “connectionism” or “parallel distributed processing.” “This idea,” Hinton told me, “of a few people keeping a torch burning, it’s a nice myth.

It was true within artificial intelligence. But within psychology lots of people believed in the approach but just couldn’t do it.” Neither could Hinton, despite the generosity of the Canadian government. “There just wasn’t enough computer power or enough data. People on our side kept saying, ‘Yeah, but if I had a really big one, it would work.’ It wasn’t a very persuasive argument.”. A Deep Explanation of Deep Learning When Pichai said that Google would henceforth be “A.I. First,” he was not just making a claim about his company’s business strategy; he was throwing in his company’s lot with this long-unworkable idea. Pichai’s allocation of resources ensured that people like Dean could ensure that people like Hinton would have, at long last, enough computers and enough data to make a persuasive argument.

An average brain has something on the order of 100 billion neurons. Each neuron is connected to up to 10,000 other neurons, which means that the number of synapses is between 100 trillion and 1,000 trillion. For a simple artificial neural network of the sort proposed in the 1940s, the attempt to even try to replicate this was unimaginable. We’re still far from the construction of a network of that size, but Google Brain’s investment allowed for the creation of artificial neural networks comparable to the brains of mice. To understand why scale is so important, however, you have to start to understand some of the more technical details of what, exactly, machine intelligences are doing with the data they consume.

A lot of our ambient fears about A.I. Rest on the idea that they’re just vacuuming up knowledge like a sociopathic prodigy in a library, and that an artificial intelligence constructed to make paper clips might someday decide to treat humans like ants or lettuce. This just isn’t how they work. All they’re doing is shuffling information around in search of commonalities — basic patterns, at first, and then more complex ones — and for the moment, at least, the greatest danger is that the information we’re feeding them is biased in the first place. Advertisement If that brief explanation seems sufficiently reassuring, the reassured nontechnical reader is invited to skip forward to the next section, which is about cats. If not, then read on. (This section is also, luckily, about cats.) Imagine you want to program a cat-recognizer on the old symbolic-A.I.

You stay up for days preloading the machine with an exhaustive, explicit definition of “cat.” You tell it that a cat has four legs and pointy ears and whiskers and a tail, and so on. All this information is stored in a special place in memory called Cat. Now you show it a picture. First, the machine has to separate out the various distinct elements of the image.

Then it has to take these elements and apply the rules stored in its memory. If(legs=4) and if(ears=pointy) and if(whiskers=yes) and if(tail=yes) and if(expression=supercilious), then(cat=yes). But what if you showed this cat-recognizer a Scottish Fold, a heart-rending breed with a prized genetic defect that leads to droopy doubled-over ears? Our symbolic A.I. Gets to (ears=pointy) and shakes its head solemnly, “Not cat.” It is hyperliteral, or “brittle.” Even the thickest toddler shows much greater inferential acuity.

Now imagine that instead of hard-wiring the machine with a set of rules for classification stored in one location of the computer’s memory, you try the same thing on a neural network. There is no special place that can hold the definition of “cat.” There is just a giant blob of interconnected switches, like forks in a path. On one side of the blob, you present the inputs (the pictures); on the other side, you present the corresponding outputs (the labels). Then you just tell it to work out for itself, via the individual calibration of all of these interconnected switches, whatever path the data should take so that the inputs are mapped to the correct outputs. The training is the process by which a labyrinthine series of elaborate tunnels are excavated through the blob, tunnels that connect any given input to its proper output. The more training data you have, the greater the number and intricacy of the tunnels that can be dug.

Once the training is complete, the middle of the blob has enough tunnels that it can make reliable predictions about how to handle data it has never seen before. This is called “supervised learning.” The reason that the network requires so many neurons and so much data is that it functions, in a way, like a sort of giant machine democracy. Imagine you want to train a computer to differentiate among five different items. Your network is made up of millions and millions of neuronal “voters,” each of whom has been given five different cards: one for cat, one for dog, one for spider monkey, one for spoon and one for defibrillator. You show your electorate a photo and ask, “Is this a cat, a dog, a spider monkey, a spoon or a defibrillator?” All the neurons that voted the same way collect in groups, and the network foreman peers down from above and identifies the majority classification: “A dog?” You say: “No, maestro, it’s a cat. Try again.” Now the network foreman goes back to identify which voters threw their weight behind “cat” and which didn’t.

The ones that got “cat” right get their votes counted double next time — at least when they’re voting for “cat.” They have to prove independently whether they’re also good at picking out dogs and defibrillators, but one thing that makes a neural network so flexible is that each individual unit can contribute differently to different desired outcomes. What’s important is not the individual vote, exactly, but the pattern of votes. If Joe, Frank and Mary all vote together, it’s a dog; but if Joe, Kate and Jessica vote together, it’s a cat; and if Kate, Jessica and Frank vote together, it’s a defibrillator. The neural network just needs to register enough of a regularly discernible signal somewhere to say, “Odds are, this particular arrangement of pixels represents something these humans keep calling ‘cats.’ ” The more “voters” you have, and the more times you make them vote, the more keenly the network can register even very weak signals. If you have only Joe, Frank and Mary, you can maybe use them only to differentiate among a cat, a dog and a defibrillator. If you have millions of different voters that can associate in billions of different ways, you can learn to classify data with incredible granularity.

Your trained voter assembly will be able to look at an unlabeled picture and identify it more or less accurately. Part of the reason there was so much resistance to these ideas in computer-science departments is that because the output is just a prediction based on patterns of patterns, it’s not going to be perfect, and the machine will never be able to define for you what, exactly, a cat is. It just knows them when it sees them.

This wooliness, however, is the point. The neuronal “voters” will recognize a happy cat dozing in the sun and an angry cat glaring out from the shadows of an untidy litter box, as long as they have been exposed to millions of diverse cat scenes. You just need lots and lots of the voters — in order to make sure that some part of your network picks up on even very weak regularities, on Scottish Folds with droopy ears, for example — and enough labeled data to make sure your network has seen the widest possible variance in phenomena. It is important to note, however, that the fact that neural networks are probabilistic in nature means that they’re not suitable for all tasks. It’s no great tragedy if they mislabel 1 percent of cats as dogs, or send you to the wrong movie on occasion, but in something like a self-driving car we all want greater assurances. This isn’t the only caveat. Supervised learning is a trial-and-error process based on labeled data.

The machines might be doing the learning, but there remains a strong human element in the initial categorization of the inputs. If your data had a picture of a man and a woman in suits that someone had labeled “woman with her boss,” that relationship would be encoded into all future pattern recognition. Labeled data is thus fallible the way that human labelers are fallible.

If a machine was asked to identify creditworthy candidates for loans, it might use data like felony convictions, but if felony convictions were unfair in the first place — if they were based on, say, discriminatory drug laws — then the loan recommendations would perforce also be fallible. Image-recognition networks like our cat-identifier are only one of many varieties of deep learning, but they are disproportionately invoked as teaching examples because each layer does something at least vaguely recognizable to humans — picking out edges first, then circles, then faces. This means there’s a safeguard against error. For instance, an early oddity in Google’s image-recognition software meant that it could not always identify a barbell in isolation, even though the team had trained it on an image set that included a lot of exercise categories. A visualization tool showed them the machine had learned not the concept of “dumbbell” but the concept of “dumbbell+arm,” because all the dumbbells in the training set were attached to arms. They threw into the training mix some photos of solo barbells. The problem was solved.

Not everything is so easy. The Cat Paper Over the course of its first year or two, Brain’s efforts to cultivate in machines the skills of a 1-year-old were auspicious enough that the team was graduated out of the X lab and into the broader research organization. (The head of Google X once noted that Brain had paid for the entirety of X’s costs.) They still had fewer than 10 people and only a vague sense for what might ultimately come of it all. But even then they were thinking ahead to what ought to happen next.

First a human mind learns to recognize a ball and rests easily with the accomplishment for a moment, but sooner or later, it wants to ask for the ball. And then it wades into language.

Advertisement Le didn’t see himself in those heady cat years as a language guy, but he felt an urge to connect the dots to his early chatbot. After the cat paper, he realized that if you could ask a network to summarize a photo, you could perhaps also ask it to summarize a sentence. This problem preoccupied Le, along with a Brain colleague named Tomas Mikolov, for the next two years. In that time, the Brain team outgrew several offices around him. For a while they were on a floor they shared with executives.

They got an email at one point from the administrator asking that they please stop allowing people to sleep on the couch in front of Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s suite. It unsettled incoming V.I.P.s. They were then allocated part of a research building across the street, where their exchanges in the microkitchen wouldn’t be squandered on polite chitchat with the suits. That interim also saw dedicated attempts on the part of Google’s competitors to catch up. (As Le told me about his close collaboration with Tomas Mikolov, he kept repeating Mikolov’s name over and over, in an incantatory way that sounded poignant. Le had never seemed so solemn.

I finally couldn’t help myself and began to ask, “Is he.?” Le nodded. “At Facebook,” he replied.) Photo.

Members of the Google Brain team in 2012, after their famous “cat paper” demonstrated the ability of neural networks to analyze unlabeled data. When shown millions of still frames from YouTube, a network isolated a pattern resembling the face of a cat. Credit Google They spent this period trying to come up with neural-network architectures that could accommodate not only simple photo classifications, which were static, but also complex structures that unfolded over time, like language or music. Many of these were first, and Le and his colleagues went back to those long-ignored contributions to see what they could glean. They knew that once you established a facility with basic linguistic prediction, you could then go on to do all sorts of other intelligent things — like predict a suitable reply to an email, for example, or predict the flow of a sensible conversation. You could sidle up to the sort of prowess that would, from the outside at least, look a lot like thinking. Part II: Language Machine 5.

The Linguistic Turn The hundred or so current members of Brain — it often feels less like a department within a colossal corporate hierarchy than it does a club or a scholastic society or an intergalactic cantina — came in the intervening years to count among the freest and most widely admired employees in the entire Google organization. They are now quartered in a tiered two-story eggshell building, with large windows tinted a menacing charcoal gray, on the leafy northwestern fringe of the company’s main Mountain View campus. Their microkitchen has a foosball table I never saw used; a Rock Band setup I never saw used; and a Go kit I saw used on a few occasions. (I did once see a young Brain research associate introducing his colleagues to ripe jackfruit, carving up the enormous spiky orb like a turkey.). When I began spending time at Brain’s offices, in June, there were some rows of empty desks, but most of them were labeled with Post-it notes that said things like “Jesse, 6/27.” Now those are all occupied. When I first visited, parking was not an issue.

The closest spaces were those reserved for expectant mothers or Teslas, but there was ample space in the rest of the lot. By October, if I showed up later than 9:30, I had to find a spot across the street. Brain’s growth made Dean slightly nervous about how the company was going to handle the demand. He wanted to avoid what at Google is known as a “success disaster” — a situation in which the company’s capabilities in theory outpaced its ability to implement a product in practice. At a certain point he did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, which he presented to the executives one day in a two-slide presentation.

“If everyone in the future speaks to their Android phone for three minutes a day,” he told them, “this is how many machines we’ll need.” They would need to double or triple their global computational footprint. “That,” he observed with a little theatrical gulp and widened eyes, “sounded scary.

You’d have to” — he hesitated to imagine the consequences — “build new buildings.” There was, however, another option: just design, mass-produce and install in dispersed data centers a new kind of chip to make everything faster. These chips would be called T.P.U.s, or “tensor processing units,” and their value proposition — counterintuitively — is that they are deliberately less precise than normal chips. Rather than compute 12.246 times 54.392, they will give you the perfunctory answer to 12 times 54. On a mathematical level, rather than a metaphorical one, a neural network is just a structured series of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of matrix multiplications carried out in succession, and it’s much more important that these processes be fast than that they be exact. “Normally,” Dean said, “special-purpose hardware is a bad idea. It usually works to speed up one thing. But because of the generality of neural networks, you can leverage this special-purpose hardware for a lot of other things.”.

Advertisement Just as the chip-design process was nearly complete, Le and two colleagues finally demonstrated that neural networks might be configured to handle the structure of language. He drew upon an idea, called “word embeddings,” that had been. When you summarize images, you can divine a picture of what each stage of the summary looks like — an edge, a circle, etc. When you summarize language in a similar way, you essentially produce multidimensional maps of the distances, based on common usage, between one word and every single other word in the language. The machine is not “analyzing” the data the way that we might, with linguistic rules that identify some of them as nouns and others as verbs. Instead, it is shifting and twisting and warping the words around in the map.

In two dimensions, you cannot make this map useful. You want, for example, “cat” to be in the rough vicinity of “dog,” but you also want “cat” to be near “tail” and near “supercilious” and near “meme,” because you want to try to capture all of the different relationships — both strong and weak — that the word “cat” has to other words. It can be related to all these other words simultaneously only if it is related to each of them in a different dimension. You can’t easily make a 160,000-dimensional map, but it turns out you can represent a language pretty well in a mere thousand or so dimensions — in other words, a universe in which each word is designated by a list of a thousand numbers. Le gave me a good-natured hard time for my continual requests for a mental picture of these maps. “Gideon,” he would say, with the blunt regular demurral of Bartleby, “I do not generally like trying to visualize thousand-dimensional vectors in three-dimensional space.” Still, certain dimensions in the space, it turned out, did seem to represent legible human categories, like gender or relative size. If you took the thousand numbers that meant “king” and literally just subtracted the thousand numbers that meant “queen,” you got the same numerical result as if you subtracted the numbers for “woman” from the numbers for “man.” And if you took the entire space of the English language and the entire space of French, you could, at least in theory, train a network to learn how to take a sentence in one space and propose an equivalent in the other.

You just had to give it millions and millions of English sentences as inputs on one side and their desired French outputs on the other, and over time it would recognize the relevant patterns in words the way that an image classifier recognized the relevant patterns in pixels. You could then give it a sentence in English and ask it to predict the best French analogue.

The major difference between words and pixels, however, is that all of the pixels in an image are there at once, whereas words appear in a progression over time. You needed a way for the network to “hold in mind” the progression of a chronological sequence — the complete pathway from the first word to the last. In a period of about a week, in September 2014, three papers came out — and two others by academics in and — that at last provided all the theoretical tools necessary to do this sort of thing. That research allowed for open-ended projects like Brain’s Magenta, an investigation into how machines might generate art and music. It also cleared the way toward an instrumental task like machine translation. Hinton told me he thought at the time that this follow-up work would take at least five more years.

The Ambush Le’s paper showed that neural translation was plausible, but he had used only a relatively small public data set. (Small for Google, that is — it was actually the biggest public data set in the world.

A decade of the old Translate had gathered production data that was between a hundred and a thousand times bigger.) More important, Le’s model didn’t work very well for sentences longer than about seven words. Mike Schuster, who then was a staff research scientist at Brain, picked up the baton. He knew that if Google didn’t find a way to scale these theoretical insights up to a production level, someone else would. The project took him the next two years. “You think,” Schuster says, “to translate something, you just get the data, run the experiments and you’re done, but it doesn’t work like that.” Schuster is a taut, focused, ageless being with a tanned, piston-shaped head, narrow shoulders, long camo cargo shorts tied below the knee and neon-green Nike Flyknits. He looks as if he woke up in the lotus position, reached for his small, rimless, elliptical glasses, accepted calories in the form of a modest portion of preserved acorn and completed a relaxed desert decathlon on the way to the office; in reality, he told me, it’s only an 18-mile bike ride each way. Schuster grew up in Duisburg, in the former West Germany’s blast-furnace district, and studied electrical engineering before moving to Kyoto to work on early neural networks.

In the 1990s, he ran experiments with a neural-networking machine as big as a conference room; it cost millions of dollars and had to be trained for weeks to do something you could now do on your desktop in less than an hour. He published that was barely cited for a decade and a half; this year it has been cited around 150 times. He is not humorless, but he does often wear an expression of some asperity, which I took as his signature combination of German restraint and Japanese restraint.

The issues Schuster had to deal with were tangled. For one thing, Le’s code was custom-written, and it wasn’t compatible with the new open-source machine-learning platform Google was then developing, TensorFlow. Dean directed to Schuster two other engineers, Yonghui Wu and Zhifeng Chen, in the fall of 2015. It took them two months just to replicate Le’s results on the new system. Le was around, but even he couldn’t always make heads or tails of what they had done.

As Schuster put it, “Some of the stuff was not done in full consciousness. They didn’t know themselves why they worked.”.

Srimad-Bhagavatam 2.1 Original Cover Once it was possible to find copies of original editions of Srila Prabhupada’s Srimad-Bhagavatams in second-hand book stores and on internet book websites but now the original editions of have become very difficult to find anywhere. So there is an urgent need to preserve these valuable books for future generations. We see the BBT making thousands of unauthorized changes to so many of Srila Prabhupada’s books in this way completely destroying the authority of the books. Srila Prabhupada’s Srimad-Bhagavatam has remained relatively free from such changes for many years but now, with the release of the BBT Folio 2012 edition, we see the BBT have now produced a new and “updated” version of Srila Prabhupada’s Srimad-Bhagavatam complete with thousands of unauthorized changes and what the BBT consider are ‘improvements’ Now they are even changing Prabhupada’s words in the Folio to what they think Prabhupada should have said The BBT are determined to change Prabhupada’s books. They have not heard the outcry from the devotees about their unauthorized changes to, and. They have not leaned from their mistakes, on the contrary according to one of the main BBT editors in recent years they have given us new, “improved”, revised editions of Srila Prabhupada’s, and and now they also have a new version of Srimad-Bhagavatam.

I do not know if they have actually printed this new unauthorized edition of Srimad-Bhagavatam but it is included in the 2012 release of the Folio Infobase. It is essential that we at least preserve the original teachings of Srila Prabhupada for future generations so as followers of Srila Prabhupada we all have to take this responsibility very seriously. At least we can not fail in handing on in tact and unchanged the original teachings of Srila Prabhupada to future generations.

That is the least we can do for Srila Prabhupada. You will find links below to PDF files that contain actual scans of original editions of Srila Prabhupada’s Srimad-Bhagavatam. Some covers are missing and they will be added when they are available, but otherwise you will find the complete book including all the original color plates.

These files are about 100 megabytes each because they contain actual scans of the original book pages. So it is an exact electronic copy of the original volumes of Srila Prabhupada’s Srimad-Bhagavatam. So please download these PDF files so you have the original first-edition of Srila Prabhupada’s Srimad-Bhagavatam, at least in electronic format.

(1972) (1972) (1972) (1972) (1972) (1972) (1974) (1974) (1974) (1972) (1972) (1972) (1972) (1975) (1975) (1975) (1975) (1976) (1976) (1976) (1976) (1976) (1976) (1976) (1977) (1977) (1977) (1977) (1977) (1980) Text files produced from the above scanned books. Hare Krishna Nandini It is very hard for us to understand because we have been so much trained by modern science in a different world-view. There is no concise description. It was not Srila Vyasadeva’s main purpose to describe the structure of the universe. Main thing is to get out, to go back home, back to Godhead, to the spiritual world.

But he does mention many points about the structure of the universe in his writings. Principally in the Fifth Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam but also throughout the whole Bhagavatam and in Mahabharata and the Puranas and Upanisads. So far I do not think anyone has a clear idea of the structure of the universe revealed in the writings of Srila Vyasadeva. So it requires spiritual advancement, realization, inspiration from Krishna in the heart, etc, to actually realize it in practice and present it as a true scientific model that could be appreciated by modern science, etc.

But I am sure when someone can do this at least a large percentage of the scientists will be very interested in it. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy!

Madhudvisa dasa. Hare Krishna! There are so many translations of the Vedic texts.

But unfortunately very few of them are by pure devotees of Krishna. The fact is that only a pure devotee of Krishna can understand and explain Krishna.

So only the translations and purports of a pure devotee of Krishna are helpful for us in our quest for spiritual advancement. Translations and commentaries by persons who are not pure devotees of Krishna will mislead us. They will not help us advance in Krishna consciousness, no matter how perfect they seem to be from the intellectual and scholarly point of view.

It is only the pure devotee of Krishna who can awaken the dormant Krishna consciousness that is within all our hearts. So Srila Prabhupada is a pure devotee of Krishna. A pure devotee of Krishna is very, very rare.

So we need to take full advantage of associating with him by reading his transcendental books. Prabhupada only translated up to Srimad-Bhagavatam Tenth Canto Chapter 13. But he has given us the entire Tenth Canto also in the form of: Krsna, The Supreme Personality of Godhead.

Then he has given us so much more nectar in the Sri Caitanya-caritamrta and many, many other books. So everything is in Srila Prabhupada’s books. You do not need to go anywhere else. You do not need to read any other books. Simply study all the books of Srila Prabhupada and put into practice in your life the instructions you find Srila Prabhupada giving you as you read his books and you will make very rapid advancement in Krishna consciousness. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa.

I am extremely Thankful first to Ms Rachana Naurial to get me motivated to download Bhadvatam, all volumes. Second thanx to A.C.Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada and his institutions such as ISKON who have made these priceless scriptures translated & written in an understandable language, effective Paintings and in electronic format which makes me a proud owner of this knowledge.

Reading It will make my life worthy for what it has been and realizing the meanings + understanding weaved in these texts may lead me to realization which has been elusive to most people. Thank you all. Hare Krishna Harish Yes. Now it is up to you to actually read Srimad-Bhagavatam and put what you learn into practice in your life. If you do this your life will be very successful and you will become a very important person in the world and will become empowered to guide so many others back home back to Godhead. Read the Bhagavatam, better if you read it aloud so you chant it including the Sanskrit verses and hear it.

We learn more by chanting and hearing than just by thinking about it in our minds. This is Srila Prabhupada’s translation of Srimad-Bhagavatam He only translated up to Tenth Canto Chapter 13. So that is all that is available and all that will ever be available in Prabhupada’s Bhagavatam. We need to have faith that Srila Prabhupada has given us everything in his books. Please read all of Srila Prabhupada’s books and you will get all knowledge. I am sure you have not even read all of Srila Prabhupada’s Srimad-Bhagavatam yet. So read it and read it again and again.

The more you read it the more you will realize who Krishna is and who you are. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa.

I try to read SB in Sanskrit in Devanagari script. Most Indians do not know English. Only those in big cities do. Prabhupada translated SB, other spiritual texts in English for the benefit of Western audience well versed in English, not for Indians. English is the official language of India along with Hindi. Hindi and English are used for official purposes such as parliamentary proceedings, judiciary, communications between the Central Government and State Government etc. Most people who are devout that I know read SB, other spiritual texts in their own mother tongue (like Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil etc).

Jai Shri Ram I want to give this message directly to respectable ISKCON authority members. ISKCON should send atleast one great Devotee Vaishnava, who is rid completely of lust, greed and anger, to every ISKCON temple to maintain them, and that too by careful investigation of him. And they should open up a Gou-shaala in every temple. And provide Scheduled sevaas to every bhakta acording to his guna (attributes).

Eg., if one is seen to be very angry everytime, he should be given to pick up the gobars mostly. I am saying this for I have seen greater maya in temples than the outside world. Devotees are falling into sense enjoyment and quitting Bhakti-maarga (selfless loving services) I am extremely sorry if I have hurt the sentiments of any devotee by giving this opinion, but I wanted to say this for uplifting the present condition of the faithful men who are falling from Lord’s service. I know this because I was one of such person. Yours humbly, A small bhakta. Hare Krishna prabhu ji I am getting bewildered after reading your page which says that ISKCON is not good now but I want to love Lord Krishna, I want to hear his past times, but you are saying that ISKCON is changing the real meaning, so i am getting very much upset. Now it is very difficult for me to find who is true and who is not.

And I also wanted to know that what is your opinion about Radhanath Swami and should I go to ISKCON temple or not and should I visit other temple or not I have many other questions, please reply me Hare Krishna. Hare Krishna Rahul Radhnatha Swami is a Mayavadi. Torrent Arena Simulation Software here. That should be fairly obvious to you. And really you have to decide for yourself in your situation what you should do.

What I suggest is that you very sincerely chant at least 16 rounds of the Hare Krishna mantra every day and strictly follow the four regulative principles and read Srila Prabhupada’s books at least 1-2 hours a day. In this way Srila Prabhupada will instruct you from his books and Krishna will instruct you from within your heart and you will then know what you should do. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa.

Hare Krishna Radhamani Mayavadi means someone who thinks Krishna is in maya. A Mayavadi thinks that when Krishna appears in the material world He accepts a body made from the material energy. But Krishna appears in His original spiritual body. The Mayavadis are impersonalists. They believe that Krishna’s appearance as a person in the material world is not His original form. They claim the original form is the impersonal brahman and when Krishna appears He temporally manifests a form and when He disappears He again merges back into the brahman. They also believe that we, ultimately, have no eternal personal spiritual form.

Their idea of mukti or liberation is merging into the impersonal brahman and loosing their individuality and personality. So the Mayavadis are envious frustrated persons. They do not want to surrender to Krishna, they are against Krishna, and they make so much word jugglery and speculation to try and ‘logically’ explain that Krishna does not exist and that the impersonal brahman is actually supreme. Unfortunately at the present time the world, ISKCON, and every other so-called spiritual organization, is full of Mayavadis Mayavadi philosophy is very attractive to the demons here in the material world. Because demons want to be god. And the Mayavadi philosophy claims that everyone is god So Mayavadi philosophy is nonsense and Mayavadis are demons who want to take advantage of the Vedas and present themselves as great transcendentalists and spiritual gurus. While never surrendering to Krishna and really working for there own personal interest, not Krishna’s interest Chant Hare Krishna and and be happy!

Madhudvisa dasa. Hare Krishna Prabhuji! I have been reading Shrimadbhagavatam in PDF format since last one year and a few other books and I have got Bhagavad-gita As It Is and it is the same as available on krishnastore.com but I have got it from Amazon as it was sent from one Vishwesh Oswal Prabhu who is on KrishnaConnect.com.Prabhuji I want all books only from KrishnaStore.com/in and as soon as I have got enough money I will get the books! And I will read all the books and as you say I hope to do everything. And I must do it! All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

All glories to Krishna SankirtanMovement! Hare Krishna Aman Yes. We need to stick to Srila Prabhupada’s books only. Everyone wants to become a famous author with his own books. But Srila Prabhupada is actually a pure devotee of Krishna, and this is a very rare qualification. So Prabhupada’s books have a very special quality that all these other authors can never match Please go to: It should be working again now for purchases of books in Indian rupees. So please place a small order and if there are any problems or errors, etc, let me know.

Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. Hare Krishna Madhudvisa Prabhu, Pamho. I recently got the 30 volume SB.

They are truely beautiful books, thank you and Hansdutta Prabhu for distributing them to the world. I read that the first edition SB sets with the original covers will be making a appearance sometime in the future. I am aware the 30 volume set is pre 1978 editions. I am also aware of the fact that Prabhupada accepted corrections to be made to the first editions which the 30 volume Hansdutta are corrected. Can you clarify what will be the difference between the future first editions that will be back in print? Im sure they are subtle, but would it be more auspicious to read the Original First Edition SB set? Please address the confusion Bolo Krsna.

Jay Prabhu As far as I remember, we’ve met in LA, or California in the 80’s I was initiated in 1974, in Amsterdam Anyway, this Prabhupad books issue is heavy stuff, and I just realized that, while I thought that I had original texts ( I gave my good old Bhagavatams away, one by one, knowing that the new ones were polluted!!! ) with the ” Hamsaduta printings ” ( someone had sworn to me it was clean ), they are not the original text!!! The way I can tell is with this: ” By regularly hearing the Bhagavatam and rendering service unto the pure devotee, all that is troublesome to the heart is practically destroyed, and loving service unto the glorious Lord, who is praised with transcen­dental songs, is established as an irrevocable fact. ” Now that’s the original In the aledgedly clean ( or simply less polluted!!! ) Hamsaduta printings, and all I saw ( even ” pre 1978 ” versions ), it sounds like this: ” By regular attendance in classes on the Bhagavatam, and rendering of service unto the pure devotee, all that is troublesome to the heart is almost completely destroyed, and loving service unto the glorious Lord, who is praised with transcen­dental songs, is established as an irrevocable fact.

” Mind you, as you might know, they actually had ” and diligently rendering service unto the pure representative of the Lord ” in a version I saw in L.A. Circa 1981, but they changed that, because it was a bit too obvious ( I had also made a stink about it!!! ) There were other changes I had noticed back in the 80’s, in key verses ( Catur slokas ) Where can one buy original texts in book form, if at all possible!?! We need to talk bro!!! Hare Krishna Dattatreya Prabhu There is no problem with the Bhagavatams printed by BBT pre 1978. That includes the Hansadutta set.

It is perfectly good. No problems at all. The change that you point out is a correction. Look at Srila Prabhupada’s Delhi Bhagavatam.

You will find that Srila Prabhupada himself personally wrote and printed “By regular attendance in classes on the Bhagavatam” in his original Delhi Bhagavatam. So you can not say this is wrong. So just read the Bhagavatam and become a pure devotee of Krishna. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa.

HARE KRISHNA I have read Bhagavatgeeta & also i started reading Srimad-Bhagavatam. After reading Bhagavatgeeta it attracted me more towards KRISHNA the Supreme Godhead. So i started reading Srimad-Bhagavatam. After reading those books i realized the real problem of human being. The problem is, people are not reading or not understanding these books. The only solution for this is we have to make our next generations to read this books and understand the message of KRISHNA, also make them to love KRISHNA.

This is only the way to get out of all troubles of Kali yuga. And on the other hand i also think that no one can stop this because the name itself indicates the yuga of quarrel. Let us hope for good and pray “LOKA SAMASTHA SUKHINO BHAVANTU” and beg Lord KRISHNA to have mercy on all fallen soul’s. And we all know that no one can be as merciful as Lord KRISHNA. And i’m searching for last two cantos of Srimad-Bhagavatam.

Can anyone help me getting the book? And i’m searching for the original one, also translated one. Please do a favor.

HARE KRISHNA. Hare Krishna You need to be satisfied with what Srila Prabhupada has given us. Vaisnava literature can only be translated by a pure devotee of Krishna.

So what you appreciate in Srila Prabhupada’s translation of Srimad-Bhagavatam and Bhagavad-gita is the transparent via-medium of Srila Prabhupada. Prabhupada is just presenting Srimad-Bhagavatam “As It Is” without injecting any personal opinion or ideas. This is a very rare thing. Almost all commentators on the Vedic texts have their own opinions and ideas which they superimpose on top of their translations and commentary of the Vedic texts thus rendering them useless in the matter of transferring any real transcendental knowledge. So I humbly suggest Prabhu that you will find everything in Srila Prabhupada’s books and now that you have completed reading Srimad-Bhagavatam as it is given to us by Srila Prabhupada you can start reading it again at the First Canto. You will be amazed Prabhu as to how much better you will find Srimad-Bhagavatam the second time you read it.

The more you read Prabhupada’s books the more the spiritual world will open up for you. Prabhupada’s books are unlimited. They are not like ordinary books. You can read them an unlimited number of times and every time you read them they will be new and fresh and every time you will find new realizations and new knowledge.

Also the logical progression after reading Srimad-Bhagavatam is to read Sri Caitanya-caritamrta. There you will find the same teachings of Srimad-Bhagavatam but presented in a very wonderful way.

Sri Caitanya-caritamrta goes further in explaining the pastimes of Radha and Krishna than Srimad-Bhagavatam does. It is the post-graduate study of spiritual life. So please read Srila Prabhupada’s Sri Caitanya-caritamrta also: Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. It is already available: There is nothing wrong with that.

It is first edition from Fifth Canto on, and cantos 1-4 are second edition. Not the first printing, they contain some corrections that were made by BBT editors working under the direction of Srila Prabhupada. These are the exact same books that Srila Prabhupada personally read himself daily and gave most of his classes from and begged his disciples to distribute widely. So this Bhagavatam set is completely accepted by Srila Prabhupada. It is perfectly bona fide. Completely spiritual. So get it and read it and become a pure devotee.

Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. Hare Krishna prabhu all glories to Srila Prabhupada Please accept my humble obeisances. I really appreciate the work you are doing prabhu but I have one concern. The Srimad Bhagavatam downloads seem to be the originals but not the ones you are advertising on Krishnastore.com I happen to have that exact set from the website Krishnastore.com and they differ from the ones that I just downloaded.

Please explain this to me because I am having a hard time trying to understand it. Thank you again prabhu for all your hard work on trying to preserve the legacy and authenticity of Our Spiritual Masters’ books. And please forgive me prabhu if I have offended you or anyone with my concerns. I just want to know the truth.

Hare Krishna Bhakta Sky The download is the first edition Bhagavatam. After the first editions were printed Srila Prabhupada instructed the editors to make many corrections to the first printed books. So there is editing between the first and later printings of the Bhagavatams. But this is not ‘changes’. If you look carefully you will not find the meaning of the text is being changed. So this editing went on under the authorization and direction of Srila Prabhupada. It is completely different from the changes that have been made after Srila Prabhupada’s disappearance.

The Bhagavatam set that you purchased from KrishnaStore.com is an exact replica of Bhagavatam volumes printed well before 1977. So it is completely authorized by Srila Prabhupada and is identical to the Bhagavatam volumes that Srila Prabhupada gave most of his classes from. So do not worry. The Bhagavatam set you have is completely authorized. There is nothing so original as the set you have in existence at the moment.

You are very fortunate to have it. They are now out of print. We have a few sets left in Europe only. So just read it and become a pure devotee of Krishna.

If it is good enough for Srila Prabhupada to read personally himself daily and give his classes from it should be good enough for you to read. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. Please read Srila Prabhupada’s original Bhagavatam in English. English is the main language for India now. It is not a problem for Indians to learn English and if you know English then why not read Prabhupada’s books in English It is available printed for sure in Marathi but you know when a book is translated into another language of course that is very good and very important for the people who only speak that language. But really in the translation process something is lost.

It is better to read the book in the original language and for Srila Prabhupada’s books the original language is English. Hare krishna!

Can i have online reading of prabhupada original srimad bhagavatam. I feel comfortable in reading in mobile(cellphone) rather than in computer or hard copy.

I hv been reading from veda base.com. As u sayn it is maintained by bbt and doesnt contain original writings of srila prabhupad, i feel it is better to change from BBT.

RECENTLY I purchased original BG AS IT IS that was from mc millan book company. Kindly accept my obeisances for your immense services sivakumar, tamilnadu, india. Hare Krishna Bhakta Parker Yes, it is safer to leave ISKCON. But somehow we have to remain in Krishna consciousness. So that is quite a challenge. We talk about chanting at least 16 rounds of the Hare Krishna mantra daily and strictly following the four regulative principles and reading Srila Prabhupada’s books every day but we have to actually very strictly follow these things and everything else Srila Prabhupada is instructing us in his books.

Really this is best done in the association of other devotees, it is very hard to be a devotee surrounded by non-devotees. But somehow that is the position we seem to be in at the moment so we have to push on and try to become Krishna conscious and try to serve Srila Prabhupada under these difficult circumstances. The solution is chanting Hare Krishna ultimately. So we have to actually get a taste for chanting Hare Krishna and have to actually do it constantly.

It is only the sankirtan, the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra that can counteract the bad effects of Kali-yuga. So we have to chant Hare Krishna or we will not be even able to counteract the evils of Kali in our own lives, what to speak of saving the world, which, at some point in time, someone has to do, again.

Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. Firstly your instruction from Swami Narayana is wrong. This sort of stress on reading specifically the Tenth Canto of the Srimad-Bhagavatam, giving special stress to reading the Tenth Canto over the other Cantos is completely wrong, completely bogus.

The Srimad Bhagavatam has to be studied from the First Canto which is considered to be the lotus feet of Krishan and the subject matter progressively develops until the Tenth Canto which is considered to be Krishna’s Lotus face. So meditation on Krishna must start at Krishna’s lotus feet and progress gradually up to Krishna’s lotus face. So have to read all of the Bhagavatam, starting from the First Canto, in the order that it has been presented.

Not that you put special stress on reading the Tenth Canto. You have to read and assimilate all the other cantos first before it is possible for you to appreciate and understand the Tenth Canto. As far as reading the complete Tenth Canto read Srila Prabhupada’s “Krsna, The Supreme Personality of Godhead”.

That is a summary study of the Tenth Canto. Each of the 90 chapters in Krsna Book corresponds to one chapter of the Tenth Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa.

There is no use in reading Bhagavatam without commentary by a pure devotee of Krishna. Srila Prabhupada has given us so many books and I suggest that you have most probably not read all of Srila Prabhupada’s books so you need to concentrate on reading all of Prabhupada’s books and listening to all of his classes and reading all of his letters, etc. Srila Prabhupada has given us enough to keep us constantly engaged in hearing about Krishna for a very long time. And the nature of Srila Prabhupada’s books is that every time you read them a new level of knowledge and realization opens up.

So when you have read all of Prabhupada’s books simply read them again and you will find the second time you read them you will get so much more than you got on the first reading. Like this when you finish reading all of Srila Prabhupada’s books for the second time start again and read them all for a third time. You can keep on reading Prabhupada’s books like this and they will continue to become more and more blissful, more and more ecstatic, and you will realize more and more transcendental knowledge as your heart becomes purified and you advance in Krishna consciousness by the mercy of Srila Prabhupada, by hearing from Srila Prabhupada. Certainly no one should ever read or even touch any of the Bhagavatam volumes that contain translations and ‘Bhaktivedanta Purports’ by Hriydananda godas.

This is ISKCON’s disease; they consider the books of Hriydananda to be non-different from the books of Srila Prabhupada. As you read the BBT Bhagavatam it just flows from Prabhupada’s Bhagavatam to Hriydananda’s Bhagavatam with absolutely no warning, on the assumption that Hriydananda godas is just as good as Prabhupada This is such an offense to Srila Prabhupada. Putting Hriydananda godas on the same platform as Srila Prabhupada. I really can not imagine that there are many idiots out there any more who can accept such insanity. I heard Prabhupada say today that you can fool all of the people for some time and you can fool some of the people for all of the time but you can not fool all of the people for all of the time. So ISKCON’s time of fooling all of the devotees is long gone and really I think they are reaching the point where they are unable to fool any of the devotees So the bottom line is forget reading anything that is not written by Srila Prabhupada.

Srila Prabhupada is a pure devotee of Krishna and he has given us absolutely everything we need to become completely Krishna conscious, to become pure devotees, and to go back home back to Godhead and to take the whole universe with us. We simply have to surrender to Srila Prabhupada and take advantage of his association in the form of his transcendental books, his lectures, his conversations, his press conferences, his morning walks, his letters and all the other transcendental nectar he has left for us to raise us up to the platform of pure devotional service.

So just read Prabhupada’s books. You do not need to read anything else at all.

Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. Hare Krishna Surabhi You can find all this information at: Please read all the articles there. You will be very shocked about what they are doing to Srila Prabhupada’s books. They don’t like a lot of the things that Srila Prabhupada says and they want to change them.

Of course they have started slowly. Still they have made thousands and thousands of significant changes that really alter the meaning of what Prabhupada says. Sometimes very dramatically changing the meaning, sometimes completely reversing what Prabhupada said ISKCON today is not like Prabhupada’s ISKCON. So their idea is they have to change Prabhupada’s books because they do not match today’s ISKCON Of course they should not have changed ISKCON into something different from what Prabhupada established Then they wouldn’t have to change Prabhupada’s books Anyhow please carefully study all the articles at: And if you have more specific questions I am happy to answer them for you.

Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. Hare Krishna Madhudvisa dasa ji, One more doubt. ISCKON was founded by SP A.C. Bhaktivedantaswami correct? Now after him (after his disappearance) are the teachings of ISCKON not correct?

Are they not perfectly divine as they are expected to be? And what are Ritvik and other foundations.? Please kindly forgive my ignorance and sorry if I had spoken anything wrong. I don’t want anyone to spread wrong teachings of Bhaktivedantaswami under the name of The Almighty Sriman Narayana. Do kindly reply me and make me understand. Thanking you, Hare Krishna, Balaji.

ISKCON have changed the teachings of Srila Prabhupada in so many ways. They are changing his books to try and reflect the changes they have made to the eternal and unchangeable philosophy of Krishna consciousness. So certainly ISKCON is no longer divine at all. You can not reject and change the instructions of your spiritual master without becoming completely demoniac. And if you look into the history of ISKCON since Srila Prabhupada left our material vision in 1977 you will see a history of completely demonic persons trying to use Srila Prabhupada’s ISKCON for their own personal gain.

This is demoniac. This is the tendency in history. When the empowered acarya leaves his preaching organization becomes overtaken by demons in the dress of devotees. There is not much that can be done to stop this.

The demons are very keen to take over the position of guru and if there is no powerful acarya to keep them in check then it is very hard to stop demons from taking the position of guru and exploiting the innocent disciples. So we have seen this happening in ISKCON now for many years and it has been the cause of spiritual ruination for so many unfortunate devotees. So my advice is that you stay far, far away from ISKCON and ISKCON devotees. They can not help you to become Krishna conscious but they are very qualified to hinder your natural progress in spiritual life. Stay away from ISKCON but become very close to Srila Prabhupada. Srila Prabhupada is living in his books and other recorded vani and you can personally associate with him by reading his books and hearing his recorded classes.

This is direct and personal association with a pure devotee of Krishna and this sadhu-sanga with Srila Prabhupada has the power to elevate you to the platform of pure devotional service. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. Hare Krishna Kowsthub The important thing about a spiritual book is the author.

Only a pure devotee of Krishna can understand Krishna and therefore only a pure devotee of Krishna can describe Krishna. We know that Srila Prabhupada is a pure devotee of Krishna and we have seen by practical example that his books have the potency to awaken the dormant Krishna consciousness that is within us all. Srila Prabhupada stressed just before he left his body that he did not feel any of his disciples were qualified to continue the translation of Srimad-Bhagavatam.

However, directly disobeying this instruction of Srila Prabhupada, Hriydananda Goswami and others continued translating and writing ‘Bhaktivedanta Purports’ for the Srimad-Bhagavatam without Srila Prabhupada’s blessings or authorization. They imitated Prabhupada but they were not pure devotees of Krishna like Prabhupada, they did not understand Krishna so they had no power to explain Krishna. So if you read their continuation of the Bhagavatam translation and their so-called ‘Bhaktivedanta Purports’ that will be very bad for your spiritual life. Milk touched by the lips of a serpent has poisonous effects. So reading the Bhagavatam which is not translated by Srila Prabhupada [after Canto 10, Chapter 13] will have poisonous effects on you, even though it appears to be the Bhagavatam The poison is very subtle but it is also very deadly. So please only read the Srimad-Bhagavatam up to Canto 10, Chapter 13, then you can read Srila Prabhupada’s translation of Sri Caitanya-caritamrta.

Then you can read the Bhagagavatam again. Prabhupada has given us so many books it is a lifetime’s reading And we can keep reading them over and over again and every time we read we will find new meaning and inspiration. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. Read all of Srila Prabhupada’s books, all small books like: Beyond Birth and Death, Perfection of Yoga, Perfect Questions Perfect Answers, Science of Self Realization, Nectar of Instruction, then of course Bhagavad-gita As It Is, Nectar of Devotion, Teachings of Lord Caitanya. We have to read ALL of Srila Prabhupada’s books and not just once. We have to read ALL of Srila Prabhupada’s books over and over again.

Why did Srila Prabhupada spend so much time and effort writing all of these books? It is so we, his disciples, could read them and become Krishna conscious. If we think we can become Krishna conscious without reading all of Srila Prabhupada’s books we are very much mistaken. Hare Krishna Santosh Yes Prabhu, you are most welcome to print out the pages of Srila Prabhupada’s Bhagavatam and read them. That is what it is for. Please do it. Print out the pages and read them.

If you read them aloud also, including chanting the Sanskrit verses, it has more potency than just reading it in your mind. Reading in your mind is also good, but if you read it aloud then you are chanting it and hearing it and Krishna consciousness is actually realized through chanting and hearing much more than thinking in the mind. Thinking in the mind is of course smaranam, remembering, one of the nine processes of devotional service, so I am not in any way minimizing this, but hearing and chanting is better and that includes remembering also. So if you read aloud you are performing simultaneously hearing, chanting and remembering, which is much better than just remembering. But yes Prabhu, print it out and read it for sure!!! Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa.

Haribol Prabhu, Can you look up something for me? I’m rereading Srimad Bhagavatam and I’m up to Canto 4. I think I’ve found an error. I’m not talking about the infamous “changes”, nor am I suggesting the error is only in your reprint of the orginal, but it’s in EVERY printing and reprint of EVERY edition since SB was ever printed. It’s at 4.4.20 Purport. A few lines into the Purport. It says: “The four different social orders—brahmacarya, gṛhastha, vānaprastha and sannyāsa” Therein lies the problem.

Aren’t brahmacarya, grhastha, vanaprastha and sannyasa the four spiritual orders. My request is I’m asking you to check to see if this error is in the pre-1978 editions?

I don’t have it. Hare Krishna, – Thomas New York City. Hare Krishna Thomas This is not an error and the current Bhagavatams still are the original pre-1977 Bhagavatams. At least as far as I know so far the BBT have not changed them although they want to change the Bhagavatam and may have done that in their most recent printing, I do not know. These four orders of life: brahmacary, grhastha, varnaprasatha and sannyasa are social orders. It is student life, married life, retired life and renounced life. So these are social orders.

Students are one social order, married people are another social order, retired people are another social order and the renounced order is another social order. These orders are part of the Vanrasrama system which is about organizing the society in such a way that it is conducive for spiritual advancement. So the whole Varnasrama system is a social order which has as its aim facilitating the spiritual upliftment of all the people Chant Hare Krishna and be happy!

Madhudvisa dasa. I purchased the 30 volume srimad bhagavatam set at krishnastore.com but there are changed by the bbt editors and there are changes in my 30 volume set Eg Original version: Lord Brahma said: At the time when the unlimitedly powerful Lord assumed the form of a boar as a pastime, just to lift up the earthly planet, which was drowned in the great ocean of the universe called the Garbhodaka, the first demon(Hiranyaksa) appeared, and the Lord pierced him with His tusk. (SB 2.7.1 translation) Changed version: Lord Brahma said: When the unlimitedly powerful Lord assumed the form of a boar as a pastime, just to lift the planet earth, which was drowned in the great ocean of the universe called the Garbhodaka, the first demon(Hiranyaksa) appeared, and the Lord pierced him with His tusk. The changed version translation is there in my 30 volume SB set.

Hare Krishna Sathya This is not a change. There is absolutely no change to the meaning of the text. The 30 volume Srimad-Bhagavatam set you purchased is an exact replica of Srila Prabhupada’s pre-1977 books. There was obviously some editing done on the Bhagavatam with Srila Prabhupada’s approval between the first edition and the later editions like here changing “earthly planet” to “planet earth”, but this was done in Srila Prabhupada’s presence. Prabhupada wrote a number of letters to the editors requesting corrections be made to the first edition Bhagavatams so you can not expect that all the printings will be absolutely identical to the first editions. So please read the books. You can feel absolutely confident that you are reading Prabhupada’s original books and you will get the complete benefit from them.

Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. I have seen that DJVU files occupy less space than PDFs containing images.

I request that the images may be optimized in size (without losing quality) and put individually so that we can see image of any page without downloading the whole file. Scanning or photographing is the best way to keep the books in computer format because it is free from missing texts and spelling mistakes. Here are some instances of missing texts: 1. Perfect Questions perfect answers – chapter 1 “you cannot say that the sun Srila Prabhupada: Just wire.” 2. Srimad Bhagvatam SB 5.23.9 “The distance from the sun to the earth is lower planetary systems”. Hare Krsna, In 1976 at NY airport, just after Rathayatra, devotees inquired from Srila Prabhupada about the nature of the confusing maps in the just released 5th canto. Prabhupada admitted that some would leave because of this but it was for us ( his decree ) to describe BG and SB ‘scientifically’ for the western scientists.

After these many years I have been given the means to define the original nature of these maps scientifically. But it requires that the information be viewed under a very different set of circumstances where a complete washout of the western education (that all western devotees were subject to and see the information through that lens.) The main condition for the new understanding redefines the nature of our sky as it appears today in contrast to how it appeared 1000’s of years ago. The current intellectual house of mirrors does not allow modern man to conceptualize outside certain restrictive definitions ie that what is not happening in the (astronomical)sky today of planets and their relationships – did not happen in ancient times. Hare Krishna Prabhapati Prabhu The sky has not changed much in the last 5000 years. What is in the FIfth Canto is an accurate description of the universe we live in.

But as you say we have all been brainwashed by the current world view and most people, devotees included, can not accept that the actual universe is so different from what they have been told it is like since birth But actually the current scientific climate is such that if you could actually explain it in a way that they could understand it at least a small percentage of scientists would be open to it and many would be curious to investigate it. That is why Prabhupada wanted to build the Temple of the Vedic Planetarium in Mayapur.

Of course they are building but they have no idea of the universe as it is described in the Srimad-Bhagavatam and they don’t believe it anyhow so it will be a disaster. The problem is we do not understand the universe as it is described in the Fifth Canto and we can not explain it to the scientists.

Not that the scientists refuse to accept it. We can not even present a clear description and explain all the observed effects like the changing of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, etc, etc We have to have a ‘predictive model’ that is better than their predictive model based on their conception of the universe. Our model has to explain everything that we observe and it has to explain it better than their model. But we do not have that model.

So how can we expect any scientist to take us seriously? The actual universe according to the Bhagavatam is dramatically different from what we have come to believe it to be according to the scientists and astronomers. For example there is only one sun in the whole universe and all the things we call stars are actually just like the moon.

The earth is in the center of the universe and everything is rotating, not around the earth, but around an axis which goes from the polestar out to the mountain range half-way out the universe. And the whole universe is rotating around that axis, it is called the sisumara-chakra, and at the same time the axis which is connected to the wheel of the sun-god’s chariot is moving all round the circumference of that mountain range once in every year 360 day year. One rotation of the wheel of the sun-god’s chariot is 24 hours and in that 24 hours the whole universe rotates causing what we see as the rising and setting of the sun, moon, stars and constellations. And everything is moving gradually because the whole thing is moving around the mountain range gradually to make a full circuit in 360 days So it is a very nice system that actually does perfectly explain everything we see.

But unfortunately “devotees” do not believe it Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Chant Hare Krishna and be happy!

Madhudvisa dasa. Hare Krishna Tushar They are cheating Prabhu. Srila Prabhupada only translated Srimad-Bhagavatam up to Tenth Canto Chapter 13. After that the Bhagavatam that ISKCON distributes is translated by someone else and the so-called ‘Bhaktivedanta Purports’ are written by someone else. After Canto 10 Chapter 13 there is no Prabhupada Bhagavatam. And ISKCON are such rascals that they are not even prepared to tell the readers who it was that made these translations and purports. Because if the readers knew this person’s personal character and activities they would be disgusted and of course would never read his books.

It is part of the ISKCON policy to mix poison with the nectar. By reading Srila Prabhupada’s books you are associating with a pure devotee of Krishna and you are getting the pure message of Krishna and you are making rapid spiritual advancement. But if someone who is not a pure devotee of Krishna, someone who still has material desires to fulfill, attempts to write Vaisnava literature it will fail. His books will not have any potency to deliver the transcendental knowledge to anyone, rather, even though they may seem very bona fide and very spiritual and even the philosophy in them may be correct, but because the heart of the author is not clean if you read his books the result will be that your heart will become contaminated, not purified So it is poison, and we are not going to put any poison on.

Hare Krishna Madhudvisa dasa ji! Is this the same as ‘Bhagavad Gita As It Is’?

Also, is this original edition available for sale too? Unfortunately, I don’t think my internet connection is so strong that I would be able to download such large files. Also, regarding Srila Prabhupada’s books being doctored by ISKCON (as being alleged by you), I do have the entire collection of Srila Prabhupada’s books.

But how do I know whether my collection is ‘unmodified’ or not? I don’t want modified versions of the books. Therefore, could you kindly publish the original versions of all the books by Srila Prabhupada as you have done with this original edition of Srimad Bhagavatam? Hare Krishna Ashwani Srila Prabhupada did write the first Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam in India.

He collected the money for the printing himself by selling his Back to Godhead magazine and getting some donations from various important persons and businessmen. I believe the Gita Press gave Srila Prabhupada some donations towards his great mission of printing the Srimad-Bhagavatam but they did not print it. Prabhupada printed it himself in Delhi. It is not that Prabhupada wrote the First Canto of the Bhagavatam twice. He printed the First Canto in India so he would have something substantial to take with him when he went to the Western countries to preach. So when Prabhupada went to the USA on the Jaladutta he took many cases of his Srimad-Bhagavatam with him and later on shipped more to the US when he was more established there.

Then later on Hayagriva Prabhu edited it and the same First Canto was published in the USA. So Prabhupada did not write it twice. He did, however, write the Bhagavad-gita As It Is twice. That is because the original manuscript he wrote in India was stolen. We still have some volumes of the exact reprint of Srila Prabhupada’s Delhi Bhagavatam available: And of course you can download the pdf file from krishna.org. Since 2001 BBT have been printing Srila Prabhupada’s 1972 Macmillan Gita but at least up to now they forbid ISKCON devotees from purchasing and distributing it So hopefully this will change. In ISKCON Srila Prabhupada’s original books are called ‘ritvik books’ and are more-or-less forbidden What a crazy world they live in As far as Prabhupada never criticizing the Gaudiya Matha, that is a lie.

Prabhupada very loudly and openly criticized his godbrothers for going against the orders of Srila Bhaktsiddhanta and even has written very, very strong criticize of the Gaudiya Matha in the purports of his Caitanya-caritamrta. So not only did Prabhupada strongly criticize his godbrothers in India even before coming to the West, he criticized them many times in letters to and conversations with his disciples, and he even published that criticize in his books.

So we have to criticize if devotees are presenting themselves as following Srila Prabhupada but are not. Otherwise innocent people will be fooled by them.

Of course Prabhupada did not concentrate on criticizing his godbrothers. He did not do it all the time. He had much more important things to talk about. But still he did very strongly and openly criticize them on many, many occasions. You may have seen my article: So really Prabhu everyone, both ISKCON and the Ritviks are lying when it comes to guru-tattva. So honestly both sides are useless. Both sides are presenting perverted and twisted versions of what “Prabhupada said” to try and “prove” that Prabhupada said what they want him to say.

The ritviks want Prabhupada to say that ISKCON devotees can never become diksa gurus, which he absolutely did not say, that is opposite to his mission, and ISKCON want Prabhupada to say that anyone can be a guru and there are no qualifications required except approval of the GBC Which is also absolutely not true. So they are both lying, both useless. Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. Hare Krishna Madhudvisa dasa Prabhu, for finding time to answer me. Yes you are correct /* anyone can be a guru and there are no qualifications required except approval of the GBC */ yes this is totally wrong. But you are suppoter of Ritvik’s, why are you opposing them, i think Banglore Temple under Madhu Pandita Dasa is a Ritvik Temple. Proxima Nova Font Free Download Dafont.

Or its different from Ritviks & ISKCON? I purchased Bhagavad Gita As It Is By Srila Prabhupada ( 1972 ) from Madhu Pandita Das Followers a year ago. They say ( Banglore Devotee’s ) that there is no Diksha Guru except SP. But it looks quite odd to me, i feel Srila Prabhupada should be on top and other follower’s ( Qualified ) should become Guru and teach SP teaching’s. But that Krishna.org, krishnastore.com are websites that propagate Banglore Temple.

But your answer have somewhat created doubt’s in me. There are many forums that i know, but excatly i do not know who is what like IRM, PADA, RITVIK, ONEISKCON. The owner of these websites have written so much of Poision on net, that any one who aspires to become devotee, he will leave leave KC forever, i think this kind of propaganda will harm not only devotee’s but also aspiring one’s.

I want to see one iskcon dying to serve Prabhupada and his mission, where everyone is out of politics hatred and envy. Please clarify who is wrong and why? And what is right? Your servent!! Hare Krishna Ashwani I am a aspiring to be a follower of Srila Prabhupada, that is all.

I am not a supporter of anyone else. And as I have clearly written both ISKCON and the ritviks are lying when it comes to the guru issue. Every ISKCON temple, every ISKCON guru, and every ISKCON devotee is required to believe that conditioned souls are qualified to become diksa gurus and this is absolutely false. It it is completely pointless to accept a conditioned soul as one’s guru because quite obviously if the guru himself is not liberated there is no hope of his disciples becoming liberated by his ‘mercy’. He can not give something that he does not have himself. So if he is not himself a pure unalloyed devotee of Krishna he can not help anyone else become a pure unalloyed devotee of Krishna. As far as ISKCON Bangalore they are preaching Krishna Kant’s philosophy that Prabhupada did not want any of his disciples to become diksa gurus, ever, and that Prabhupada will be the only guru for 10,000 years, and so on.

And this is also a lie. Prabhupada wants his disciples to become qualified bona fide diksa gurus. But of course the qualification is required. That qualification is not very difficult, in theory, but in practice it is very rare to find someone who is actually prepared to surrender to Srila Prabhupada and Krishna. So in this way they are lying also. That is all I am saying and I am suggesting that if you really want to understand what Srila Prabhupada is teaching us on the guru issue and on every other issue is that you please read his books. There is no point in listening to either the ISKCON lies or the ritvik lies.

Just hear directly from Srila Prabhupada Chant Hare Krishna and be happy! Madhudvisa dasa. My first contact with a Hare Krishna was a most merciful Mataji in Oxford Street, London who sold me a 'Higher Taste' cook book in 1984 while I was on holidays there. I started seriously reading Srila Prabhupada's books in Australia 1985 and by 1986 Srila Prabhupada had convinced me 'Krishna is the Supreme Personality of Godhead' and 'we should surrender to Krishna.'

I joined the Hare Krishnas in Perth, Western Australia in 1986. Since then I have been chanting Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare/ Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare, reading and distributing Srila Prabhupada's books and preaching as much as I can. That's my life and full-time occupation now really.

I like it more than anything I've ever experienced before. Srila Prabhupada's books are so amazing. Even after reading them all many times they're still fresh and new. They are truly transcendental!

That's it really. Now I'm just hankering to once again see the world chant Hare Krishna, dance and feast and float away in the ecstasy of Lord Caitanya's Sankirtana movement as it did in Srila Prabhupada's physical presence. Let the whole world drown in the ecstatic flood of love of Krishna! • Latest Posts • July 2nd by Madhudvisa dasa • May 27th by Madhudvisa dasa • December 20th by daily-devotions--dravinaksa-dasa • December 19th by HDG A.C.

Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada • December 18th by HDG A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada • December 17th by HDG A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada • December 16th by Gadadhara das • Categories • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Popular this Week • • • • • • • • • • • Recent Comments.

• () •: Yes Prabhuji.I’m only praying to Srila Prabhupada to engage me in his service. I’m again not. • () •: Hare Krishna Prabhuji! I asked this question because some people here say that there are some specific Ekadashi.

•: Hare Krishna Prabhuji! Are there any specific Ekadashis from which one should start observing Ekadashi?

• () •: Thank you prabhuji, wonderful answer. I will try my best, with your advice and bless i will make a progress.

•: Hare Krishna prabhuji, this is truth all Words from Krishna realy the highest truth. This years i always try. • () •: Pranam Guruji “Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare, Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare. • () •: hare krishna.really happy to read bhagavad gita chapter 1 and ready to read rest. • () •: Hare krishna prabhu ji. I can’t live without krishna,,I wanna become a small permanent.

• () •: Please add the year of publication of this original book pdf on this page for convenience to people searching. • () •: It simply tells us that that Hanuman is great and the world will see him again. Jai Shree Hanuman • () •: not read yet! But very much excited. • () •: I want to buy the srimad bhagavatam complete volume sets. But I want to know if it is possible to do it.

• () •: Hare Krishna I made a promise to worship krishna and then demigods out of respect to help me on my path to. • () •: Very true prabhuji without knowing the sunshine how we can see the mirror similarly one can have the. • () •: Hare Krishna Prabhuji!

Please accept my humble obeisances. Does the whole cooking pot become prasadam if.

• () •: Nice & sincere prayer.Good. Lord Krishna will Bless.!!! • () •: Hare Krishna Mandi!

Not all are fools. Only we non-devotees are fools. Pure devotees are the most intelligent. • () •: I am searching job since November, going well prepared but not getting job due to partial reasons or luck. • () •: Hare Krishna Prabhu Ji, How long will you stay in Vrindavan. How can I meet you.

• () •: Hare Krishna Prabhuji, Really very beautifully explained & quite elaborate topic.