Revealed knowledge, & how to receive it

The disease of the modern civilized man is his disbelief of everything in the revealed scriptures. Faithless nonbelievers cannot make progress in spiritual realization, for they cannot understand the spiritual potency.

Although there are varieties of personalities, from Brahma down to the insignificant ant, all of whom are living beings, their development of knowledge is different. Therefore we have to gather knowledge from the right source. Indeed, in reality we can get knowledge only from the Vedic sources. The four Vedas, with their supplementary Puranas, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and their corollaries, which are known as smrtis, are all authorized sources of knowledge. If we are at all to gather knowledge, we must gather it from these sources without hesitation.

Revealed knowledge may in the beginning be unbelievable because of our paradoxical desire to verify everything with our tiny brains, but the speculative means of attaining knowledge is always imperfect. The perfect knowledge propounded in the revealed scriptures is confirmed by the great acaryas, who have left ample commentations upon them; none of these acaryas has disbelieved in the sastras. One who disbelieves in the sastras is an atheist, and we should not consult an atheist, however great he may be. A staunch believer in the sastras, with all their diversities, is the right person from whom to gather real knowledge. Such knowledge may seem inconceivable in the beginning, but when put forward by the proper authority its meaning is revealed, and then one no longer has any doubts about it.

From Srila Prabhupada’s purport to CC Adi, 5.14

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