Revealed knowledge, & how to receive it

[Bhakti Vikasa Swami]

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.
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From Srila Prabhupada's purport to
CC Adi, 5.14