Jagat

Madhavanandaji has finally sprung back into action on the GGM, which has being lying without any input from me or anyone else in over a year. That has not stopped people from downloading texts to the tune of nearly 400,000, not including the archive. There are a large number of changes and updates that need to be made. I am looking forward to seeing this project get some life back into it.

2. "Radha: Mistress, Mother, Mediatrix" by Su.. Su. is the most advanced student in the class, as she is now working towards a PhD, and it shows in her thorough research, sophisticated writing style and scholarly presentation. Her doctoral dissertation is to be based on Vallabhacharya's Bhagavata commentaries. I don't know exactly what part of Vallabha she intends to cover, but she evidently realizes the importance of understanding Radha in the historical context. Her desire to make a thorough inquire into the subject is clear and the research for this paper covers most of the significant secondary literature that has come out of the past three decades of Western scholarship on the subject. The stated goal of her paper is to contrast the Gaudiya Vaishnava vision of Radha with the one found in the Brahma-vaivarta Purana and to show how she ultimately functions in both as Mother to the devotees and Mediatrix between them and God, despite the somewhat different theologi...

I am reading Eric Berne's Beyond Games and Scripts , as I believe I already mentioned earlier. I can't help quoting the following passage, as it makes me think of George Bush and wrong religion in general. I'm OK, you're not OK. I'm a prince, you're a frog. This is the "get rid of" position. These are the people who play "Blemish" as a pastime, a game, or a deadly procedure. They are the ones who sneer at their spouses, send their children to juvenile hall, and fire their friends and retainers. They start crusades and sometimes war, and sit in groups finding fault with their real or imagined inferiors or enemies. This is the "arrogant" position, at worst a killer's, and at best a meddler's, for people who make it their business to help the "not-OK others" with things they don't want to be helped with. But for the most part it is a position of mediocrities and clinically it is paranoid. (p. 193)

In the context of the discussion on modernity and Bhaktivinoda Thakur, I had the following notes that were not included. These are more or less disorganized. ...It should be noted that the general response of liberal Christianity has been to identify religion most generally with the search for meaning (See Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life ). The influence of modernism, however, has been such as to "demystify" the religious tendency: the experience of God and the experience of the world have somehow become indistinct. In other words (in the Christian way of expressing it), since God created the world as an expression of his own desire, (or in the Hindu way of expressing it) the world is a manifestation of Himself or His energies, that therefore the highest value in life can be found in this world--in its pleasures and pains, in the life experience itself. In the hierarchy of values, of course, justice, love and compassion stand at the forefront, and to act in accordance wit...

I have been marking my students' papers. There were only three who made it to the end. I guess I was given a pretty easy ride for a university course. I think that the three were pleased with the course and since, on the whole, their papers were very good, I thought I would share a few excerpts here. Each of them cited passages, made comments, or had insights that were worth reflecting on. For privacy reasons I will only refer to them by their initials. This posting was begun more than a week ago on May 2, showing just how my time deficit is affecting my ability to write. This also will account for the lack of a discernable train of thought. ====================================== 1. "Reason, Belief, Essence, Faith, or how Bhaktivinoda Thakur 'rationalized' the Spirit" by E.M. EM has written an excellent paper, inspired primarily by readings from Shukavak's articles and his book on Bhaktivinoda Thakur. She had previously read other material on the effect...

I have to mention that last night my son's choir (PCMR or Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal, "Canada's Answer to the Vienna Boys Choir") sang with the McGill Chamber Orchestra at Pollock Hall in downtown Montreal. It was, for me, the best concert that I had heard them give in the eight years my son has been with them. After singing Bruckner and Vivier's Jesu erbarme dich a capella, the MCO came on stage with the conductor Boris Brott and they started Vivaldi's Gloria . The acoustics were so good and the choir so together, it was better than any recording I have ever heard of this famous choral work. The boy soprano and alto soloists were very good--in all these years, I have never heard Gilbert Patenaude give this much solo responsibility to any of the boys, so I assume that they are very special. The encore was Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus , which once again was crystal clear and absolutely perfect in harmony and sound quality. It turned out we were sittin...

I am backblogged a bit. For a person whose life is going nowhere, I don't have much time. Previously I would at least get a little reading done on the bus before I went home and did a little eating and sleeping. Like they say up here: "Métro, boulot, dodo." Anyway, I did want to say that I went to the Montréal temple on Sunday to participate in the 30th anniversary celebrations of the installation of Radha Manohar. Festivities had been going on since Friday, with the honored participation of three former presidents: Sripati Das , Uttamasloka Das and Visvakarma Das. It was a great pleasure to see them all. It was easy to see the charisma that these three early preachers of Krishna consciousness in central Canada possessed, something conspicuous by its absence in the present. We were really just missing Rochan and Jagadish... and I guess Jayapataka Swami, who was one of the first both here in Montreal and in Toronto. But he had already left before things really started get...