Jagat

In my last post, I wanted to stress the following point, but perhaps I missed saying it. I have seen that many devotees eventually come to a point where they lose faith in the mythology or some aspect of the theology of bhakti, or they become disillusioned by the kind of people who profess to follow these teachings, and so on. In my experience one needs to have a strong baseline of spiritual experience that one can fall back on, a base line that one can return to in order to retrace one's steps until one restores one's mental stability and renews enthusiasm for sadhana, even when efficacious association is not available. Things like the existence of God, the nature of the self as a spiritual being, the necessity for sadhana, the ultimate goal of prema... all these things seem like flimsy possessions when one is in an undeveloped state of spiritual life, and it seems that they are quite persistent, even in people who are acclaimed as having high levels of realization, or hav...

It has come to my attention that some people are having a difficulty putting all the pieces of my philosophy and sadhana together. That is perfectly understandable, since various people are coming to the issue from different angles of vision and levels of experience and knowledge. Most people who read or hear about this Prema Sadhana or Sahaja Sadhana are coming to it from the point of view of the bhakti-marga, which is not at all surprising since that is my original orientation also. However, as readers of these pages will know, I am critical of the general approach to bhakti for several reason. Too many devotees of Krishna are literalist and ritualistic in their approach. Moreover, they are philosophical so dualistic that phrases like bhedābheda are functionally meaningless to them. They get the bheda part, so much that they are willing to die or kill for it, but the abheda part of it is a complete mystery. Because of these defects, they are basically stuck in the beginner s...