Jagat

There was a kirtan for Guru Purnima last night, but I went to my room and conked out early. Had good meditation this morning. Feel more normal after a disruptive few days. Hopefully it will mean improved work ethic. Silence is actually a good thing, but requires a bit of getting used to. One thing is that here in this ashram, people are used to other people doing a mauna-vrata, and they just ignore you. You become practically speaking invisible. Then, as I found out, when you finally do talk, they still ignore you! You realize that most of what you say is not really of any great significance -- to you or to others. Observing my own body is not something I have done very well in this lifetime. Even now, with the yoga, it feels like I haven't explored my own body very well. But with the Yoga Tarangini work, I have been zeroing in on at least the essential original hatha yoga practices, which require a lot of internalization focused on the body itself. That is really what hatha...

Tomorrow is Guru Purnima. So you should meditate on ALL your gurus. From the earliest... parents... to all the rest, teachers, priests, diksha gurus, shiksha gurus, books.... And then progress from the outside inside. Think of your intelligence as a guru, as the Lord within your heart. And try to capture the great epiphanies you have had, the times when the lights went on. And now merge the external with the internal. Observe how your very own story -- even in suffering --, the story of your evolution towards perfection in love, is being guided by the sweet hands of the Lord's grace. And focus on the source of that feeling. Swami Veda wrote as part of his meditation for today: The guru tradition is a universal in all ancient cultures... Seeking a guru, therefore, is an innate part of our nature; part of our spiritual urges. Many resist this urge out of ego. They think ‘I can make it on my own’ and sooner or later they stumble or become disappointed or confused as to thei...

Being yourself is not being someone you remember being in the past, someone lost in the judgment of others. Being yourself, finally, is about becoming that which you feel is perfect. Be yourself. Make yourself. Sartre says, "Hell is other people." Because of other people's judgment we are never free to be ourselves. Therefore, in a way, the worst hell is to love and be loved, because as soon as we become involved with another conditioned human being, we immediately become wrapped up in their expectations of what we should be or become. On the other hand, Scott Peck defines love as the ability to "extend oneself" or to make sacrifices for the spiritual welfare of another person. I think that what he means here by "spiritual welfare" is that selfish expectations are not what a person who loves is interested in, i.e. conditional love. But, of course, we are all fallible and conditioned, and even our concept of other people's spiritual welfare is ...

Radha's superiority is not because she is a woman. And Chaitanya's taking Radha bhava shows what is meant. It is about love. Radha's superiority comes because she is more expert in loving; she is an āśraya , whereas Krishna is the  viṣaya , the object of love. In my experience of my own personal character and observing other men, I think that it is true that men, by virtue of both nature and nurture, tend to be more driven in the direction of being a  viṣaya  than an  āśraya  of love. But it is better to love than to be loved. Better to give than to receive. This is the clichéd truism that lies at the basis of the myth. At the same time, no woman is free from the desire to be loved. No one is so selfless. And in fact, it is wrong to be selfless in such a way. The normal spiritual state is to experience the reciprocation of God, and all love seeks reciprocation, otherwise it is not in fact love. Love of necessity invites reciprocation, and if it is appropr...

Impersonalism or personalism, what is the real difference? It is not so much in the doctrine, but in the behavior that the real test comes. The problem is projection. We see the body or the religious affiliation and so on and we don't see the soul, the person. We don't see the divine or sacred reality of the other. That happens, sadly, as often if not more with people who identify themselves as theists, because they see the religious affiliation as the identifier, i.e., they see the upādhi or covering as the truth, and not the spiritual being. And, like it or not, your religion is an upādhi . You cannot dance around that fact with philosophical word jugglery. So-called impersonalists are often more aware of this problem than so-called personalists. Now whether you call that spiritual truth Brahman or anything else, if you accept that the person with whom you are engaged is a sacred entity and you treat them accordingly, that is personalism. This is true whether you do ...

I am slowly coming out of silence. I don't really know if I still am or not. The actual vrata was to stay in silence until I finished a particular project, which is still not finished. So it feels a bit like an incomplete vrata and I will probably have to plunge again. It has been and is being a very interesting experience overall. I tried so many times to do a perfect vrata in my life, especially when I was younger. In ISKCON and as a babaji I started to do very strict Chaturmasyas on at least three occasions. Even eating plain kitcherie for weeks in yoga mudra and so on. But it never lasted to the fullest extent. Once, when I was a babaji in Nabadwip, I did a vrata in Agrahayan, the Katyayani vrata. This is in around 1984. I tried to keep it simple. I went at 2 a.m. every night to Porama Tala (Paurnamasi Tala) and meditated for two hours, chanting japa. It was only to be for a month. It was a very interesting experience, because Pora Ma is a very powerful Shakta and Tantric...