Jagat

If you don’t know your instrument, then how will you play any music? Knowing the body is knowing the instrument of spiritual perfection, the god-given gift, the human body. The gross body is the outermost layer. That is the one we identify with in the lowest stage of consciousness. That does not mean it is rejected. Indeed, our first encounter with the miraculous is to see this body with the mind. ṣaṭ-cakraṁ ṣoḍaśādhāraṁ tri-lakṣyaṁ vyoma-pañcakam | sva-dehe ye na jānanti kathaṁ siddhyanti yoginaḥ || eka-stambhaṁ nava-dvāraṁ gṛhaṁ pañcādhidaivatam | sva-dehe ye na jānanti kathaṁ siddhyanti yoginaḥ ||14|| 1.13 How can those yogis succeed who do not know the six wheels ( cakras ), the sixteen containers ( ādhāra ), the three targets ( lakṣya ) and the five skies ( vyoma ) in their own body? 1.14. How can those yogis who do not know the home, which has a single pillar, nine doors and five divinities ( adhidaivata ), which is present in their own body, ever attain success...

"So, you are 65 and you wasted your whole life being a Krishna devotee, and now here you are stuck with this stupid religion and you got nowhere to go. So now what to do?" Well, you came this far, you might as well just keep moving in the direction of Love. I see a lot of other people in this boat; maybe they are drawn to me because of what they perceive as a similar attitude of cynicism, but in fact I am not one to regret the past. We are finally puppets in the hands of Time, after all, and our lives are so conditioned that self-knowledge is something of a fool's errand. So I take responsibility for the pain I have caused others and the mistakes I have made, with regret and sadness for as long as I contemplate their suffering. And I do contemplate it, for it is only in understanding the suffering that one causes that one can eliminate the causes of suffering. I have tried to look at religion and Vaishnavism from both inside and out, just to try to make sense o...

I can't say I particularly care for watching myself on video. I get very squeamish. But anyway, Kryszna Kirtan has made these available. So, here are some more lectures on Radha-rasa-sudha-nidhi from last Karttik at Munger temple.

So in my last post, I spoke a little of my own experience on the Sahajiya path and how I found that the experiment as I had been conducting it had been deemed a failure. I was contemplating whether one should be pessimistic about my philosophical understanding, in view of the seeming rarity of success. In actual fact, what is happening, my friends, is that we are giving the juices time to ferment. I really do not know what the outcome of this experiment will be, because whatever happens, the repercussions of it will remain. In other words, very strong samskaras were created in the last ten years, and I really don't think it will be possible for me in the long run to accept the orthodox position, as expressed to me by a friend: This world is a shadow of the spiritual world and so resemblances exist in form....but not in substance. Male and female forms exist both here and there, so there is a slight resemblance of form. However the substance is entirely different. Visvanath Cakr...

Sorry, the internal links for footnotes don't work. III. Women saints in the modern era The primary source of information for women saints of the modern period is O.B.L. Kapoor's Hindi Braj ke bhakta (46) Altogether, there are only twelve woman saints described in Braj ke bhakta , of which only five can be considered Gaudiyas. Though these women are respected for their saintliness, only one (Sadhu Ma) is a leader in the sense of being an initiating guru. It is no coincidence that she was born into one of the great Gaudiya initiating families, that of Advaita Acharya. Otherwise, they were all also born in well-to-do families. Of the three who were Bengali, all were Brahmins. All twelve women whose biographies appear in Kapoor's book are renunciates, showing perhaps more the bias of what that author expected a "saint” to be like, and are thus not necessarily representative of true saintliness. Taken as a whole, the women of Braj ke bhakta show, as might be...

[ This is an article from a few years back. It feels like it is in need of some work. But since I may need it for reference, I am putting it back on line, as I don't think it is available anywhere. Sorry, the internal links for footnotes don't work. ] There are few traditional societies in which women have played a dominant historical role. In this respect, Gaudiya Vaishnavism is no different. The egalitarianism of bhakti movements, which stress the universality of devotion and deny any disqualifications based on birth, sex, or caste, seems to have had limited real effects on the actual social circumstances of any of these classes of people. There are some, including the eminent Bengali historian, Ramakanta Chakravarti, who feel that the status of women was improved in Chaitanya Vaishnavism, mainly due to the singular example of Jahnava Devi. (1) Indeed, it does appear that literacy rates among women (and men) in Vaishnava castes in Bengal were somewhat higher than in other, ...