Jagat

This was originally posted on Vrindavan Today as part of a commentary on  Vṛndāvana-mahimāmṛta 1.79, just as I was running out of steam on my daily postings. Looking back on it (I am backdating this cross-posting from 31-08-2018), the commentaries leading up to this one are some of the best that I wrote, in my opinion. But this reflection on "East is East and West is West and ne'er the twain shall meet" is something that I return to frequently in reflecting on my own presence in Vrindavan, as an "immigrant." See  I have been in the West for four months on a "fact-finding expedition" (!) out in the field, this time the field being the country of Canada, which for all intents and purposes has now become more of a foreign country to me than one that I can identify as my own. My fact-finding mission mostly took place in a basement TV room, where I steadfastly observed popular entertainments as administered by the One-eyed God who stares unblinking...

Viktor Frankl meaning article . Human beings make the mistake, you could call it the “romantic fallacy,” that there is something called love, which when one falls into, everything will be complete and one is spiritually fulfilled. That is precisely why it is called a puruṣārtha of kāma , because it carries with it this illusion of completion. In a film, one sees the lovers kiss in the train station, all obstacles have been removed, and they live happily ever after. That is clearly a fallacy. A similar fallacy exists in spiritual life: it is the liberation fallacy, it is the idea of any kind of perfection in stasis, whether called nirvana or mukti or prema. It doesn't matter what we call it, if we identify it as the absolute cessation of suffering, a stasis, then it is fundamentally a fallacy. It is not bhakti, it is not reality. That is why bhakti theologians object to it. Both kāma or mukti are dreams of a state of being that is complete plenitude. Similarly, the other pu...

Now are the myths of Radha and Krishna to be qualified as "mental idolatry where, removed from the direct experience of the guiding force of unconditionality, theoretical frameworks and vestigial linguistics conjure up a surface mirage in terms of which the experience is interpreted, under which the experience is subjugated"? Well, in the sense that all words do that to some extent until their real meaning is discovered. But the nature, I think, of words is their capacity to create realities within which we have our direct experience. This is how, it seems to me, rasa works. For instance, at the age of 64, as a result of my life's culture of Krishna bhakti, I have chosen a particular way of perceiving the world (to a great extent against the received dominant culture to which I was born), through the framework of Radha-Krishna bhakti and its myriad forms and expressions, including a lot of peripherals -- including India itself as it is in the present day, non-Vaishnav...