Jagat

I had to tend to other duties the past week or so and thus was unable to complete the article I started earlier. On thinking about Muralishwar's comment that my belief is that "human love IS Love Divine." Although I there said  "the natural loves can be sadhanas of Divine Love within the context of bhakti-yoga, " the fact is that for a pure devotee human love and divine love are indeed one. The reason for that is that Krishna is the ātmā of all ātmās , the soul of all souls, the Self of all selves, ātmānam akhilātmanām . In the previous article, it was said that the difference between kāma  and prema is really centered on the Object of that love. If one loves Krishna, that is prema . If one loves someone else without any knowledge of the fact that there is nothing outside of Krishna, then it is kāma . kṛṣṇam enam avehi tvam ātmānam akhilātmanām jagad-dhitāya so’py atra dehīvābhāti māyayā vastuto jānatām atra kṛṣṇaṁ sthāsnu cariṣṇu ca bhagavad-rūpam ...

I was reflecting on my Gopala Champu class for which I had not prepared myself properly and wrote: The sin of a translator, of which I am often guilty, is to start translating before becoming the original.   How do you become the original? Samadhi. By which I mean you should at least completely forget the language of arrival for as long as it takes to get to the end of the passage you are translating. In other words, not to translate. To get to the point of not translating. I don't particularly like the "mysterious" style. I am more of a verbose and boring explainer. So I began to examine what provoked those thoughts. In my class, I explain the passage word by word, so I am translating right from the very beginning. If I haven't understood the passage properly before I start that process, then in the public situation I will only produce an unclear sense, or one that deviates from the purpose of the passage. We were doing GC 1.1.17 and tomorrow we will have to...

Muraliswara das said... I'm trying to understand your conception, Jagadānanda Ji, but I'm afraid that I fail to do it. As far as I understand you make essentially one simple point: human love IS Love Divine. Let me quote from your writings: "You should understand that the love that exists between you and your wife is the very same feeling as that which exists between Radha and Krishna." Or, as you've said in this article, "What it does mean is that the love that you feel for the child is the same qualitatively though not quantitatively as that cosmic vātsalya-bhāva exemplified and symbolized by Yashoda." How is it possible? I'm neither theologian nor intellectual but I've heard something about Krishna-prema from certain Vaishnavas, and I heard from them one simple thing: human love is kāma , Love Divine is prema and kāma is a PERVERTED REFLECTION of prema , and kāma and prema although looking similar are opposite in nature, they are ...

I was just leafing again through a book, Dieu des Athees , by a French Catholic theologian from the 50s, and was reminded of his argument that faith and science/technology are distinct domains dealing with different aspects of human reality. Because they are distinct, nothing in science can really disprove God, who is mediated through faith, and indeed the critiques of science actually do believers a favor by leading them to recognizing that distinction. They will then understand that God acts in the natural world through the natural law, and reveals himself through the human will. We agree with this, as all Indian sciences are sciences of the soul. Any knowledge of the world is validated only through its value in achieving the ultimate goal of the Self. Even if scientists were to produce life in a test tube, or artificial intelligence, or (as I was saying in my class today) a way to duplicate mystical experience by prodding certain parts of the brain, it would not change anything...

Prisni wrote the following status on Facebook a few days ago and I responded almost immediately. I have been meditating on the exchange for a few days. I will quote her whole post because it does show some nice devotional sentiment: She was responding to the following blog post . Woke up in the middle of the night, this pops up on my phone, and I cannot fall asleep again, me thinking [ about the following blog post ]. The last sentence “You need to understand Radharani by entering into her soul. That is what lovemaking is all about.”, and have the male approach in a nutshell: "I will come, I will conquer, I will penetrate." And no, it is so not working. . You have to let Radharani enter your soul, let her energy, her mercy, enter you. That is what sakhi bhava is all about. When her energy enters your soul, then you become an instrument of Her. She plays her tune, the strings in your soul vibrate. That way you experience what she experiences, that is the key to "ma...

I found this which appears to be an old Gaudiya Discussions posting. I will probably revisit this when I get to Bhakti Sandarbha 312 in my editing work. QUOTE (Madhava @ Jun 17 2004, 11:21 AM) The injunction for a disciple to hear of his eternal pārṣada-form from the guru is there in the writings of Sri Jiva. kecid aṣṭādaśākṣara-dhyānaṁ go-dohana-samaya-vaṁśī-vādya-samākṛṣṭa-tat-tat-sarvamayatvena bhāvayanti | yathā caike tādṛśam upāsanaṁ sākṣād vraja-jana-viśeṣāyaiva mahyaṁ śrī-guru-caraṇair mad-abhīṣṭa-viśeṣa-siddhy-artham upadiṣṭaṁ bhāvayāmi || Bhakti-sandarbha 312 "Some, while remembering the eighteen-syllable mantra, meditate on the pastimes of tending cows and playing flute, becoming attracted and absorbed in them. In such upāsana (worship), in order to attain my specifically desired perfection, I should meditate on that unique form of a resident of Vraja my revered guru has instructed me in." Satyanarayana Dasaji has this as: Some devotees, while meditati...

I had some misgivings about posting this and even considered deleting it completely. Facebook pie fights are unseemly and who wants to admit to having been sucked into one. I regularly get posters from my ISKCON friends -- usually people who are on the fringes, for I suspect that for a temple devotee to be my FB friend is a capital offense -- who exhort me to read Prabhupada's books as the magic cure for my confusion. It is not fair of me to point out that often they are clearly symptomatic of some kind of spiritual blockage, but occasionally I do. However, the following made me take the whole question of this infantile approach to religion and to look at it in the light of history. A comment on Facebook I made elicited the following response from the aptly named Yuyutsu: Aha ha ha ho ho ho Jagadananda.. thinks he's Santa CAUSE.... ALSO THINKS HE'S SOME KIND OF HOLYMAN GURU SADHU... OF SORTS... 😂😂😅😆😃😂😂😂😂😂 THAT EARNS YOU A "PHCK OFF" LITTLE OLD MA...

One of the most famous verses in the entire Chaitanya Vaishnava tradition is the following, found three times in Caitanya-caritāmṛta ( Madhya 1.58, 13.121, Antya 1.78). yaḥ kaumāra-haraḥ sa eva hi varas tā eva caitra-kṣapās te conmīlita-mālatī-surabhayaḥ prau ḍ hāḥ kadambānilāḥ sā caivāsmi tathāpi tatra surata-vyāpāra-līlā-vidhau revā-rodhasi vetasī-taru-tale cetaḥ samutkaṇṭhate || The very one who took my maidenhead is here now as my bridegroom. And these too are the same moonlit nights of the month of Chaitra. The same fragrance of malati flowers is there and the same sweet breezes blowing from the kadamba forest. I too am the very same person with whom he made playful, ecstatic love. Yet my unsatisfied mind yearns for that place under the bullrushes on the bank of the Reva River. Padyāvali 378 (Srk 815, Skm 2.12.3; Spd 3768; Smv 87.9; SD 1.2) Since the story has been told by Kaviraj Goswami in three different places, it is important to examine the contexts. In the f...

I have been reading from Jiva Goswami's Gopāla-campū (GC) at the Jiva Institute. Classes are held Monday to Friday from 5-6 in the evening. As I prepared my course, I began going over Saṅkalpa-kalpa-druma (SKD), which gives further clues into Sri Jiva's purpose in writing GC. Saṅkalpa-kalpa-druma (SKD) is the last book Jiva Goswami wrote, which came at the end of his life. In the beginning of the book, which has over 700 verses, Jiva tells his mind that since he is growing old, it should be fixed on Krishna's eternal pastimes. SKD was written after GC, and in some ways it is a recapitulation or summary explanation of the basis or theory of GC. What was Jiva trying to do in his magnum opus? One of the verses given by Vishwanath and his senior contemporary Radha Krishna Das Goswami to support their idea that Jiva Goswami was actually dissimulating when he wrote in various places his defense of svakīyā-vāda is the one which concludes the commentary to 1.21, after his...