Jagat

When for every thing the night does break,  then the self-controlled are wide awake;  and when other creatures are roused to light,  for the introspective, it is the night. (Gita 2.69}  yā niśā sarva-bhūtānāṁ tasyāṁ jāgarti saṁyamī  yasyāṁ jāgrati bhūtāni sā niśā paśyato muneḥ   Not so long ago a young friend wrote a little piece on the ten things he had learned from his Krishna bhakti experience after a few years of chanting.First on his list was the benefit of getting up early in the morning and doing sadhana at that auspicious time of day. It is true that I got a taste in Iskcon for getting up at the Brahma Muhurta and doing bhajan before the sun comes up. I had fallen off a lot before I returned to India, but in Rishikesh I was an eager early riser and present in the meditation hall to enjoy the atmosphere alone at four in the morning or earlier. You get a taste for the darkness, which is truly a rarity in our Kaliyuga. Early rising a habit that ...

Just imagine if you were brought up speaking Sanskrit. Do you think that you would have a different sort of brain? I have spent a lot of time thinking about the psychology of language and identity. Identity is central to raganuga bhakti, both on the level of the sadhaka deha and the siddha deha. I was thinking about this earlier (since in class I had mentioned that you more or less have to be crazy to want to learn Sanskrit). We were discussing this verse as an illustration of different classes of athematic verbs being used in the same sentence, all in the third person singular. The following verse has six verbs, each from a different class: ददाति प्रतिगृह्णाति गुह्यमाख्याति पृच्छति । भुङ्क्ते भोजायते चैव षड्विधं प्रीतिलक्षणम् ॥ One gives and accepts [one another’s gifts], one tells and inquires about one another’s private matters, one eats what the other offers and one invites the other to eat. These are the six kinds of signs of love. ( Upadeśāmṛta 4) Here √दा, ददाति (3P), √ग्रह्, गृ...