Jagat

In chapters 13 ,14, and 15 our guru puja yatra in Goloka Nabadwip will take a brief rest so that we can hear about three Gaura parshads who lead Thakur Bhaktivinoda's guru parampara: they are Ramai Thakur, Jahnava Thakurani, and Vamsivadan Thakur. This chapter will present a study of Ramai Thakur's life that his nephew-disciple Rajaballabha Goswami tells in Muralī-vilāsa . As Ramai is nitya-siddha , it is not surprising that Rajaballabha became kṛpā-siddha by his sanga and blessings Muralī-vilāsa 's Story To learn about Ramai, we will first need to know something about Vamsivadan, since Ramai is Vamsi's second avatar. Hence Muralī-vilāsa begins with this mangalacharan: jagad-ākarṣiṇī śaktir nitya-prema-svarūpiṇī tvaṁ vamśīvadanānanda vande tvāhaṁ jagad-guro | śrī-caitanya-priyatamas tadīya-prema-vigrahaṁ vande tac-caraṇāmbhoja-makaranda-pipāsayā || The Vamshi is Krishna's nitya-prema-svarūpiṇī , and her divine shakti produces a melodious vibration t...

Yesterday was a fairly uneventful day, yet to describe it would require volumes, a kind of Proustian effort to understand how entire lifetimes, entire worlds, universal histories are contained in each microsecond, that to fully describe any moment would require volumes equal to the universe itself. This insight rarely flashes before anyone's mind, since we are usually fixated on immediate goals and desires, and those absorb our mind and intelligence to the exclusion of nearly all the phenomena, internal and external, that clutter ever moment of our lives. And to write about it, well to write about it meaningfully, you have to make it into a story, and a story is an organization of those phenomena into recognizable and communicable patterns, which is why human beings are mythopoeic creatures, turning everything into story and myth. We have to simplify, but simplification means a kind of falsification. Trying to reduce everything into digestible truths usually means caricatures, c...