Jagat

I started publicly professing to be a Sahajiya when I saw various individuals promoting an agenda that I was not in tune with. I do not believe that sexuality is meant to be "free," or to be indulged in wantonly. The Prema we talk about is pure . That is the axiomatic basis. Just because sexuality is involved does not mean that it is necessarily kāma , any more than any other activity transformed by relation ("dovetailing") to Krishna is kāma . It is part of the process of converting the innate desire that is expressed towards matter ( kāma ) into prema , i.e., that same desire directed towards God. There is only one energy in the soul, that is desire for union. Everything else is subordinate to that, and everything else is a servant of that. sarve vidhi-niṣedhāḥ syur etayor eva kiṅkarāḥ . I fully expect Sahajiyaism and the other paths related to Gaudiya Vaishnavism -- good, bad and ugly -- to manifest in the course of time, just as happened in Bengal. There is ...

One of the most exotic and exuberant streams flowing from the spring of Sri Chaitanya and his followers is that of the Bauls, who are broadly classifiable as Sahajiyas and thus treated as a heterodox or apasampradaya sect by the mainstream followers of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. At various times over the past century, the Bauls have sprung into prominence in Bengal and further afield, without ever really penetrating the public consciousness. They remain, as Shashi Bhushan Dasgupta classified them, an "obscure religious cult." This despite the support they received from no less a figure than Rabindranath Tagore, whom Dasgupta even calls "the greatest of the Bauls of Bengal." [ Obscure Religious Cults , 187). In recent times, prominent members of the tradition such as Purna Das, Kisan Das, and Paban Das Baul have attracted some public attention, primarily as folk singers in the world music and fusion genres, rather than as a specific religious school. Some scholarly...