Jagat

It has been quite interesting that Advaita Dasji has sent me a second postcard I wrote addressed to Radharaman Dasji. (See here also .) I used to keep diaries when in India, as did Advaitaji, but unlike him, I lost all mine when I came back to Canada in 85. As a result I have absolutely no recollection of the exact dates of my whereabouts at any given time, and most of my memories are fuzzy at best and totally non-existent at worst. I have expressed wonder at this many times. It has convinced me of the utter untrustworthiness of memory in general and mine in particular. I used to make the excuse that I was so concentrated on texts and so on that my external life was always relegated to the background. That might be an acceptable excuse if I could remember a few more shlokas, which also have gone the way of flotsam on the ever-flowing Ganga. These little forgotten bits and pieces remind me how we also have previous lives that are lost to us. This postcard is from Nabadwip and sent...

I don't go out all that much, but whenever I do, the transformations that are taking place in Vrindavan on a day-to-day basis are constantly at the forefront of my perceptions. The other evening I cycled the length of the Chattikara Road from NH2 to the house and found it quite amazing to see how rapidly everything is mutating. But that is quite the road at night now. New buildings -- hotels, ashrams, guesthouses, apartment buildings, residential developments, temples -- popping up everywhere, many of them looking quite posh in the night with their glass and polished granite facades and colored neon signage. With the dark night backdrop obscuring the old Vrindavan from view, one could be forgiven for thinking we were actually in at least the 20th century. I went into the huge Akshaya Patra complex and attended arati there. It is a separate ISKCON, just a couple of centimeters different enough to be a "not-ISKCON", with a personality quite different from Krishna Bal...

vibhur api sukha-rūpaḥ sva-prakāśo'pi bhāvaḥ kṣaṇam api rādhā-kṛṣṇayor yā ṛte svāḥ pravahati rasa-puṣṭiṁ cid-vibhūtīr iveśaḥ śrayati na padam āsāṁ kaḥ sakhīnāṁ rasajñaḥ Nandimukhi continues: “Hey Vrinde! Just as the all-pervading Supreme Lord cannot relish pleasure without his hlädiné çakti , Radha Krishna’s combined form of premānanda fails to be nourished without the sakhis’ help. How then could a rasika bhakta resist the temptation to take their shelter?” This verse has been of interest to me for some time. It is quoted in the Ramananda-samvada as a glorification of the necessity of taking shelter of the sakhis. Generally, the GLA does not make philosophical or theological statements, as it is a lila grantha. Here, however is a statement about rasa-tattva and lila-tattva that is quite unique. Without the sakhis, Radha and Krishna's bhava, even though it is all-pervading, full of joy and self-luminous (sat, ananda, cit), does not fulfill its potential as rasa withou...