Jagat

Impersonalism or personalism, what is the real difference?  It is not so much in the doctrine, but in the behavior that the real test comes. The problem is projection. We see the body or the religious affiliation and so on and we don't see the soul, the person. That happens, sadly, as often if not more with people who identify themselves as theists, because they see the religious affiliation as the identifier, i.e., they see the upādhi or covering as the truth, and not the spiritual being. Now whether you call that spiritual truth Brahman or anything else, if you accept that the person with whom you are engaged is a sacred entity, and you treat them accordingly, that is personalism. Whether you do so on the level of full realization or as an aspect of sādhana . If you believe God is a bearded old man or a flute-playing cowherd, but you treat other people as objects, in whatever guṇa of nature, you are an impersonalist. Our personalist philosophy ultimately tells us to see Krishna...

A friend of Facebook wrote a status: "I don't believe in sexiness," which elicited a number of comments. In a talk I gave last night here in Rishikesh, one person once again accused me of promoting "free sex": nothing could be further from the truth and indeed it gets tiresome defending oneself against such a shallow understanding of my theology and practice. We are in a world where hypersexualization has vitiated the spiritual potential of erotic love. But sexuality is so fundamental to human life that if we do not understand how to cultivate the sacred in that, we will never truly understand madhura-rasa . This also takes discipline because it is a sādhana . It is pleasurable, of course, because spiritual life IS about the highest pleasure, and the highest pleasure is love, and the highest love is the love of God, which we experience through our human love relations. So I too find it gross when I see a woman flaunting her sexuality, like the movie stars w...

One of the subjects that I am confronted with on a regular basis is that of the woman's experience in India. As a self-avowed Sahajiya, any issues related to gender and sexuality are of particularly interest to me, so I am an observer of sexual attitudes in this part of the world. A recent event taking place in India has once again pushed the issue to the front pages of the newspapers and other media, primarily for its sensationalism. An Assamese reporter happened to film the brutalization and sexual harassment of a woman in the Guwahati streets at night by a gang of men. A discussion of the event and the general situation can be found in this Guardian article by Helen Pidd, Why is India so bad for women? . The litany of related news items in this article makes one hang one's head in despair. The land of the Goddess, of Shakti, of Radha... I truly want to weep, not only because I have been hearing this for so long, but once again this is brought to my attention so I wan...

Prabhavishnu Swami , a leading ISKCON sannyasi and guru, 60 years old, was recently caught in flagrante delicto with a woman, apparently a non-devotee, in Bangkok. Another tiresome episode that has ISKCON's critics jumping up and down with indignation, and many disciples crying in pain and disbelief. Where are the pure devotees? they cry. All the gurus are false, they scream. ISKCON is full of fakers and misleaders, they say. Prabhavishnu himself has given a litany of excuses -- overwork, too much travel, etc. But they refuse to put their finger on the obvious. Neither the ISKCON leadership nor their critics in the Prabhupadanuga camp have identified the real flaw, which is the sannyasa institution itself. Sannyasa, like brahmacharya, is something of a cult trick. It is a leftover from the Mayavada influence on India that rejects the world, and therefore sees woman and sexuality as false. An organization like ISKCON demands uncompromising and absolute fidelity to ...

If there were no love in this world, there would be none in the next either. But nobody would be able to doubt the existence of love in this world if they were not busy trying to find love apart from God. Krishna says, "I am the source of all. All things begin with me. Those enlightened persons who know this, worship me with love." (Gita 10.8) The very fact that we can conceive of an "ideal" is the beginning of the ontological argument. In this sense, it is connected to other arguments for the existence of God, like those of first origins or of teleology, i.e., the purposefulness of existence, both of which point to God. So, God as Person is the truest result of understanding, as it is Personhood, capable of the highest love, that stands at the pinnacle of creation. But when I say that love is the result of the discovery of God as a Person, it is because of the connection of the two, i.e., the personhood we encounter in this world, which is given value and sacr...

The point of much of what was said before is this: The I-Thou mode of relation is more natural to woman, the I-It mode to men. Even this very discourse is contaminated by the masculine approach as I try to dissect these matters and analyse them without apparently directly engaging in an I-Thou act. In fact, Buber himself says that the I-Thou mode assimilates the I-It mode in the way that relation assimilates experience . "There is nothing I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather, it is everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number, included and inseparably fused." Therefore, my dear reader, when I speak these things, they are all assimilated into You. The acharyas confirm this insight in relation to the bhakti path as well. Jiva Goswami writes that knowledge need not be inimical to devotion (see Durgama-saṅgamanī to BRS 1.1.10). The early scientists thought of natural reason as a way of understanding t...

I have been talking about the relation of man to woman and their appropriateness for bhakti-sādhana . In my last article on this subject, I concluded that the encounter of the sādhaka or sādhikā is a manifestation of Guru Tattva which, I have attempted to explain, is the incursion of the divine Other on the closed or solipsistic consciousness. Something of what has been said in the previous sections can be further elucidated by a reference to Martin Buber’s concept of “I-Thou” (sometimes called "dialogical") mysticism, which was very influential in liberal Protestant circles, especially in the America of the 50's and 60's. Like many of the Western thinkers to whom I refer, he is somewhat out of date, at least he is no longer the fad he once was. Nevertheless, I am unapologetic about referring to his extremely perceptive summary of human consciousness, which I feel gives insight into the bhakti path and is helpful in understanding its implications. Buber's ba...