Jagat

2016 Verses in glorification of the Holy Name. I have revisited these translations several times. They were done in connection with my work on Hari-nāma-cintāmaṇi . It appears that on this day in 2016 I was relishing a few of them which I posted on Facebook. The complete collection was put on the blog for the first time in January this year: Verses in glorification of the Holy Names from various sources I Verses in glorification of the Holy Names from various sources II Verses in glorification of the Holy Names from various sources III 2014 Vote counting has started in India. The exit polls show a BJP led majority. Indeed, it looks like they are crushing the opposition. Namo NaMo. The full moon over Rishikesh. Last day tomorrow. As usual, I am completely behind in everything. It has been pretty silent. Swamiji was looking a little better today, but yesterday he said that each day brings new physical problems. I said, "We just pray that you finish your Yoga Sutra work and your fiv...

In his letter posted to this blog , Christiaan asked a question about spiritual life and practice in general. In the second, he is more specific. At the end of his first paragraph, he spoke about cultural conditioning and objects of worship. He develops on this in the second paragraph: Then there is Jung. Although considered a little outdated in the more modern cognitive field, it seems that the projection of love on a divine couple is a nice example of a Jungian archetype. Jung spent much time in India, even in Bengal. What would you say to a person like me to convince me to become a practitioner. I am neither a psychologist (as you might have guessed) nor a devotee or worshiper of Krishna. I am interested though in both. As far as Jung is concerned, to say that he is not thought highly of by today's pundits just shows the bias of the particular schools of psychology with which you are familiar. Archetypal psychology is simply saying that our brains are predisposed to formulat...

Love eternal Obviously, we could go into a great deal more detail on practically every level of this story, but we have to stop somewhere for the sake of drawing some conclusions from this tale. I wanted to start from the parallels were already made with the Bhagavatam. According to Sanatan Goswami, there were only some 30 years between Krishna’s departure from Vrindavan and the meeting in Kurukshetra. Even so, I guess that what I am saying is that this story has hit a few archetypal bells, themes that are the stuff of myth and legend—the love that does not die. So that is the angle that I see this memoir—a tragic love story in the great tradition. Radha and Krishna were also childhood lovers who were separated--forever, if we accept the Bhagavata version. On reading the book, I came to feel that this was an archetypal tragic love story with interesting parallels to the Bhagavata's account of Krishna and the gopis, and it seems worthwhile to try to make a bit of sense out of ...

It is interesting that atheistic humanism is more often than not associated with the political left, while belief in God is, especially in America, immediately identified with the socially conservative right. This kind of prejudice is clear on The Guardian "Comment is Free" pages, where there are often articles discussing different aspects of religion, and any positive comment is invariably clubbed viciously by strongwilled leftists. Recent examples are Sue Blackmore's A Dangerous Delusion and Dave Hill, who in Faith and the Left , asks for a more nuanced understanding of religion without abandoning his own atheist credentials. Blackmore is basically rehashing the currently ubiquitous Richard Dawkin's ideas, including that of the meme, the cultural equivalent of genes. Dawkins first came into prominence by suggesting that genes themselves were engaged in a struggle for survival, and that all evolution could be looked at from the point of view of the genes, the fittes...

Someone has asked for a little more clarification on the relationship between manjari bhava and the practices I am talking about. Anyway, I don't see how this ties into manjari bhav sadhana. If both the male and female partners identify as a manjari, then how can they engage in sexual relations with each other while maintaining that inner identity? Two little girls on the brink of Kishorihood who just want to assist their Swamini in meeting with her Priyatam are now having sex with each other? What is up with that? That's why I say that yes, Vaishnava couples can and do have creative intimate lives, but while doing so they can't and do not identify themselves in the same way they identify themselves during their sadhana time. When I say "can't" above it is not meant as "it's impossible", but it means I can't see how it would work. So could you address this issue please Jagat? I have written a number of articles that deal with this topi...

I used those words in my previous post... "by curious coincidence." And as I rushed out of the office, I noticed on Deborah (professor of church history in Canada, with whom I share it)'s desk: There Are No Accidents , by Robert H. Hopcke. All about Jung's synchronicity theory. The theory is simple. Our lives are a story. "Coincidences" are meaningful connections that move the story along. Who knows what triggers will move us out of our sloth and lethargy? The wife burning a husband's clothes so he can look at an insect bite... the coded letter of a brother... the words of an old woman? It is not so much the event as the surge into consciousness that it produces. The same coincidence for a rushed and harried businessman passes by unnoticed. I pray for that trigger. Here I am, laughing, thinking maybe this is it, maybe this is the trigger. This collection of small, vairagya-related coincidences.

A lot has been written about androgyny from a variety of perspectives in recent years, mostly by Jungians and those various religious tendencies that find Jung's ideas useful. These persons tend toward New Age type philosophies, or what Huxley called "the perennial philosophy," doctrines that generally make us in the Vaishnava tradition recoil because of their great fluidity and ultimate indifference to the principle of bhakti. In fact, they look a lot like the Hinduism that Gaudiya Vaishnavas feel uncomfortable with and reject as impersonalism. At the very least, if the Jungian goal of psychological individuation, which is characterized as a coincidentia oppositorum, is the ultimate object of the spiritual quest, then it seems to us not to really be "the best story," but only a part of it, as much as liberation is only valued when seen in the context of prema bhakti . In order to follow up on this subject, I have been reading a number of works on the sub...

Plus ça change, plus ça reste pareil. One thing I did not mention in speaking of the June McDaniel book, because it was not relevant then, is that I am quoted in it. The reason I mention it now is because now it has become relevant. June McDaniel interviewed me in Nabadwip back in 1984. Nitai introduced us, as she was a fellow student of his at the University of Chicago. Evidently, she did not find speaking with me particularly fruitful as she only quoted the one statement, in which I say, "In the Western system, people try to invent things for themselves. In India, we try to follow previous people, to do what they did and get it down properly, the way that it was done before." (Page 19) Maybe I was thinking of this verse: etāṁ sa āsthāya parātma-niṣṭhām adhyāsitāṁ pūrvatamair mahadbhiḥ ahaṁ tariṣyāmi duranta-pāraṁ tamo mukundāṅghri-niṣevayaiva “Fixed in faith in the Supreme Soul in whom dwelt the great souls of yore, I shall cross over the boundless ocean of darkne...

The second seminar was centered on Mahaprabhu's life. The readings were (1) Bhaktivedanta Swami's introduction to the Srimad Bhagavatam, (2) Adi 17 and Madhya 1 of Chaitanya Bhagavata, based on a version I found on the web and revised. (3) Then I found a version of the Jagai Madhai story from CBh translated by Tony Stewart ( Religions of India in Practice , ed. Donald S. Lopez). I also gave an article by Joseph O'Connell in which he traces a particular incident from Chaitanya's life through the different biographies ("Historicity in the Biographies of Chaitanya", JVS 1.2), and finally the first chapter of June McDaniel's The Madness of the Saints . In preparing for the course, I found that June McDaniel's introduction gave some very useful insights into the Chaitanya phenomenon. Her book is not really about Mahaprabhu, as such, but rather about ecstatic religion in Bengal, and though she begins with Mahaprabhu as the paradigmatic ecstatic, she gives...

Since Anuradha wrote me, I thought I would answer a comment he wrote in response to my Thursday, August 17, 2006 blog. (This is being posted, even though it is incomplete). Trying to make your own sex-life a spiritual experience is fine, but it is not yet "full surrender" and "selfless Devotion". Repeat,repeat... I personally play soccer. Maybe Krishna likes it too. Maybe He wants to play with me one day. I don't know. But my soccer is not Krishna's soccer. I play for many selfish reasons and because testosterone is fueling my body. Therefor I regulate it. I play. I enjoy. But it is not part of my spiritual Quest. I have to say that I found this to be a total misunderstanding of what I am coming to understand about the worship of Radha and Krishna. In fact, I am not quite sure what philosophical position Anuradha is trying to defend here. I notice that Advaita continues to associate me with "immorality." Clearly Anuradha is making a certain...

A few weeks ago, I believe I mentioned that I had started rereading Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life , a collection of readings in ethics edited by Fred and Christina Sommers (Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997). I have been finding almost every single article to be useful to some degree or another. It seems that a commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita taking into account all the various moral philosophers would make an interesting text. After all, the essential question of all ethics is, like Arjuna asked, "What should I do?" Arjuna's situation is meant to illustrate a most fundamental ethical quandary and a particular solution is offered, one that would be interesting to examine, verse by verse, in the light of developments in philosophical ethics. No doubt, someone has done it. The latest article I have gone through is an excerpt from Alasdair Macintyre's After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). The article comes in chapter four, titled "Virt...