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...

After a hiatus of several months, we are continuing with Gadadhar Pran Das's Another side of Bhaktivinoda Thakur. In the very interesting previous chapter about Siddha Krishnadas Baba's Guṭikā can be found here . In Chapter 5 Gadadhar recounts how he came into the association of Madan Mohan Das Babaji Maharaj, Gopal Das Babaji Maharaj and Ananta Das Pandit Baba (now Radha Kund Mahant), who each published their own versions of the Guṭikā. Gadadhar studied  especially   under Madan Mohan Baba, spending extended periods of time with him in Radha Kund and then Govinda Kund between 1980 and 1990. 1: GuruNishtha 2: Raganuga Sadhana following Bhaktivinoda Thakur's ManjariParampara 3: Svarasiki Bhajan 4: Attaining Siddhi 5: Discovering Siddha Krishnadas Baba's Gutika 6: The contents of the Gutika The Guṭikā 's contents For rāga mārga sādhakas and sādhikās the Guṭikā is indispensable. Here are a few reasons: To help lay a good foundation for o...

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...

Not more than two months after I received diksha and siddha-pranali from Lalita Prasad Thakur in 1980, he left this world, entering Radha Krishna's nitya-lila. But Prabhu's departure stirred a greater desire in me for the bhajana-shiksha that I desperately needed. This lured me to Radha Kund the same year. When the Toofan Express pulled into the Mathura station, late as usual, I was contemplating how to reach my destination. It was late afternoon and I was alone. So I started praying to Radharani for guidance. Whenever I enter Vrindavan, it always seems that something mystical happens, and this time was no different. Stepping down from the train onto the platform, I saw a Vaishnava friend from Nabadwip named Jadunath Saha who was getting off the same train a couple of bogies away. Upon seeing me, he came running over. Since we were both alone and in the same predicament, we decided to team up. "Come with me," he said, "I shall introduce you to a great sadhu....