Jagat

This is a photo of my friend Vishnu Panigrahi taken at the final rituals on the day of Swami Veda's jala samādhi. They were offering flowers to his body, which was about to be taken to Haridwar to be placed in the fast flowing Ganges in a place where the water was deep. Swamiji's akhara oversaw the rituals. Many people will be posting photos and videos, so I decided just to take pictures of some of the people who came. Not everybody, just the ones I recognized.  Here is my album from that day in 2015. There are other Rishikesh-related memories. FB memories July 17.   2017   One of my favorite songs. I heard this in the film Nīlācale Mahāprabhu , but the link has been lost. I did not post a translation the first time, so here it is.   ki rūpa herinu madhura mūrati pirīti rasera sāra| hena laẏa mane e tina bhūbane tulanā nāhi go tāra|| What beauty have I beheld, a form of sweetness, the essence of the taste of love It seems to me that this form has no equal anywher...

The Rutgers students who came for a three-week course during their Christmas break went with a few others from Jiva including myself. We went to Binode Bihari Babaji's ashram near Priya Kund and then went with him on Barsana parikrama. I first met Binode Bihari Das Babaji Maharaj in 1984 when his guru Tinkori Goswami came to Nabadwip. In those days, Tinkori Prabhu was the topmost bhajananandi in the Gaudiya Vaishnava world. It was a great surprise to everyone when, like Jagannath Das Babaji, he decided to spend the last part of his life in Gauda desh. So naturally there was a great attraction to go and visit him in Manipur Ghat, not far from the crematorium. I visited several times since in those days there was a general enthusiasm building for Mahaprabhu's 500th appearance day anniversary. Tinkori Prabhu had many disciples in Nabadwip, and I used to join them daily for early morning nagar sankirtan through the streets of Nabadwip, singing "Sri Krishna Chaitanya, ...

I just heard from Madhavananda Dasji of Bhubaneswar ISKCON that Fakir Mohan Das, a noted scholar of Orissan religious history and literature, is extremely ill and will probably not survive this crisis. His kidneys are failing and various other problems mean that the 90 year old sage and naishthika brahmachari is close to the end. We met for the first time in many years just a few days ago in Vrindavan, where he had come for Karttik Niyam Seva, as was his wont. It was a wonderful, sweet meeting. I am sorry I missed the opportunity to associate with him more over the years as he is a fountain of knowledge about the history of Chaitanya Vaishnavism in Orissa. I was a bit sad that he left Vrindavan when the heart problems struck again, but for him, Orissa is every bit as much a divya lila sthan as Braj. He was staying here with Nabadwip Chandra Das, a disciple of Gaur Govinda Maharaj, who was himself a childhood friend of Fakir Mohan's. When Gaur Govinda Maharaj opened the Bhubane...

With Malati Lata Dasi on Govardhan Parikrama in 2005. This is the Dauji temple in Puchari  where I stayed in 1980. It is now a Nimbarki ashram and being well taken care of. A few days ago I was on a bit of a roll... and it stirred up so many memories of my life in Nabadwip and Braj in the early 80s. In my kaupin, the sweat rolling down my chest as I chanted japa, the heat reminded me of the way my summer days back then were spent sitting, almost entirely inactive except for chanting, meditating and studying. I was feeling a bit of appreciation for the immobilizing heat. It seems to push you inward... not such a bad thing, on the whole, despite all the prejudices and pressures to externalize, externalize, externalize. After reading Ramdas's book , I was thinking about his idea of laminar flows ... that material and spiritual activities are separate and parallel streams that do not really affect one another, existing side by side, ebbing and flowing to their own rhythms. Ramd...

I am occasionally asked to speak on bhakti here at Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama. Interestingly, Swami Veda has been giving daily classes on the Gita's sthita-prajña-lakṣaṇam (i.e. 2.54-72), using Shankara and Madhusudan Saraswati's commentaries. One open secret here in this tradition is that Swami Rama himself was (or claimed to be) a reincarnation of this Madhusudan. Madhusudan Saraswati was an interesting personality whose scholarship was so multifaceted that there were few areas of traditional knowledge that he had not mastered. According to the information at hand, his forefathers escaped north India in the 12th century after the Muslim conquest and began by settling in Nabadwip. Later they moved to Faridpur in present-day Bangladesh. Madhusudan became renounced early in life and went to Benares to study Mimamsa. Some traditions have it that he first went to Nabadwip to study Navya-nyaya and there imbibed bhakti in the Chaitanyaite tradition. He was born after Chaitanya ...

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...