Jagat

I here post the post I made on Facebook on April 10, 2021 about my meeting with Paramadvaiti Swami nearly three years after the scandals that pretty much destroyed his society of disciples called VRINDA. This was picked up and posted elsewhere on the internet , where it was a source of some glee to the Schadenfreude crew. I likely would not have posted but was motivated by an encounter with a neighbor who was one of the leading advocates for the victims on line and elsewhere. This led me to post what was an objective  leaning to sympathetic assessment of my encounter with Paramadvaiti. I have a bit of a suppressed journalistic instinct that occasionally gets me into trouble.  In the beginning there were favorable comments to this post but the tide turned and those who advocated for the victims and for a hard line against all abuse took me to task for being too soft. This then resulted in a campaign of complaints against me that had unpleasant consequences for me.  I don't...

April 11 of last year was a significant date for me on Facebook. I posted some comments related to B.A. Paramadvaiti Swami (BAP) that excited a lot of comment and had real-life repercussions for me when some advocates for the victims of BAP's abuses decided that I was their enemy and needed to be cancelled. There were complaints made about me to Satyanarayana Dasaji and my life at Jiva was made quite uncomfortable. It was one of three events that made 2021 particularly notable, the others being the death of my son and my return to Canada. I never discussed the Paramadvaiti issue on this blog but I think it is time that I at least publish the salient portions of what I wrote on this matter for the record.   I am not really an activist by nature, but a few years ago I participated in activities related to the environmental and heritage issues in Vrindavan. This is the ground on which I encountered Paramadvaiti Maharaj on many occasions as he was very active in the Braj Vrindavan Her...

Almost two hundred years ago the Queen of Manipur married the King of the neighbouring state of Tripura. The King was an exalted Vaishnava. He came to Vrindavan and built a temple for the people of his kingdom. It was named Tripura-kunja. After the marriage, the Queen of Manipur said to him, "You have your kunja, but I don't have my own. I also want to have my kunja. When my people will come to Vrindavan, where will they stay? Where will they meet?" The king replied, " My dear, your wish will be fulfilled. Nearby Tripura-kunja we will have your Kunja, the Manipuri-rani-kunj." The place was named Rani-kunja. Rani means Queen. Therein the deities of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Giriraj Govardhan and Sri Sri Radha-Vrajamohan were duly installed. In this way a nice temple was established there. The Arati was first offered at Tripura-kunja and then at Rani-kunja. The Queen lived for a long time in a room near the Deities'room and performed her bhajan there. ...

Jai Sri Radhe. Well I am finally going to be speaking at a few programs here in Montreal. I will still try to do more. Swami Bhakti Bibudh Bodhayan Maharaj is here in Montreal at the moment. He has been preaching in the Montreal area for more than ten years now, since one of his disciples, Anuradha Dasi , an innovative Odisi dancer from La Belle Province, is also something of a good promoter. Another friend of his is  Patrick Bernard, Prahlad Das , an ex-ISKCON person who took mantra initiation from Bhakti Rakshak Shridhar Maharaj. He has become fairly successful as a New Age musician with plenty of fans. So through the two of them, Bodhayan Maharaj has made plenty of contacts in local yoga schools, etc. Bodhayan Maharaj and Paramadwaiti Maharaj at Vrinda Kunj in Vrindavan, 2009. I went to a couple of Bodhayan Maharaj's programs, and have met many of his disciples, who are mostly new and real beginners. The mood in his programs is very good and quite different from t...

The amazing Ed Bryant (Advaita Prabhu Das) just received here at Jiva the final proofs for his new book, "Yoga in the Krishna Bhakti Tradition" to be published by the same company that did his Yoga Sutra, Macmillan. He has promised to give me a few excerpts for Vrindavan Today, so look for them in the coming days. For all my friends in the AHYMSIN tradition, I will just say that Swami Veda Bharati wanted me to do something like this, research yoga in the Bhagavata Purana. He even had Ram Charit photocopy and paste all the relevant verses from BhP so that he could have it as a ready reference. And I even wanted to do it, and if I hadn't committed to Vrindavan  and the Sandarbhas project , I may have gotten around to it. Swamiji was planning projects that he knew he could never ever finish to his final day. Anyway, his desire has been fulfilled by a reputable scholar and, I may say, a great admirer of Swamiji's work. He relied on it heavily for his own Yoga Sut...

Recently I was sent a link to a video of a lecture by Swami B.A. Paramadwaiti given in Vrindavan. In the video he speaks of many different things, obviously outlining the directions he wants his own devotional organization, Vrinda, to take in the future. One of the things he spoke of in particular was the issue of milk products: "You could say, milk from the market is coming from the cow concentration camp. [---] Then comes the next thing, that this milk industry, producing this concentration-camp milk, butter, cheese, yoghurt – that industry puts chemicals into the cows and produces a milk that is not healthy. In other words, all these milk products, they're the reason why you have this disease and that disease and that disease, and why the hospitals are filled. This is not healthy food. [---] We want the Vrinda family to go in a vegan lifestyle. [---] We didn't want to make it like an absolute, but at least we wanted to give that example." The subsequent discussi...

Kutichak Prabhu invited my wife and me to come to Ste-Agathe for a program with Bhaktivedanta Sadhu Maharaj. Kutichak kept repeating that Paramadvaiti Maharaj, Sadhu Maharaj's sannyasa guru, insisted that we meet. To tell you the truth, decent sadhu sanga is hard to come by in this part of the world, and I have long wanted to meet this Brajavasi of noble origins and get to know him better. There is an article about him on the old VNN site. (www.vnn.org/world/WD0304/WD10-7978.html) On arrival, I gave Maharaj my last copy of Madhurya Kadambini , which was left over after my course. I had never met Maharaj before, but after talking with him a little, I found out that he was never forced to give up his initiation in the Nityananda parivar. Radha Govinda Das Babaji was the first preacher of Gaudiya Vaishnavism in the Munger region, probably in the late 19th century. If I am not mistaken, this Baba is mentioned in Vrajake Bhakta by O.B.L. Kapoor, which will need to go back and check out...