Jagat

Gaura Nitai the other night. I generally have secondary reading material lying around, stuff that is meant more for entertainment and distraction than anything else. Nevertheless, I generally speaking keep an open mind and betwixt and between I also don't mind cross-fertilizing my brain with books that often fall into my hands serendipitously. Bizarre as that may seem. I remember once when I was living in Nabadwip and I was invited to a small village on the Katwa-Burdwan medium-gauge line. It was not a particularly prosperous village. I had several friends on that line, including Shambhu Narayan Ghoshal, one of the most colorful personalities in the Vaishnava world I ever met. Srikhanda and Jajigram are on that line, close to Katwa, but these villages were further. The bhakta who invited me was once an ordinary man, but then he cured a couple of people in the village -- brahmins, and he wasn't one -- of leprosy, by chanting the Holy Name. Then he had become a pakka Vais...

In literature, it is in the nature of the text itself to control the emotional responses. (Under this rubric or the word "literature," I include plays, movies, musical works, novels, poems, etc.; in short, anything where the kinds of dynamics under discussion are operative.)  And here we must draw a distinction between Rupa's divine aesthetic and that of other, "mundane" literature. In the latter, most audiences tend to seek entertainment that confirms their ("bodily") identities, and therefore young men like action flicks with themes that allow them to experience vicarious heroism and a macho kind of love. For them, identification with the young girl mentioned previously will be difficult and somewhat forced. In such a case, a certain amount of acculturation or education is required, principally in the acquisition of a predisposition or capacity to bring one's attention to bear on the text material ( sattva-guna ). A little bit of work is require...