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...

As you may well imagine, coming back into a marriage from the place one left off 14 or 15 years ago is an interesting experience. A lot of things have happened in the intervening time and we all undergo changes, for better or worse. Hopefully in my case it was for the better.  Nevertheless, I am a person who seeks meaning in the accidents of life, and what is going on now is certainly one of those.

I want to say something about the impression that people have that I am always talking about sex. Perhaps it is because I have been open about the subject in a way that others have not been that has created this impression. Women are ready to talk about misogyny, but fail to recognize that ambivalence and confusion about sexuality itself are an important contributing factor in misogyny, and a spiritually viable response is needed to assimilate sexuality into our culture of the sacred. There are many people who feel uncomfortable with any mention whatever of sexuality, and tell me to emphasize love. After all, our tradition has always hidden direct references to sex and dressed it up in Radha Krishna's "love dalliances" or whatever. I think that a little direct talk is not only useful but necessary. That does not make me a sex maniac or a lusty old womanizer. Indeed, most people in the modern  materialistic view of sexual liberation would find me a fusty conservative ...

I need to be doing more Harinam sankirtan and publicly talking about bhakti. For twenty years I have been mucking about on the internet. To what avail? When I started my blog, it was really to avoid public forums like Facebook. Of course, at that time I had just gone through the whole Gaudiya Discussions fiasco, when the private correspondence I was having on that site was hacked and a romantic relationship with another member was revealed. It was also made clear and public at that time that my thoughts on Krishna consciousness tended to the Sahajiya side. Many people on Gaudiya Discussions felt personally deceived by me and the entire site crashed and everyone went their own way. For a short time -- but it only takes a few moments for epiphanies to take place -- GD was something of a "magic place" where discussions were hot but polite, where information was shared and everyone was curious and eager to know, where much poetry was written, some original, some translation....

Chandan Goswami asked on Facebook, after hearing yet another person accuse almost everyone in the Vaishnava world of being a Sahajiya, "Have you found or met accidentally any such person in Gaudiya Sampradaya who you think is a Sahajiya?" In other words, have you met someone who fits your own description and still calls himself a Sahajiya? If there is any such thing as a "Sahajiya," it should be a person who calls himself by that name. If I call you a "Green Duck" that is me calling you something, not you yourself. If I then say "Green Ducks are like this or that" then it is clearly propaganda. Like people calling each other "Communists" or "Nazis" in political discussions. No one has asked the Green Ducks for their opinion. There are no doubt real Communists and Nazis, but before trying to define what one is, it may do well to find one and talk with that person to find out what they do and what they believe. Then your cr...

I used the word sahajiya in the previous post, in reference to the idea of doing a Gita commentary from that particular point of view. But I think I need to say a word or two, once again, about the use of the word. First of all, let us remember the saying, "Give a dog a bad name and then hang him." The propaganda against sahajiyaism has been very successful, and though few people have any experience of or understanding of Vaishnava sahajiyaism, which in its pure form is a legitimate and powerful process of experiencing the Divine Truth in its personal form. Actually, I feel somewhat foolish now, thinking about it. It seems a little childish, using a word that presses so many buttons. Let's face it, Gaudiya Vaishnavas already called me a Sahajiya before I declared it myself, they will continue to do so from now to eternity. The only question is whether we can reclaim the term and make it meaningful and worthwhile. So as a deliberate act of self-definition, despite my ...

I spent the last few weeks travelling and on my return to Rishikesh became involved with other preoccupations, so I have neglected this blog. It is hard to gauge changing times, but certainly Madhavananda's departure from our little virtual world of scattered devotees, some barely "limping along," as Advaita Dasji put it, makes me think that perhaps there is some significant tectonic shift taking place. I had accumulated things to say, but most of them have withered into silence, where in all likelihood they belonged. Wheat and chaff are separated by the steady sighs of time. I spent a little more than two weeks at Gadadhar Pran's. On the whole it was a good stay, but the encroaching Ganga has Gadadhar feeling as though he is under siege. Nothing new there: if you are a raganuga bhakta in the domain of Iskcon and the Gaudiya Math, their animosity is like a steady tide that wears at the banks of your self-assurance anyway. But it is a cruel blow to have Nature attack o...

I feel somewhat guilty that I did not mention my pleasant visit to Advaitaji in Radha Kund while he has spoken rather kindly of me over on Madan Gopal. Since there seems to be a kind of link between the two blogs, I really should have shared my perception of that meeting. The only disagreement he mentioned was related to the subject of projecting sexual desires on the lila. This was in fact a response to his misunderstanding that people like myself are projecting our own sexual desires on the lila; I was saying that Western psychology would argue that the lila is seen as the projection of repressed or unfulfilled (or unfulfillable) sexual desires. Which, if true, would mean that saying it is not is nothing more than denial, a refusal to accept the obvious. But of course, the relationship between material sexual desire and the lila of Radha and Krishna is more complex and sophisticated than projected repressed desires, and certainly seeing it as nothing more than titillation is equa...

Here I go again. Stop me if you have heard all this before. I heard through a grapevine that a particular GM sannyasi said that lovemaking between devotees is not one of the 64 angas of devotion, and so could never be considered a valid practice for Gaudiya Vaishnavas. I hold that loving intimacy with another devotee can indeed be considered an important anga of bhakti in the cultivation of madhura rasa. Sadhu-sanga is a bhakti anga, and touching the devotee is an element of sadhu-sanga. But it is not the touching in itself, it is the accompanying feelings of love. Bhakti is of two kinds, that practiced externally and that practiced internally. The former is supposed to lead to the latter. Bhakti means feeling, cultivating feeling. If making physical love did not have the potential to create and aid in the cultivation of such feeling, I would say, OK, you are right, it has no possible role in bhakti yoga. But the very concept of madhura rasa depends on the presumption that it does. Eve...

Now Sridhar Maharaj evidently reserves a special place in hell for those who imitate Radha and Krishna's pastimes physically. The most heinous thing is that one will play the part of Krishna and a lady will play the part of a gopi and they will unite, and in that way they will enjoy. To think this to be that, it is impossible. Any ordinary moral man will hate this. What to speak of the higher devotees, even an ordinary moral man will hate it. The problem with such statements is that they are so lacking in subtlety or in comprehension, not only of the wide variety of sahajīyā doctrines, or even the distinction between traditional orthodoxy and Sahajiyaism, but of human sexuality itself. We have already been saying repeatedly that sexuality can be analyzed according to the model of the three gunas just like any other material phenomenon. The Gita tells us that goodness, passion or ignorance, all are entangling in the material nature, but that sattva is still better than the oth...

I am still working on those grey areas, which will hopefully be made a little more clear soon. But for starters, a friend sent me the URL of a book of talks given by Bhakti Rakshaka Sridhar Maharaj called Heart and Halo . At the risk of offending devotees who admire Sridhar Maharaj and are unconditional supporters of the Gaudiya Math, I am afraid that I shall repeat some of the opinions that caused so much consternation a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, when Sridhar Maharaj says openly, "So they have got their hated position in society; the general society has got great hate for them, those bābājīs" and "[The sahajīyā s] are the worst enemies," then we certainly must give him the respect he deserves and examine his arguments thoroughly and see how and why he justifies such vehement opposition. I have to say right off the bat that there is much in this book that is interesting and valuable. I am, and I have said it before, someone who admires Sridhar Maharaj and res...