Jagat

I get regular mailings from the Pure Bhakti website of Narayan Maharaj's sangha. The last few days have been full of messages citing Narayan Maharaj's warnings about Ananta Das Baba. Today was the bouquet, as we say in French, as the headlined audio file was "Satsvarupa Goswami confirms Srila Narayan Maharaja saved him and others from Ananta Das Babaji."

I think this will be the last article I post from 1997. After reading one of the others, a friend on Facebook told me that this scientific mode of thinking has reached its limits and that mystical techniques including psychotropic substances open one's "doors of perception" in ways  that scientists have yet little hope of understanding, precisely because they are subjective experiences. I will have to return to this question later, but it does indeed form the crux of much of the thinking that I am just now in the process of crystallizing. It centers on the left-brain/right-brain type  duality  that it is imperative, our psychological and spiritual duty, that we learn to synthesize. Functional equilibrium is far from meaning genuine synthesis.  Different personality types will always lean to one or the other styles of thinking and experiencing reality. But my friend Mathura Das [for it is he!] is fundamentally right on the principle of bhakti . Bhakti is ultima...

I wrote the last article in a rush of feeling. I have to admit, however, that there is a bit of rhetoric as well as truth-telling ( parrhesia ) in the post. Philosophy of History Making a comment like "history has decided" indicates a facile and yet sweeping generalization about History, with a capital H. It's a bit funny, because at the same time as the subject came up, I encountered an article by David Greenberg on Slate discussing George W. Bush's concept of history ( George Bush, Hegelian ). Simultaneously, I am proofreading a dissertation in which someone is attempting to analyze the Krishna consciousness movement using Michel Foucault's historical method, so I am getting a bit inundated with these theories. In an article I wrote about charismatic renewal in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, published in Bryant and Ekstrand's book , I began by saying that India, with its strong avatar doctrines, would subscribe to Carlyle's famous idea that "history is...

When I see a discussion starting that deals with questions I was deeply involved in 10 or 20 years ago, or even more recently, I do not feel tempted to get involved again. One moves on, I guess. Rocana Prabhu has recently published an editorial on the Sampradaya Sun wherein he struggles to make sense of Bhaktivinoda Thakur's avowal that he engaged in meat eating. In the context of this article, he makes a few disparaging comments about my diksha guru, Sri Lalita Prasad Thakur. It is unfortunate that there is no one but me to currently come to the defense of my guru, and for me to do so means exposing myself to involvement in disagreeable disputes, which is certainly not appealing to me. Nevertheless, it seems to me that I am under some obligation to say at least a few words. Poor Rocana seems to have just discovered that Bhaktivinoda Thakur admitted eating meat and fish in his memoirs. He worries about "the potential this has to disturb the minds of many readers," w...