Jagat

premā dvayo rasikayor ayi dīpa eva hṛd-veśma bhāsayati niścala eva bhāti | dvārād ayaṁ vadanatas tu bahiṣkṛtaś cet nirvāti śīghram athavā laghutāṁ upaiti The Prema of the Rasika pair is a wondrous lamp that floods the room of the heart with light and burns bright with a steady flame. Should the door of the mouth be opened and the lamp brought out into the wind, it quickly is extinguished, or its effulgence reduced. Prema-sampuṭikā 68 Secrecy is the essence of romantic love. Secrecy means being able to control your sexual desire. The problem is that no one today is trained in this. I was reading in Gopinath Kaviraj's explanation of "Tantric" society, by which he was giving a Tantrik explanation to the Vedic or Varnashram social system, he says that the first stage of life, the student life or  brahmacaryā , is all about controlling the bindu . The essence of education is to control the bindu . It was being able to control the bindu that made you eligible fo...

After a discussion on Facebook, I posted two articles I wrote on "Sex and Bhakti Yoga" ( Part I and Part II )  Prisni responded by saying "The biggest problem is not sex, but the identification of love with sex, and the inability to feel love except through sex. Men want sex, then its over, and they can go on doing whatever they really want. Fixing cars, fighting with swords, or playing football, or becoming a celebrated scientist." This led to the following response: You have correctly described the material situation for sex. This is why the appropriate practice is to retain the semen. Nobody in the world learns this technique and so all the anarthas related to sex arise. It is not that retaining the semen on its own solves the problem, but it is an important ingredient in the solution. When orgasm ceases to be the goal of sex, then one's mind is freed to enter into other dimensions of meditation and awareness. I hope you will understand that this is ...

In his classic dystopian novel, Brave New World , Aldous Huxley projected a future of human society, based on consumerism socially engineered to technocratic perfection. One of the prominent features of this world, set in the distant future, was a complete separation of the sexual functions of erotic pleasure from reproduction, which was taken care of by advanced test-tube incubation centers and from-birth indoctrination in consumerist values. Without marriage or any need for attachments, sex was also separated from love in the sense of intense commitment to a single partner and simply a source of recreational pleasure, efficiently enhancing the qualities of life and smoothing social cohesiveness. Though Huxley himself was rather sanguine about such developments, now it appears that his nightmarish vision is seeking realization. In their popularly acclaimed and controversial book Sex at Dawn , subtitled "How we mate, how we stray, and what it means for modern relations...

"Primal Scene" Ira Simidchieva, 2019 The other day someone commented on Facebook that one had to come to an accommodation of Superego and the Id, and that this balance was healthy. Other states, in other words, an overbearing attachment to rules and regulations, to various restrictions (i.e., the Superego) or a complete abandonment to the instincts (Id) inevitably result in neurosis. Some kind of harmonious adjustment is needed for a healthy psychic life. In principle I agree with this, which was in tune with my friend's argument that since bhakti prioritizes the emotions, excessive repression of the emotional life and desires has a counterproductive effect on one's spirituality. In this way, there are numerous correspondences of Freud's ideas to Vaishnava conceptions and these are worthy of exploration. In this article I would like to talk about his "primal horde" and then his "primal scene." Typical of the presentation of Vaishnavas i...

A small book I have had lying around for a few months was given to me by the author, Ramdas , Ronald Engert, whom I met at the Munger temple in Vrindavan. He is a jovial 50-year-old German devotee from Berlin. He has been publishing a good quality magazine in German on spiritual topics, called Tattva Viveka and has also been making forays into other kinds of publishing. He is trained in religious studies, and although engaging in bhakti since 1989, was only formally initiated by Bhaktivedanta Narayan Maharaj in 2003. Currently, he is a leading supporter of Bhaktivedanta Sadhu Maharaj in central Europe, and the numerous German-speaking devotees at the Munger temple from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, are a testament to Sadhu Maharaj's laid back approach, which Ramdas is also promoting. The book, which he told me has met with considerable criticism from conservative ISKCON ranks, is called Natural Bhakti : Bhakti without fear – the lost science of attraction (Rati) . He has a...

For the course in Rishikesh, we reviewed Freud and Jung's models of the psyche. Looking first at these two, we then looked at three others, that of the Tantra-yoga and two others represented by the  Rāsa-līlās in the  Bhāgavata  and Gīta-govinda . Freud's model Freud's psychic model sees the instinctual urges as id or libido , an unconscious energetic force that in its attempt for gratification strikes the external world, the reality principle. This shock then creates the intelligence, which becomes internalized as the superego, conscience, etc., and is projected outward as God. Freud sees the economy of the psyche as essentially one of sublimation: libidinal energy is syphoned off for the strengthening of superego, which through self-discipline then produces all the gains of civilization. For Freud, God was perhaps necessary for the beginnings of civilization to strengthen such self-discipline, but has now outlived his usefulness. Human beings should through self-a...

My basic idea here is simply this: I don't think that after Marx, Nietzsche, Huxley, Spenser, Freud, Sartre, Camus, and the rest of the 19th and 20th century's giants of atheistic thought, that there will be much new to be said. I have read most of these authors and also responses to their thought by Christian authors like Borhnoeffer, Tillich and Niebuhr. Nevertheless, I think that there is value in the contribution all these thinkers made, and atheism had a strong influence on the development of Christianity in the post WWII period, both as a transformative in liberal mainline Protestantism as well as in the reactionary fundamentalisms. Of course, I find liberalism more attractive, and that is one of the reasons I appreciate the atheist critiques of fundamentalist thought. In India, the influence of Buddhism meant that the most basic arguments of atheism were given much more credence philosophically and theism could not credibly grow in India without the intermediate ste...

Literalist concepts of God were made to be mocked; they are for children. And even understood symbolically, many concepts of God are fraught with problems. In the present day world, crude literalist forms of Islam and fundamentalist Christianity are leading the charge to cause doubts in the minds of reasonable people about all forms of the religious life. And for good reason. The purpose of the "God idea" or "God symbol" is to elevate humanity both as individuals and as social beings. If it appears to do the opposite, then what can this mean? Some defenders of religion say that it has done more good than bad, but since there is no way to measure such things it is quite easy to point out that plenty of pretty horrible evils have been wrought in the name of God and religion. Even if such a jaundiced view were to be true, on its own, it hardly functions as a decisive proof that religion does not have a positive function or that God does not exist. Thinking of God ...