Jagat

A lot of stuff from a wide range of preoccupations--Gītā Govinda, Vr̥ndāvana-mahimāmr̥ta, Yoga-sūtra, American politics. Quite a mishmash. I chose for the title an utterance from seven years ago, when I seem to have been having deep thoughts.

A longtime friend of mine whose FB handle is Sri Sri wrote the following. He later changed "Steven Hawkins" to "Captain Kirk" since the idea of going "where no western gaudiya has gone before" and "to a different universe" etc., do indeed seem to be more appropriate to that. Anyway, I am certainly no intellectual giant, or perhaps it is that the Gaudiya Vaishnava world is unfortunately full of intellectual pygmies. Nevertheless, I have occasionally gotten positive feedback and I do think that there is some need of a cogent intellectual defense of religion in general and Vaishnavism in particular. I am totally inadequate to the task, but perhaps I have seen some glimpses of directions that such defenses could be made -- and they are not found in the direction of blind and literal belief. There are a few other reflections later in this post.   jagadananda pabhu is the stephen hawkins of gaudiya vaishnavism......we all read him and have no idea ...

The other day in my Gopala Champu class, I said the following: "We can't understand the love of God without knowing love in this world. It has to reflect reality. You won't find love of God through failure of love in this world." This comment did not pass unnoticed and one of the students asked Babaji for clarification. He said he disagreed and the student asked us if we were willing to debate the issue. Since we have been doing Nyāya and Babaji is something of an aficionado, he presented his point of view as a logical syllogism, making that the center of debate rather than my original statement, which made the discussion a little untidy. I was not prepared to answer his argument directly, but many in the audience were disappointed by the radical bifurcation of kāma and prema . At one point Babaji says that desire is not in the soul. Frankly, I think that there is a bit of confusion in the sampradāya due to the Hindu world-view arising from Mayavada and Y...

My attention span seems to last approximately three minutes since GN left. But slowly my center is returning. The warm weather is back and the baking heat is to my liking. I like walking outside to the corner store barefoot, in just a babaji sarong. Like many men, I use work as an escape from life. I have actually countless escapes from life. I am a real fire gazer. But that is the true grace of being alone, is that you can seek out a fire in which to gaze and find the Glory of God therein. Of late I have been working on Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha and, for the past few days, Tattva-sandarbha . We are hustling to complete the Jiva Institute editions. Satya Narayan Dasji has now found a generous donor who is willing to subsidize the entire project, so a new, revised and updated edition of the Tattva-sandarbha will be published along with Bhagavat-sandarbha , which is the first of the books that I helped with.  Paramātma-sandarbha is currently in the able hands of the third member of ...

Yoga takes one only as far as kaivalya , which is the perfection of the singular, going "solo." All other yoga systems, including bhakti , also pass through kaivalya , in the sense that they are the establishment, as far as is possible, of the self in the self, without which relationship is meaningless. But in the relishing of bhakti-rasa , it is indeed only a stage: both the work of vidhi-bhakti and yoga are elements of the pravartaka stage or preliminary stage of practice in rasika-bhakti . This is because in yoga, the culture of love is restricted to the yamas and niyamas and some other general internalizing processes, whereas in bhakti, love is the culmination, both the means and the end. In other words, in yoga, love is one of the means, and a subordinate one at that, but in bhakti, love is the one and only all consuming goal. Nevertheless, the gains of yoga, both as a psychological force (as expounded on in the Yoga-sutra ) and as a psycho-physical force (fro...

Swami Veda quoted this Bhagavata verse last night in Yoga Sutra class while discussing sutra 4.25. vāg gadgadā dravate yasya cittaṁ rudaty abhīkṣṇaṁ hasati kvacic ca | vilajja udgāyati nṛtyate ca mad-bhakti-yukto bhuvanaṁ punāti || One who is united with me in bhakti yoga, whose words are choked with emotion, whose mind has melted, who cries constanty and sometimes laughs, who shamelessly sings alound and dances... such a devotee purifies the entire world. (11.14.24) Swamiji does not usually quote full verses in his classes, though he makes a point of teaching his disciples the Sanskrit terminology used in the Yoga Sutra. Needless to say, it was a pleasure to hear him recite this sweet verse so nicely. And he pointedly said that he was doing so for me. Because "Jagat knows the Bhagavata." The context here was the following sentence from Vyasa's bhashya, yathā pravṛṣi tṛṇāṅkurasyodbhedena tad-bīja-sattānumīyate, tathā mokṣa-mārga-śravaṇena yasya r...

Many people criticize and condemn religions and religious institutions because of the evil done in their name. This is often based on a predisposition to anti-religious sentiment. One should recognize that religion is a human institution and subject to the same frailties as all human institutions. Those who are in such institutions should recognize these frailties and take steps to control and counteract them. According to Patanjali's Yoga-sūtra (4.7), there are four kinds of people. Patanjali does try to estimate what percentage of human society fits into each category, no doubt since modern ways of enumerating populations was not yet devised. In any case, such percentages no doubt change as societies change. Patanjali divides people according to the kind of work they do in relation to the goal of enlightenment. The first three are (1) kṛṣṇa (black, or dark karmas), which are the actions performed by the evil; (2) śukla-kṛṣṇa or mixed karmas, which evidently are the kinds...

In my last post, I wanted to stress the following point, but perhaps I missed saying it. I have seen that many devotees eventually come to a point where they lose faith in the mythology or some aspect of the theology of bhakti, or they become disillusioned by the kind of people who profess to follow these teachings, and so on. In my experience one needs to have a strong baseline of spiritual experience that one can fall back on, a base line that one can return to in order to retrace one's steps until one restores one's mental stability and renews enthusiasm for sadhana, even when efficacious association is not available. Things like the existence of God, the nature of the self as a spiritual being, the necessity for sadhana, the ultimate goal of prema... all these things seem like flimsy possessions when one is in an undeveloped state of spiritual life, and it seems that they are quite persistent, even in people who are acclaimed as having high levels of realization, or hav...

I think that once a devotee gets a taste of Radha-Krishna katha, there is no going back. They will never get a taste for "prema" or "bhakti" or "Truth" or "transcendence" without Radha Krishna. All the words will be just so much fluff in the air. I am just trying to understand why and how to transmit that taste. tad eva ramyaṁ ruciraṁ navaṁ navaṁ tad eva śaśvan manaso mahotsavam tad eva śokārṇava-śoṣaṇaṁ nṛṇāṁ yad uttamaśloka-guṇānuvarṇanam Those words describing the glories of the all-famous Personality of Godhead are attractive, relishable and ever fresh. Indeed, such words are a perpetual festival for the mind, and they dry up the ocean of misery. (SB 12.12.50) I think that even if you just chant this verse from the Bhagavatam, feel its rhythm, you will get a glimpse. But how many lifetimes of preparation will it take someone to come to the point of just letting those sounds roll on the tongue and dance in the heart? Who can give y...

It really is time to get this beast shaking again. Over the past few months I have not been doing much original writing. I had a few translation jobs that preoccupied me, and it would have been quite possible to comment publicly on that work. In fact, two different projects were directly connected with Ishopanishad, and I lectured on the Ishopanishad for a month at Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama. There was definitely material that would have been of interest to my readers in that and now I am rather sorry that I did not take the trouble to publish my notes. Perhaps we can do it later. (He said with a sigh.) One of the reasons I did not of course is that this blog has a somewhat specialized purpose, unclear as that may seem, and I would like to stick to that, rather than enter into an arcane discussion of the meaning of an ancient Upanishad. Though, since part of my work involved reading A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami's totally idiosyncratic interpretation of that work, it might have been wor...

A few days ago, one of my Gurukula students showed me a video he had downloaded from the internet about meditation. This was a very nicely animated computer graphics film showing the various pranic energies entering the subtle body, the kuṇḍalinī rising, and so on. Yogis love this stuff. You can see the more advanced yogis scoffing at the distractions that all this hullaballoo present to the serious seeker of liberation. The Yoga-sūtra defines kaivalya as svarūpāvasthānam , or being situated in one’s svarūpa , i.e. true identity or constitutional position. This is stated at the beginning and at the end of the Yoga-sūtras — tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe’vasthānam When one has stopped all the activities of the mind-field, then the individual, who is the seer, becomes situated in his true identity. (1.3) puruṣārtha-śūnyānāṁ guṇānāṁ pratisavaṇaḥ kaivalyaṁ, svarūpa-pratiṣṭhā vā citi-śaktir iti Kaivalya or liberation means the resorption of the qualities that are devoid of meaning for t...

Yesterday we were reading in the Philosophy of Hatha Yoga class the section from the Yoga-sūtras dealing with asana, i.e. 2.46-48. There is a long discussion at 2.47. Anyway, the basics are: āsanas are to be steady and comfortable (46). They can be perfected by relaxing the effort and by meditation on the infinite (47). When one perfects the āsanas , one becomes indifferent to the dualities (48). The discussion about "meditation on the infinite" (actually, Swamiji translates samāpatti by "coalescence" with the infinite, but that is a little harder to follow) was pretty interesting. I have to say that I got a glimpse of that in meditation today in relation to my sahaja-sādhanā and my siddha-svarupa . There was a moment when I was literally dancing in my Jaya Manjari form, my blue dress covered with silver sequins literally swirling in the sky and merging into the milky way. Anyway, in his discussion there, Swamiji gives two interpretations of the phrasa an...

From the point of view of the Indian jnani tradition, Madhusudana Saraswati has some interesting things to say on the complementarity of the different spiritual paths in his introduction to Gūḍhārtha-dīpikā , a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. Madhusudana is an interesting figure. The story goes that he was born in Bengal in 1490 AD (I suspect a bit later) in Faridpur, now in Bangla Desh. He went to meet Chaitanya in Nabadwip, but Mahaprabhu had already left Nabadwip by the time he got there. Madhusudana stayed in Nabadwip for a while, studying Nyāya, the speciality of the place, but remaining deeply devoted to Krishna. From there he went to Benares to further his studies. He became convinced of the Advaita philosophy, but remained a devotee at the same time. This devotional strand shows in his interpretations of the Gita, his commentary on the Bhagavatam, and other works like Bhakti-rasāyana . As Atmaramananda Swami says in his introduction to the Adwaita Ashram edition of Gūḍhār...