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...

There is, of course, much more to the story, but we will leave it for here and I will conclude by giving a summary of the contents of my first lecture on Yoga-taraṅgiṇī . The GS course in yoga starts with a lesson in anatomy. This is something that needs to be learned as the beginning of the yoga journey inwards begins with an internal inspection of the physical body, which especially in later Nath Yoga texts is seen as the microcosm, where everything found in the universe can be found. The later Nath Yoga texts like Siddha-siddhänta-paddhati take this quite seriously and have a series of meditations on these correspondences. Nowadays research into yoga by the empirical method is being given increasing favor, and this means that the yogis' understanding of the body as viewed from within is not given anything more than arcane importance, without much scientific or objective value. But thousands of years of investigation through practice should not be minimized or discounted. Su...

My last night in Rishikesh, Swamiji called me upstairs. He had called me up earlier in the day, but was unable to talk as he was undergoing another hypoglycemia attack. He was rolled out in his wheelchair onto the balcony. Bhola, the manager of AHYMSIN's publishing department, was also there. Swamiji wanted to talk about how long the Yoga-sūtra work was going to take and would I get it done “before I die”? The scenario, no doubt staged, but still a reminder of the urgency with which Swamiji is approaching this work. Swamiji may live another twenty years, but he takes each health crisis to simply push harder to get certain things done before he quits the world. On top of that, he seems to keep finding new stuff he wants done. At least, as he deals with major priorities, he feels free to start pushing on other projects. Not that I am not also feeling a great need to be done with these yoga texts so I can get to the business of tending to my own life's work! My life is also ...

The task of completing a task Even the most basic insights into the mentality of the haṭha-yogis did not come immediately. It took some time for the realization to come that the book itself was a paddhati to be looked at as a whole rather than piecemeal. I had been too busy looking at the forest for the trees. And even then, they were not transmitted into action right away I was content with my own practices, for which I had accepted the guidance of Swami Veda, by a combination of factors, proximity to him personally and through life in the ashram, I slowly imbibed the ethos emanating from Swami Veda. I admired him for numerous reasons. When one has already taken a guru, one is loathe to give that psychological space to anyone else. Indeed, I had come to feel that in the interests of my personal liberation and individuation it was rather time to attempt sticking to my inner guru's guidance. But clearly, a different kind of grace brought me into contact with Swami Veda. It ...

[ I   am happy to have finally received a copy of the  Yoga-taraṅgiṇī , which has been published by Motilal Banarsidass with the Himalayan Yoga Publications Trust. When I was writing the introduction, I started also to describe the adventure that working on this text represented, and became quite bogged down as the self-examination and other external factors made it seem impossible to conclude. Finally, I just gave up on the idea and handed in the manuscript without this part of the introduction. This is the first part, which discusses the apparent conflict between the bhakti and yoga paths. ] In the SRSG library and research center. Bhakti and Yoga I often wonder about the relationship of a translation to the original text. The famous Italian saying that "to translate is to betray" indicates that any translation is inevitably an interpretation of some kind. A third person enters between the speaker and his audience, and neither the third person nor the audience wer...

Well, my book is finally here. Yoga-tarangini: A Rare Commentary on Goraksha-samhita. Published by Himalayan Yoga Publications Trust and Motilal Banarsidass. Just got my copy. It is just a book, but in my case, blood, sweat and tears. My gratitude to Swami Veda Bharati for making it happen. I will have to finish my blog article on how this thing got written and what I went through doing it. I will post that in a day or two. I did post a bit of the introduction on this blog a year or so ago. You can find it here: The Restless River of Yoga (Intro)

I am pleased to say that on Guru Purnima, I finally completed the Yoga Tarangini project and handed camera ready copy to Swami Veda Bharati to be sent for publication. Jai Guru. I have been told that the book will be printed as a combined AHYMSIN and Motilal Banarsidass production. All this commuting back and forth from Vrindavan to RIshikesh has been very revealing. And I can tell you, of the two I am definitely a Vrindavan person. There is just a little bit of yogi lurking in there that still cries out for attention, but my impression is that the clock is running out on that. What is yoga has pretty much been assimilated and we move on in the direction of primarily bhakti, as always. On returning to Vrindavan, I have been rushing around trying to get the Vrindavan Today project working again, and I have been singing , a lot. kathā gānaṁ nṛtyaṁ gamanam api . Yoga Tarangini was a great project. Swami Veda asked me to do it, he hired me. I took it seriously and tried hard to do a ...

Over the next two weeks, I will be giving my attention back to  Yoga-taraṅginī commentary to Gorakṣa-śataka  as this project needs to be completed, and all that is left to do is a final redaction of the text and translation, and writing an introduction. So I will try to communicate those portions that I think are important or which affected me as I was doing the work. I must confess that there has been a considerable change in lifestyles between the way I was living in Rishikesh at Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama and the way I am right now in Vrindavan. The three months at SRSG were fairly intense. Most of that time I spent in at least verbal silence, although I still used the internet. But even in that I was far more disciplined than I am now, as I kept my personal computer internet free. Besides that, I regularly meditated three hours a day and did hatha-yoga on a regular basis, including many of the disciplines that are described in the book I was working on. Since coming bac...