Jagat

A lot has been written about androgyny from a variety of perspectives in recent years, mostly by Jungians and those various religious tendencies that find Jung's ideas useful. These persons tend toward New Age type philosophies, or what Huxley called "the perennial philosophy," doctrines that generally make us in the Vaishnava tradition recoil because of their great fluidity and ultimate indifference to the principle of bhakti. In fact, they look a lot like the Hinduism that Gaudiya Vaishnavas feel uncomfortable with and reject as impersonalism. At the very least, if the Jungian goal of psychological individuation, which is characterized as a coincidentia oppositorum, is the ultimate object of the spiritual quest, then it seems to us not to really be "the best story," but only a part of it, as much as liberation is only valued when seen in the context of prema bhakti . In order to follow up on this subject, I have been reading a number of works on the sub...

This week's subject was Chaitanya Mahaprabhu as seen by Krishnadas Kaviraj. The readings included CC Madhya 2 (a collection of Mahaprabhu's favorite verses), Madhya 13 (Mahaprabhu dancing before the Ratha, with the  yaḥ kaumāra-haraḥ  verse, and Antya 14 (more of Chaitanya's ecstatic utterances). All these chapters were meant to show how Krishnadas Kaviraj enriched the Lord Chaitanya myth. This was followed by Rabindra Svarupa's article on Chaitanya as Radha Krishna milita-tanu in JVS, and then by June McDaniel's article in the same issue, which describes the raganuga yogapitha meditation on Mahaprabhu in Nitya Nabadwip. The purpose was to show a development in the ways that Chaitanya was envisioned by his followers. The discussion went in a number of directions, and it was necessary to explain various elements of the Radha-Krishna story, the Rathayatra, and some aspects of Mahaprabhu's Puri lila. What I want to write about here, though, is Chaitanya Mahapr...

The point of much of what was said before is this: The I-Thou mode of relation is more natural to woman, the I-It mode to men. Even this very discourse is contaminated by the masculine approach as I try to dissect these matters and analyse them without apparently directly engaging in an I-Thou act. In fact, Buber himself says that the I-Thou mode assimilates the I-It mode in the way that relation assimilates experience . "There is nothing I must not see in order to see, and there is no knowledge that I must forget. Rather, it is everything, picture and movement, species and instance, law and number, included and inseparably fused." Therefore, my dear reader, when I speak these things, they are all assimilated into You. The acharyas confirm this insight in relation to the bhakti path as well. Jiva Goswami writes that knowledge need not be inimical to devotion (see Durgama-saṅgamanī to BRS 1.1.10). The early scientists thought of natural reason as a way of understanding t...