Jagat

I am on my way to Vrindavan after two months in Gauda Mandal Bhumi. Currently in Kolkata waiting for my train. Liminal is the word that best describes my "in-between" state of mind. There is something about the interplay of Gaura and Krishna lila that is unique to our sampradaya, another of those mysteries that life and bhajan are full of. I see that this post was originally made exactly a year ago day before yesterday. unmatta-prāya-vācaḥ parimūṣita-dhiyo māyayānartha-bījaṁ svārthaṁ matvā kṛtārthā atha na sukha-vivekādayo grāhya-vācaḥ | svīyāḥ sarve jighāṁsanty ahaha bahu-mṛṣā sneha-pāśair nibadhya śrī-vṛndāraṇya yāyām aham ahita-samājāt kadā nisṛtas tvām ||1.87|| Alas, my own family and friends all want to kill me by binding me in the ropes of affection, all of which are completely false. Their intelligence has been stolen by illusion, and they speak almost like madmen. They take the seeds of unwanted sufferings as their true self-interest, thinkin...

I was thinking this morning in meditation about Marx's famous statement, "Religion is the opium of the people." His meaning was that religion is one of the tools elites use to distract the powerless from revolution. Promises of heaven and threats of hell are part of the system to preserve the status quo in the world. Making tolerance and other passive virtues into cultural values -- for the ruled, not the rulers -- is another element of that exercise in social control. Like Napoleon Bonaparte observed, "Religion [alone] is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." In so many ways, religion is just a kind of entertainment, an element in the "circuses" part of "bread and circuses." Interestingly, Bharata Muni in the first chapter of  Nāṭya-śāstra makes it clear that entertainment was originally conceived of as religious propaganda. The dramatic arts, which in Bharata include poetics as well as music and dance, are meant to communicate ...

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...

Teaching Sanskrit in the winter sun at SRSG. Ever since I arrived at Swami Rama Sadhaka Grama ashram a couple of months ago, people have been suggesting that I take the role of Santa Claus in the annual Christmas celebrations. Now it is a strange fact, perhaps mostly due to the presence of numerous American and European residents here that Christmas is probably the most celebrated festival on the calendar. Deepavali, Janmasthami, Shivaratri and other important holidays do not go unnoticed, but Christmas is celebrated with a tree and many other familiar trapping, as well as a kind of "talent" night with different ashramites putting on performances of various types. In past years I have participated. One year I told the Dickens' story "A Christmas Carol" in Hindi, another time I attempted to tell O.Henry's "A Gift of the Magi," with much less success. But the groundswell of requests to have me play Santa this year made me progressively uneasy...

India has recently passed a law that will allow mass retailers to enter the Indian market. This is ostensibly to make the retail sector more "efficient" in the way that Western retail markets are efficient. We should be wary of the effects such a move will have on the Indian economy. The opening of the Indian economy in the last 20 years has resulted in great increases of prosperity for a large number of people, but the limits of such prosperity are currently being experienced in the advanced economies. Walmart presence in North American towns has resulted in the gutting of the shopping districts of entire towns as its "efficiency" in exploiting economies of scale makes competition impossible. Walmart is famous for its reduction of labor costs by shifting the burden of health care and so on onto the taxpayer, paying the absolute minimum in salaries, avoiding hiring full time workers as far as possible. In many markets, because they have driven all competition int...

Naomi Wolf has a new article on Huffington Post in which she speculates on the possible relation of the pornography culture to the rash of politicians like Anthony Weiner who have exposed themselves carelessly in the the social media. She refers there to an older article, The Porn Myth , published several years ago in New York magazine, in which she refers to a debate about pornography she had with Andrea Dworkin, one of the early feminist anti-porn crusaders. Dworkin felt that porn would result in the increased objectification of women and lead in turn to more sex crime. Wolf debunks this conclusion as a myth and postulates that it was rather resulting in different kinds of desensitization, especially among the young men who had become habituated to its use. One thing is certain though, the common thread in both their ideas is that those who are habituated to the use of pornography increasingly tend to depersonalize or objectify women. Towards the end of her article, Wolf come...

One thing I have noticed about the Western Krishna conscious movement is that most devotees (older ones at least) are progressive politically, due to their radical stance as youthful hippies against the "establishment culture." This is unusual, on one sense, because Srila Prabhupada was VERY conservative, politically as well as socially. At one time or another, he said things that showed racist, fascist, anti-feminist, libertarian, anti-taxation and corporatist leanings. His preaching in India was geared towards business elites. How hippies came to adopt leadership from this quarter is a curious matter in itself and worthy of investigation. Let us say that they were in search of a radical alternative to the established dominant culture in Western society, and the hedonistic and libertine counterculture of the time had proved an abject failure experimentally. Prabhupada also fed conspiracist and apocalyptic tendencies amongst devotees--the coming of WWIII, the moon landi...