Jagat

Language shapes us. I came across this  interesting article about the discovery of an Amazon tribe with almost entirely different way of constructing language that calls into question Noam Chomsky's theory about innate language. One of the interesting things for me in this article (and there were many) was how hermetic this tribe is, to the point that anything that is outside their world view simply does not register as meaningful or interesting. In a way it was almost like they were living a "be-here-now" philosophy taken to the extreme, where they are almost completely indifferent to past and future, or abstractions of any kind. It is not surprising that modern people have suspected them of some kind of debility! They who see day where others see night. Although I don't think that it would be either possible nor even desirable to duplicate this particular community's way of dealing with reality, and it is surprising that the World has permitted them to d...

I spent quite a bit of time over the past few days wandering more or less aimlessly on the Internet. As usual, when one does this kind of thing, disparate streams coalesce and one is left with certain impressions that carry a greater significance than one might have expected. I started out by looking up the "reptilian" brain and ended up on a website connected to a rather well-known conspiracy theorist from England, but of whom I had never heard, David Icke . Icke describes what those on the left have become rather well aware of, such as increasing concentrations of power in the hands of a few, the global financial crisis and the opportunism of elites to exploit the situation in their own favor at the cost of common people (the "shock doctrine"), mass manipulation through media and education, and the increasingly repressive surveillance state. Icke's summary of the situation is mostly cogent and frighteningly familiar, but totally marred by his fantastical t...

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...

I am going through a period of intellectual dullness. It has much to do with the move, which is very final. I am not using this blog as a confessional of late, though the temptation to do so is great. Kutichak recently compared me to a flame covered by a basket, refering to the description of Devaki's pregnancy. Clearly, the changes that I am going through are meant to bring that flame out into the open, but a flame in the open can easily be blown out. Who knows the future? Sometimes we just have to make a move. Like the Bhagavatam says--even if you run with your eyes closed, you won't trip, you won't fall. That is the essence of faith, the leap. Reading Christopher Hitchens' sharp comments on today's Slate makes me realize just how much work there is to be done. Hitchens is a veritable cutting machine in his analysis of American obsession with faith and belief against the background of the American founding fathers' secularism. Recently someone on the Guar...