Jagat

"So it is clear that the yogis receive their knowledge through non-imaginary, non-fictitious ( a-vikalpita ) samādhi , and use the fiction ( vikalpa ) of āgama and anumāna to convey the true knowledge." [Vachaspati Misra to Yoga-sūtra I.43 (trans. Swami Veda Bharati)] [ I get  the problem here, but it is hard for me to believe that any experience is free of an overlay of memory and certainly when śabda is given as much importance as in Vaishnavism, one expects that "direct experience" will conform with what one has learned, heard or become conditioned to. But even a yogi who is directing his practice and self-conditioning is also working towards an expected experience that is strongly influenced by memory. This is a significant point and requires clarification, Memory is notoriously fallible just like sense perception -- indeed the defectiveness of both is intertwined -- but for Vaishnavas, memory is the locus of the practice, which is distinct from dhyāna altho...

A big question that is frequently asked of me is about where I get the authority to say things, i.e., about my sources of knowledge, or pramāṇa . This is what we call epistemology: How do we know what we know? Many devotees are appropriately very attached to the words of śāstra and their gurus. I have myself spent most of my life in a study of the Sanskrit and Bengali texts related to our school of thought out of a great respect for our acharyas, a respect that was instilled in me by Srila Prabhupada himself. As a result, I have long contemplated the value and meaning of these texts, along with my spiritual practices, and come to certain conclusions. In the article linked to above, I simply wrote that I had no pramāṇas for my spiritual path, but this of course is not entirely true. I still need to know that what "I know" is real knowledge. So I do have a position on pramāṇas , which is as follows: Pramāṇa is used in argumentation to verify one's position, to es...