Jagat

As I come to the end of my three months exile from the Dham, I have decided to publish this following article, which has been sitting as a draft for most of that time. It has taken me all this time as I have struggled with my current situation in spiritual life to assess where I stand on the fundamental question of relations with other followers of Bhaktivinoda Thakur. Clearly, I have to objectively assess my own decision to apparently renounce my initiation from A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, who gave me my inspiration to engage on the path of devotional service and which has sustained me throughout my life. Living in Vrindavan and also having the perspective of being an outsider to Vrindavan (a "wannabe Brijbasi" if you wish) I have arrived at what I believe is the proper position to take, as I have attempted to describe it in my most recent post of Vṛndāvana-mahimāmṛta ( VMA 2.50 ) This article was meant to be the last remaining part of my introduction to the pe...

The evolution of religious ideas As I return to this theme of svakīyā-parakīyā and the research work I did while doing my doctoral dissertation in connection with the current work on Kṛṣṇa-sandarbha , some thoughts have been coming to me about the general thrust of my own thought about the history of religions and what I see as being the purpose of my own intellectual quest in this regard. Krishna consciousness, like any other thought system, is based in positive principles that are universal and should be exportable to other religions and ideologies. In other words, they are translatable. Now in order to translate religious experience from one linguistic and symbolic conversation, often one that has been going on for thousands of years, first one must discover what that experience is, not just by looking at the entire complex in isolation, but also by looking at the universal experience of humanity. This is the logic behind the study of comparative religion, just as it is wi...

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...

It is interesting that atheistic humanism is more often than not associated with the political left, while belief in God is, especially in America, immediately identified with the socially conservative right. This kind of prejudice is clear on The Guardian "Comment is Free" pages, where there are often articles discussing different aspects of religion, and any positive comment is invariably clubbed viciously by strongwilled leftists. Recent examples are Sue Blackmore's A Dangerous Delusion and Dave Hill, who in Faith and the Left , asks for a more nuanced understanding of religion without abandoning his own atheist credentials. Blackmore is basically rehashing the currently ubiquitous Richard Dawkin's ideas, including that of the meme, the cultural equivalent of genes. Dawkins first came into prominence by suggesting that genes themselves were engaged in a struggle for survival, and that all evolution could be looked at from the point of view of the genes, the fittes...