Jagat

One of the verses that struck me when reading the Haṭha-yoga-pradīpikā was the following tatra vastu-dvayaṁ vakṣye durlabhaṁ yasya kasyacit | kṣīraṁ caikaṁ dvitīyaṁ tu nārī ca vaśavartinī || I will now tell you of two things that are very rare for anyone in this world. One is milk. The other is an cooperative woman. (HYP 3.84) I found the verse a little troublesome, first of all because milk does not seem all that hard to find, not like a spiritual partner for bhajan, and also because this word vaśa-vartinī seems to indicate a kind of patriarchal model of male-female relations, which I as a worshiper of the female deity, Radharani, i.e., as a worshiper of the Divine Feminine, Shakti, felt was philosophically incompatible. After all, Radharani is known as the one who controls Krishna through bhakti, indicating a primacy of the feminine. My position has always been that of the spiritual complementarity of the sexes, a position that is closer to the Shakta philosophy than to t...

On Facebook the other day, I posted a link to an article by George Monbiot, one of the few journalists whose work I admire, from the Guardian. Monbiot laments about the corporate culture and compares it to cult-like indoctrination and brain washing. He seems to be on a bit of a run about this because he had another similar article a couple of days later. Of course, having experienced a religious cult, spending nine years in the Hare Krishnas, I thought of Prabhupada's statement that he was indeed engaged in a brainwashing exercise, precisely because our brains did need to be washed. And that is quite true. The idea of "cleansing the mirror of the mind" is central to all yoga systems. We willingly submitted to the brainwashing process because we wanted to change our way of consciousness, our way of being. To fill our minds and senses with Krishna. To become Krishna conscious. And on the whole, I am glad of it. The process was based on the Bhāgavata-dharmas of the sc...

The way I see feminism is this: The feminine qualities are valuable and ennobling. It is not that women must compete with men as men, but rather that the natural feminine perspective should be given a place of honor rather than being denigrated as inferior. In other words, society itself should be restructured according to feminine values, which are, in the final analysis, the truly civilizing values. A good example of the bias against the feminine is being illustrated in the troglodyte conservative take on Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's nominee to the US Supreme Court, which has centered on the idea of "empathy" as a negative. In the hearings, Sotomayor played the game by saying that a judge decides on the basis of "facts" on the one hand, and the "law" on the other. But what is missing here is that the "facts" include an entire empathic dimension. Do the facts of a particular case not include the entire psychological situation of all the players?...

(1) Normal Sexual Relations Someone wrote in the previous comments section that "normal sexual relations" were permitted for devotee householders. Some of the other posters there also expressed similar ideas. I just want to say that I am not in favor of "normal" sexual relations. The general attitude in Vaishnava circles is to quote the Bhagavatam, in which it is made very clear that for men (and the instructions are given for men), association with women is the door to hell (5.5.2). mahat-sevāṁ dvāram āhur vimuktes tamo-dvāraṁ yoṣitāṁ saṅgi-saṅgam All bad qualities come out of association with women (3.31.33). satyaṁ śaucaṁ dayā maunaṁ buddhiḥ śrīr hrīr yaśaḥ kṣamā śamo damo bhagaś ceti yat-saṅgād yāti saṁkṣayam Women are temptresses. Chota Haridas was expelled and, more or less, obliged to commit suicide because of a rather doubtful case of association with women, just so that he could be an example to all of us. So can anything good be said for...