Jagat

There are six kinds of useless servants or disciples: alir bāṇo jyotiṣakaḥ stabdhībhūtaḥ kimekakaḥ preṣita-preṣakaś caiva ṣaḍ ete sevakādhamāḥ (1) One is like a bee ( ali ) that wanders from flower to flower, i.e., is not loyal. (2) Another is like an arrow ( bāṇa ), who wounds his master. (3) Another is the procrastinator ( jyotiṣaka ), always waiting for the right alignment of planets before he acts. (4) The fourth is stabdhībhūta , i.e., lazy, bewildered, dull and inactive. (5) The fifth ( kimekakaḥ ) is someone who lacks initiative or courage to act alone, saying, "I can't do this by myself." (6) The last is one who passes the buck ( preṣita-preṣaka ), shifting responsibility onto others rather than taking it himself. Fifteen years ago I posted this verse on the Indology list because I had some difficulty with a few of the words. Who knows where I found it, probably in a text related to Bhakti Promode Puri Maharaj, as I was working for Mandala at the ...

Maya infiltrates everywhere. As soon as there are signs of bhakti, she comes to do her job. Lābha, pūjā, pratiṣṭhā , what to speak of ordinary sense gratifications, are all important parts of her arsenal. Institutionalization is a particularly effective trick employed by Maya because it allows her to use the whole panoply of allurements, surreptitiously, by stealth as it were, deceptively, by dressing and decorating them in disguise as saintliness, dutifulness and surrender. Ultimately, though institutions and organizations may serve a temporary benefit to (mostly) beginners in spiritual life, at some point they outlive their utility to the individual practitioner. As you progress in spiritual life, you recognize the presence of the guru in the proximate , and not in the remote. The principle is: the more distant the guru, physically and psychically, the less advanced you are. If your guru is only present in books, or on an altar, or on a stage 300 meters away, or on a scree...

Some make the unequivocal statement that it is never correct for a guru to sleep with his disciples. I would like to state that in reverse. I say: A woman should only sleep with her guru, and a man should only sleep with his guru. All sexual relationships should be mutual guru-disciple relationships. The guru-disciple relationship is the vātsalya relationship par excellence, in that it selflessly seeks the welfare of the other. Vātsalya , like friendship, service, and admiration, is included in madhura . But in the latter, vātsalya  must be mutual, i.e., felt by both parties. Without mutuality, if vātsalya or, worse, vātsalya-ābhāsa (the mere outward appearance of guru sentiment) is predominant, then sexual relations would be inimical to love, or  rasa-virodha , to use the Sanskrit terminology. Rasa-virodha means "distasteful", which is a rather understated translation. That is why we recoil at these guru-disciple sexual relations and why we intuitively ...