Jagat

  Sri Pranananda Mishra’s Korcā Gadadhar Pran Das, whatsapp+91-7501237557 This korcā continues from where Another Side of Thakura Bhaktivinoda left off. In ancient Bengal when Sri Gauranga’s bhauma lila was manifest in our world, a diary was called a korcā , and Svarupa Damodar, Murari Gupta and Raghunath das Goswami are amongst the foremost authors who wrote korcās to record what they witnessed in Mahaprabhu’s daily life. But similarly, as we make notes of our Gaura lila and Krishna lila meditations (to preserve and share these adventures) Pranananda Mishra’s Korcā will become like a diary as well. As this venture begins though we wonder: Can this personal diary be presented to a general audience? Because since most people are uninformed about how the raganuga bhakti process works (to bring about our eternal destiny with Sri Bhagavan in the spiritual world) won’t they lack appreciation for what we earnestly wish to share? But on the other hand, those who are resol...

Gadadhar Pran Das has sent me a couple more chapters of Another Side of Bhaktivinoda Thakur  to share with you all. Jai Radhe! Jai Gaura!  We have found that some devotees don’t believe in this  sādhana , and take it to be mental concoction. So before beginning this chapter’s story, let us examine Rupa Goswami’s guidelines for those who hanker to take up  rāga-mārga bhajana . Another Side of Bhaktivinoda Thakur 28 :  Sri Gopinath’s Sevā Pālā As we were reading in Chapters 26 and 27 about Gaura and Gadadhar’s madhura lilas that unfold in Their bhāvāḍhya and rasātmikā moods, now in the next two chapters (28 and 29) it will be similarly rewarding to investigate how the bhaktas’ sevā unfolds in two ways also: in the ānugatyamayī and in the pratyakṣa moods. The first step is the ānugatyamayī sevā , when one serves the Lord following after their guru, guru-varga and Mahaprabhu’s nitya-siddha bhaktas . In the next stage, however, which...

Is bhakti a transcendent religion, or is it anchored in time and place? In other words, is it delimited by historical and cultural factors, which by definition would make it material? Recently I said that the purpose of Gaudiya Vaishnava sadhana appears to be "entering" the eternal pastimes of Radha and Krishna, and Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. And that this required our identifying with the historical, linguistic and cultural circumstances into which their lilas transpired. One of my friends objected that this jeopardized Gaudiya Vaishnavism’s claims to universality and demonstrated a cultural chauvinism -- i.e., ahankara -- that diminished the transcendent glory of this religion. Indeed, for those in the West who on the whole find many defects in the Indian culture, past, present or future, it seems a travesty to be chained to a culture that, in the end, they do not admire all that much. I apologized to my friend that I had been unable to resolve the conundrum. And he...