Jagat

My friend, Paramadwaiti Maharaj’s young sannyasi disciple from Argentina, Padmanabha Swami, recently wrote me a note thanking me for introducing him to Jordan Peterson after I posted a few links on my Facebook page. He then wrote an article , extracting a few points from Peterson’s latest book, Twelve Rules for Life An Antidote to Chaos , that he felt were compatible with Vaishnava teachings. At any rate, Peterson’s full-throated defense of religious belief and his debates with neo-atheists like Sam Harris have attracted the attention of Christian pastors like Paul VanderKlay who use his insights in their own understanding and explanations of religion. I have not written directly about Peterson very much on this blog, as my own journey is taking me away from the kind of academic explanations of religion that were a concern earlier on in this blog, after I had gone through religious studies at McGill University. Nevertheless, that is what first attracted me to Peterson was his...

These thoughts are based on conversations I had in 2017, after I had posted on my response to Srila Narayan Maharaj's statements related to Bhaktivinoda Thakur's  Sva-likhita-jivani (SLJ), which it would be advisable to read before going on here. I am currently doing a bit of work on SLJ and the Thakur's frank description of his conversion to Chaitanya Vaishnavism is particularly important to us, who are also converts. I have heard that Swami Tripurari Maharaj coined the sobriquet "the first European convert to Vaishnavism" since the Thakur passed through a thorough indoctrination into Western thinking before being exposed to the Chaitanya Charitamrita and Bhagavata Purana when already in his 30's. His English-medium education, which a strong element of Unitarian Universalism through the association of Reverend Charles Dall , was not monolithic. In fact, it reflected the contemporary debates in Europe and America about scriptural literalism and the natur...

It has been a couple of months since I posted on the blog. I was not inactive. In Karttik I was making a big effort to enhance the Vrindavan Today website, concentrating on writing articles related to understanding the Dham as a "final step" in rāgānugā sādhana . I was conducting a daily meditation on the Vrindavan Mahimamrita (VMA) of Prabodhananda Saraswati. This work is no doubt the result of living in Vrindavan and experiencing its spiritual power. In particular, after returning from Bengal, the first time I had been away from Braj in two years, I could feel the effects of the Dham very intensely. I think that perhaps I will cross post the VMA articles series, either here or on an independent site, but we will see. At any rate, for the time being, people can read those articles on the VT website. A reader of this site recently wrote to me and asked the following: Namaskar. Throughout your writings you teach reality over hagiography. Recently, you have written tha...

Now are the myths of Radha and Krishna to be qualified as "mental idolatry where, removed from the direct experience of the guiding force of unconditionality, theoretical frameworks and vestigial linguistics conjure up a surface mirage in terms of which the experience is interpreted, under which the experience is subjugated"? Well, in the sense that all words do that to some extent until their real meaning is discovered. But the nature, I think, of words is their capacity to create realities within which we have our direct experience. This is how, it seems to me, rasa works. For instance, at the age of 64, as a result of my life's culture of Krishna bhakti, I have chosen a particular way of perceiving the world (to a great extent against the received dominant culture to which I was born), through the framework of Radha-Krishna bhakti and its myriad forms and expressions, including a lot of peripherals -- including India itself as it is in the present day, non-Vaishnav...