Jagat

This was a response to something an ex-devotee posted about self-love. As often is the case, something else crossed my path at about the same time, namely this verse by Haridas Shastri. It provoked certain thoughts in me that I felt worth sharing. As prayers go, it seems particularly good to me and I had  even included it in an earlier post . I wrote this comment on Facebook but never posted it on the blog, though I rather like the trend of the meditation.

Muraliswara das said... I'm trying to understand your conception, Jagadānanda Ji, but I'm afraid that I fail to do it. As far as I understand you make essentially one simple point: human love IS Love Divine. Let me quote from your writings: "You should understand that the love that exists between you and your wife is the very same feeling as that which exists between Radha and Krishna." Or, as you've said in this article, "What it does mean is that the love that you feel for the child is the same qualitatively though not quantitatively as that cosmic vātsalya-bhāva exemplified and symbolized by Yashoda." How is it possible? I'm neither theologian nor intellectual but I've heard something about Krishna-prema from certain Vaishnavas, and I heard from them one simple thing: human love is kāma , Love Divine is prema and kāma is a PERVERTED REFLECTION of prema , and kāma and prema although looking similar are opposite in nature, they are ...

I was just leafing again through a book, Dieu des Athees , by a French Catholic theologian from the 50s, and was reminded of his argument that faith and science/technology are distinct domains dealing with different aspects of human reality. Because they are distinct, nothing in science can really disprove God, who is mediated through faith, and indeed the critiques of science actually do believers a favor by leading them to recognizing that distinction. They will then understand that God acts in the natural world through the natural law, and reveals himself through the human will. We agree with this, as all Indian sciences are sciences of the soul. Any knowledge of the world is validated only through its value in achieving the ultimate goal of the Self. Even if scientists were to produce life in a test tube, or artificial intelligence, or (as I was saying in my class today) a way to duplicate mystical experience by prodding certain parts of the brain, it would not change anything...

I started publicly professing to be a Sahajiya when I saw various individuals promoting an agenda that I was not in tune with. I do not believe that sexuality is meant to be "free," or to be indulged in wantonly. The Prema we talk about is pure . That is the axiomatic basis. Just because sexuality is involved does not mean that it is necessarily kāma , any more than any other activity transformed by relation ("dovetailing") to Krishna is kāma . It is part of the process of converting the innate desire that is expressed towards matter ( kāma ) into prema , i.e., that same desire directed towards God. There is only one energy in the soul, that is desire for union. Everything else is subordinate to that, and everything else is a servant of that. sarve vidhi-niṣedhāḥ syur etayor eva kiṅkarāḥ . I fully expect Sahajiyaism and the other paths related to Gaudiya Vaishnavism -- good, bad and ugly -- to manifest in the course of time, just as happened in Bengal. There is ...

Love is the sthāyi-bhāva . Prema is its rasāvasthā . According to Madhusudana Saraswati, God himself is the  sthāyi-bhāva  of love. When certain emotional upsurges heat the heart and allow him to be imprinted there. He is both the vibhāva and the sthāyi -bhāva . The first of these being the bimba , the latter the pratibimba , or reflection, related in exactly the same way as īśvara to the jīva . The same idea expressed in Vaishnava terms would be that it is the reflection of the  svarūpa-śakti. Only God is capable of melting the heart fully. Since He is all things, even the mundane nāyaka and nāyikā are nothing but He, but incapable of fully melting the heart, since they are He covered by Maya. Maya is God's own potency for self-covering. ============= Here is Rupa Goswami's definition of prema : samyaṅ-masṛṇita-svānto mamatvātiśayāṅkitaḥ | bhāvaḥ sa eva sāndrātmā budhaiḥ premā nigadyate || When that very same  bhāva  described in BRS 1....

Viktor Frankl meaning article . Human beings make the mistake, you could call it the “romantic fallacy,” that there is something called love, which when one falls into, everything will be complete and one is spiritually fulfilled. That is precisely why it is called a puruṣārtha of kāma , because it carries with it this illusion of completion. In a film, one sees the lovers kiss in the train station, all obstacles have been removed, and they live happily ever after. That is clearly a fallacy. A similar fallacy exists in spiritual life: it is the liberation fallacy, it is the idea of any kind of perfection in stasis, whether called nirvana or mukti or prema. It doesn't matter what we call it, if we identify it as the absolute cessation of suffering, a stasis, then it is fundamentally a fallacy. It is not bhakti, it is not reality. That is why bhakti theologians object to it. Both kāma or mukti are dreams of a state of being that is complete plenitude. Similarly, the other pu...

I would like most of all that Jijaji be happy. In the course of our spat, I said that his life sucks, which seems to have struck a sensitive spot. But at the same time I said, life sucking is pretty normal. My only claim for my own life was that I found it interesting, because, after all, in the micro moments, taken one by one, my life also sucks. Without the sucking part, what would be the meaning of happiness? Even embedded in tranquil surroundings, with no worries for food or shelter, receiving the love and gratitude of seniors, respect and kindness from equals and juniors, the mind usually focuses on the problems that we have before us, the tasks that are inevitably presented to us and which are the nutrition by which life, as an experience, grows. Of course, my life would not be interesting for everyone, that is the blessing I get for being an individual, but I summarized why it is so for me, and expressed that in the form of gratitude to Srila Prabhupada. And this is because the...

Over the last few days I have gone through a few anxious moments. There is no moment in life where a conflict does not lurk. In Gaudiya Vaishnavism, there is a big conflict between the so-called bhajanānandī and the goṣṭhyānandī , introverts and extroverts. I have been living in Vrindavan, the ultimate destination of all Vaishnavas, at least according to Rupa Goswami, who lived in a different time, a different world from the one today. I love Vrindavan and I wish to cultivate love for Radha and Krishna in the way I do best, by doing bhajan and writing. Indeed, I have a strong introverted tendency. For me it has been characterized by a sense of unworthiness, that I am never good enough or accomplished enough to make a worthwhile contribution.  On the other hand, in my youth I underwent a period of intense indoctrination in ISKCON to the idea of preaching. And that is characterized, as we often see, by an overinflated and borrowed  sense of confidence . Neither of these ...

A look back on the Rishikesh classes As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been in Rishikesh the past two weeks, teaching a dwindling number of students an impromptu course that I spontaneously entitled, "Bhakti, rasa and psychology." There are three subjects in one which, when taken together, form the basis of my philosophy, but it was a pretty big chunk to get across in ten classes, especially to an audience that for the most part was not conversant with any of them. It is said that a good teacher is one who can explain a complex subject matter simply, and I am working towards that goal. As always, my primary objective was to try to integrate the three subjects as best I could, in short, to come to a better understanding of the subject matter and put it into words; and, if it could be communicated to others, so much the better. Some parts of the course naturally worked better than others. Many of these subjects are well represented on this blog, though not in a ...

Radha and Krishna are simultaneously Love and the symbol of love. Some people seem to think that I am saying that Radha and Krishna are some kind of "role model" for human lovers. That is not what I think. The question is complex and one has to have a real close understanding of the psychology of myth, symbol and archetype and their relation to spiritual experience. We start from the premise, based on our faith, experience, and reason, of the reality of God. God is represented psychologically in many ways as an archetypal reality. People think that you can reduce psychological realities, like myths and stories, to the realm of falsehood or fiction, but in fact they are  functioning realities and remain so even when repressed. For Jung, archetypes are equivalent to the instincts. The archetype of God, according to Jung, is simply the "Self", a realization that no doubt came to him from Indian thought. But Jung also recognized the Syzygy, or Divine Couple, ...