Jagat

Andrew Brown's blog on the Guardian is about the difference in the Anglican and Roman Catholic Church. He makes interesting points about the vision of women in the two Christian denominations. After discussing Henry VIII, who had several of his wives beheaded (since divorce was not allowed) for not bearing him a son. The following paragraph puts the matter succinctly: The point, for the heads of global religions, is that you cannot have a sexual morality which fits both sides of the demographic divide. Either sex is primarily about children or it is primarily about love. The Anglican communion has ripped itself to bits about this; although it accepted contraception early and without much fuss, and came to terms with divorce when it became obvious that this was the only way to keep women members, the implication of sex being primarily an expression of love ends up with gay people being able to love each other sexually, and the traditionalists won't stand for that while the chu...

What we are really asking is the question of what is pleasure itself. What is happiness? The prayojana according to the shastras is sukham , happiness. This is the argument at the beginning of Prīti-sandarbha and that argument leads to the conclusion that it is prīti or prema for the Supreme Truth. The opposite of this, as different as day to night, is the desire for one's own self-centered sense pleasure. So, the shastra accepts that happiness is the goal, but simply asserts that we are going about finding it in the wrong way: na te viduḥ svārtha-gatiṁ hi viṣṇum . We are looking for our own happiness, but we don't actually know who we are. Activities in knowledge of our true self are pleasurable; those which are not, are not. Let me make this very clear: I am not proposing an irresponsible lust and free sex program. That just does not make any sense. When the Bhāgavata and Gītā, etc., warn about lust, they are making a valid point that needs to be made. It is princip...

I have to thank Advaita for taking the time to respond to my October 31 posting . The fact of the matter is that it does not seem as though Advaita has read any of my arguments or that he has understood anything if he has. And so he is rehashing the same old points, which in many cases look rather like straw men, without even trying to deal with any of them. Contradictions abound in Advaita's post, showing that like so many others who are incapable of calmly and rationally looking at an issue, they simply fire whatever lies on the surface of their brains. In the very same post he says that it is a "logical" proof that sex is for procreation because women always get pregnant from sex, then later he argues that spilling semen is not murder because they don't. But nothing is more indicative of his bad faith than his so-called final comment: If illicit sex would lead to enlightenment, the whole world would have been enlightened from day 1. If he could show me where I have...

Advaita recently posted the following on his blog . Pāyūpasthayoś ca tatra sākṣād ayogyatvāt ,which says one cannot use the genitals and the anus in Krishna's service, out of context. tatra means 'here', 'in this context', the context being Hari-bhakti-vilāsa 11.627-9, describing several ways in which the active- and knowledge-senses engage directly in Krishna's service, like the head in bowing down, the nose in smelling offered incense and Tulasi, etc., sākṣād means ' directly'. Sanatan Goswami states in the quoted tika that in this context the anus and genitals can not be directly engaged. My friend Brajabhushan personally wrote me last August:  "Now, regarding your quote from HBV: my understanding is that the ṭīkā-kāra says that 'when describing sādhanā bhakti, various activities related to our senses were mentioned, but those related to anus and genitals were not included as they are not directly ( sākṣād ) suitable for the service....