Jagat

Chandan Goswami asked on Facebook, after hearing yet another person accuse almost everyone in the Vaishnava world of being a Sahajiya, "Have you found or met accidentally any such person in Gaudiya Sampradaya who you think is a Sahajiya?" In other words, have you met someone who fits your own description and still calls himself a Sahajiya? If there is any such thing as a "Sahajiya," it should be a person who calls himself by that name. If I call you a "Green Duck" that is me calling you something, not you yourself. If I then say "Green Ducks are like this or that" then it is clearly propaganda. Like people calling each other "Communists" or "Nazis" in political discussions. No one has asked the Green Ducks for their opinion. There are no doubt real Communists and Nazis, but before trying to define what one is, it may do well to find one and talk with that person to find out what they do and what they believe. Then your cr...

You see, my friends, at some point one has to make a decision in life. Does one want to push through with the gifts one has been given, or is one going to be hampered by doubts to the very end? saṁśayātmā vinaśyati . I figure if you are, like me, a vicāra-pradhāna personality, you can allow yourself until the age of say, 57, to come to some state of equilibrium with the intellect and reason. But when you get to the age of, say 57, then you have to surrender to the limitations of reason. These limitations are hard-wired into the nature of our world and existence. Like Krishna who is lying down and being fanned by Radha, forgetting everything other than the sweetness of her movements, that is a point where one simply surrenders to the mercies one has been given. Call it "a return to ruchi." People were asking me about my attitude to Bhaktivinoda Thakur, etc., after I published those articles. Like I said, most of those questions were answered in the followup articles, bu...

I left off talking about association with devotees and saying that aṅga-saṅga was an element of service to a devotee. In this case, however, I did mean to place some restrictions: it is not that every bhakta is somehow to receive this kind of intimate service. It is restricted to the most antaraṅga association; and without the central element of love, it will most definitely be counterproductive. Love cannot be reduced to a mere sentiment, nor to the mere mechanics of physical sexuality. To do so is to make the same kind of mistake the beginning devotee makes when he confuses the bliss of first discovery with spiritual perfection. The love between sādhakas is the raw material of their sādhanā . But let us press on with our understanding of the compatibility of the Orthodox tradition with this way of thinking. Actually, no one has contributed to the revival of Sahajiyaism more than Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati himself, who emphasized the concept of yukta-vairāgya . If something c...