Jagat

tad viddhi praṇipātena paripraśnena sevayā upadekṣyanti te jñānaṁ jñāninas tattva-darśinaḥ Know the ways of sacrifice [i.e., sādhanās ] should be learned by submission, exhaustive inquiry and by service [i.e., obedience to instruction]. Those who have seen the truth are knowledgeable about the means, and they will instruct you if you have the above qualifications. (Gita 4.34) This instruction is given in relation to the series of yajñas listed in Gita 4.25-33. Yajña is used in the Gita as a synonym for sādhanā . One should take one's sādhanā from the guru. Mañjarī-bhāva is a sādhanā . You don't get the siddhi , you get the sādhanā . A siddha-deha doesn't mean you are siddha . The sādhanā is performed internally with the siddha-deha . And that which you practice is the unripe form of what you achieve, which is the ripe form. All India sādhanā traditions are oral as well as written. We tend to value the written traditions over the oral, but that would be a mi...

Your theory is irrelevant, in my view, where it does not offer a solution to the problem of sustainability in relationships. You insist that this is achieved through incorporating yoga in the routine, but I disagree that it needs even consideration at this stage of the commitment of two bhaktas. Body is not the first priority in our tradition. Let me say that I think that this  sādhana  is at least potentially a solution to the sustainability of relationships. Prema Prayojan Dasji's model of  sādhana  in a couple, i.e. where the husband and wife participate as companions in bhajan of Radha and Krishna, is pretty much right on. I certainly don't think that any relationship can be sustainable if there is not a third point to the triangle , which is the Sacred, which in our case as Vaishnavas means Radha and Krishna. Without that external focus of the Divine Ideal, how can there be sustainability? Even the Catholics say the family that prays together stays...

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...

An oft-repeated error of orthodox Vaishnavas is that the the love of Radha and Krishna has "nothing to do" with the romantic love of human experience, especially not where parakiya-rasa is being considered. I say that it would take only the blindest and most deluded observer to say such a thing. The Gaudiya Math and ISKCON have deliberately obfuscated the connection between Krishna's madhura lila and our human experience to promote the pan-Indian belief in sannyas that arises from the Buddhist and Shankarite schools. As I often say, the entire corpus of Rupa Goswami's work is meant to demonstrate the superlative position of madhura rasa. But any such hierarchy of rasa must be based in real human experience. Ideals have a relation to reality; they are meaningless without them. You need to see the madhura lila of Radha and Krishna as an object lesson in how to deal with sexual desire, not how to destroy it. Through worshiping Radha and Krishna we become aware of t...

Radha and Krishna's loves do not appear like mature love in the modern psychological sense to which they would appear more like "infatuation." If that is the case, then how can they be "ideal"? Are they ideal in the sense that they are supposed to be exemplary to couples who want to develop a mature relationship between them? What does Sahajiyaism have to say here? To begin with, I am not against mature relations between the sexes. And, hopefully, the purpose of everything that I am saying will help lead to mature spirituality in which other, objectively higher realms of agape and caritas are practically realized in behavior. So I not only honor the idea of maturity in love, but hope that all Sahajiya practitioners work to cultivate mature relationships in the modern sense. The ideas of Christian love and so on that are often refered to as superior to erotic love should be familiar territory to anyone who tries to advance in spiritual life. But that is n...

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...

In general, I have until now primarily written for an audience of people who have some experience of bhakti, i.e., either have or have had faith in the path of devotion to Krishna. This is why I am periodically asked to defend my ideas with quotations from shastra. Now, the fact of the matter is that, amongst those who have some experience of the bhakti path, there are very few who have progressed beyond the stage of vidhi-bhakti . Even those who have gone to Narayan Maharaj or some other rasika guru, only a few have taken initiation in the rāgānugā process by receiving ekādaśa-bhāva from him. Even less in number are those who have actually taken up a serious study of the līlā-granthas and practiced aṣṭa-kāla līlā smaraṇa , even briefly, what to speak of with intensity and niṣṭhā . Of those foreign students who have either done or not done these things, there are probably even a smaller number who have learned Bengali and attended Nama kirtana yajnas or listened to lila kirtan ...

Since Anuradha wrote me, I thought I would answer a comment he wrote in response to my Thursday, August 17, 2006 blog. (This is being posted, even though it is incomplete). Trying to make your own sex-life a spiritual experience is fine, but it is not yet "full surrender" and "selfless Devotion". Repeat,repeat... I personally play soccer. Maybe Krishna likes it too. Maybe He wants to play with me one day. I don't know. But my soccer is not Krishna's soccer. I play for many selfish reasons and because testosterone is fueling my body. Therefor I regulate it. I play. I enjoy. But it is not part of my spiritual Quest. I have to say that I found this to be a total misunderstanding of what I am coming to understand about the worship of Radha and Krishna. In fact, I am not quite sure what philosophical position Anuradha is trying to defend here. I notice that Advaita continues to associate me with "immorality." Clearly Anuradha is making a certain...

It's a little ironic to be talking about the 20th century Hassidic Jewish philosopher Martin ( Mordechai ) Buber in the context of current events in Lebanon. It seems that there is something of a reaction to these events in a slow but steady rise of anti-Jewish feeling, as evidenced by Australian actor Mel Gibson's drunken tirade, which was of course followed by the expected ritual self-flagellation (https://forward.com/culture/449521/mel-gibson-anti-semitism-timeline-winona-ryder/) that only confirmed to conspiracy theorists the absolute domination of Jews in the world of American film and media. Jewish contributions to civilization are so great and disproportionate to their numbers that I never cease to be amazed by them. One of those is this mystic insight of Buber into the essence of theism, which after all is Judaism's soul and its first and proudest contribution to human civilization. Yet it, of all things, has somehow gone missing in this action. Militarization is ...

In a previous posting , I used the expression “The Other came to me as Woman” twice. I think it is important to discuss what I meant here in connection with the question of strī-saṅga . Generally speaking, it would not be an understatement that, for the sādhaka , the world is a fearful thing. As for the Buddha, whose four noble truths begin with the word “misery,” the perception is that birth, old age, disease and death haunt us and incessantly reduce all our efforts in this world to mere vanity. Thus, nearly every religion starts with some kind of movement away from the world and harbors persistent monastic movements where other-worldly values are given preeminence. Rather than calling this a movement away , it may be more correct to call it a movement within. Nevertheless, though on this stage preoccupation with the perishable is seen as a waste of time, with a change in spiritual perceptions, the position of the external world is eventually raised again. Mystics who find uni...