Jagat

On Facebook the other day, I posted a link to an article by George Monbiot, one of the few journalists whose work I admire, from the Guardian. Monbiot laments about the corporate culture and compares it to cult-like indoctrination and brain washing. He seems to be on a bit of a run about this because he had another similar article a couple of days later. Of course, having experienced a religious cult, spending nine years in the Hare Krishnas, I thought of Prabhupada's statement that he was indeed engaged in a brainwashing exercise, precisely because our brains did need to be washed. And that is quite true. The idea of "cleansing the mirror of the mind" is central to all yoga systems. We willingly submitted to the brainwashing process because we wanted to change our way of consciousness, our way of being. To fill our minds and senses with Krishna. To become Krishna conscious. And on the whole, I am glad of it. The process was based on the Bhāgavata-dharmas of the sc...

I want to say something about the impression that people have that I am always talking about sex. Perhaps it is because I have been open about the subject in a way that others have not been that has created this impression. Women are ready to talk about misogyny, but fail to recognize that ambivalence and confusion about sexuality itself are an important contributing factor in misogyny, and a spiritually viable response is needed to assimilate sexuality into our culture of the sacred. There are many people who feel uncomfortable with any mention whatever of sexuality, and tell me to emphasize love. After all, our tradition has always hidden direct references to sex and dressed it up in Radha Krishna's "love dalliances" or whatever. I think that a little direct talk is not only useful but necessary. That does not make me a sex maniac or a lusty old womanizer. Indeed, most people in the modern  materialistic view of sexual liberation would find me a fusty conservative ...

In his classic dystopian novel, Brave New World , Aldous Huxley projected a future of human society, based on consumerism socially engineered to technocratic perfection. One of the prominent features of this world, set in the distant future, was a complete separation of the sexual functions of erotic pleasure from reproduction, which was taken care of by advanced test-tube incubation centers and from-birth indoctrination in consumerist values. Without marriage or any need for attachments, sex was also separated from love in the sense of intense commitment to a single partner and simply a source of recreational pleasure, efficiently enhancing the qualities of life and smoothing social cohesiveness. Though Huxley himself was rather sanguine about such developments, now it appears that his nightmarish vision is seeking realization. In their popularly acclaimed and controversial book Sex at Dawn , subtitled "How we mate, how we stray, and what it means for modern relations...

I have received a few private remarks, including the complaint that I seem to be obsessed with sexuality. Do I have no other subject that interests me? Of course, there are plenty of things that interest me, but my principal subject is prema . And because of Rupa Goswami's emphasis on the madhura-rasa , I have expanded my areas of interest to include the sexual, the spiritual and Sahajiyaism, which I understand as the natural way to prema . One of the most often heard criticisms or comments is that I think that sex itself leads to prema . This is of course ridiculous. It is like saying that the reason kirtan is effective is only because of the music. If that were the case, every musician would be enlightened, which is certainly not the case. It is music when used in the service of the Holy Name, like clothes and decorations on the Deity, that it becomes spiritual. In the same way, in a mind that has been properly prepared, sahaja-sādhanā helps propel one into the realm of prem...

A couple of things in the current news cycle caught my attention and made me return to this unpublished post.  “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?” Sigmund Freud At the risk of reopening a rather nasty can of worms, I am descending once again into the rape discussion. For background, see here , here and here . I never really thought much about Prabhupada's famous statement that women "enjoy rape." Like most people, I suppose, I just laughed it off, or considered it irrelevant. I have no skin in the game myself as I feel no great need to defend Prabhupada at all costs. But since I have now been accused of " supporting rape " I feel challenged to at least inform myself about this debate. One thing I have done fairly consistently on my blog, however, is to argue the following major points, which of course are nowhere i...

(continued from previous ) So is Freud relevant? Nowadays it has become the accepted wisdom that Freudianism is dead. But so many of his ideas are now considered commonsensical that it is almost a joke to reject him by name without knowing which of his ideas are still current and on what level of discourse. I could go into this in some depth, and I think that especially for devotees it would be salutary to consider these points. The relations of sexuality to love and to spirituality are the complexes that need to be decoded. I tend to accept Freud's monistic view of psychic energy, or consciousness, and not make a radical distinction between material sexuality and spirituality at all. Now this will seem counter-intuitive for those people who do make such a radical distinction. Kama andha-tama, prema nirmala bhaskara and all that. But if we say that they are generic opposites, that is erroneous. They are simply different ends of one continuum or spectrum, that of d...

I got into a bit of a debate with Sachin Gupta, a devoted follower of Vivekananda and Hindu nationalist, on Facebook. He posted a review of Wendy Doniger's book History of the Hindus , which reiterated criticisms that sensitive Hindus have had about her work almost since the beginning. Fair enough. She has attracted a lot of attention ever since she wrote Shiva, the Erotic Ascetic for raking up every juicy bit of erotica she can find in the Puranic mythologies. There is a lot of defensiveness amongst some Hindu nationalists who resent it when scholars point out the sexual nature of much of Hindu symbolism and mythology. My intention here is not to defend Doniger in what she says, as the accusations leveled against her ("Doniger's is not a prayerful, thoughtful approach, but a whimsical, frivolous approach to both the mundane as well as the esoteric.") in all likelihood do have some merit; nevertheless, to totally deny the explicit sexuality of much of the content of P...

I feel somewhat guilty that I did not mention my pleasant visit to Advaitaji in Radha Kund while he has spoken rather kindly of me over on Madan Gopal. Since there seems to be a kind of link between the two blogs, I really should have shared my perception of that meeting. The only disagreement he mentioned was related to the subject of projecting sexual desires on the lila. This was in fact a response to his misunderstanding that people like myself are projecting our own sexual desires on the lila; I was saying that Western psychology would argue that the lila is seen as the projection of repressed or unfulfilled (or unfulfillable) sexual desires. Which, if true, would mean that saying it is not is nothing more than denial, a refusal to accept the obvious. But of course, the relationship between material sexual desire and the lila of Radha and Krishna is more complex and sophisticated than projected repressed desires, and certainly seeing it as nothing more than titillation is equa...

So the day has been getting imperceptibly closer and is finally here. My flight is this evening and I have a lot of last minute preparations still to do. My books are still filling their shelves, their future uncertain. Countless photocopied pages lie piled up in boxes, some dating back to undergraduate days, waiting in futility for one kernel of wisdom to be picked up, one significant quote to be cited in a magnum opus, and which now will most likely be forever overlooked. I spent much of the last two days scanning books and articles into PDF format. I wish that I had done much more, but now that will have to wait. At least much of what I will need to consult for the work I know I will have to do in the next few months is available to me for consultation. The following verse comes to mind-- pustaka-sthā tu yā vidyā para-hasta-gataṁ dhanam kārya-kāle samutpanne na sā vidyā na tad dhanam Knowledge that is in books is like money in another's hand. When the time to use it com...

I just caught the last bit of a CBC interview with Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity . There was a great deal in this man’s ideas that resonated very strongly with me. Indeed, the words with which he ends his book verbalize one aspect of my own core concept very clearly: “I renounce masculinity and choose instead to be a human being.” Commenting on this statement, Jensen says that the model of masculinity that is the norm in our society, and is promoted in pornography (“a window to the sexual imaginations of our culture”) is toxic. It is based on ideas of conquest and control and hence leads directly to aggression and violence. It perpetuates and enhances sexual and racial stereotypes that have well-known negative consequences for both men and women. The increasingly pornographic culture of the West, and the predatory corporate capitalist system behind it, promote a cruel and misogynistic vision of women. It undermines the essential feminine q...