Jagat

Jai Sri Radhe! So, today another year of the Jiva Ratna courses by Satyanarayana Dasa Babaji at the Jiva Institute came to an end. The Jiva Institute is slowly growing each year through the online courses which allow Babaji Maharaj to remain in Vrindavan with a core group of students while still shepherding a small international group from around the world. These students have developed a taste for his teaching method -- basically studying the Sandarbhas line by line from beginning to end, accompanied by a second field of study based on the six philosophical systems and other aspects of the Sanskrit literary tradition such as Alankara. This appeals to those who seek a more profound analysis of the philosophical basis of the Gaudiya Vaishnava doctrine. Babaji rightly believes that for Gaudiya Vaishnavism to prosper, this kind of thorough scholarship is absolutely necessary. That is arguably following in the footsteps of Jiva Goswami himself, the last of the six Goswamis and the one who ...

  Sri Pranananda Mishra’s Korcā Gadadhar Pran Das, whatsapp+91-7501237557 This korcā continues from where Another Side of Thakura Bhaktivinoda left off. In ancient Bengal when Sri Gauranga’s bhauma lila was manifest in our world, a diary was called a korcā , and Svarupa Damodar, Murari Gupta and Raghunath das Goswami are amongst the foremost authors who wrote korcās to record what they witnessed in Mahaprabhu’s daily life. But similarly, as we make notes of our Gaura lila and Krishna lila meditations (to preserve and share these adventures) Pranananda Mishra’s Korcā will become like a diary as well. As this venture begins though we wonder: Can this personal diary be presented to a general audience? Because since most people are uninformed about how the raganuga bhakti process works (to bring about our eternal destiny with Sri Bhagavan in the spiritual world) won’t they lack appreciation for what we earnestly wish to share? But on the other hand, those who are resol...

Sampadananda Mishra Prishni shared some questions and answers about Sahajiyaism which she asked of an on-line AI program that almost instantly searches all the data available to it on the internet and is able to construct a human-like response, based purely on superpowered capacity to process information. It gave quite a good answer, but I recognized in it a kind of mechanical character: it was a collection of data points, pointing to agreements and disagreements with clinical evenhandedness. Nevertheless, Ii have to admit that it was an impressive overview of much of what has happened over a 500 or 1000-year history, something you would expect to get in a university world religions study course. It did not however show the life of a lived tradition. I do not doubt however that one could get the program to adapt to your particular preferences by refining your inquiries. For instance, you could ask, "Where can I learn about this and implement its practice in my own life, from a li...

A couple of days ago I wrote on Facebook: It is good to be 73. I feel as though everything I have done in my life is coming to a ripening. Eventually the fruits that have been growing for a lifetime start to ripen. Just as long as you water. Fortunately, I have had plenty of water, and still have, and hope to have more. I wasn't even thinking about my birthday when I wrote the above, though I suppose there must have been some subliminal processes going on. But it is more like a coming to terms with being in Canada and staying here for so long, something that was both unexpected and has been challenging. It is often hard to find a synthesis between the various worlds that one inhabits. The Vedic system always seeks to minimize disruption through simplification. The theory is that the sattva guna is the highest promoter of happiness and one should increase the sattva guṇa throughout life. It is not that growing old inevitably means only tamas. The varnashram concept sees a ni...

श्रीमधुसूदनसरस्वतीपादानां गूढार्थदीपिका टीका अत्युपकारिणीति मन्ये । सा अतितरां विस्तृता पाण्डित्यपूर्णा गूढार्थप्रकाशिनी च । मम चिरदिनं तत्पिपठिषा वरीवर्तते । तस्माद् इदानीं गम्भीरानन्दस्वामीपादानां आंग्लानुवादं अवलम्ब्य अग्रेसर्तुमिच्छा वर्तते । आशासे तत् सर्वेषां संमतं । हरिः ॐ तत् सत्॥ We recently finished the fourth chapter in our daily Gita class that I am giving on Zoom. Up until now, we have been reading the Gita with three Sanskrit commentaries, those of  Sridhara, Vishwanatha and Baladeva. Occasionally we turned to Madhusudana Saraswati's Gūḍhārtha-dīpikā  for insight, but with the above message, I announced that beginning with the fifth chapter, we would read Madhusudan in his entirety as well.  Though I have long recognized the justifiable reputation of Madhusudana's commentary, we are generally not encouraged to read him because he is a known opponent of Vyasa Tirtha, the accarya of the Madhva line and senior contemporary of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. He is, ergo, ...

When for every thing the night does break,  then the self-controlled are wide awake;  and when other creatures are roused to light,  for the introspective, it is the night. (Gita 2.69}  yā niśā sarva-bhūtānāṁ tasyāṁ jāgarti saṁyamī  yasyāṁ jāgrati bhūtāni sā niśā paśyato muneḥ   Not so long ago a young friend wrote a little piece on the ten things he had learned from his Krishna bhakti experience after a few years of chanting.First on his list was the benefit of getting up early in the morning and doing sadhana at that auspicious time of day. It is true that I got a taste in Iskcon for getting up at the Brahma Muhurta and doing bhajan before the sun comes up. I had fallen off a lot before I returned to India, but in Rishikesh I was an eager early riser and present in the meditation hall to enjoy the atmosphere alone at four in the morning or earlier. You get a taste for the darkness, which is truly a rarity in our Kaliyuga. Early rising a habit that ...