Today is a good day

As you may well imagine, coming back into a marriage from the place one left off 14 or 15 years ago is an interesting experience. A lot of things have happened in the intervening time and we all undergo changes, for better or worse. Hopefully in my case it was for the better. Nevertheless, I am a person who seeks meaning in the accidents of life, and what is going on now is certainly one of those.

After almost a week now of tending to Madhuri's operation and doing what little nursing I am capable of, she is making her recovery. She does not get easily swayed by alarmist doctors who want to overmedicate all the time. Opioids, laxatives, blood decoagulators and all the rest are in the prescriptions. So the last item was begrudgingly accepted and her mood is certainly better. She is watching the blood pressure constantly--the nurse told her if it gets too high to go to Emergency. But this clash of natural medicine with modern interventionist medicine has reached a point of stasis and we follow the natural vegan diet and give the body all the opportunity it needs to heal itself.

In the meantime, I have been without Facebook for a couple of days now. I still cannot drive the car as I only just got my learner's permit a couple of days ago. After five years you have to start from scratch, go through all the tests before Quebec will allow you to drive independently. There is a woman's bicycle here but it has no muscles at all. My primitive Indian bike had more oomph to it than this multi-geared decoration piece. I cycled out the other day to Best Buy to see if they could fix the problem. One is the charger, the other the keyboard. Nowadays they only sell a universal charger with attachments for, it would seem, every conceivable kind of laptop -- except mine. So I have to go back again... The discontents of civilization. 

Because of the change of computers there is a problem accessing Facebook, and until Computer #1 is working I cannot make the necessary adjustments to allow it. So here I am, without all my Facebook memories to mull over. It seems that this is perfectly okay. 

Facebook has the capacity to addict one to immediate responses, whether in the form of likes or comments. Writing a blog is a bit less rajasika, writing a book is a bit more sattvika than that. Nevertheless, the best times on this blog were the times when I was writing from some immediate and independent inspiration that could be expressed and shared quickly, while they were still hot off the oven. 

In the last couple of days I went looking through my collection of draft files, which is something I do from time to time, to see if any worthwhile ideas have been sitting latent, waiting to be prodded into coherence. As you know I lament from time to time that none of the material on this blog has seen any coherent effort at publication. Most of those are translations or scholarly pieces about Vaishnava history or historical ideas. There were a few that were about sadhana, most of which came from the time immediately prior to my leaving for India up and to the first few years while I spent time in Rishikesh and was taking a not-very-profound interest in yoga. Then later I moved to Vrindavan and the mood started to change.

The two articles that came across were from 2020. One was an article by Babaji that dismissed the label Sahajiya as an insult leveled at the "Babajis" by the Gaudiya Math. This is actually a significant confusion that has been deliberately shared by the Gaudiya Math, and one that has significant import, since it implies that any meditation on Radha and Krishna prior to complete subjugation of the sexual impulse will inevitably lead to sexual misconduct of one kind or another. Therefore the Babajis are commonly accused of being engaged in sexual misconduct and simply posing as celibates and renunciates. This of course becomes moot when Gaudiya Math sannyasis engage in their own anti-dharmic manner, but the critique is kept alive. So I personally don't mind aligning Sahajiyaism with orthodox traditional Vaishnavas and the madhura-rasa tradition in Bengal in opposition to the radical puritanical stance of the Gaudiya Math sect. Radha and Krishna symbolize eroticism, whatever you may think, and if you avoid that self-evident truth, well you are kind of missing the point.

So Babaji did an article on that, which is at the beginning of this here. I must have written this article at about the same time in 2020. At any rate, after reading the article about "Where I stand on Sahajiyaism Today?" which I found to have a rather tepid conclusion -- a reluctant admission to still being somewhere in the general realm of Sahajiyaism. So from that point I find myself again redefining it in ways that try to diminish the potentiality for the shadow projections of every person who only allows for the most-limited range of permissible sexual behaviors.

The different situation of course is that I am (1) no longer in India, and (2) in the company of Prema Madhuri, both of which are significant and will need some exploration. But we are going to have to "work our couple," to use an expression that has a bit of history in my affective adventures. 

Things have certainly changed since 2005 and Madhuri's willingness to take up almost as if I had never left present an amazing opportunity at putting into practice a lot of what I have been saying, but this time without the sexual component at all. One has to understand that Sahaja is not about sex alone, it is about prema and its application in all worldly relations. To label something as maya without understanding it is only to have missed its potential. 

Evidently, it is not good enough to simply pretend that a married relationship turns into a routine modus vivendi with two autonomous individuals more or less living in the same space without ever going past a certain, rather modest level of intimacy. How does spirituality work into that equation? That is where the Yugal Bhajan Triangle comes in.

So today I started to explain some of these things to Madhuri. I may have done so before, but it was never really put into application. I was never so purposeful before. Now that I have a little more experience with the external psychological penumbra revealed by whatever piecemeal sadhana I have done over the years, I can understand a bit more clearly what I am doing here. 

Luckily she has a good start from meditation and listening to Sadh Guru and Deepak Chopra. So she is quite familiar with a lot of the terms. Today I primarily explained to her about ālambana. The ālambana is the apex of the triangle. It is the point of commonality that makes it possible for a couple to pursue the same spiritual course. But we have our reasons for preferring Radha and Krishna as the apex of our Yugal Bhajan triangle.

I also explained about dharma, artha, kāma and mokṣa, and the fifth puruṣārtha, prema.

I also explained about yamas and niyamas and why they were external but essential to all yoga practice.

So this is about practical application of theories about sādhana to the present situation. And I am going to continue posting on this theme until I can get my other computer functioning and resume the FB memory trail, leaving a mystery month of June, whose memories will not be immediately resuscitated. The links to the previous articles are above.

Another thing that needs to be looked at again is romantic love.

At any rate, I will be looking at other draft articles and bringing them up to date. That may be a better idea.