Jagat

The procession around Radha Kund and Shyam Kund At 7.30 yesterday morning, when most of us at the Jiva Institute were still engaged in our morning bhajan, Manjari came to my neighbor Pradeep Das’s door and in a trembling voice announced that their Guru, Ananta Das Babaji, the Mahant of Radha Kund, had left his body a few minutes before. There are three initiated disciples of Mahanta Maharaj living at Jiva. They immediately made arrangements to go to Radha Kund. I joined them. We traveled in silence, each preoccupied by our own memories of Pandit Baba By some turn of events, Babaji had left his body in Vrindavan and was being transported by ambulance to the Gopinath temple in Radha Kund, where he lay in state for a few hours near the samadhi temple of Srila Raghunath Das Goswami, whose throne he had adorned for the past three decades. There I sat with the kirtaniyas, thinking that I am only a distant admirer of Babaji Maharaj and I should not get in the way of his disciples and ...

It has been quite interesting that Advaita Dasji has sent me a second postcard I wrote addressed to Radharaman Dasji. (See here also .) I used to keep diaries when in India, as did Advaitaji, but unlike him, I lost all mine when I came back to Canada in 85. As a result I have absolutely no recollection of the exact dates of my whereabouts at any given time, and most of my memories are fuzzy at best and totally non-existent at worst. I have expressed wonder at this many times. It has convinced me of the utter untrustworthiness of memory in general and mine in particular. I used to make the excuse that I was so concentrated on texts and so on that my external life was always relegated to the background. That might be an acceptable excuse if I could remember a few more shlokas, which also have gone the way of flotsam on the ever-flowing Ganga. These little forgotten bits and pieces remind me how we also have previous lives that are lost to us. This postcard is from Nabadwip and sent...

"On Ekadashi I was visited by old friend Ralph Neuburger [Radharaman Das] who donated me his vast library of Gaudiya granthas and manuscripts, as he is migrating." ( Advaita Das ) I was a bit surprised the other day when my old friend Advaita Dasji from Holland sent me a postcard I had written from Nabadwip to Radharaman Das way back on New Year's Eve, 1983. "Radharaman was here. He cleared out his godown here and gave me his entire collection of books, khatas, handwritten documents and letters from Braj. Among them was this letter you wrote him on December 31, 1983." Once again, I was completely baffled about the context of the letter. My bad memory astounds me. Obviously some untoward incident had taken place, but I could not recall at all what it was all about. I asked Advaita and he wrote back to me telling me that he remembered the whole thing very well. "You and Gadadhar Pran stayed in his kutir one night on the way back from Radha Kund t...

A bit of a debate took place on the internet as a result of Advaita Das's blog, in which he posted a response from Satyanarayana Dasji about the Bhavisya Purana and Brahma Vaivarta Puranas, particularly with reference to predictions about a "golden age" of ten thousand years within the Kali Yuga, which devotees following Srila Prabhupada attribute to the sankirtan movement. Satya Narayan Dasji did not think much of the Puranas in question and also questioned the interpretations made of the verses themselves. Hari Parshada Dasji, a young ISKCON scholar and also a friend, expressed some reservations about the article in a Facebook note . He noted several places where Prabhupada made statements supporting the 10,000 year prediction (e.g. CC Antya 3.50 Purport, Room Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, 13 May 1969) and expressed dismay that devotees out of ISKCON seem to be going out of their way to disparage anything that ISKCON or Prabhupada says or believes. Anyway, I ma...

I have to thank Advaita for taking the time to respond to my October 31 posting . The fact of the matter is that it does not seem as though Advaita has read any of my arguments or that he has understood anything if he has. And so he is rehashing the same old points, which in many cases look rather like straw men, without even trying to deal with any of them. Contradictions abound in Advaita's post, showing that like so many others who are incapable of calmly and rationally looking at an issue, they simply fire whatever lies on the surface of their brains. In the very same post he says that it is a "logical" proof that sex is for procreation because women always get pregnant from sex, then later he argues that spilling semen is not murder because they don't. But nothing is more indicative of his bad faith than his so-called final comment: If illicit sex would lead to enlightenment, the whole world would have been enlightened from day 1. If he could show me where I have...

Advaita recently posted the following on his blog . Pāyūpasthayoś ca tatra sākṣād ayogyatvāt ,which says one cannot use the genitals and the anus in Krishna's service, out of context. tatra means 'here', 'in this context', the context being Hari-bhakti-vilāsa 11.627-9, describing several ways in which the active- and knowledge-senses engage directly in Krishna's service, like the head in bowing down, the nose in smelling offered incense and Tulasi, etc., sākṣād means ' directly'. Sanatan Goswami states in the quoted tika that in this context the anus and genitals can not be directly engaged. My friend Brajabhushan personally wrote me last August:  "Now, regarding your quote from HBV: my understanding is that the ṭīkā-kāra says that 'when describing sādhanā bhakti, various activities related to our senses were mentioned, but those related to anus and genitals were not included as they are not directly ( sākṣād ) suitable for the service....

I realized that Madhavananda is still with me, despite my having spoken of him twice in the past several days. There is a deep vexation in my mind, of which I need to speak. This feeling has several parts and is in some need of analysis. *** At the root of it is a deep sadness that he did not love Radha and Krishna like I do. That he did not love the devotees, even the most kanishtha among them, that he did not love Vrindavan, Govardhan and Radha Kund, despite the thick overlay of rajas and tamo-gunas that are such an obstacle to that love. That he did not love us enough to recognize that we loved him. Yes, it is all very well and good to talk siddhanta, but the real problem was, as he himself seems to have recognized, in the area of emotional fitness. But even there, I am still saddened by the fact that there was not enough love to keep him around. Ah well, enough said. Madhava is Radharani’s own dasi, and if he wants to avoid that truth for another lifetime or two, let him. Let him...

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...

I responded to a posting on Advaitaji's Madan Gopal site , where I made reference to a Bengali verse from Kunja Bihari Das Babaji Maharaj's  Mañjarī-svarūpa-nirūpaṇa . Advaitaji, always wary of Jagat's every word, stated that this was sahajiyā-vāda . Of course, I have a hard time seeing any difference between orthodoxy and sahajiyaism, so maybe he was right. At any rate, I made a further comment which Advaita decided not to post. We had a little followup discussion on email, which Advaita thought of posting as a separate blog, but later had second thoughts about. Anyway, here is the brief posting that did not make it. For an advanced sādhaka, as I said, even trivial phenomena are inducements to ecstatic feelings and experiences of rasa. Less advanced sādhakas are indeed asked to observe restrictions on their hearing and chanting, i.e., put a Radha and Krishna label on everything. This is the meaning of the verse Kunja Bihari Dasji quotes near the end of  Mañjarī-svarūpa-ni...

After concluding my previous post , I thought it was a little ironic that I had to take refuge in Kierkegaard to confirm something that is stated with such vigor in the Upanishads, namely that God, or the life of faith, is known exclusively by the path of subjectivity, or by what the Indian system would call antarmukhatā or turning inward. And if any yoga system holds this to be more true than another, it is certainly that of bhakti, which opposes the empirical method of jñāna. yam evaiṣa vṛṇute tena labhyaḥ . I tend to want to defend the intellectual effort as an act of devotion in itself, since I hold that all human faculties, especially one as fundamental as reason, must have a devotional function. This is what is meant by jñāna-yajña in Gita 18.70. Since desire is the essence of bhakti, the desire to understand God, the way He works and His will for me personally, is what the power of reason was meant for. In terms of knowledge, it will always be inadequate, for one can neve...

My old friend Madhavanandaji has posted an article on Sahajiyaism on his Wiki site. In this article, he has done me the honor of posting my picture and saying a few words about me. Certainly I am unworthy of any notice or mention whatsoever. Nevertheless, the fact that my very existence has been noticed is, I admit, invigorating and timely, as it coincides with the launching of this humble effort. As I am in a position where time is chronically short, I would just like to comment briefly on my statement, "Sahajiyaism and orthodoxy are like two wings on the Gaudiya Vaishnavism bird." Advaita Dasji , an old friend wrote in response (after asking for scriptural references): Jagat: I still cannot see how my or anyone else's bird of bhakti cannot fly without the one wing of sahajiyaism. I don't need them to act as foil at all because I and most other Vaishnavas had for most time no clear idea even what sahajiya means. You mean to say that all suddha vaishnavas (sorry...