Jagat

So my spare time is being spent contemplating the question of the phenomenon of sectarianism, and thinking about remedies. Whether there is a remedy for the disease of sampradāya . Yet without  sampradāya  we have no history. And in fact, it is not untrue to say that it is through  sampradāya  that we are meant to arise above  sampradāya . No one can be without an identity, but ultimate love includes the capacity to transcend identities to find oneness everywhere. And that is really the fruit of prema , without which prema has little meaning. In other words you have to be able to find something universally true in your symbol system for you to be able to communicate with the universe, to commune with ultimate reality. So, the story I have been sitting on at Vrindavan Today for the past month or more is that the Radhavallabhi and Gaudiya rivalry is threatening to flare up again in the courts. Some disciples of the Radha Vallabha sect have filed a case against ...

I started writing this while sitting in the Moscow airport. Now in Montreal, Canada. I just want to talk about my last day in Vrindavan. I already confessed to a wide and long detour into English language entertainments. Now that I knew I was finally leaving, I regretted all that I am missing even though present in the Dham. Even after a serious attempt in my three days in Barsana , I still hadn't finished my introduction to the Jivani , though I did make progress. I had hoped to finish it before departure, but I could not manage, though it seems tantalizingly close. One thing that has always been difficult for me with Guru-tattva is this disagreeing with the Guru or finding flaws in the Guru. Naturally, any intelligent observer is bound by nature to apply his powers of rationality to assess the validity of information received from an authoritative source or of one's own sensory perceptions. Information from authoritative sources still has to be confirmed by experien...

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 ...