Jagat

Three and a half months in Birnagar has come to a sudden and very abrupt change of Dham. I am feeling the intoxication of Vrindavan. Intoxication is not really permitted in sādhanā , but then again, sādhanā is really about nothing else BUT intoxication. The intoxication of forgetfulness of conventional reality. Which is inevitably accompanied by a fear that one is distancing oneself from the conventional reality of duty and attentiveness to the normative. When Bhakta Das and I were about to get off the train in Mathura -- he goes to Radha Kund, I to Vrindavan -- he said that he felt it would be lonely going to his cottage in Gaura Dham Colony. He has been relishing the kind of respect and sense of community and purpose that he gets at Dwadash Mandir. I also felt something like that on arriving here. There we fulfill a role in the service of our Guru, which makes us automatically seen as special, through our relation, through our connection. Here we are specks of dust, luminous n...

I just came back from a Smriti Sabha on the Parikrama Marg for Shyama Sharan Nyayacharya, who was Satya Narayan Dasji's pandit for more than 20 years. Babaji regularly studied from him--Yoga Sutra, nyaya, Vallabhacharya, Nimbarkacharya, Mimamsa, and more. The list is quite long. Shyama Sharan left his body in Vrindavan a little over a week ago, and this was the official memorial. Ramanandacharya Shri Ram Nareshacharya Ji Maharaj   A great number of Vrindavan's cream, pandits and babajis, dominated by representatives of the renounced wing of the Nimbarka sampradaya, were there. But really, Satya Narayanji knew him best because he had studied with him for so long. The most impressive speaker, whom I had never heard before, was the Ramanandacharya, Ram Nareshacharya, who gave a relaxed speech, full of humor and anecdotes about Shyama Sharanji, but filled at the same time with delicious tidbits of his scholarship -- a bit of Patanjali's Mahābhāṣya  here, an extract fr...