Jagat

In Christianity, one cultivates the sense of being a sinner through constant, ever more subtle self-examination. The purpose of this is to see one's own utter incapacity of attaining salvation from the material conditioning and to thus take complete shelter of the Lord. Ammachi's bhaktas say she became blue like Krishna in Vrindavan. She came to Vineet Narain's place right next door to Jiva on this date 2016. Big event. Big crowd. She did not come alone. My crappy picture.

The Thakur and Christianity Judging from the amount of association he had with Christian missionaries and the praise that he reserves for Christianity, it is perhaps surprising that he did not become a Christian. Right across the street from where he lived in Calcutta was the church run by Krishna Bandyopadhyay, one of the most famous Bengali converts to Christianity. [59] Notable among the foreign missionaries were Alexander Duff, the fournder of the Scottish Church School, with whom he mentions he had a disagreement [73] and Charles Dall, with whom he seems to have had a more substantial relationship. [69, 71, 73-74, 82-83, 106, 115] Throughout the Jīvanī , especially in the early period of Kedarnath Dutt’s professional life, we see that the Brahmo Samaj had a very strong presence among the educated leaders of Bengali society, and debates with traditional Hinduism were fierce and often acrimonious. But even at the age of 23 (1861) when teaching in Midnapore, working as a teacher ...

I mentioned yesterday that I have started a new regime, only coming on line once a day. Prior to that, I was watching a number of Christian websites and videos and getting a bit of a feel for various branches of Christian thought. I found out that for some, "Jews are our friends, it is the Catholics who are the real whores of Babylon. The Jesuits are ones behind the New World Order." So this counter conspiracy theory was like a beam of light into the darkness. I realized that only God knows, and the rest of us are a bunch of idiots who think we know. And this knowledge does not give us happiness but helplessness. And this is very liberating. One thing, though, that is striking about some branches of Christianity is their utter seriousness about "saving souls." From the lake of fire and so. "There is no other way to the Father but by me." Well, at least they recognize that there is suffering, as the Buddha said. Today in Bhakti Sandarbha , I had the ...

This is an old article from way back published on the now defunct VNN site. I came across it as I was doing some research on compassion. There was no copy on the blog so I decided to repost it. It will be somewhat interesting to see the difference of style and content. One thing that springs quickly to anyone who reads my other stuff on this blog, is that I am directly addressing some hypothetical Iskcon audience. Anyway, check out the current article when I put it up. The link is dead. EDITORIAL, Apr 25 (VNN) — In his article ( Practical Standard of Goodness ), Akhilesvara Prabhu recognizes the role that the Golden Rule has played in Western moral philosophy and asks the question whether we can find an alternative to it as the basis of morality. This is a significant question, and though it may seem self evident that we accept the idea of treating our neighbor as we would be treated ourselves, it is worth investigating. The American transcendentalist Josiah Royce identified thi...

I don't know much about Gaurahari Das. I met him personally once in Mayapur a few years ago. I was told at the time that he was making disciples and trying to build a following. He had a nice face, a good smile, was generally polite and curious in conversation. If I formed any opinion then, it was that it was a little early for him to be acting as guru, but then that is so typical that I did not make much of it. Later on, I followed his career a little since I had had some personal contact with him. I noticed him go through a phase of supporting the ritvik philosophy. He was constantly making videos and trying so hard to reach a state of emotional bhakti, or bhava. Then he started watching videos of Christian preachers, televangelists of the Southern Baptist variety, miracle workers and Pentecostals. His sudden conversion to Christianity took us all by surprise, however. After all, most devotees recoil before a religion that condones meat-eating, what to speak of the crass commerc...

This letter is dated Sept. 4, 1997. I am posting these old letters with a bit of editing, and not really following the chronological order, which is a bit problematic. I will try to fix it later by putting them in logical sequence. But, Prabhu, just WHOSE myths are you going to believe? The whole world is replete with myths! Tolkien said that myths are not lies, but they reflect truth and god. What seems myth may not necessary be a lie. We are not the only ones with difficult things to understand! I am very glad that you have brought up the question of myths and myth interpretation. As I indicated in one of my previous letters, allegorical interpretation is something that seems historically to be an important step in the development of scriptural interpretation in all religious traditions. When a Tolkien or a Jung says that myths are not lies, but that they reflect truth and god, this is to correct a common misuse of the word; it does not mean that these are truths in the same ...

mugdhaṁ māṁ nigadantu nīti-nipuṇā bhrāntaṁ muhur vaidikāḥ mandaṁ bāndhava-sañcayā jaḍa-dhiyaṁ muktādarāḥ sodarāḥ | unmattaṁ dhanino viveka-caturāḥ kāmaṁ mahā-dāmbhikaṁ moktuṁ na kṣamate manāg api mano govinda-pāda-spṛhām || Let the sharp moralist accuse me of being illusioned; the experts in Vedic ritual may slander me as misled, friends and relatives may call me lazy and irresponsible, while my brothers, no longer respectful or affectionate, call me a fool. I don't mind. The wealthy mammonites will point me out as mad, and learned philosophers assert that I am much too proud. Still, my mind does not budge an inch from its determination to serve Govinda's lotus feet. ( Pady ā vali 81, M ā dhavasya ) Actually, I don't think it is just "I don't mind." It is a kind of relish. We Hare Krishnas have been thumbing our nose at the Establishment since 1966. And they called us irresponsible and told us to get jobs, or to be good Christians, or philoso...

Part I. All in all, on reading this book I expected to come to some more earth-shattering conclusions about celibacy or discover some new facts that might make me adjust my opinions. Rather to my surprise, after reading through more than 400 pages of historical information, I felt rather less enlightened than more. Nevertheless, Abbott's summary of modern developments, celibate movements in the current environment, did resonate with me. She describes, as I occasionally have also on these pages, the malaise in today's society that has grown out of the commodification of sexuality and its use as a tool for commercialization. (Indeed, the growth of sexual liberty seems to be an integral part of the consumer culture.) I also described in an earlier post my horror at the kind of sexual escalation that has developed in youth culture, to a great extent the result of easy accessibility of pornography . Obsessions with the body, bodily appearance, the idealization of sexuality itsel...

I am going through a period of intellectual dullness. It has much to do with the move, which is very final. I am not using this blog as a confessional of late, though the temptation to do so is great. Kutichak recently compared me to a flame covered by a basket, refering to the description of Devaki's pregnancy. Clearly, the changes that I am going through are meant to bring that flame out into the open, but a flame in the open can easily be blown out. Who knows the future? Sometimes we just have to make a move. Like the Bhagavatam says--even if you run with your eyes closed, you won't trip, you won't fall. That is the essence of faith, the leap. Reading Christopher Hitchens' sharp comments on today's Slate makes me realize just how much work there is to be done. Hitchens is a veritable cutting machine in his analysis of American obsession with faith and belief against the background of the American founding fathers' secularism. Recently someone on the Guar...

I try to keep away from politics on this blog, but I came across this video by Max Blumenthal, Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour , on Huffington Post. I find the world one gets a glimpse of here to be pretty troubling. I believe in the power of myth, but I find it needs to be carefully vetted by the use of reason. I can't help but feel disgust at this smorgasborg of true belief, self-righteousness and sheer hypocrisy. If I had to be a Christian, I would still try to keep myself as far as possible from these deluded and dangerous people. Quakers, Catholics, liberal Protestants, Unitarians... anyone but these guys! And yet, unfortunately, they rule the roost in the good old U.S.A. Is there a better reason to fear the crumbling of the empire? ============= Actually, thinking about it a little later, I came back to a certain recollection of how I got here in the first place. These pink and bloated millionaire preachers are the perfect representation of t...

In the context of the discussion on modernity and Bhaktivinoda Thakur, I had the following notes that were not included. These are more or less disorganized. ...It should be noted that the general response of liberal Christianity has been to identify religion most generally with the search for meaning (See Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life ). The influence of modernism, however, has been such as to "demystify" the religious tendency: the experience of God and the experience of the world have somehow become indistinct. In other words (in the Christian way of expressing it), since God created the world as an expression of his own desire, (or in the Hindu way of expressing it) the world is a manifestation of Himself or His energies, that therefore the highest value in life can be found in this world--in its pleasures and pains, in the life experience itself. In the hierarchy of values, of course, justice, love and compassion stand at the forefront, and to act in accordance wit...

In view of the discussions in this blog, I though the article “Bishop’s take on sexuality ignites debate” (Michael Valpy, Globe and Mail , March 9, 2007) interesting. I have excerpted liberally from that article here. The Anglican Church is currently in the middle of a crisis that threatens schism. The issue is that of sexuality, with liberal North American churches taking a progressive stand on homosexual marriage and other hot button issues, while the numerically superior and more vibrant, at least in terms of growth, third-world churches taking conservative positions and resisting what appears to them as the first-world churches’ arrogance. One of the more vociferous spokesmen of the liberal position is Bishom Michael Ingham of New Westminster in British Columbia. Last week, at a church conference in Ottawa, he said that the church’s opposition to birth control, abortion, masturbation and homosexuality is morally groundless because its traditional teaching that sex is reserved for p...

In a previous posting , I used the expression “The Other came to me as Woman” twice. I think it is important to discuss what I meant here in connection with the question of strī-saṅga . Generally speaking, it would not be an understatement that, for the sādhaka , the world is a fearful thing. As for the Buddha, whose four noble truths begin with the word “misery,” the perception is that birth, old age, disease and death haunt us and incessantly reduce all our efforts in this world to mere vanity. Thus, nearly every religion starts with some kind of movement away from the world and harbors persistent monastic movements where other-worldly values are given preeminence. Rather than calling this a movement away , it may be more correct to call it a movement within. Nevertheless, though on this stage preoccupation with the perishable is seen as a waste of time, with a change in spiritual perceptions, the position of the external world is eventually raised again. Mystics who find uni...