Jagat

After a hiatus of several months, we are continuing with Gadadhar Pran Das's Another side of Bhaktivinoda Thakur. In the very interesting previous chapter about Siddha Krishnadas Baba's Guṭikā can be found here . In Chapter 5 Gadadhar recounts how he came into the association of Madan Mohan Das Babaji Maharaj, Gopal Das Babaji Maharaj and Ananta Das Pandit Baba (now Radha Kund Mahant), who each published their own versions of the Guṭikā. Gadadhar studied  especially   under Madan Mohan Baba, spending extended periods of time with him in Radha Kund and then Govinda Kund between 1980 and 1990. 1: GuruNishtha 2: Raganuga Sadhana following Bhaktivinoda Thakur's ManjariParampara 3: Svarasiki Bhajan 4: Attaining Siddhi 5: Discovering Siddha Krishnadas Baba's Gutika 6: The contents of the Gutika The Guṭikā 's contents For rāga mārga sādhakas and sādhikās the Guṭikā is indispensable. Here are a few reasons: To help lay a good foundation for o...

One of the things that Gadadhar and I talked about the other day was the Janma Sthan. He was reading to me from his latest chapter in "Another side of Bhaktivinoda Thakur," and in the context of Bipin Bihari Goswami brought up the controversy about the birthplace. He downplayed it in part by saying that Mahaprabhu responds to devotion, and the rāgānugā bhakta in particular is not confined by material time or place, but in his mind goes to the eternal Goloka Navadvipa. Ananta Das Babaji's dsiciple Vaishanva Pada Dasji also said to me last year when I saw him at Radha Kund: "What is the harm in having two birthplaces? Why argue over it? We have two places to remember Mahaprabhu's appearance. Mahaprabhu accepts everyone's sincere devotion and prayers. The external place is not the important thing." "But," Gadadhar said, "I don't agree with these Gaudiya Maths who just claim that their math is on the site of Nandanacharya's house...

Yesterday was a fairly uneventful day, yet to describe it would require volumes, a kind of Proustian effort to understand how entire lifetimes, entire worlds, universal histories are contained in each microsecond, that to fully describe any moment would require volumes equal to the universe itself. This insight rarely flashes before anyone's mind, since we are usually fixated on immediate goals and desires, and those absorb our mind and intelligence to the exclusion of nearly all the phenomena, internal and external, that clutter ever moment of our lives. And to write about it, well to write about it meaningfully, you have to make it into a story, and a story is an organization of those phenomena into recognizable and communicable patterns, which is why human beings are mythopoeic creatures, turning everything into story and myth. We have to simplify, but simplification means a kind of falsification. Trying to reduce everything into digestible truths usually means caricatures, c...