Jagat

Memories from May 17 on Facebook. Snips and snails and puppy dog's tails, that's what little boys are made of. Sugar and spice and everything nice, that's what little girls are made of. So what are bhaktas made of? Little boys AND little girls.  

I got a letter from a devotee who called himself an “accidental hermit.” He said he was gloomy because he has outgrown the Hare Krishnas and religious people in general reject new ideas. He finds that many of them are locked into “scripture-repeat” and “look-for-heretic” mode. Nevertheless, he is attached to his friends, who are all devotees. But if says something that doesn’t conform to their ideas, he loses his friends, so he remains mum. The long and short is that he feels lonely, but can find no solace in New Age, or anything else. At the same time, he cannot blindly follow scripture. ==================== This is my quite short answer: Yes, you have put your finger on a problem--that of the loneliness of the individual. Since individuals evolve, human groupings, like religions, must evolve. IGM have the big problem of a very dominant charismatic founder. That magnifies small heresies. A truly big tent has to account for and permit a certain amount of heresy, i.e., allow fo...

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...

Looked over yesterday's post ... Blogging gives you a license to be incoherent; no editors, you know. I also see that all this commentary is likely meaningless to the majority of western Krishna devotees. This means only a very small minority of that ever-declining number is even a potential audience for what I have to say. And yet, I have no other audience... If enthusiasts are relatively scarce, so also are philosophers... Those with a philosophical bent are perturbed by traditional utterances even before the existence of alternative traditions is revealed to them. They find to be obscure what "everyone" takes for granted, or they do not see what reason there is to take it for granted, or they see further implications or plausible corollaries of what is believed. Whether their particular bent is critical or speculative usually determines whether they become resident sceptics or imaginative metaphysicians. In neither case are they content to remain entirely within the ...