Jagat

I think I am slowly coming out of my Jordan Peterson phase, though it might take a bit longer. To me he represents an aspect of the Western critique of the East. When the critical eyes of all these great Western thinkers turned to India, they were nearly all dismissive in each their own way.

My friend, Paramadwaiti Maharaj’s young sannyasi disciple from Argentina, Padmanabha Swami, recently wrote me a note thanking me for introducing him to Jordan Peterson after I posted a few links on my Facebook page. He then wrote an article , extracting a few points from Peterson’s latest book, Twelve Rules for Life An Antidote to Chaos , that he felt were compatible with Vaishnava teachings. At any rate, Peterson’s full-throated defense of religious belief and his debates with neo-atheists like Sam Harris have attracted the attention of Christian pastors like Paul VanderKlay who use his insights in their own understanding and explanations of religion. I have not written directly about Peterson very much on this blog, as my own journey is taking me away from the kind of academic explanations of religion that were a concern earlier on in this blog, after I had gone through religious studies at McGill University. Nevertheless, that is what first attracted me to Peterson was his...

Humanity is engaged in a conversation between faith and faithlessness and there are many shades of gray between the two. Opposition is not the answer, but synthesis. This is one of the reasons I like Jordan Peterson. He is arguing in favor of Western civilization, by which he means the theistic Christian tradition. He argues from biology and psychology to show that the basic tenets of Christian religion are integral to the evolutionary process and reflect biological elements in our makeup that stretch back millions of years, way before humanity awakened. And that we should thank our lucky stars that in the modern west especially we get to play an eminently playable game. In other words, all facility is there to make your life meaningful. It is a complex argument with many strands, but the conclusion derives from the Western countries' material, technical and social success, which can be attributed to the way that their culture evolved as a result of the specific ideas that its...

It has been a couple of months since I posted on the blog. I was not inactive. In Karttik I was making a big effort to enhance the Vrindavan Today website, concentrating on writing articles related to understanding the Dham as a "final step" in rāgānugā sādhana . I was conducting a daily meditation on the Vrindavan Mahimamrita (VMA) of Prabodhananda Saraswati. This work is no doubt the result of living in Vrindavan and experiencing its spiritual power. In particular, after returning from Bengal, the first time I had been away from Braj in two years, I could feel the effects of the Dham very intensely. I think that perhaps I will cross post the VMA articles series, either here or on an independent site, but we will see. At any rate, for the time being, people can read those articles on the VT website. A reader of this site recently wrote to me and asked the following: Namaskar. Throughout your writings you teach reality over hagiography. Recently, you have written tha...