Jagat

I am enjoying Gopala-vijaya more and more as I read it--and that is slowing me down. I still haven't been able to get through to the Dāna-līlā section because each little bit that I reads sets me off into a chain reaction of delight and realization. Today, I was simply trying to get through chapter 34, where Radha and Krishna's pūrva-rāga is starting to get quite intense. Neither Radha nor Madhava are able to find peace as they contemplate each other in their minds. As much pleasure as it brings them to think of the other, it causes them an anguish that is thousands of times greater. Radha is boxed in by her in-laws and so unable to openly express anything of what she is undergoing to anyone. So powerful is her feeling, it seems as if a potter's furnace is burning inside her. Krishna too is undergoing the exact same thing. kāhnāi se khena hoite āna nāhi mane dekhite se rādhā-maa dekhe vṛndāvane From that moment on, Krishna was unable to think of anything else. Lo...

The way I see feminism is this: The feminine qualities are valuable and ennobling. It is not that women must compete with men as men, but rather that the natural feminine perspective should be given a place of honor rather than being denigrated as inferior. In other words, society itself should be restructured according to feminine values, which are, in the final analysis, the truly civilizing values. A good example of the bias against the feminine is being illustrated in the troglodyte conservative take on Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's nominee to the US Supreme Court, which has centered on the idea of "empathy" as a negative. In the hearings, Sotomayor played the game by saying that a judge decides on the basis of "facts" on the one hand, and the "law" on the other. But what is missing here is that the "facts" include an entire empathic dimension. Do the facts of a particular case not include the entire psychological situation of all the players?...