Jagat

Viktor Frankl meaning article . Human beings make the mistake, you could call it the “romantic fallacy,” that there is something called love, which when one falls into, everything will be complete and one is spiritually fulfilled. That is precisely why it is called a puruṣārtha of kāma , because it carries with it this illusion of completion. In a film, one sees the lovers kiss in the train station, all obstacles have been removed, and they live happily ever after. That is clearly a fallacy. A similar fallacy exists in spiritual life: it is the liberation fallacy, it is the idea of any kind of perfection in stasis, whether called nirvana or mukti or prema. It doesn't matter what we call it, if we identify it as the absolute cessation of suffering, a stasis, then it is fundamentally a fallacy. It is not bhakti, it is not reality. That is why bhakti theologians object to it. Both kāma or mukti are dreams of a state of being that is complete plenitude. Similarly, the other pu...

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 ...