Jagat

May 1, 2016 Part One was actually written on April 28, 2016 and is included in the memories for that day. This article also has some relation to the reflections I had on Gurus Falling From the Sky . Unfortunately some of the pages linked to in article have been lost. I would kind of like to see them--I think I wrote what I could find out about Vivekananda, Ramkrishna and Sharada Mother's visits to Vrindavan, but for some reason never crossposted to this blog. 

I had to tend to other duties the past week or so and thus was unable to complete the article I started earlier. On thinking about Muralishwar's comment that my belief is that "human love IS Love Divine." Although I there said  "the natural loves can be sadhanas of Divine Love within the context of bhakti-yoga, " the fact is that for a pure devotee human love and divine love are indeed one. The reason for that is that Krishna is the ātmā of all ātmās , the soul of all souls, the Self of all selves, ātmānam akhilātmanām . In the previous article, it was said that the difference between kāma  and prema is really centered on the Object of that love. If one loves Krishna, that is prema . If one loves someone else without any knowledge of the fact that there is nothing outside of Krishna, then it is kāma . kṛṣṇam enam avehi tvam ātmānam akhilātmanām jagad-dhitāya so’py atra dehīvābhāti māyayā vastuto jānatām atra kṛṣṇaṁ sthāsnu cariṣṇu ca bhagavad-rūpam ...

Dear friends, First of all, my apologies for the lengthy silence. Silence is something of a fetish around this ashram, though I am publicly teased for being a rather noisy fellow around here. I am learning, though. So, do I have anything at all to say? Well, in general terms: I am still a Vaishnava, but I am, moreover, an acintya-bhedābheda-vādī . The more I study any text of any kind, I realize that my philosophical position holds squarely to both the personal as the surface of spiritual life and the impersonal as the unifying underlying ground of that life. This has ramifications everywhere, and it only becomes stronger with my sādhanā . But, of course, I have become identified with my Sahajiyaism, and I think that most or at least many people who read on this site are inquisitive about that. But it must be made clear that my Sahajiyaism is based on a solid philosophical and theological basis--many of the points which I have already raised and indeed which are familiar to t...

One of the psychological features of devotees that atheists like to complain about is that we always want to be saved. Whenever we get a little bit weak we start hollering for God to come and save us. I haven't had that mood for a long time. But still, from time to time, I start doing it. Reading in Vivekananda's biography, it says that in his Brahma Samaj days, he could not stand "devotees who would cry emotionally, pray for God's mercy in every sentence they spoke, or repeatedly condemn themselves as lower than worms or insects. He thought that a man should hold his head up high like a man and worship God with steadfastness and unbroken resolve." (Satyendranath Majumdar, Hindi edition, p.58) [विशेषतः भक्तों का भावावेश में रोना, बात बात में दयामय भगवान् की कृपा के लिये प्रार्थना करना, अपने को कीटानुकीट के समान हेय मानकर आत्मनिन्दा करना अदि बातों की नरेन्द्र कठोर आलोचना करते थे । वे तो यही उचित समझते थे कि पुरुष पुरुष की ही तरह मस्तक ऊंचा करके दृढ़ उद्यम और अ...

I am just reading a book by a Bhakti Vilas Tirtha Maharaj disciple I had heard of, but did not know very well. His name is Janardan Chakravarti and he is (or was) a professor in Bengali literature at the University of Calcutta (Jadavpur?). He wrote a book in English called Bengal Vaisnavism and Sri Chaitanya (1975)* (See below for details). Chakravarti shows signs of that Bengali syncretism that most of us Western Vaishnavas are so suspicious of: he speaks of Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Aurobindo, Rabindranath and all the other Bengali cultural heroes in a favorable way. This kind of Bengali nationalism is something that we feel averse to, although I recently wrote on my blog that, as a consequence, we (I mean Western KC in general) have lost contact with Bengali culture per se and are participating in the creation of a neo-pan-Indian culture that mirrors the diminishing influence of Bengal in that world, but which ignores the fact that Bengali culture has been interacting with and in...