Jagat

A lot of stuff from a wide range of preoccupations--Gītā Govinda, Vr̥ndāvana-mahimāmr̥ta, Yoga-sūtra, American politics. Quite a mishmash. I chose for the title an utterance from seven years ago, when I seem to have been having deep thoughts.

"So it is clear that the yogis receive their knowledge through non-imaginary, non-fictitious ( a-vikalpita ) samādhi , and use the fiction ( vikalpa ) of āgama and anumāna to convey the true knowledge." [Vachaspati Misra to Yoga-sūtra I.43 (trans. Swami Veda Bharati)] [ I get  the problem here, but it is hard for me to believe that any experience is free of an overlay of memory and certainly when śabda is given as much importance as in Vaishnavism, one expects that "direct experience" will conform with what one has learned, heard or become conditioned to. But even a yogi who is directing his practice and self-conditioning is also working towards an expected experience that is strongly influenced by memory. This is a significant point and requires clarification, Memory is notoriously fallible just like sense perception -- indeed the defectiveness of both is intertwined -- but for Vaishnavas, memory is the locus of the practice, which is distinct from dhyāna altho...

These thoughts are based on conversations I had in 2017, after I had posted on my response to Srila Narayan Maharaj's statements related to Bhaktivinoda Thakur's  Sva-likhita-jivani (SLJ), which it would be advisable to read before going on here. I am currently doing a bit of work on SLJ and the Thakur's frank description of his conversion to Chaitanya Vaishnavism is particularly important to us, who are also converts. I have heard that Swami Tripurari Maharaj coined the sobriquet "the first European convert to Vaishnavism" since the Thakur passed through a thorough indoctrination into Western thinking before being exposed to the Chaitanya Charitamrita and Bhagavata Purana when already in his 30's. His English-medium education, which a strong element of Unitarian Universalism through the association of Reverend Charles Dall , was not monolithic. In fact, it reflected the contemporary debates in Europe and America about scriptural literalism and the natur...

This article was first sent on the short-lived Garuda  list serve run by Rocana Dasa, most probably in 1997. It was available on line on the Wise Wisdoms site for a while, but was taken down. On rereading, I find it still relevant. Reason and scriptural interpretation We are human beings endowed with reason, with which we try to make sense of our experiences in life and learn from them. In Krishna consciousness we have been indoctrinated to mistrust reason and even our direct experience to the benefit of authority-based learning. The argument is, of course, cogent: You cannot invent your own language, and there is no point in reinventing the wheel, and if we wish to see far, it is advisable to stand on the shoulders of giants. But even when standing on the shoulder of a giant, it is with our own eyes that we see and with our own brains that we process the sensory or extrasensory information our eyes give us. Thus, where scripture is concerned, we state the following: C...

A look back on the Rishikesh classes As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been in Rishikesh the past two weeks, teaching a dwindling number of students an impromptu course that I spontaneously entitled, "Bhakti, rasa and psychology." There are three subjects in one which, when taken together, form the basis of my philosophy, but it was a pretty big chunk to get across in ten classes, especially to an audience that for the most part was not conversant with any of them. It is said that a good teacher is one who can explain a complex subject matter simply, and I am working towards that goal. As always, my primary objective was to try to integrate the three subjects as best I could, in short, to come to a better understanding of the subject matter and put it into words; and, if it could be communicated to others, so much the better. Some parts of the course naturally worked better than others. Many of these subjects are well represented on this blog, though not in a ...

I am at Swami Rama Sadhaka Gram in Rishikesh for a few days, lecturing and tending to some personal business. The other day a visiting sannyasi from the Shringeri Math tradition came to perform a Shri Chakra puja at the newly inaugurated "Mother Goddess" shrine on the campus. Swami Veda personally supervised the Jaipur sculptors in the forming of the white marble image, which he calls "White Tara" based on the Tibetan form of the Mother Goddess. In particular, he told me, he wanted the image to have soft contours and a divine motherly feel, without the hard edges that are sometimes seen in Tara deities. Though the puja was supposedly an abbreviated one, it lasted a full five hours. The pujari, who prefered not to have his name publicized,  conducted the entire ritual in complete silence, though he was mentally chanting the complex mantras as ordained in the paddhatis. His knowledge of all the mudras and gestures was clearly apparent, and he maintained a relax...

Radha and Krishna are simultaneously Love and the symbol of love. Some people seem to think that I am saying that Radha and Krishna are some kind of "role model" for human lovers. That is not what I think. The question is complex and one has to have a real close understanding of the psychology of myth, symbol and archetype and their relation to spiritual experience. We start from the premise, based on our faith, experience, and reason, of the reality of God. God is represented psychologically in many ways as an archetypal reality. People think that you can reduce psychological realities, like myths and stories, to the realm of falsehood or fiction, but in fact they are  functioning realities and remain so even when repressed. For Jung, archetypes are equivalent to the instincts. The archetype of God, according to Jung, is simply the "Self", a realization that no doubt came to him from Indian thought. But Jung also recognized the Syzygy, or Divine Couple, ...

In the previous post I talked about śabda-vṛtti and rasa . Now in fact this was a preamble to a response to those who are confused about metaphorical interpretations of Radha and Krishna and the lila. In another earlier post ( The Two Rasa Lilas, Again ), I made a statement to the effect that Krishna was both bhagavān and the archetypal man. My friend Shivaji said that calling Krishna the archetypal man was a metaphoric interpretation. That is wrong. It is the direct statement of the shastra, even though many devotees turn a blind idea to this. To again clarify: The idea of Krishna as  bhagavān  is the Bhāgavata version. If there is a metaphorical version of Krishna lila, it is there in what the Goswamis called and rejected as the ādhyātmika interpretation. In fact, however, they cannot entirely reject the metaphorical version. It is just that they would not take the metaphorical version exclusively at the price of the literal one which the Bhāgavata makes...

I was sent by a link on Facebook to a live lecture by Niranjana Swami in Russia. The main theme was a retelling of the Prabhupada story. It was an embellishment of the Prabhupada myth: Old man goes to foreign land and in the face of multiple obstacles spreads God's message. His story shows how mythology works and grows: A man in a temple saw an old sannyasi crying in front of deities of Gaura Nitai and asked him why he was crying. The old sannyasi answered, "I have been ordered by my guru maharaj to preach the yuga dharma of Harinam sankirtan in the Western countries. This is an impossible task and so I am crying, praying to Gaura Nitai to bless me and allow me to fulfill this mission. I am leaving tomorrow." Many years later, the devotees were selling Back to Godheads in India, and this man inquired from them what they were doing. They showed him the picture of Prabhupad on the cover and this man immediately recognized him as the saint who was crying in the temple on th...