Jagat

Durvasa Muni's ashram, about two kilometers across from Vishram Ghat in Mathura. (P.C. Pure Bhakti ) Oh mind! My brother! Here you have come with a little hope to this raremost Vrindavan forest, which is such a supreme essence of the ocean of Krishna’s blissful rasa, such a form of variations of the ujjvala-rasa that even those who have gone through all the topmost Upanishads have not had even the slightest glimpse of it, and yet you constantly wander around in externals, driven by the witch of petty aspirations. (1.49) kṛṣṇānanda-rasāmbudheḥ parataraṁ sāraṁ vicitrojjvalā- kāraṁ pāra-gatair api śruti-śiro-vṛndasya nekṣyaṁ manāk | śrī-vṛndā-vipinaṁ sudurlabhataraṁ pratyāśam āsādya bhoḥ kṣudrāśā-kupiśācikā-vaśa-gato bambhramyase kiṁ bahiḥ || Commentary Prabodhananda has already mentioned the Upanishads in 1.12 and 1.22 . Here he speaks of the śruti-śiraḥ , which is a reference to Gopāla-tāpanī , as indicated in Gautamīya-tantra . The ujjvala-rasa is t...

premā dvayo rasikayor ayi dīpa eva hṛd-veśma bhāsayati niścala eva bhāti | dvārād ayaṁ vadanatas tu bahiṣkṛtaś cet nirvāti śīghram athavā laghutāṁ upaiti The Prema of the Rasika pair is a wondrous lamp that floods the room of the heart with light and burns bright with a steady flame. Should the door of the mouth be opened and the lamp brought out into the wind, it quickly is extinguished, or its effulgence reduced. Prema-sampuṭikā 68 Secrecy is the essence of romantic love. Secrecy means being able to control your sexual desire. The problem is that no one today is trained in this. I was reading in Gopinath Kaviraj's explanation of "Tantric" society, by which he was giving a Tantrik explanation to the Vedic or Varnashram social system, he says that the first stage of life, the student life or  brahmacaryā , is all about controlling the bindu . The essence of education is to control the bindu . It was being able to control the bindu that made you eligible fo...

Truth Dig published an interesting excerpt from a book by Robert Jensen called “The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men, " [ dead link ]  which begins with the question of sexual equality and prostitution. "How can a society achieve a meaningful level of justice if people from one sex/gender class could be routinely bought and sold for sexual services by people from another sex/gender class?" This of course leads to questions about the meaning of sexuality itself, and these significant questions are at the basis of the theory and practice of Sahaja. The excerpted piece ends with the following reflection, More than two decades ago, when I first started thinking about this question, I kept coming back to the phrase to describe an argument that is intense but which doesn’t really advance our understanding — we say that such a debate ‘produced more heat than light’. Much of the talk about sexuality in contemporary culture is in terms of heat: Is the sex you are ha...

It is true that to speak on dovetailing sexuality for bhakti to an orthodox devotional audience is inviting opprobrium. People have already (as I suspected they would) complained to other senior Vaishnavas about me. People hear the word "sex" and they immediately respond with their deepest saṁskāras . Sex is the desire for love manifest in the human body. Love is the desire for giving and receiving the pleasure of union. Union with the non-physical normally does not precede union on the physical plane. On the other hand, to think that experience of sexual union on the physical plane without spiritual maturity has ultimate benefit is a pipe dream. Union with God based on disgust with the material world is not love. It is mukti . The human organism has many levels. The foolish think they can reach the spirit and the soul without first purifying the gross anna-maya body, the prāṇa body, the mental body, the vijñāna body, and the ānanda-maya body. Similarly the ex...

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 ...

A bit like old days... Alone working at the computer, listening to the radio and throwing chips from the workshop at the internet... Nostalgia is a curious beast. I was going through my old blogs for the past five years. Some of the most creative moments came from the cavern of a troglodyte. kālena pādaṁ labhate tathāyaṁ tathaiva pādaṁ guru-yogataś ca | utsāha-yogena ca pādam ṛcchec cchāstre ṇa ca pādaṁ ca tato'bhiyāti || The disciple learns one-fourth from the guru, one-fourth by his own effort, one-fourth by discussion with his co-disciples, and one-fourth by the efflux of time. ( Sanat-sujātiyā 3.13) The translation does not give the four items in the same sequence as the Sanskrit, following the commentary ascribed to Shankara. Swami Veda's translation, which is more faithful to the original, goes as follows: The disciple attains a quarter in time, a quarter through association with the guru, a quarter through his own enthusiasm and diligence, and the final quarter ...

In Patiala and Delhi, I had a TV in my room and so I checked out what was going on in the 24-hour news cycle world. There were two major scandals in the last couple of weeks involving Indian sadhus, gurus and what-have-you, whom they call by the generic name "babas". At least they seem to have given up the term "God-men" which was a longstanding favorite of theirs I particularly hate. (I seem to be wrong about that.) There was even a little juicy video to play over and over again, what to speak of other clips of the babas dancing ecstatically. One TV station even played that up by juxtaposing the dancing guru with a belly dancer to make him look even more idiotic. The anchor man very sincerely said, "We are doing this as a public service as so many people put their faith in babas and they need to know who is genuine and who is not." Then Baba Ramdeva went on record in calling for the death penalty (!) for bogus babas, saying they are giving g...

One of my students is a 25-year-old brahmachari named Gangesh. He is from a well-to-do family in Bangalore, but has taken a vow of naishthika brahmacharya from Swami Veda since joining the Gurukula in September last year. Gangesh is dark-skinned with his head shaven, leaving a large, South Indian sikha. He is a bit stocky, strong looking, and his face, with bright and even teeth, exudes an effulgent good humor. Yesterday he came into my room to show me his latest enthusiasm, a copy of Tirumantiram , the Tamil Shaiva Siddhanta work, which according to Gangesh “contains everything.”  I leafed through it and it does indeed look interesting. It is a famous work which I have unfortunately never read, so I put it on my mental filing cabinet for things that I must one day and hopefully will do. Then Gangesh, with the force of the Ganges as it passes under Lakshman Jhula, began to tell me of his adventures over the past few years. To repeat everything would take more time than I have, but ...

Part I. All in all, on reading this book I expected to come to some more earth-shattering conclusions about celibacy or discover some new facts that might make me adjust my opinions. Rather to my surprise, after reading through more than 400 pages of historical information, I felt rather less enlightened than more. Nevertheless, Abbott's summary of modern developments, celibate movements in the current environment, did resonate with me. She describes, as I occasionally have also on these pages, the malaise in today's society that has grown out of the commodification of sexuality and its use as a tool for commercialization. (Indeed, the growth of sexual liberty seems to be an integral part of the consumer culture.) I also described in an earlier post my horror at the kind of sexual escalation that has developed in youth culture, to a great extent the result of easy accessibility of pornography . Obsessions with the body, bodily appearance, the idealization of sexuality itsel...

I have been promising for some time a review of A History of Celibacy by Elizabeth Abbott . I did not do so primarily because I had not finished it and the book is fairly complex in its description of the varieties of celibacy, so I have been trying to come to some conclusion about what to make of it. Indeed, I think she may even have played with the title, The Varieties of Celibate Experience before settling on A History of Celibacy . Part of the hook used to publicize this book was the infobyte that Abbott had herself become celibate in the course of researching and writing it. This made her something of an oddity and short-lived media darling. She admits that she started the work with the idea that celibacy was aberrant or unnatural and finished with the conclusion that it is a genuine, normal human phenomenon that deserves attention on its own merits. Her general thesis, to which she returns again and again through all the complexities of rationales and motivations given for ...

From both the Vaishnava and the Occidental points of view, what I am doing here may seem bizarre. For the modern Westerner, it is patently ridiculous to try to argue for a sacred sexuality; for some of them, sexuality is an animal instinct that should be indulged without guilt or fear, for others, the romantic premise has been so ingrained that a degree of sacredness to sexual love is axiomatic. Nevertheless, even those holding the latter idea would find any proposal to add rituals, mantras, yoga, and extensive philosophical rationalizations far in excess of necessity. The former would hold that this is a sign of some kind of deep ambivalence to sexuality, indeed neuroticism. On the other hand, those who have come through Iskcon and traditional Vaishnavism and who have been deeply convinced that the celibate standard is the objective and the compulsory prerequisite to higher levels of spirituality, will find all these arguments, no matter how sophisticated, just sophistry, word juggler...