Jagat

One of the verses that struck me when reading the Haṭha-yoga-pradīpikā was the following tatra vastu-dvayaṁ vakṣye durlabhaṁ yasya kasyacit | kṣīraṁ caikaṁ dvitīyaṁ tu nārī ca vaśavartinī || I will now tell you of two things that are very rare for anyone in this world. One is milk. The other is an cooperative woman. (HYP 3.84) I found the verse a little troublesome, first of all because milk does not seem all that hard to find, not like a spiritual partner for bhajan, and also because this word vaśa-vartinī seems to indicate a kind of patriarchal model of male-female relations, which I as a worshiper of the female deity, Radharani, i.e., as a worshiper of the Divine Feminine, Shakti, felt was philosophically incompatible. After all, Radharani is known as the one who controls Krishna through bhakti, indicating a primacy of the feminine. My position has always been that of the spiritual complementarity of the sexes, a position that is closer to the Shakta philosophy than to t...

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...

So in my last post, I spoke a little of my own experience on the Sahajiya path and how I found that the experiment as I had been conducting it had been deemed a failure. I was contemplating whether one should be pessimistic about my philosophical understanding, in view of the seeming rarity of success. In actual fact, what is happening, my friends, is that we are giving the juices time to ferment. I really do not know what the outcome of this experiment will be, because whatever happens, the repercussions of it will remain. In other words, very strong samskaras were created in the last ten years, and I really don't think it will be possible for me in the long run to accept the orthodox position, as expressed to me by a friend: This world is a shadow of the spiritual world and so resemblances exist in form....but not in substance. Male and female forms exist both here and there, so there is a slight resemblance of form. However the substance is entirely different. Visvanath Cakr...

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 ...

(Written yesterday.) I just got into Vrindavan and I will likely be pretty busy over the next couple of days. I would like to thank the many Anonymous posters for their interesting comments, some of which touched on many crucial points. In particular I would like to answer one or two things for the person who asked about genuine realization and other things. With regards to realization, I try to write only from such, and only use scriptural quotations where it is helpful or tasty. But I do also consider scripture and the insights of previous acharyas an important source of realization. The other day I completed the walk through Rajaji park that I mentioned a while back, and I was carrying some verse cards that I use for memorizing. I felt such elation as I sang the viśveṣāṁ verse from Gita Govinda that I thought I was a very lucky person and wished I was able to share some of what I was feeling. That is part of the purpose of this blog, of course. With regards to your point about...

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 ...