Jagat

Whiteboard from class on rasa. [Earlier articles on psychological models in the context of Radha Krishna can be found here  and here .] We have been studying Madhusudana's Bhakti-rasāyana and some other texts on rasa and I finally managed to diagram things in a way that seems to me to explain the idea as a kind of psychological model, and which can be used to include all the rasa theorists from Bharata to Rupa Goswami. Actually Madhusudana does not fit this model exactly, even though he provides an important element in the understanding of the interface of rasa and psychology. There are a number of posts that explain aspects of this model, others that are forthcoming and hopefully we will be able to tie them all in together eventually. The overall idea is based on the concept that the personality is formed by impressions that are the result of emotional experiences that leave imprints on the unconscious mind. There are, according to Bharata, eight rasas, with śān...

A lot has been written about androgyny from a variety of perspectives in recent years, mostly by Jungians and those various religious tendencies that find Jung's ideas useful. These persons tend toward New Age type philosophies, or what Huxley called "the perennial philosophy," doctrines that generally make us in the Vaishnava tradition recoil because of their great fluidity and ultimate indifference to the principle of bhakti. In fact, they look a lot like the Hinduism that Gaudiya Vaishnavas feel uncomfortable with and reject as impersonalism. At the very least, if the Jungian goal of psychological individuation, which is characterized as a coincidentia oppositorum, is the ultimate object of the spiritual quest, then it seems to us not to really be "the best story," but only a part of it, as much as liberation is only valued when seen in the context of prema bhakti . In order to follow up on this subject, I have been reading a number of works on the sub...