Jagat

I am in the hospital waiting for Prema Madhuri's operation to be finished. One week ago, she fell and fractured her hip. She tried to wait it out but the pain was too great and finally we went for the X-ray. We were told almost immediately to get to an emergency room and get it fixed. So finally on Friday we took a taxi to Sacre Coeur hospital in Montreal and after a rather long and uncomfortable wait on an emergency room stretcher, the orthopedic surgeon was able to get to her and operate. I have been with her the whole time, and indeed for the whole week I have been acting as her nurse to the best of my ability. I know that I have said a lot of pious words about love -- many of them are quoted here and over the past few weeks. At some point I came to the conclusion that prema prayojana meant a certain human culture that requires sacrifice that goes beyond the academic. But looking at them all I have to admit that they are theory and not so much practice.  The Hindu scriptures gen...

It appears  that I was recycling old poems and that recycling process seems to have taken place more than once, which goes to show that just by cutting down lines into digestible chunks can make them seem more profound or at least is an attempt to imbue them with profundity. Profundity is in the eye of the beholder, but a trick of arranging things into lines signals to the reader "this is profound." Occasionally, it is. But profundity is cheap in our day and age. Anyway, today's poem on the Rasa Dance is one that I have commented on several times in this blog, which presupposes that I thought I was hitting on something deep. The other links are given below. Facebook Memories May 8.

There is certainly an unexpected symmetry to these memories--a crossing over of multiple synchronicities. There are ideas that recurrently trouble us, were troubling us then and they also seem likely to continue to trouble us recurrently to arbitrary unconscious triggers like, in this case, the coincidence of dates.  The similarities, the synchronicities and so on, are only so if we notice them. Non-observation of any kind, whether it is the non-observation of scripture, the non-sensual imperception of things, the things that happen but are so far from consciousness that they do not even ruffle a hair of our heads as they pass by, equal the non-existence of synchronicity. It is just another name for a meaningful memory. An uddīpana if you will.  At any rate, the "guru issue" appears to be a recurrent preoccupation.

So I don't believe in gurus / who fall whole from the sky. / Gurus are forged in the furnace / like every other finished thing. //

Facebook reminded me that last year was the 50th anniversary of my joining the temple in Toronto. A year on down the road and headed back to Canada. It seems another momentous change is occurring in my life.  I told the story of " Oct. 1, 1970 " on this blog. In myth, travel is always associated with some dramatic change. In 1970, I hitch hiked with another seeker, who for some reason struck me as something of a fool, and intentionally headed, on his whim, to the Toronto temple on Beverley Street. Just the other day, I visited a friend of mine, Shyama Priya, originally from Holland, who is the same age as me, also white haired, pony-tailed and bearded. He has a little jewel of an ashram out on the Ramtaal road. It is right near the protected "forest" land that stretches from Chattikara Road all the way to his neighborhood. It is a cul-de-sac and thus very quiet. The road is barely tended to and it has that old Braj feel. When I arrived in the late afternoon, he was ...

Vaishnava sanga: Devakinandan Thakur and his disciples doing their bit for "clean Vrindavan." This important anuccheda discusses the question of renouncing the guru in more detail than heretofore. There are actually several subjects within the anuccheda , all of them connected to association and service to the devotees. The subject of the guru comes in connection with his allowing or not to render service or have association with other devotees. Since devotional association is so important for spiritual progress, if one's guru prohibits it or show negativity towards genuine devotees from a competing sect, etc., then the disciple should distance himself from that guru, and even reject him outright. This is because his attitude towards other Vaishnavas is symptomatic of a non-Vaishnava. The other parts of the anuccheda talk about different kinds of service to the Vaishnavas as well as vratas , etc. These are brought up to ward off the suspicion that since servic...