Jagat

I started publicly professing to be a Sahajiya when I saw various individuals promoting an agenda that I was not in tune with. I do not believe that sexuality is meant to be "free," or to be indulged in wantonly. The Prema we talk about is pure . That is the axiomatic basis. Just because sexuality is involved does not mean that it is necessarily kāma , any more than any other activity transformed by relation ("dovetailing") to Krishna is kāma . It is part of the process of converting the innate desire that is expressed towards matter ( kāma ) into prema , i.e., that same desire directed towards God. There is only one energy in the soul, that is desire for union. Everything else is subordinate to that, and everything else is a servant of that. sarve vidhi-niṣedhāḥ syur etayor eva kiṅkarāḥ . I fully expect Sahajiyaism and the other paths related to Gaudiya Vaishnavism -- good, bad and ugly -- to manifest in the course of time, just as happened in Bengal. There is ...

Love is the sthāyi-bhāva . Prema is its rasāvasthā . According to Madhusudana Saraswati, God himself is the  sthāyi-bhāva  of love. When certain emotional upsurges heat the heart and allow him to be imprinted there. He is both the vibhāva and the sthāyi -bhāva . The first of these being the bimba , the latter the pratibimba , or reflection, related in exactly the same way as īśvara to the jīva . The same idea expressed in Vaishnava terms would be that it is the reflection of the  svarūpa-śakti. Only God is capable of melting the heart fully. Since He is all things, even the mundane nāyaka and nāyikā are nothing but He, but incapable of fully melting the heart, since they are He covered by Maya. Maya is God's own potency for self-covering. ============= Here is Rupa Goswami's definition of prema : samyaṅ-masṛṇita-svānto mamatvātiśayāṅkitaḥ | bhāvaḥ sa eva sāndrātmā budhaiḥ premā nigadyate || When that very same  bhāva  described in BRS 1....

Viktor Frankl meaning article . Human beings make the mistake, you could call it the “romantic fallacy,” that there is something called love, which when one falls into, everything will be complete and one is spiritually fulfilled. That is precisely why it is called a puruṣārtha of kāma , because it carries with it this illusion of completion. In a film, one sees the lovers kiss in the train station, all obstacles have been removed, and they live happily ever after. That is clearly a fallacy. A similar fallacy exists in spiritual life: it is the liberation fallacy, it is the idea of any kind of perfection in stasis, whether called nirvana or mukti or prema. It doesn't matter what we call it, if we identify it as the absolute cessation of suffering, a stasis, then it is fundamentally a fallacy. It is not bhakti, it is not reality. That is why bhakti theologians object to it. Both kāma or mukti are dreams of a state of being that is complete plenitude. Similarly, the other pu...

A friend of Facebook wrote a status: "I don't believe in sexiness," which elicited a number of comments. In a talk I gave last night here in Rishikesh, one person once again accused me of promoting "free sex": nothing could be further from the truth and indeed it gets tiresome defending oneself against such a shallow understanding of my theology and practice. We are in a world where hypersexualization has vitiated the spiritual potential of erotic love. But sexuality is so fundamental to human life that if we do not understand how to cultivate the sacred in that, we will never truly understand madhura-rasa . This also takes discipline because it is a sādhana . It is pleasurable, of course, because spiritual life IS about the highest pleasure, and the highest pleasure is love, and the highest love is the love of God, which we experience through our human love relations. So I too find it gross when I see a woman flaunting her sexuality, like the movie stars w...

A couple of years ago, I started summarizing the three ratis from  Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi   I never completed the series, but the first two articles can still be found here: Samañjasā and Sādhāraṇī . I will now try to complete this project by working on  samarthā rati . This may require more than one article, and I intend to tie it in with some other ideas. I will start off this discussion by simply quoting verbatim my translation of  Mañjarī-svarūpa-nirūpaṇa , completed in 1983. ======== The dominant mood of erotic sacred rapture is also given the name of samarthā rati (“competent affection”). Kṛṣṇa is the greatest lover in the supernatural affaires-de-coeur of the sacred land of Vrindavan and there, the supreme among his lady-loves are the cowherd girls. Here Viśvanātha Cakravartin makes some relevant comments about samarthā rati in his commentary on Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi : This samarthā rati is extremely potent and exists eternally in the gopīs; it does not dep...

In November, I got a nice present from Brahmachari Brajvihari Sharan at Golok Dham Ashram in Delhi: An annotated copy of Harivyas Devacharya’s Mahāvāṇī (ca. 1573 CE). Of late, there has been a rather unappetizing scandal surrounding the sex tapes of a popular Bhagavata speaker, which raises doubts again about the appropriateness of discussing or repeating Radha and Krishna’s “confidential”, i.e., erotic, pastimes. It seems that such worries are well-founded when such prurient interest in what appear to be mundane sexuality is dressed up in Vrindavan garb and then marketed for profit to those who have little or no appreciation for Braja rasa in its purest and most transcendental form. Nevertheless, we must, against all criticism, reaffirm our own faith in madhura-rasa, the erotic mood of love, as the king of the “mellows” and in Radha and Krishna, the divine embodiment of that mood, in two moieties as Rasarāj and Mahābhāva. Vrindavan is unique in that it is the ...

This idea of a middle stage of love is probably not new; there is nothing new under the sun, but it arises out of a conviction that everything in the human condition is material for the purpose of spiritual culture. If love is the goal, then how powerful a device human love must be for the culture of Divine Love! We say Krishna is the attractive power. His reflection is mundane Lust who so easily conquers over the three worlds. We are told to see him in all the various opulent and wonderful manifestations of material creation, with this one exception. But that is completely ludicrous. If we cannot recognize the presence of Krishna in the most powerful forces that exist, then our whole endeavor is a mockery. I will admit that this is like playing with nuclear fuel in some ways. But there is a characteristic where material pleasure and spiritual pleasure have an unlikely feature in common. Feeding the flames results in their growing higher. The famous verse by Yayati, which is foun...

Listening to Radhanath Swami's lecture on the Internet radio. Looking at form rather than content, I can almost feel that Protestant preacher mood when the Prabhupada cadences don't start peeking through. Since Radhanath is Jewish in background, perhaps he picked it up from Kirtanananda Swami. It's amazing, actually. I have heard Radhanath Maharaj speak two or three times, and it seems that he repeats several things that make it clear just how close to the orthodoxy this Sahajiya doctrine is. I see that what I am saying here is not really so radical after. It is just one small step, one small piece of the puzzle. The concept of perverted reflection... The idea of transforming this world through consciousness... The idea of yukta-vairägya . It is all there. All that is needed is taking that one vital step that links these ideas to the spiritual power sexuality, that allows for the transforming power of love in this world. Unfortunately, without that, no madhura-rasa . No...

 I recently rediscovered the following article, which came about as a result of a discussion on Gaudiya Discussions centered around the Gita verse (7.12, dharmāviruddha-bhūteṣu kāmo'smi bhāratarṣabha ) that Madhavananda mentions in his refutation of Sahajiyaism and referred to earlier on this blogsite. Since this is all a part of the general theme of this blog, I have decided to repost it here. The statement, "I am desire ( kāma ) when it does not go against religious principles" is found in one of the vibhūti-yoga sections of the Gita, where Krishna is describing his own glories. Desire is one of the most glorious and powerful manifestations of the creation and, as Krishna says at the end of Chapter 10, wherever such glorious manifestations are to be found, they are he. At least, they are clues pointing to his existence and his glory. As such, the extremely narrow definition of kāma given by the Gaudiya commentators seems inadequate. Though sexual desire as procr...

So we have seen the idea that one who has come into identity with Brahman can no longer be considered the bhoktā . How can anyone who is identical with the Other be its enjoyer? This is called being ātmārāma , or enjoying in the self, a consistent theme throughout Hindu scriptures, applying equally to God and to the jiva. God's talking pleasure in the jiva or his other energies is not something that goes against the principal of ātmārāma . Nor does the idea of the jiva, enjoying with God, "the soul of his soul," contradict the ātmārāma principle. From the devotional point of view, Krishna states to the gopis-- na mayy āveśita-dhiyāṁ kāmaḥ kāmāya kalpate bharjitāḥ kvathitā dhānā prāyo bījāya neśate The desires of those absorbed in thought of me are not to be considered material desire; just as barley once fried and boiled cannot later be used as seed. (10.22.26) BBT translation: "The desire of those who fix their minds on Me does not lead to material desire f...