Jagat

Prisni wrote the following status on Facebook a few days ago and I responded almost immediately. I have been meditating on the exchange for a few days. I will quote her whole post because it does show some nice devotional sentiment: She was responding to the following blog post . Woke up in the middle of the night, this pops up on my phone, and I cannot fall asleep again, me thinking [ about the following blog post ]. The last sentence “You need to understand Radharani by entering into her soul. That is what lovemaking is all about.”, and have the male approach in a nutshell: "I will come, I will conquer, I will penetrate." And no, it is so not working. . You have to let Radharani enter your soul, let her energy, her mercy, enter you. That is what sakhi bhava is all about. When her energy enters your soul, then you become an instrument of Her. She plays her tune, the strings in your soul vibrate. That way you experience what she experiences, that is the key to "ma...

The other day in my Gopala Champu class, I said the following: "We can't understand the love of God without knowing love in this world. It has to reflect reality. You won't find love of God through failure of love in this world." This comment did not pass unnoticed and one of the students asked Babaji for clarification. He said he disagreed and the student asked us if we were willing to debate the issue. Since we have been doing Nyāya and Babaji is something of an aficionado, he presented his point of view as a logical syllogism, making that the center of debate rather than my original statement, which made the discussion a little untidy. I was not prepared to answer his argument directly, but many in the audience were disappointed by the radical bifurcation of kāma and prema . At one point Babaji says that desire is not in the soul. Frankly, I think that there is a bit of confusion in the sampradāya due to the Hindu world-view arising from Mayavada and Y...

Over the last few days I have gone through a few anxious moments. There is no moment in life where a conflict does not lurk. In Gaudiya Vaishnavism, there is a big conflict between the so-called bhajanānandī and the goṣṭhyānandī , introverts and extroverts. I have been living in Vrindavan, the ultimate destination of all Vaishnavas, at least according to Rupa Goswami, who lived in a different time, a different world from the one today. I love Vrindavan and I wish to cultivate love for Radha and Krishna in the way I do best, by doing bhajan and writing. Indeed, I have a strong introverted tendency. For me it has been characterized by a sense of unworthiness, that I am never good enough or accomplished enough to make a worthwhile contribution.  On the other hand, in my youth I underwent a period of intense indoctrination in ISKCON to the idea of preaching. And that is characterized, as we often see, by an overinflated and borrowed  sense of confidence . Neither of these ...

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 ...

One year is over, another begins. Happy New Year to all. For me, it is again a time for some reflection. It has been an eventful year for me, but still not entirely satisfying, mainly because of my own limitations. What have I done this year? What have I accomplished? And where am I going and what do I hope to yet achieve? I am going to make a couple of blog posts musing on these matters, which will no doubt look like navel-gazing, but then what are blogs for? Of course, the main, basic, fundamental point is prema . This is such a grand and cosmic goal that it sometimes gets lost in the day-to-day functioning of life, the immediate goals, but one should never forget it. And in fact, everything that I do, in one way or another, is connected to that overarching principle, prema is the prayojana . Even when it appears otherwise, that is the principle that I live by to the best of my understanding. And if one ever feels satisfied, then that merely means his hunger was not great enoug...

I like this verse so much, I am just about adopting it as my new motto: प्रेमा योऽसौ राधिकाकृष्णयुग्मं स्वानन्देन प्लावयित्वा सखीश्च । शश्वद्विश्वं प्लावयन् सुप्रसिद्धः सोऽयं बुद्धिं नः समिद्धां करोतु ॥ premā yo'sau rādhikā-kṛṣṇa-yugmaṁ svānandena plāvayitvā sakhīś ca | śaśvad viśvaṁ plāvayan suprasiddhaḥ so'yaṁ buddhiṁ naḥ samiddhāṁ karotu || This love, which after inundating the pair of lovers, Radha and Krishna, with its own bliss, and their girlfriends too, constantly engulfs the entire universe, as is well known. May that love enflame our intelligence. (Gopala-champu 15.4) Interesting mixed metaphor. Inundates, engulfs... enflame. Love inundates with joy. The essence of Vaishnavism is the recognition that love and joy are intimately connected. The receipt of joy... when you love, the object of love is a source of joy. When you love all, then all is a source of joy. At the same time, when you love, you seek to give joy. This requires practical intelligence, of...

(continued from previous ) So is Freud relevant? Nowadays it has become the accepted wisdom that Freudianism is dead. But so many of his ideas are now considered commonsensical that it is almost a joke to reject him by name without knowing which of his ideas are still current and on what level of discourse. I could go into this in some depth, and I think that especially for devotees it would be salutary to consider these points. The relations of sexuality to love and to spirituality are the complexes that need to be decoded. I tend to accept Freud's monistic view of psychic energy, or consciousness, and not make a radical distinction between material sexuality and spirituality at all. Now this will seem counter-intuitive for those people who do make such a radical distinction. Kama andha-tama, prema nirmala bhaskara and all that. But if we say that they are generic opposites, that is erroneous. They are simply different ends of one continuum or spectrum, that of d...

Radha and Krishna's loves do not appear like mature love in the modern psychological sense to which they would appear more like "infatuation." If that is the case, then how can they be "ideal"? Are they ideal in the sense that they are supposed to be exemplary to couples who want to develop a mature relationship between them? What does Sahajiyaism have to say here? To begin with, I am not against mature relations between the sexes. And, hopefully, the purpose of everything that I am saying will help lead to mature spirituality in which other, objectively higher realms of agape and caritas are practically realized in behavior. So I not only honor the idea of maturity in love, but hope that all Sahajiya practitioners work to cultivate mature relationships in the modern sense. The ideas of Christian love and so on that are often refered to as superior to erotic love should be familiar territory to anyone who tries to advance in spiritual life. But that is n...

Let's look at it a bit differently. I was reading a book A Spiritual Approach to Male/Female Relations  recently in which the following sentence popped out at me: "...life can become more meaningful by recognizing that this very personal attraction comes from an impersonal energy in the universe, which we sometimes glibly term 'love'. Aligning ourselves with this love, with its impersonal and palpable reality, can be a first step towards improving all our human relations." This is an interesting statement that has a certain intuitive cogency. The word anaṅga , which is a name for Kamadeva, means "bodiless." In one sense, love is shapeless. When people say, "God is love," they can mean various things. One is "Love is God," in the sense that this amorphous, all-pervading, underlying substratum of love can be tapped into and experienced. There are various ways to experience the underlying unity of all existence--one is simply by bein...

(1) Normal Sexual Relations Someone wrote in the previous comments section that "normal sexual relations" were permitted for devotee householders. Some of the other posters there also expressed similar ideas. I just want to say that I am not in favor of "normal" sexual relations. The general attitude in Vaishnava circles is to quote the Bhagavatam, in which it is made very clear that for men (and the instructions are given for men), association with women is the door to hell (5.5.2). mahat-sevāṁ dvāram āhur vimuktes tamo-dvāraṁ yoṣitāṁ saṅgi-saṅgam All bad qualities come out of association with women (3.31.33). satyaṁ śaucaṁ dayā maunaṁ buddhiḥ śrīr hrīr yaśaḥ kṣamā śamo damo bhagaś ceti yat-saṅgād yāti saṁkṣayam Women are temptresses. Chota Haridas was expelled and, more or less, obliged to commit suicide because of a rather doubtful case of association with women, just so that he could be an example to all of us. So can anything good be said for...