Jagat

A couple of things in the current news cycle caught my attention and made me return to this unpublished post.  “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is, What does a woman want?” Sigmund Freud At the risk of reopening a rather nasty can of worms, I am descending once again into the rape discussion. For background, see here , here and here . I never really thought much about Prabhupada's famous statement that women "enjoy rape." Like most people, I suppose, I just laughed it off, or considered it irrelevant. I have no skin in the game myself as I feel no great need to defend Prabhupada at all costs. But since I have now been accused of " supporting rape " I feel challenged to at least inform myself about this debate. One thing I have done fairly consistently on my blog, however, is to argue the following major points, which of course are nowhere i...

I left off talking about association with devotees and saying that aṅga-saṅga was an element of service to a devotee. In this case, however, I did mean to place some restrictions: it is not that every bhakta is somehow to receive this kind of intimate service. It is restricted to the most antaraṅga association; and without the central element of love, it will most definitely be counterproductive. Love cannot be reduced to a mere sentiment, nor to the mere mechanics of physical sexuality. To do so is to make the same kind of mistake the beginning devotee makes when he confuses the bliss of first discovery with spiritual perfection. The love between sādhakas is the raw material of their sādhanā . But let us press on with our understanding of the compatibility of the Orthodox tradition with this way of thinking. Actually, no one has contributed to the revival of Sahajiyaism more than Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati himself, who emphasized the concept of yukta-vairāgya . If something c...

I feel somewhat guilty that I did not mention my pleasant visit to Advaitaji in Radha Kund while he has spoken rather kindly of me over on Madan Gopal. Since there seems to be a kind of link between the two blogs, I really should have shared my perception of that meeting. The only disagreement he mentioned was related to the subject of projecting sexual desires on the lila. This was in fact a response to his misunderstanding that people like myself are projecting our own sexual desires on the lila; I was saying that Western psychology would argue that the lila is seen as the projection of repressed or unfulfilled (or unfulfillable) sexual desires. Which, if true, would mean that saying it is not is nothing more than denial, a refusal to accept the obvious. But of course, the relationship between material sexual desire and the lila of Radha and Krishna is more complex and sophisticated than projected repressed desires, and certainly seeing it as nothing more than titillation is equa...

Now Sridhar Maharaj evidently reserves a special place in hell for those who imitate Radha and Krishna's pastimes physically. The most heinous thing is that one will play the part of Krishna and a lady will play the part of a gopi and they will unite, and in that way they will enjoy. To think this to be that, it is impossible. Any ordinary moral man will hate this. What to speak of the higher devotees, even an ordinary moral man will hate it. The problem with such statements is that they are so lacking in subtlety or in comprehension, not only of the wide variety of sahajīyā doctrines, or even the distinction between traditional orthodoxy and Sahajiyaism, but of human sexuality itself. We have already been saying repeatedly that sexuality can be analyzed according to the model of the three gunas just like any other material phenomenon. The Gita tells us that goodness, passion or ignorance, all are entangling in the material nature, but that sattva is still better than the oth...

On the Guardian 's "Comment is Free" page today, there is a short article by Theo Hobson, We need a new sexual revolution , which echoes something that I have been thinking for a long time. It has been my feeling that sex is underdiscussed in Gaudiya Vaishnavism and that whatever discourse there is lacks subtlety. Thus, anyone who even mentions the possibility that sexuality has a more complex human function than procreation on the one hand or is of an unambiguous materialistic darkness on the other, is immediately accused of immorality, as indeed has happened to me. The discourse surrounding Sahajiyaism is thus so clouded by reactionary thinking that all rational discussion is clamped down on before anything really meaningful can be accomplished. Hobson's article does not say much, I admit, but at least he points out that the so-called "sexual revolution" has trivialized sexuality to a level of complete irresponsiblity, seemingly confounding sexual free...

I find it a bit unfortunate that though the Gita (chapters 14, 17 and 18) and the Bhagavata (11.25) describe various phenomena and categorize them according to the three guṇas of material nature, they did not make any analysis of sexuality according to this method. This has fed the bias in some circles that there is no room whatsoever for sexuality, that it is by default in the modes of ignorance or passion, and if it could ever be in the mode of goodness, it would only be such sex as is engaged in for the sake of procreation. The Bhāgavata (11.25) adds the nirguṇa category to the discourse, by which it is to be learned that in the Bhāgavata view, the same activities that are conducted in the various modes of nature can also be free from the modes if only they are somehow dovetailed into bhakti. Thus residence in a whorehouse is tāmasika , in a city, rājasika , in the forest s ā ttvika , but living in a temple of the Lord is nirguṇa (11.25.25). Human sexuality is extremely comp...