Jagat

Yesterday was Akshaya Tritiya, an auspicious day for undertakings, like marriages. I finished a book I started work on when I was a Gurukula teacher of Sanskrit at SRSG. I showed it to Swamiji and I am glad to say that he was very enthusiastic.  It includes explanations of all the verses that are chanted in the morning and evening at the ashram, including Gita verses and Ishopanishad.  The name Adhika Pathyam is temporary. It needs a catchier title. Adhika Pathya means "extra reading material" for the course, as it was intended to supplement other text books and reading materials, so that the students would feel that even if they did not learn Sanskrit that at least they would know what the prayers mean! Every morning we chant the Sapta shloki Gita . So here is a sample of what I did with those verses. This would be considered a little bit more advanced. But with a good teacher, these can still be very useful teaching materials at any level. I think I will s...

I was thinking this morning in meditation about Marx's famous statement, "Religion is the opium of the people." His meaning was that religion is one of the tools elites use to distract the powerless from revolution. Promises of heaven and threats of hell are part of the system to preserve the status quo in the world. Making tolerance and other passive virtues into cultural values -- for the ruled, not the rulers -- is another element of that exercise in social control. Like Napoleon Bonaparte observed, "Religion [alone] is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." In so many ways, religion is just a kind of entertainment, an element in the "circuses" part of "bread and circuses." Interestingly, Bharata Muni in the first chapter of  Nāṭya-śāstra makes it clear that entertainment was originally conceived of as religious propaganda. The dramatic arts, which in Bharata include poetics as well as music and dance, are meant to communicate ...

One of the reasons I wanted to be in Vrindavan in March was to attend the 40th anniversary of the opening of Krishna Balaram on Ram Naumi. As it happens, I attended none of it, though I did enter the Iskcon property a couple of times. I was there in 1975. It was my first visit to India. The hosts of foreign devotees came there after the Mayapur festival, which is why the opening took place on Ram Naumi rather than some other auspicious day. Prabhupada knew how to make a statement with his " dancing white elephants ." We stayed in Fogla Ashram. The whole Raman Reti area was mesmerizing, with its dust and trees, monkeys and peacocks. And we were all so proud of the achievement, which in the end was truly a marvelous accomplishment for the young, inexperienced Americans and Europeans who managed the project in what would have been trying circumstances. Forty years later, here I was, back in Vrindavan, living in Vrindavan, serving in Vrindavan, immersed in Vrindavan, glori...

Language shapes us. I came across this  interesting article about the discovery of an Amazon tribe with almost entirely different way of constructing language that calls into question Noam Chomsky's theory about innate language. One of the interesting things for me in this article (and there were many) was how hermetic this tribe is, to the point that anything that is outside their world view simply does not register as meaningful or interesting. In a way it was almost like they were living a "be-here-now" philosophy taken to the extreme, where they are almost completely indifferent to past and future, or abstractions of any kind. It is not surprising that modern people have suspected them of some kind of debility! They who see day where others see night. Although I don't think that it would be either possible nor even desirable to duplicate this particular community's way of dealing with reality, and it is surprising that the World has permitted them to d...

Yesterday I went to listen to the Bhagavatam around the corner, where a seven-day program is going on. The speaker is in the Swami Haridas line, but he is a real non-denominational Vrindavan lover and seems to have equal affection for Harivansh Goswami and Radha Vallabha as he has for Swami Haridas and Banke Bihari. He also told some Gaudiya stories, like about Shyamananda finding the nupur in Seva Kunj, and Rupa Goswami’s warning not to look at Govindaji or you would lose everything. smerāṁ bhaṅgī-traya-paricitāṁ sāci vistīrṇa-dṛṣṭiṁ vaṁśī-nyastādhara-kiśalayām ujjvalāṁ candrakeṇa | govindākhyāṁ hari-tanum itaḥ keśi-tīrthopakaṇṭhe mā prekṣiṣṭhās tava yadi sakhe bandhu-saṅge'sti raṅgaḥ ||  My friend, if you still want to find pleasure in the company of your friends and relatives, then don't look at this form of Hari called "Govinda," not far from here at Keshi Ghat, smiling, in his famous triple-crooked stance, with his big crooked glance. the red sl...

It has been a little strange here at Jiva these past few days. Swami Vishwananda is here with his troupe of disciples, of whom there are a goodly number, perhaps 80 or so. When I arrived in Vrindavan already a couple of weeks back, almost the first thing I noticed at the corner of Mathura Road and the Parikrama Marg was a big billboard with Swami Vishwananda’s charming smile and glowing tilak staring charismatically out at the world and announcing that he would be giving darshan on March 8 at the Jiva Institute. Below him, in a smaller frame was Satyanarayana Dasa Babaji, who besides being his host will be speaking on the Bhāgavatam at the darshan event. This is not the first time that Vishwananda and his group have been at Jiva. Satyanarayana Dasaji calls Vishwananda a friend, and indeed the relations between the two are very cordial. Vishwananda's group is mostly young and enthusiastic, predominantly European (German and points east), who are very enthusiastic about...

Yesterday I read Sunil Gangopadhyaya’s version of the Nala-Damayanti story. This is a rather famous story in the annals of Sanskrit literature originally found in the Mahābhārata , and I must surely have read it through before, but in this case I found that it was unfamiliar and new. And it still requires a bit of digestion, but on the whole it is a story of the glories of a woman’s love. Once she has picked her man, she remains faithful until death, no matter how lost her man becomes. Of course, by the intervention of the gods and the power of her devotion to her husband, all is well in the end. And she even becomes the power of compassion in her husband’s kingdom. The story is, briefly, as follows. Nala is the king of Nishadh. He has a half-brother Pushkar who has an unimportant role as a prince in the kingdom and he hates Nala for having received their father’s blessings. A swan acts as a go-between and brings Nala and Damayanti together at her svayamvara. Since the swan...

I recently wrote an article in which I began to inquire into samādhi and bhakti-yoga . So, ever since I have been involved with hatha yoga, seeing what it offers to a bhakti-yogi, I have been fascinated by the insistence that many people make that the ultimate goal of all paths is one. Now in one sense, one has to agree, since nothing exists outside of God, and whatever the varieties of enjoyments on offer to us by the three gunas , it is all indirectly and directly interaction with God and nothing else, so how can anyone say that they are not all one? And it is certain that with a little awareness one will see the God present, though hidden, in the material manifestations, the mirages that we go running after in the desert. But the connoisseurs, those who are rasikas of the eka-rasa , want to know the mechanics of rasa and samādhi , because that is the promised land in the direction of which we have been pointed, somewhere beyond the desert. So, generally speaking, the yoga...

The other day I was attending Satyanarayana Dasaji’s Bhāgavata class and something came into my head when I heard it said that we are not these bodies. So I asked him the question, “If a devotee’s body is spiritualized when he takes initiation, then would he not identify with it as the sādhaka-deha ?” Babaji’s answer was no, the spiritual identity is internal, we do not identify with the material body. I told him I would prepare my argument and submit it to him when it was ready. My thinking goes like this: Vaishnavism is all about identity . “I am a servant of God.” That identity exists as a servant in the material body, which once we become sādhakas ceases to be, strictly speaking, material. This is the sampradāya-siddhānta : Since all the senses are engaged in devotional service, the body can no longer be called material. There is only one energy of God, which serves different functions, parāsya śaktir vividhaiva śrūyate . The appearance of difference is illusion. So, thi...

There is, of course, much more to the story, but we will leave it for here and I will conclude by giving a summary of the contents of my first lecture on Yoga-taraṅgiṇī . The GS course in yoga starts with a lesson in anatomy. This is something that needs to be learned as the beginning of the yoga journey inwards begins with an internal inspection of the physical body, which especially in later Nath Yoga texts is seen as the microcosm, where everything found in the universe can be found. The later Nath Yoga texts like Siddha-siddhänta-paddhati take this quite seriously and have a series of meditations on these correspondences. Nowadays research into yoga by the empirical method is being given increasing favor, and this means that the yogis' understanding of the body as viewed from within is not given anything more than arcane importance, without much scientific or objective value. But thousands of years of investigation through practice should not be minimized or discounted. Su...

My last night in Rishikesh, Swamiji called me upstairs. He had called me up earlier in the day, but was unable to talk as he was undergoing another hypoglycemia attack. He was rolled out in his wheelchair onto the balcony. Bhola, the manager of AHYMSIN's publishing department, was also there. Swamiji wanted to talk about how long the Yoga-sūtra work was going to take and would I get it done “before I die”? The scenario, no doubt staged, but still a reminder of the urgency with which Swamiji is approaching this work. Swamiji may live another twenty years, but he takes each health crisis to simply push harder to get certain things done before he quits the world. On top of that, he seems to keep finding new stuff he wants done. At least, as he deals with major priorities, he feels free to start pushing on other projects. Not that I am not also feeling a great need to be done with these yoga texts so I can get to the business of tending to my own life's work! My life is also ...