Bhakti Collective

Tag: Ravindra-svarupaDasa

  • “God”?

    What the punctuation in the title indicates: Quotation marks: Draping the word God in quotation marks indicates that we are first concerned with the signifier, not the signified. (Compare these two sentences: I am interested in God. I am interested in “God.”) Question mark: The mark of interrogation backstopping “God” points us next to questions…

  • Sense Gratification: An Essay in Pathology

    In Bhagavad-gita (5.22) Krishna says this about enjoyment of the senses: ye hi samsparsha-ja bhoga duhkha-yonaya eva te “The pleasures that arise from contact between the senses and their objects are in truth the sources of all suffering.” The Sanskrit word bhoga (with the long ‘a’ of the plural) means ‘pleasures’ or ‘enjoyments’. What kinds?…

  • Pointing

    Sometime in the 1730’s, a young Scottish philosopher tried, and failed, to find himself. David Hume reflected upon this experience in his first book, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). The passage is much quoted and anthologized. I encountered it frequently as an undergraduate philosophy major, for my teachers regarded it as a watershed in…

  • Disease

    The heroes of my youth were the great healers of humanity. While it’s true that in those days I could be seen with other American boys paying homage to the likes of Elvis Presley and Joe DiMaggio, I rendered them only lip service. My real—if somewhat secret—devotion was reserved for a pantheon of great medical…

  • Munchies for the Mind II

    So They Say: Prayer I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door. John Donne (1572-1631)

  • The Nature of the Self: A Gaudiya Vaisnava Understanding

    ESSAY: In his paper The Nature of the Self: A Gaudiya Vaisnava Understanding Ravindra-svarupa dasa provides an introductory presentation on the nature of the self according to the followers of Sri Chaitanya.

  • The Divine Names: An Adventure Continued- Episode Two

    A group of us gathered in the bedroom after the wedding, and as the large reels of the tape recorder slowly revolved, the room filled with the sound of “the Swami” leading the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra. I sang in response, answering his call. Looking back, the chanting on that August afternoon in…

  • The Divine Names: An Adventure

    My first connection with the Hare Krishna maha-mantra happened during the “Summer of Love” in August, 1967 in the course of a wedding within a three-room apartment in Powelton Village, the budding hippie district in Philadelphia. The wedding epitomized the time and place.