To VK-JI ! Mirror Mirror on the Wall , . Who is the most Adwaitin of ALL ?

[Guest guest]

Most respected Professor-ji !

 

This is to wish you and Kamala-ji a very safe trip home.

 

We would like you to continue the shata-sloki verses from India .This

will be your gift to us.

 

Also, i am excited to hear about your project ...

 

A step by step first exposure to advaita through a

dialogue of 1008 entries.

 

I bet it is going to be 'funny' as well as educational!!!

 

We will miss you Professor-ji in this as well as in my own group

Sadhana shakti .... Your most wonderful gift to us is of course the

Four part serial on Raasa Lila of Lord Krishna and the Gopis!!!

 

Yes !!! Myth and Reality!!!

 

Professorji , i would like to share with you something i read

recently on Raasa Lila ...

 

"There is a fine line between myth and reality. A myth can be a

falsehood, or it may be the truth expressed allegorically. Indeed, at

least since the time of Carl Jung it has become popular to find

meaning in myth.

 

Yet even the best myth is only an allegorical reality. It is not

itself a true story. What is the true story? For most of us, our

reality is the world of our mind, informed by data gathered through

our senses. This may be our reality, but how real is it? It certainly

does not endure. Our instruments of perception, our senses, are

imperfect to begin with, and thus the world of our mind informed by

them may be more false than real. Hot, cold, happy, sad, good, and

bad are mental notions relative to our sense perception. The same day

is cold for one and hot for another, good for one, bad for another.

 

We view the world though the glasses of our mental and sensual

experience, yet ultimately these get in the way of truly

experiencing. Vedanta tells us that which we presently perceive to be

reality is more akin to myth, a falsehood, while we ourselves, the

experiencers, are units of reality-souls.

 

The phenomenal world may be real, but our perception of it is false,

so false that it causes us to lose sight of our souls. The sense of

the loss of our souls that dominates our culture thus serves to

underscore the mythical nature of our perception of reality arising

out of misdirected sensual and mental preoccupations. As for the true

story, the myth that leads us to our soul leads us to reality.

Indeed, that so-called myth may not be a myth at all, whereas our

mental and sensual perception of so-called reality may be mythical.

It is not altogether false, rather an allegory for the absolute, a

reflection of reality.

 

If we examine it closely, we will find that the reflection of reality

informs us indirectly about the ultimate reality. The religious myth

of the rasa-lila represents ultimate reality. It is an ultimate

reality, however, that also confirms the value of humanity,

especially its sensual and emotional aspects, for it informs us both

that our sensuality has its origins in the absolute and that the

absolute's expression of loving emotion is best facilitated within

humanity. In the rasa-lila, God Krishna enters humanity to celebrate

his sensuality, thus confirming the sense in all of us that our drive

for the erotic is not something to be abolished. It is to be

redirected away from the world and toward the absolute, appearing in

its human-like expression of Krishna-Radha and Krishna. In the rasa-

lila we discover divine humanism, where divinity validates the

essence of humanity and humanity speaks to us about that which

divinity must embody in its fullest expression.

 

Although the love story of Radha and Krishna has been analyzed on

many levels-social, psychological, political, and so on-it implies

something more profound: Our misdirected mental, sensual, and

intellectual lives are a myth, while Radha and Krishna's love drama

is ultimate reality. It is the truth that many have reasoned is

synonymous with beauty, and it is the eternal drama in which the soul

can realize its highest potential, living in love. Any attempt to

establish a structured logical exegesis of beauty is flawed. An

exegesis of ultimate spiritual beatitude is no exception. This is so

because beauty, and more so the spiritual experience itself, are non-

rational and transrational respectively. Spiritual beauty is not

unreasonable, rather it picks up where reason leaves off. Because in

this world we speak the language of logic, we must try to speak about

the spiritual experience in our language. Should we broach the

spiritual, however, the language of logic will be of little utility,

for in the spiritual plane the language is love. While we will

certainly benefit from the logical exercise of Vedanta in an effort

to demonstrate that Vedanta is pointing logically to the love and

beauty that Radha and Krishna personify, expressions of the

experience love of itself are often more compelling. Thus if the

logic falls short as it must, the poetry of and about the experience

of rasa-lila speaks for itself. One poem expressing spiritual

experience can convey the spirit of that experience more than volumes

of tightly reasoned argumentation.

 

(snip)

 

The rasa-lila is a tale of selflessness to the extreme hidden in an

exterior of apparent selfish love. That selfish love in which we are

all involved and about which we are thus most eager to hear about is

the context in which the ultimate in selflessness is couched. Such is

the beauty and mystery of the rasa-lila, where Radha risks all-

family, society, and even religion, driven by her love for Krishna.

While she appears to act for her own selfish interest without concern

for others, in her tryst with Krishna she teaches us how to give up

everything for God. If this were not the inner truth of the rasa

lila, how could her apparent selfishness cause God to fall in love

with her? No story speaks more about that which we all need to hear

to make the world a better place-selflessness properly centered on

the perfect object of love.

 

 

http://www.vnn.org/editorials/ET0112/ET20-7048.html

 

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Yes! Love is the Essence .... It is the Ultimate Reality ! not the

ordinary *love* between a man and a woman - Kama but the Ultimate

Love For THE LORD , OUR BELOVED Krishna ... Krishna Prema !!!

 

 

Thank you professor-ji !

 

With warmest regards