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Post by Ekantin on Jun 2, 2011 16:15:53 GMT -6
Nitaiji, I tried looking into this a while back to no avail. To the best of my knowledge, 'religious' neurological studies are only just getting off the ground, mainly consisting of testing Buddhist meditators for any neurological differences due to the practice of meditation, so it might be a while before anything as sophisticated as Harinama is tested.
I am aware of only one study that directly tests Harinama chanting in relation to psychology, and it was carried out by a well known Iskconite as part of his own PhD. studies. The paper was published in some journal as I seem to recall, but I was never able to get access to it because it turned out that my university didn't subscribe to that journal. I can try tracking it down again and probably asking some friends if they can access the paper. It should be an interesting read.
I'll also try looking for info on effects of chanting, etc, even Buddhist ones, since they're the main religious group everyone seems to be excited about at the moment.
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 2, 2011 17:43:22 GMT -6
Nitaiji, I tried looking into this a while back to no avail. To the best of my knowledge, 'religious' neurological studies are only just getting off the ground, mainly consisting of testing Buddhist meditators for any neurological differences due to the practice of meditation, so it might be a while before anything as sophisticated as Harinama is tested. I am aware of only one study that directly tests Harinama chanting in relation to psychology, and it was carried out by a well known Iskconite as part of his own PhD. studies. The paper was published in some journal as I seem to recall, but I was never able to get access to it because it turned out that my university didn't subscribe to that journal. I can try tracking it down again and probably asking some friends if they can access the paper. It should be an interesting read. I'll also try looking for info on effects of chanting, etc, even Buddhist ones, since they're the main religious group everyone seems to be excited about at the moment. Thanks. Anything you can find would be helpful. I am very interested the scientific study of what happens to people when they chant. For instance, does it matter if one chants one thing or another? Or, is it just the repetition that counts? Naturally, on some level it does make a difference. My wife (mostly to make fun of me doing Harinama) repeats her mother's name. Certainly that evokes all her memories and feelings with respect to her mother and it can become a deep, powerful emotion, I am sure. If we cultivate our associations with Krsna and Radha through Krsna-katha something similar happens for those of us who chant Krsna's names, only centered on Krsna. Add to that add the suggestion that Krsna somehow belongs to everyone or is everyone or is the all and more and perhaps one can invoke a transformative experience. I don't know. I am just speculating now. Would such empirical study exhaust the phenomenon or would it just catch the visible parts of the iceberg, missing what lies beneath the surface?
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Post by vkaul1 on Jun 3, 2011 1:50:27 GMT -6
Yes, similarly a deep emotion is generated by people who real Kalidasa's Shakuntala or Shakespare's play. Do you think the ontological reality of Krsna can be demonstrated just because it evokes good emotions? Can't a good story without any ontological reality also draw emotion?
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Post by vkaul1 on Jun 3, 2011 13:00:58 GMT -6
My conversation with my friend who finished in PhD in evolutionary biology form Stanford.
Thanks for your input. Another thing is that in biology it is important to assert that you are an atheist before making any claim, lest you won't be taken seriously. In the case of Margulis, she did oppose the prevailing paradigm in her initial research, and despite all odds she prevailed. Coyne says this went into her head and she started being overconfident. This is a peculiar problem: breakthroughs are made by people who oppose the current paradigm many times in spite of opposition and then they may become insane and not make sense later on. But they were important for the breakthrough. So it is not a straight path. What do you think?
I just read the article by Coyne you sent, and from it, Margulis does appear to be a crackpot of some kind. The only thing is that I don't know what her views are, and as you say, a few of today's crackpots may be tomorrow's paradigm creators. Even if she is pretty unreasonable in attacking mainstream biologists, and even if she has a grudge against them (probably because of the opposition she would have faced), I still don't know what her technical arguments in favor of symbiosis being much more prevalent than we thought are. For that, I will need to read her book(s) rather than one-line summaries of her stand by Coyne or anyone else which obviously wouldn't look good considering that we would be evaluating those one-liners from within the paradigm. My friend had asked me a few years back to read her book "Acquiring Genomes" and "Microcosmos" which he said he found more convincing than descent with modification kind of evolution. I have forwarded him Coyne's article and asked him for his comments. If he replies, I will forward it to you. I don't disagree with Coyne, I'm just not familiar with Lynn Margulis' technical work to comment on it. I think her having grudge against mainstream evolutionary biologists or being arrogant about defending what she believes is right is not atypical of many scientists, and I wouldn't just take that and decide that her claims are worth nothing more than scorn. Maybe they are, but I can't decide that at this point of time.
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 3, 2011 16:10:24 GMT -6
Well I had a bit of a scare last night. My computer crashed and I thought I have lost everything I have been working on. I tried rebooting and the durn thing just kept shutting itself off. When I finally got it to boot, it got itself into a permanent loop and would not complete the process. I woke up this morning thinking my hard disk was fried. But there was a slender hope that rebuilding world (that is the way we talk in the FreeBSD world) might fix the problem. It took all morning and a chunk of the afternoon (this is an old and slow computer), but it worked. Nothing lost and everything gained. I did also manage to backup my files so if it happens again I should be in pretty good shape. Anyway, after that distraction and anxiety, I am back to work. Nearly done with the Visvanatha text and about to start on the Baladeva text. Then come the translations.
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 3, 2011 16:20:05 GMT -6
Yes, similarly a deep emotion is generated by people who real Kalidasa's Shakuntala or Shakespare's play. Do you think the ontological reality of Krsna can be demonstrated just because it evokes good emotions? Can't a good story without any ontological reality also draw emotion? This is true and some certainly (Abhinava Gupta and Bhojaraja) see a semi-divine experience behind all aesthetic pleasure and experience. What gets added to the Krsna or Rama versions of these aesthetic experiences is the sense that there is something special about Krsna that differentiates him from the ordinary nayaka and Radha from the ordinary nayika. I used to call that their divinity, but I no longer like that way of talking about it. No one knows what that means anyway and probably each of us imagines it differently too. A lot depends on what Krsna means to you. One could argue that bhakti-rasa is no different from rasa. But how would one know that? On the other hand, how would one know that it is different? A lot has to do with the idea of sharing of heart (sahrdayatva) which is an essential concept in rasa aesthetics.
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Post by Ekantin on Jun 9, 2011 20:45:14 GMT -6
Hi Nitai, I managed to find at least a couple of papers that claim to directly test the effect of Harinama. As I mentioned, they are by an Iskconite - David Wolf PhD. aka Dhira Govinda das - and mainly consists of his own PhD. thesis and a follow-up study. VNN - this was my starting point, a mention on the old VNN site. Using Google Scholar for that study title and author name brought me to: Examining the Effects of Meditation Techniques on Psychosocial Functioning - published in Sage Journals. The study purports to measure the effect on harinama on reducing stress, depression, rajas and tamas. Further researches turned up this: New Article On Child Abandonment In ISKCON - nothing much here, but it seems Wolf has been busy trying his best to establish a basis for further research. Wolff's original doctoral dissertation is listed there, so perhaps it simply remained a dissertation that was unpublished in a journal for peer review, etc. What worries me about all of this is that Wolff seems to be using "Western psychology" to validate mood and personality constructs (sattva, rajas, etc.) that may have no validity in mainstream personality research. The last time I looked, which is incidentally the last time I engaged in this sort of research for my own BSc. studies, is that personality psychology uses well-established constructs that have undergone rigorous analyses, such as the Five Factor Model (or "Big 5"). Other such personality scales exist, of course, with just as much validity as the Big 5 such as the Revised NEO (I used the Neo-FFI in my own studies). In other words, it is well established in personality psychology that personality can be measured in terms of 5 stable dimensions: Neuroticism, Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Psychoticism. It worries me that Wolf and others of his ilk are trying to develop personality measurements that may not adequately describe the dimensions of sattva, rajas, etc. It seems that Wolff is not the only one doing this; a lot of Indian psychologists are doing it too. I spotted this seemingly wacky study (on PubMed of all places! ) in my searches: A randomized control trial of the effect of yoga on Gunas (personality) and Self esteem in normal healthy volunteers - which makes reference to a "Gita Inventory of Personality" (GIN). "The Gita inventory (GIN) is now available as a standardized, psychological tool, and is based on the concept that there are three different levels of human existence in which the mind is always in a dynamic equilibrium between three types of response patterns called Gunas." Really? What does the Gita know about personality constructs that several decades of established and stable personality research don't? I looked it up in the references, and the authors appear to quote a 1991 article in the Journal of Indian Psychology authored by the suspiciously-named RC Das. It is possible that this is the civil name of some Indian psychologist who thought it up, but just think of the cringe if it turned out that RC Das was aka RamaChandra Das from ISKCON Bangalore or something like that. Just from my extremely preliminary researches it seems to be a disturbing trend that such studies seem to be published larely in Indian journals, largely using their own scientific tools, and sciencey sounding discussions of concepts that are known to be pseudoscience, in order to prove a research point that, well, could lead anywhere really. Is this good science, I wonder, to make up sciencey sounding things that have an obvious basis in religious/spiritual foundations if one cared to look deeper? I notice that Wolf now has a network of websites where he promotes, of all things, a Vedic Personality Inventory! Anyway, one thing I noticed to my delight. His original PhD. thesis is now available on one of his websites: YedaVeda. I have not gone through it yet, but I presume it will deal with the questions of what effect the chanting of Harinama has on mood and such things.
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Post by Ekantin on Jun 13, 2011 9:33:35 GMT -6
No comments at all? I can understand that Nitai is busy frequently, but no one else has anything to say about the above? Wow.
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 14, 2011 11:23:35 GMT -6
Hi All,
Sorry for my silence these last few days. As usual, I was out of town. I just got back from Bonnaroo, yes, the huge music festival in Tennessee. Wow! What an experience! My wife and I joined a couple of our colleagues from Truman State in a rented RV in the VIP section of the festival. Even then it was a challenging experience with all the heat and dust and crowds. But, we heard some great music and learned (or maybe were reminded of) some things about the human race and the younger generation of this country. It has given me a lot to think about and it will take me a while to digest it all. We were there to hear Buffalo Springfield reunited and of course to sample some of the newer bands that we didn't know. Two unfortunate souls gave up their lives at the festival, they say from heat exhaustion (which could very well be true), but it may have been drug overdose. We met a lot of interesting people, some of whom I will talk about later, probably.
Anyway, for all the excitement and lovely music it is great to be back. So what has been going on here? Thanks Ekantin for that research and those links to studies that have been done on Namjapa. I will read them and give my reactions over the next few days. Thanks also to Malati and Madanmohan for continuing to post jewels from the Padyavali. We have a couple new members who I hope will introduce themselves and join in our discussions. I will continue to work on some of my projects and post the results as they accumulate. The Gita translation is at the top of the list. Next comes Kanupriya Goswami's book, which is almost done. After that I will push some of the other translations along (Murari Gupta, Visvanatha C, Bhagavata, Brhad-bhagavatamrta).
Then, of course, there are our discussions science and religion, evolution, and my favorite topic (ie, secular or atheistic Vaisnavism), the paranormal, consciousness studies, etc. etc. Where else are these things discussed in the context of Caitanya Vaisnavism without trying to stuff them into medieval, outdated, narrow-minded modes of thinking? If you are not willing think outside of that narrow box of traditional CV ways of thinking, then you will not be comfortable here. Remember, however, being comfortable is not the goal of life. After the last four days I can heartily vouch for that. My vision of the Caitanya Symposium is as a place where we can step outside our comfort zones and expand our horizons. We are searching for the truth. The truth is Krsna. When and if we find him, we can't step back and say "Oh sorry! You were not what I was expecting." Others start with the assumption that they already know the truth. When they search they only want to find what they were expecting and if they find something else they try to twist it in some way into what they were expecting. That is not the kind of search I want and I hope there are others here who think the same way.
It is becoming increasingly clear that Satyanarayan and Haridas Sastri are not going to be sources of light for us. They have become the Nastikas of today. Nastika does not mean atheist. It literally means deniers. Anyone who denies something as well established as evolution or the laws of physics or the material basis of life is in a very real and tragic sense a nastika. Anyone who tries to confine Krsna to certain narrow boundaries inherited from the 16th century and wants to deny all else is a nastika. Nothing has really changed. Knowledge has always been based on the best evidence. But in a strange turn of events, those who proclaim themselves to be astikas these days are really the nastikas. I've already shown many times in this forum and elsewhere that the arguments against the authority of sense perception are completely bogus, shameful, in fact. We can perhaps forgive people like Sri Jiva for pushing such ideas because of the limits of the intellectual life in his days. But to try to push them today is sheer stupidity and that is the category into which people like SN and HDS and Tripurari and countless other IGMers and modern traditionalists (Chandan Goswami, et al) fit. It is really shameful and the clearest indication that CV is either dying out or sadly may be dead already.
Sorry. I didn't mean to harangue so morbidly, but I had to get it off my chest. I will continue to do my translation work and my sadhana, even though it may become more like a funeral rite or a rite of commemoration of a deceased friend, but I entertain little hope of our ailing friend's eventual recovery in this climate.
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Post by vkaul1 on Jun 14, 2011 12:32:25 GMT -6
No comments at all? I can understand that Nitai is busy frequently, but no one else has anything to say about the above? Wow. See Ekantin I was going over his research in the limited time I had and I did not find the research compelling. The other thing is that on this forum, only Malati, myself, you and Nitai will be responding to such queries. Most people on this forum are not active.
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Post by vkaul1 on Jun 14, 2011 12:36:55 GMT -6
If you are not willing think outside of that narrow box of traditional CV ways of thinking, then you will not be comfortable here. Remember, however, being comfortable is not the goal of life. After the last four days I can heartily vouch for that. My vision of the Caitanya Symposium is as a place where we can step outside our comfort zones and expand our horizons. We are searching for the truth. The truth is Krsna. When and if we find him, we can't step back and say "Oh sorry! You were not what I was expecting." Others start with the assumption that they already know the truth. When they search they only want to find what they were expecting and if they find something else they try to twist it in some way into what they were expecting. That is not the kind of search I want and I hope there are others here who think the same way.
I concur with your points above. However, most people need comfort and security, so traditional CV is working beautifully for them. Also many times when I inquire, people use the BG verse where Krsna says that for the doubting soul there is no happiness in this world or the next. It is a sin to doubt authorities and inquiry is always pushed down with disdain. I will post some excerpts from an interesting discussion we are having on verses from the Bh Upanishad that talking about beating a woman and eating cow meat to get a son.
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 14, 2011 13:35:33 GMT -6
If you are not willing think outside of that narrow box of traditional CV ways of thinking, then you will not be comfortable here. Remember, however, being comfortable is not the goal of life. After the last four days I can heartily vouch for that. My vision of the Caitanya Symposium is as a place where we can step outside our comfort zones and expand our horizons. We are searching for the truth. The truth is Krsna. When and if we find him, we can't step back and say "Oh sorry! You were not what I was expecting." Others start with the assumption that they already know the truth. When they search they only want to find what they were expecting and if they find something else they try to twist it in some way into what they were expecting. That is not the kind of search I want and I hope there are others here who think the same way.I concur with your points above. However, most people need comfort and security, so traditional CV is working beautifully for them. Also many times when I inquire, people use the BG verse where Krsna says that for the doubting soul there is no happiness in this world or the next. It is a sin to doubt authorities and inquiry is always pushed down with disdain. I will post some excerpts from an interesting discussion we are having on verses from the Bh Upanishad that talking about beating a woman and eating cow meat to get a son. Those aren't people. Those are sheep. Does Krsna really want a bunch sheep to flock to him? All of these ways of portraying Krsna make him out to be an idiot in constant need of ego reassurance. It really is quite insulting to Him and to us.
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 14, 2011 13:48:36 GMT -6
Hi Nitai, I managed to find at least a couple of papers that claim to directly test the effect of Harinama. As I mentioned, they are by an Iskconite - David Wolf PhD. aka Dhira Govinda das - and mainly consists of his own PhD. thesis and a follow-up study. VNN - this was my starting point, a mention on the old VNN site. Using Google Scholar for that study title and author name brought me to: Examining the Effects of Meditation Techniques on Psychosocial Functioning - published in Sage Journals. The study purports to measure the effect on harinama on reducing stress, depression, rajas and tamas. Further researches turned up this: New Article On Child Abandonment In ISKCON - nothing much here, but it seems Wolf has been busy trying his best to establish a basis for further research. Wolff's original doctoral dissertation is listed there, so perhaps it simply remained a dissertation that was unpublished in a journal for peer review, etc. What worries me about all of this is that Wolff seems to be using "Western psychology" to validate mood and personality constructs (sattva, rajas, etc.) that may have no validity in mainstream personality research. The last time I looked, which is incidentally the last time I engaged in this sort of research for my own BSc. studies, is that personality psychology uses well-established constructs that have undergone rigorous analyses, such as the Five Factor Model (or "Big 5"). Other such personality scales exist, of course, with just as much validity as the Big 5 such as the Revised NEO (I used the Neo-FFI in my own studies). In other words, it is well established in personality psychology that personality can be measured in terms of 5 stable dimensions: Neuroticism, Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness and Psychoticism. It worries me that Wolf and others of his ilk are trying to develop personality measurements that may not adequately describe the dimensions of sattva, rajas, etc. It seems that Wolff is not the only one doing this; a lot of Indian psychologists are doing it too. I spotted this seemingly wacky study (on PubMed of all places! ) in my searches: A randomized control trial of the effect of yoga on Gunas (personality) and Self esteem in normal healthy volunteers - which makes reference to a "Gita Inventory of Personality" (GIN). "The Gita inventory (GIN) is now available as a standardized, psychological tool, and is based on the concept that there are three different levels of human existence in which the mind is always in a dynamic equilibrium between three types of response patterns called Gunas." Really? What does the Gita know about personality constructs that several decades of established and stable personality research don't? I looked it up in the references, and the authors appear to quote a 1991 article in the Journal of Indian Psychology authored by the suspiciously-named RC Das. It is possible that this is the civil name of some Indian psychologist who thought it up, but just think of the cringe if it turned out that RC Das was aka RamaChandra Das from ISKCON Bangalore or something like that. Just from my extremely preliminary researches it seems to be a disturbing trend that such studies seem to be published larely in Indian journals, largely using their own scientific tools, and sciencey sounding discussions of concepts that are known to be pseudoscience, in order to prove a research point that, well, could lead anywhere really. Is this good science, I wonder, to make up sciencey sounding things that have an obvious basis in religious/spiritual foundations if one cared to look deeper? I notice that Wolf now has a network of websites where he promotes, of all things, a Vedic Personality Inventory! Anyway, one thing I noticed to my delight. His original PhD. thesis is now available on one of his websites: YedaVeda. I have not gone through it yet, but I presume it will deal with the questions of what effect the chanting of Harinama has on mood and such things. Thanks for this Ekantin. It is just as I expected. I think that, if this is the way this research has been undertaken, we can safely say that nothing has been done in this area. It is beyond dumb to try to connect the study of the effects of chanting with the three guna. I hope no university gave him a degree for that. What will they come up with next a guna-meter? Something like those silly meters used by Scientology? The only worthwhile study would be to study it in terms of Western psychology. Otherwise it is just pseudo-science as you suggest. I think one has to simply hook someone up to an MRI or EKG or some other kind of sensitive instrumentation that measures physical states and see what changes after an hour or two hours or eight hours. If we approach it with some bull-crap presuppositions like the guna we will miss something interesting. If nothing changes, that too is interesting. I wish I could do this kind of research, but sadly it is not my field. I would hook my guru-bhai JD up to a battery of machines in a heart beat and see what happens to him when he chants. One would also have to have a subjective component. He would have to write or describe to someone what he experienced during the chanting. Anyway, thanks for collecting all this together for us. I will follow some of the links and see what else we have. It is incredible! Florida State University granted that piece of charlatanry a PhD? Unbelievable!
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Post by Nitaidas on Jun 16, 2011 10:36:11 GMT -6
Nothing to rave or rant about today. Just reflecting on the svarupa of Krsna as Bhagavan. What exactly does Bhagavan mean? Sure, possessor of those famous (though puzzling) six qualities, but that strikes me as highly artificial. The main component of the word bhagavat seems to be vat, possessor or owner, the one who possesses something. The question is then: what is possessed? It must be indicated by the word bhaga. Bhaga has a variety of meanings: the sun ; the moon ; good fortune, happiness, welfare, prosperity ; dignity , majesty , distinction , excellence , beauty , loveliness ; love , affection , sexual passion , amorous pleasure , dalliance ; the female organs , pudendum muliebre , vulva. This is quite a list. I personally like the suggestion that bhaga is related to bhaj which means to take part in. In the simplest terms one might say that bhagavan means the one who has parts or the whole and contrast that with the idea of our being those parts. In other words, we are some of the parts (along with much else) and Krsna is the whole into which or whom all those parts fit. We are indeed very small parts of the vastness that we see around us and the many vastnesses beyond that. That is all Krsna, that one non-dual truth that is described variously as Brahman, Paramatman and Bhagavan. Viewed from this perspective Krsna is really unknowable. All of those descriptions, all of them, fall short. Those descriptors are not just random descriptors, but as Sri Jiva points out, are based in different adhikaras, always a difficult word to translate. It suggests both qualification and authority. Those with one set of qualifications perceive the non-dual truth as Brahman, that is without its various powers expressed, and describe it so. Others, with different qualifications describe it as Bhagavan, with energies expressed in the form of qualities and actions. The "it" is the same. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Notice the importance of perception here. It is the basic and fundamental form of knowing. The question remains: how can something so minute perceive something so vast with any degree of comprehension at all?
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Post by malati on Jun 17, 2011 1:18:38 GMT -6
Nothing to rave or rant about today. Just reflecting on the svarupa of Krsna as Bhagavan. What exactly does Bhagavan mean? Sure, possessor of those famous (though puzzling) six qualities, but that strikes me as highly artificial. The main component of the word bhagavat seems to be vat, possessor or owner, the one who possesses something. The question is then: what is possessed? It must be indicated by the word bhaga. Bhaga has a variety of meanings: the sun ; the moon ; good fortune, happiness, welfare, prosperity ; dignity , majesty , distinction , excellence , beauty , loveliness ; love , affection , sexual passion , amorous pleasure , dalliance ; the female organs , pudendum muliebre , vulva. This is quite a list. I personally like the suggestion that bhaga is related to bhaj which means to take part in. In the simplest terms one might say that bhagavan means the one who has parts or the whole and contrast that with the idea of our being those parts. In other words, we are some of the parts (along with much else) and Krsna is the whole into which or whom all those parts fit. We are indeed very small parts of the vastness that we see around us and the many vastnesses beyond that. That is all Krsna, that one non-dual truth that is described variously as Brahman, Paramatman and Bhagavan. Viewed from this perspective Krsna is really unknowable. All of those descriptions, all of them, fall short. Those descriptors are not just random descriptors, but as Sri Jiva points out, are based in different adhikaras, always a difficult word to translate. It suggests both qualification and authority. Those with one set of qualifications perceive the non-dual truth as Brahman, that is without its various powers expressed, and describe it so. Others, with different qualifications describe it as Bhagavan, with energies expressed in the form of qualities and actions. The "it" is the same. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Notice the importance of perception here. It is the basic and fundamental form of knowing. The question remains: how can something so minute perceive something so vast with any degree of comprehension at all? Haribol Nitaidasji Of course the concept of God is ineffable, something extremely difficult to express with our little mind and it seems to me the reason why the shastras are written. To me the descriptions given of God Krishna are just a language that carry with it an imaginative idealization and symbology which will help the devotee with a conception by which he/she can centre his heart's devotion. And by following a guru, the guru not only imparts the teaching of his/her lineage but also facilitates the sharing of his/her experiences. We may not have the exact same experiences as our guru but the connection is in the sharing. My understanding of adhikara is that which is tied up with the verse in the Gita that says, " Everyone follows my path and as they surrender unto me, I reward them accordingly". I am writing the verse something similar to the translation of SP. I'm not sure if the word "reward" in the verse is translated accurately, but the meaning of the verse is in that likelihood, I suppose. Therefore though others may describe his name, forms, attributes in many ways, or may express its conception in a negative concept as in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, neti neti, not this, not that, and exalt one deity over the other, this is only due to the result of how everything makes sense to the respective aspirant and how well one follows one's path. Our understanding and experiential conception are facilitated by that antaryami (the paramatma) within us.
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