Each day begins with a singular focus, a dedication of the intellect that quietens all other concerns. This is my world, at least for now; grappling with questions, clarifying ideas, piecing the puzzle together, and reflecting on what it all means in real life. I’m drawn into a unique absorption. Education is meditation! In an age where attention fractures into a thousand fleeting fragments, there is profound beauty in focus: the slow, deep, deliberate work of learning. We venture beyond hollow memorisation and premature certainty, realising there’s no room for overconfidence in learning. The journey is cyclical: fascination often turns to confusion, confusion to assimilation, and then fascination anew - day after day, an intellectual rollercoaster.
This is the life of the scholar. They spend years unravelling the intricacies of a specialised field, systematically dissecting the subject and unravelling the unknown story behind it all. Yesterday I spoke to an ethnographer who transplanted himself into a foreign community for four years to write one book. He journeys to the physical space, gradually penetrating the hearts and minds of the people, tracing rituals, observing behaviours, and discerning beliefs, painstakingly weaving together a tapestry of meaning. This study is devotion – the sheer patience to embrace the fullness of complexity without reduction or haste. Learning, real learning, takes time.
Depth, however, is one element of the equation. Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern hermeneutics, offered his framework for interpreting information – literary, historical, spiritual or otherwise. He proposes the hermeneutic circle: we can only understand the whole through its parts, and the parts through the whole. To grasp a single word, we are called to situate it within the landscape of the text; to grasp the text, we attend carefully to every word. Meanings emerge within this dynamic tension, a continual movement between precision and perspective. Zooming in and zooming out.
Here lies a profound truth: plunge too deeply, and one risks drowning in an ocean of particulars; rise too far above, and one is alienated from the subtle texture of a single leaf. Scholars tend to be precisionists, pleasured by the depths of detail. Spiritualists tend to be essentialists, rising to the ultimate, or getting to the ‘bottom line.’ The danger of scholasticism is to become so engrossed in detail that the larger contextualisation and conclusiveness never occurs. The danger of religion may be to grasp at the “big picture” so swiftly that we neglect the patient investigation that reveals the beauty of expression and hidden meanings that charm the heart. We reach the conclusion but forget to relish.
When the scholar and the spiritualist converge, zooming in and zooming out, it’s a match made in heaven.
Having had a liberal arts education at Princeton University under the tutelage of one of the greatest cultural historians of modern times (whose family I became a part of through marriage where I got to observe up close his actual unresolved state of being) , and then a legal education, (far less philosophical and profound) at UC Berkeley School of Law, one of the top law schools in the US, I find all that I learned in those places to be utterly mediocre in the face of Vaisnava Sastra.
The bird’s eye view and attachment to particulars are BOTH aspects of rigorous intellectual life, but they do very little, if anything, to elucidate the fundamental dilemmas of life. It is a seductive and pernicious force that has kept me in Maya most of my life save for the transcendent moments when Krsna, through His Causeless Mercy interceded in my life and made me a devotee both before living in a temple and during the two years that I did, with only spotty returns on my part to direct acknowledgment of Krsna as the Supreme Divine Person of all existence during the long trajectory of my life.
After decades of forgetfulness and full immersion in every conceivable exploration in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, AND religious traditions of every ilk, I can tell you from the vantage point of old age and a looming mortality, that NOTHING holds a candle to Vaisnava Sastra.
I disagree that the spiritualist engages predominantly in the bird’s eye view or “bottom line”: all spiritual traditions have a plethora of detail about all the aspects of living in this realm—the particulars that you speak of in your essay, as well as an overarching philosophy. The same goes for any academic discipline of any high status. So this dichotomy you name doesn’t make sense to me.
Therefore, all I can say, having returned to the one experience of all my 74 years that fully satisfied every aspect of my incarnate being, is that the Bhakti-Yoga of unalloyed devotion to Krsna has no parallel anywhere in all the multitude of academic disciplines, spiritual traditions, world cultures, that I have explored with full passion of intellect and feeling since my very early youth.
Nothing has satisfied my heart so utterly and if I turned my back on the most exalted mystical revelation of my entire life (among a good number) it was only my weakness, my addiction to rationalism, to mundane interpretations of how the world works, and other addictions to my sense gratification that made thst happen, and I joined ISKCON as what I then saw as a “penance” in light of all that Krsna had revealed to me of His All-Pervading Presence in every crevice of my then NYC-urban life.
You call what you observe in scholars “devotion”, but following that logic, so are the activities of any other common person in the world who do what they do with intention and deep commitment. And it begs the question: devotion to what? What in life IS SO fundamental that it makes the devotion fruitful, liberating of the core of the heart?? All the scholarship, all the devotion to family, country, hearth, can be stripped away in a moment, as it is, moment by moment, in this bedeviled world of ours, where the greatest thinkers and lovers alive in the world today see No Exit.
So with all due respect, Maharaj, the only utility that I see in your present reflection, is that perhaps your appreciation of scholarship in this new way, will provide another language with which to communicate the incomprehensibly magnificent revelations that Krsna, by His Causeless Mercy, has made available to us.
Never forget the treachery of Maya to entrance and seduce. I speak from deep experience, and am so profoundly relieved that Their Lordships have restored me to Their Lotus Feet, even at this very late date. I am comforted by the knowledge that where Radha-Krsna are loved, there is no such thing as limitations of time or space.
With great wishes that your impulse to serve the mission of Guru and Gauranga are purely realized in this lifetime for the benefit of all beings. Hare Krsna❣️
Makes me think of Viveka - discernement. Discerning just the amount of zooming in and zooming out.