Part of my yoga teachers training course involves a three hour class each week on Yogic Philosophy. It’s taught by Dr. Tamara Ditrich, who lectures in Sanskrit at the University of Queensland. Her students have included His Grace Svayambhu prabhu and His Holiness Prabhavishnu Swami.

It’s an intense, interesting,and enjoyable experience. Last Friday two of the five of us doing the course went along. Others went to the Nrsimha caturdasi festival at the temple and manned the Atma Yoga program.

The processing of the information that is presented in this course is very good for my conception of Krishna Consciousness. I like to be conscious and intentional about what I’m doing. As Krishna das Kaviraja mentions in his Sri Caitanya Caritamrita, discussing things in this way helps to strengthen one’s faith. I am familiar with all the elements - the facts, the figures, the ideas, the personalities, that are being presented, and what I am really enjoying is integrating the meta-narrative that Tamara weaves them into.

Here is something very interesting that H.H. Tripurari Swami wrote:

In our daily life we should test the metal of our faith in God with the fire of reason. If it starts to melt, we should withdraw to spiritual practice and saintly association - the company of men and women of faith. If it is strengthened through the fire of reason, this faith is no longer tender (komala), and such firm faith will fuel our spiritual practice, and more, it will grant us entrance into spiritual life and enable us to fuel the practice of others.

I am going to write about the material that is being presented, especially the meta-narrative - you can read about all the elements in Srila Prabhupada’s books, but how they fit together is something else - and about my processing and integration of this presentation into my conception.

This is the activity of the madhyama-adhikari stage - the integration of reason with faith. Kanistha adhikari means something like a religious fanatic (outsiders will consider this person to be a bit “dogmatic”). Reason and critical deliberation is unimportant and even suspect. In the madhyama-adhikari stage reason comes more to the forefront. At this point, almost perversely, a practitioner becomes susceptible to doubt and even conversion, if they are not solid in their practice, as mentioned above. In the uttama-adhikari stage, beyond this, reason again retires.

An example of this:

Reporter: “What would you do if you found out tomorrow that Krishna wasn’t God?”

Srila Prabhupada (smiling broadly): “I would do the same thing, because I am happy.”

That is the realization of the Uttama-adhikari - topmost faith - beyond reason, and based on experience. Pratyaksvagamam - direct perception of the self.

Let me first of all talk about the weakness of a purely academic approach to understanding the information and constructing a meta-narrative.

The western ideal of study is to be the impassive, immutable “objective observer” who is neither involved in nor modified by the material they are studying. In this model you try to explain everything from a supposedly neutral point of view, which is in fact whatever subjective state of consciousness you possess, with all its assumptions, preconceptions, and limitations. You try to explain the tradition, and end up in many cases explaining it away.

The idea of the tradition, on the other hand, is not to understand it from your present point of view. The approach to the tradition recommended by the tradition itself is not to try to explain the tradition, but to try to experience it. You do not fit it within your frame of reference, you fit yourself within its frame of reference, and see where that takes you. The goal is not to explain it away, transforming it with the power of reason to make it fit where you are at and what you are all about, but rather to experience it and be transformed by it. You cannot taste the honey by analyzing it and licking the outside of the bottle - you have to dive in.

If I didn’t have a few years of trying to chant the Hare Krishna mantra and do service to my Guru and his mission behind me, then I might be negatively affected by the presentation I am hearing. That effect would be to reduce it to intellectually interesting information which doesn’t translate into a transformative practice. However, after having directly experienced the transformative power of the process and studied the teachings for some time, I’m in a better position to explain the meta-narrative from the perspective of our own meta-narrative, assimilating the presentation into the frame of reference of the tradition.

If you find the processing I do on the information disturbing then please don’t read the articles that I’m going to write about it. The madhyama-adhikari platform is characterized by contention and dispute, but I’m not so much inclined toward debate. I’m happy to share my processing of this information for others who may come across it and wonder how to integrate it with their faith. I’m not trying to promote it as a doctrine, however, but just as my processing of the information. There are many ways to peel a mango, many points of view and valid ways of explaining the same thing in a way that arrives at the same essential conclusion.

I’ve added a new category “Yoga Teacher Training” for recording my experiences on my Yoga Teacher Training Course.