Thursday, June 14, 2012

Mostly Concerning Kama and Her Immortal Lord

Professor wrote this essay in 1973 in Austin, Texas and it was published in Indian Horizons as Volume XXII, No. 1, January, 1973.  I had been a student in several of his classes in the late  sixties and later, after I graduated, I was privileged to stay in contact with the Professor.  I have lost track of the exact date but sometime in the late seventies he gave me a copy of this essay.  It was an Offprint and had been marked up, I later found out, by him.  There were a great many errors in the Offprint and I've learned since that Todd Katz used the corrected copy given to me to prepare the Rissala manuscript of which Mostly Concerning Kama and Her Immortal Lord was included for republication.  Unfortunately Rissala, as I mentioned below, has never been published and is now, as I understand it, owned by the United Nation's Children's Fund.  Todd has more details on this on the site he hosts, Desani.org.  My site, this "blog", is more in the nature of a virtual shrine for the purpose of venerating a spiritual leader and, to me, life mentor.

A while back I took the trouble to scan into PDF the essay at hand and shared it with Todd.  He in turn performed OCR (optical character resolution) on the file and sent it back to me for proof reading.  The document, some 53 pages, is back in Todd's hands.  He intends to incorporate my proofs and publish it at Desani.org.  Meanwhile, here are two pages out of the original Offprint with Professor Desani's own markings.  This piece is a profound scholarly exposition of the subject and provides insights I dare say not available anywhere else in the world, not to speak of the personal testimony of a man who braved the most sublime ordinarily unknowable territory of the spirit daring to discover for himself the deepest, and yes, the darkest secrets of existence.  The philosophical insights are unparalleled.  Anyone with the capacity to grasp Desani's offering, and it is that, in a most religious, worshipful sense, I should hope would be most grateful that he or she has had the great good fortune to have this access, to them here bequeathed.

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