Why don’t devotees discuss the eight stages of jnana?

Transcript

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Question we talk about Jnana usually in terms of speculation or in terms of other terms which are not very positive but Jnana also has 8 stages which involve progressive analysis and development of knowledge so we never hear devotees talking about that. Prabhupada also doesn’t talk about it. Why is that? Answer every Acharya based on Shastra focuses on a particular process.
Now if you look at the Bhagavad Gita although it talks about Jnana but if you want to see where Jnana is talked about it doesn’t talk much about the technicalities of Jnana. The only verses directly about Jnana in the Bhagavad Gita are 18.49 to 18.53 and there it talks about announcing the world and controlling the diet and sitting in the forest in meditation so Bhagavad Gita doesn’t talk much about Jnana. Further if you look at the Bhagavatam the Bhagavatam also talks about renunciation whenever it talks, it talks more in terms of the Sankhya metaphysics where it focuses on analyzing the body in terms of the elements and withdrawing the consciousness from those elements.
So the Bhakti scriptures in general don’t talk about Jnana and that’s why our Acharyas don’t talk about it. So in fact you see overall we look at the Bhagavad Gita it does not encourage Jnana at all. The Uddhav Gita to some extent encourages Jnana as a second reference in Bhakti is not possible but even then the Jnana it talks about is more in terms of analysis which ultimately leads towards devotion only.
So the every field can have, every subject or any path can have its detailed analysis. Now if you see, if you look at the Asanas and we talk about Asanas just at one stage but even within Asanas there are so many different kind of Asanas and of course most Asanas are for bodily health and other things but there are Asanas which might be helpful for spiritual purposes also but because that process is not the focus of our Acharyas so we just talk about 8 divisions of Ashtanga Yuga and we don’t go any further beyond that. So with respect to Jnana because that is not a process that our Shastras talk about so our Acharyas also don’t devote much time analyzing or describing it and that’s why we don’t see that discussion but overall the principle underlying whatever stages of analysis or progression that is there, the principle is of using one’s intelligence for perceiving higher spiritual reality and gaining more and more perception of higher spiritual reality.
That principle applies even to the path of Bhakti and that principle of Narbhagavata itself is a philosophical one. It requires intellectual understanding to appreciate it. So we see that that principle is accepted even in the process of Bhakti and rather than going into the specifics because in any path if we go deeper, the specifics can become many many.
Now we just talk about Mayavad as Mayavad but even in Mayavad also there are so many different there is no oneness about the idea of oneness. There are so many different conceptions of how that oneness manifests. Actually the Advaitavad in Mayavad is one type of Advaitavad which has become very popular.
There are other types of Advaitavad also. So we don’t go into the technicalities of those schools of thought. Similarly we don’t go into the technicalities of those processes also.