The Application of Bhakti to Daily Life | Swami Nishpapananda

[SPEAKER_03]: We are very pleased and grateful to have Swami Nishpapa Nanda, Assistant Minister at the Vedanta Society of Saint Louis, to speak with us again today.
[SPEAKER_03]: We are very grateful that you have taken the time over these last couple of weeks, soarmagey, and we know you have every responsibilities there, and we have been very happy to have you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anyway, the subject of his talk today is the application of Bhakti to daily life, soarmagey.
[SPEAKER_03]: Think you might have something to do with house painting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come on, come
[SPEAKER_01]: lead us from the ever-changing to the unchanging.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lead us from darkness to light.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lead us from death to immortality.
[SPEAKER_01]: Light is through and through, and guide us ever more with thy loving presence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Peace, peace, peace, and all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, good morning.
[SPEAKER_02]: Good morning, and good morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's nice to be here and it's nice to be away from my heavy responsibilities in this warm center.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I thank you for that and all the good food and conversation that I've had since I've been here.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, there are two main paths within Hinduism, the path of devotion and the path of knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: The devotees approach personal God with blessed qualities through a reciprocal loving relationship.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the followers of the path of knowledge approach the impersonal which is beyond thought and symbol.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great teacher, Shishankaracharya, and the great exponent of the path of knowledge once wrote, of all the means to liberation, to complete freedom from all bondage and suffering,
[SPEAKER_01]: Now why in the world, which on car are right there, because just through the intellect, just through reasoning, we cannot realize God.
[SPEAKER_01]: The heart must move with the head.
[SPEAKER_01]: The emotions must join with the intellect.
[SPEAKER_01]: the heart must yearn for the divide.
[SPEAKER_01]: Without Bhakti, we're just research students.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sri Ramakrishna puts it more plainly.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says the Pundit is a scholar of the scriptures.
[SPEAKER_01]: not only is he not getting the rasa, the nectar, but those books are heavy.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is, this is in the days before flash drives.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's got to carry all those books around with them everywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: Constant recollectiveness of God is called bhakti.
[SPEAKER_01]: And truly speaking, we meditate on what we love.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what carries us through this life, and it's the vector that determines the direction we take when we leave this life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what is it that carries the normal, well-adjusted person through life?
[SPEAKER_01]: years ago this was brought to my attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: In a conversation I had while I was doing market research shortly after graduating from college.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was interviewing a man who
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a very easy interview, as a long interview.
[SPEAKER_01]: And most people, at a certain point, wonder whether they should be doing something else other than the interview.
[SPEAKER_01]: And most of your attention is focused on keeping them in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he settled down and gave his full attention to it, and I was very appreciative.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when he started conversing afterwards, I was happy to talk with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he started asking me a series of very interesting questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when you get older and you have
[SPEAKER_01]: learn things from your own experience in life.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't feel like leaving without sharing that, and when you find someone who looks like they might be in the right frequency range, you want to share that with them, and this is what was happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't remember all the questions, I just remember this one.
[SPEAKER_01]: What was the slave and Egypt thinking about when he was hauling stones for the pyramid?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, now that's a very good question, and I didn't have an answer, so I was quiet for a very long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, he said, he was thinking about his wife and kids back home.
[SPEAKER_01]: And how did the commercial insurance inspector and Altna Lennoy know what a slave thousands of years ago building the pyramids would be thinking that would be thinking about his wife
[SPEAKER_01]: because he's a human being, and for most human beings, their primary joy comes through close personal relationships.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even while engaged in work that is intellectually challenging, part of the mind will be remembering consciously or subconsciously, these primary relationships
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I'll segue to Swami Saradation on the, how many have heard of Swami Saradation on the, not too many, Cordelia has.
[SPEAKER_01]: Swami Saradation on the very long life, he was a disciple of Holy Mother.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was known as Gopesh Maharaja in our order and respected for his spiritual attainment.
[SPEAKER_01]: and he wrote a book toward the latter part of his life about Holy Mother, and this is taken from that book.
[SPEAKER_01]: He is reflecting on something that happened probably when he was in his 40s.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd gone to the house of a friend of mine to meet him after a long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: The friend was a doctor about 40 years of age, who had a good practice and a reputation as a good physician,
[SPEAKER_01]: After two sons, he was blessed with a daughter who was then a year and a half old.
[SPEAKER_01]: From his early boyhood, my friend was very particular about the neatness of his clothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: If he went to a place and found that the seat he wanted to sit on was not clean enough, he would first carefully dust it off and clean, dusted clean, and then sit.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if he didn't do that, he'd stand.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one had ever seen my friend dressed in any way, except Spick and Span.
[SPEAKER_01]: Seeing me, my friend came running in Great Joy, and we started exchanging greetings and pleasantries.
[SPEAKER_01]: When this little daughter of his, the apple of his eye, toppled over, and raised up her arms, lisping data.
[SPEAKER_01]: He bent down at once, raised her up, and in the exuberance of his love for her, remarked, plaintively.
[SPEAKER_01]: For her sake, I have had to leave off everything, even my fast-didiousness.
[SPEAKER_01]: She will never accept a no, I can't pick you up.
[SPEAKER_01]: The moment her eyes fall on me, I must at once take her up in my arms.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I come back from my practice, I am not allowed to change my clothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: She may be playing in the dust, but when she sees me, she comes running at once, and I have to take her up in my arms, then hand there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was able to keep myself away from my sons.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not allowed to get on my lap, but I could not save myself from her.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just see, she's been rolling on the ground and has dirt and dust all over her.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the moment she saw me standing there, she came running.
[SPEAKER_01]: And saying this, my friend's eyes, again, fixed on his daughter, and embraced her again, the joy of his heart shining through his face and eyes.
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw and heard this, and the thought came to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is perhaps for tasting this bliss in life that one takes to the life of a householder.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a very good observer of human life.
[SPEAKER_01]: My friend's sons were born when he was much younger.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then perhaps the lotus of his heart had not fully blossomed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps the nectar of love was not in such abundance at that time.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was very happy to see the joyous household of my friend.
[SPEAKER_01]: much later when he was above 80 and had become incapable of much movement.
[SPEAKER_01]: I came to know that it was this jewel of a daughter who took care of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: By thus serving her father with love and respect,
[SPEAKER_01]: You see anything that is deeply imprinted on the mind becomes a preoccupation, and it carries us along.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is true even for most people who find their engagement with life is highly skewed to the rational rather than the emotional.
[SPEAKER_01]: We had a devotee in St. Louis, a physician who moved to another town and he was on the phone.
[SPEAKER_01]: He'd called and he was telling me that he'd been diagnosed with cancer.
[SPEAKER_01]: What kind of cancer, and I happened to know that this is the type of cancer that tends to take people very quickly.
[SPEAKER_01]: It didn't work out that way with him, but that was the expectation.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was puzzled because there was such joy in his voice that I'd never heard before.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he had my complete attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it turns out that very quickly after he was diagnosed, both of his daughters, one of whom was starting her, she was also a physician, she was starting her specialization training in another part of the country, the other had a teaching job outside the country, both of them picked up everything and re-located their families in the town that he was living, very close to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then I thought,
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I understand the joy in his voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he was trying to be very clinical about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he finished narrating this story.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, so eight more mammals.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was thinking, what's he talking about?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's two daughters, two sons in law, two grandchildren, and two dogs.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was hanging onto his rationality somehow, the joy that his daughters loved him, that much, that they wouldn't allow themselves to be away from him when he really needed them.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when the mind turns to God, it's natural and highly effective to approach God through human relationship and any human relationship can be divinized.
[SPEAKER_01]: The practical problem is to take the mind that has been churning through the ocean and
[SPEAKER_01]: and turn the ship around so that it's churning in the opposite direction, preoccupied with God.
[SPEAKER_01]: How does one change preoccupation with the world to preoccupation with God?
[SPEAKER_01]: How does one change devotion to the world, to devotion to God, to bhakti, to divine love?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now the topic is the application of Bokdi to daily life.
[SPEAKER_01]: So do you get a bucket of Bokdi and roll it on the wall with a roller?
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you use a two inch trim brush or a four inch house brush to brush it on the wall of daily life?
[SPEAKER_01]: or you can tell what I've been doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or do you get an air compressor and tape off the windows and spray it on the side of the house?
[SPEAKER_01]: Or if you're feeling very exuberant, you put the intake hose way down in the bucket of buckley and machine gun it on the wall of Maya, windows and all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every analogy has its limitations, and this analogy has a lot of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't buy a bucket of boxy at the hardware store or the paint store.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's something intrinsic that must be awakened.
[SPEAKER_01]: We each carry it in our hearts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Devotion to the world is really devotion to the infinite.
[SPEAKER_01]: and unchanging, masquerading as devotion to the finite and changing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that love of God is usually not kindled within us until we come in contact with those who carry that burning flame within them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The grace of God comes through those who have already received it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, excuse me, we've got a bigger podium in St. Louis, and I'm able to turn the pages over like this there.
[SPEAKER_01]: So sometimes when I have an addendum, I'll put it on the back of the preceding page.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so it takes me a while to shuffle things around.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is about Holy Mother, Sara de Davy, when she was 13.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was her first opportunity.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was in Kamer Pukar when Shirama Krishna was visiting from Daksana Swar.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was her first opportunity to spend any time with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, she was married to him, but it was really of the trovele.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she didn't actually become stay with him until she was 17.
[SPEAKER_01]: But this was her first opportunity to see what kind of, I could say, person who she'd married, I'll put it that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: I know I never saw his face, sad or sour.
[SPEAKER_01]: He always radiated joy, whether he was absorbed in somebody, or in the company of an older person, or a five-year-old child, never did I see him gloomy.
[SPEAKER_01]: At that time, I always felt as if a jar of bliss had been set in my heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is impossible to describe that divine joy which is full to the brim, and it has been pouring ever since.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, Holy Mother's case is exceptional.
[SPEAKER_01]: Stree Ramakrishna was exceptional, not to say the least.
[SPEAKER_01]: But something similar can also happen in the case of an ordinary teacher and disciple.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as an example of that,
[SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes, often it just happens very slowly and imperceptibly, like, but occasionally it'll happen in a more dramatic way.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was witness to one of those events, years ago when I was first getting interested in Vedanta, I was still a student, and I'd started coming to the Sunday lectures and at a certain point, this engineer started coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was about 40.
[SPEAKER_01]: dressed impeccably always in a white suit with military posture, Ram broads straight.
[SPEAKER_01]: And after the talk, Swami Satprakash and under who later became my teacher would come into the library, which was near the chapel and sit.
[SPEAKER_01]: chat casually with the people that came in there, not everyone came in.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I'd overcome my shyness and started sitting in there, I noticed that from the first time he came to a service, this gentleman who was a brilliant engineer by profession, worked for the Illinois Department of Transportation.
[SPEAKER_01]: would come right into the library and sit down at the table and start firing questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's why me sat percussion on that.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one else I saw ever sat at that library table with them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They'd all sit around the periphery of the room and there wouldn't, and people would ask questions with great hesitation.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he had this big booming voice and it's like he had all these
[SPEAKER_01]: questions lined up in his head, and Harry finally found someone who could answer these very intricate questions about Vedanta and all these things that he had been thinking about he knew Sanskrit.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was studying these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: He got in an interest in them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one particular day, I was sitting behind this whammy, and this gentleman was sitting on the other side of the table booming out his questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the topic was karma.
[SPEAKER_01]: son Chatechama Agamakarmah, parabdechama.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean he was getting into the nitty-gritty stuff and he got to parabdechama.
[SPEAKER_01]: Swami was very methodically answering his questions and not going and do a great detail, just kind of answering them and an intellectual question and intellectual answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the topic was Praravda, and this gentleman boomed it out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I could see Swami's posture change from behind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I heard His voice change from being very humble and quiet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Suddenly, there was this authority in His voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he looked across the table with one of those looks, I couldn't see the look, but I imagine it was one of those looks that goes through your eyes and down into your toes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you know how much karma is on your shoulders?
[SPEAKER_01]: the karma is the karma that we have in this life.
[SPEAKER_01]: The arrow has been shot, and it will go through its trajectory until it lands.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay?
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you know how much karma is on your shoulders?
[SPEAKER_01]: And Capeo deos expression change.
[SPEAKER_01]: The expression in his eyes, the expression on his face.
[SPEAKER_01]: and he didn't say anything, his hands came up, his head bowed, and he said, I don't know, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: the change was immediate and permanent.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what's unusual about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The change was immediate and impermanent.
[SPEAKER_01]: He never sat at the library table.
[SPEAKER_01]: He'd sit on the outside with everyone else.
[SPEAKER_01]: The white suit never showed up again.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wore casual clothes.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had a very striking appearance.
[SPEAKER_01]: He looked like a brown Paul Newman, very striking appearance.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he never said anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then after a while, he didn't even sit down.
[SPEAKER_01]: He'd stand near the exit door.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're a Swami would have to go when he left the room.
[SPEAKER_01]: And every time Swami's up percussion on that would leave, he went when he got near Capildo, his hands would come up, and he'd say, please bless me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he was asking for Dixie, was asking for spiritual initiation.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Swami would say, oh, you know, these things take time, be patient.
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't worry, be patient.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he wasn't patient at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this went on for some time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And his wife, one day at home, said,
[SPEAKER_01]: I need a job of mal.
[SPEAKER_01]: I need a rosary to do my prayers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you ask Swami to give me a
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you have to have observed how much attention swammy pays to what I ask for.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you ask him?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, Pritiba wasn't shy either.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, the next time she saw the, got a chance.
[SPEAKER_01]: She pigeonholed Swami on the landing of the main staircase.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she said, Swami, I need a, I need a job of Mala.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can you give me a job of Mala?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, oh, he says, I only give Rosaries to people when I initiate them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she said, when can you initiate me?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, well, I have to find an auspicious day.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'll call you, but you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, oh, by the way, you can bring your husband.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think he wants an initiation too.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that way, he got two for the price of one.
[SPEAKER_01]: So once that love of God wakes up, how do we nourish and develop it?
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a matter of removing obstacles.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the urge for the infinite, the eternal, and the perfect that impels our seeking wealth position, love, friendship, and power, and why our minds refuse to be satisfied with anything limited and imperfect.
[SPEAKER_01]: Swami Vivekananda says, we're infinite dreamers.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is infinite, the Ottoman.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dreaming finite dreams, and they'll never satisfy us.
[SPEAKER_01]: The only thing that's going to satisfy us is the infinite.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or, the same things, put a little bit differently.
[SPEAKER_01]: The universe, he said, is the wreckage of the infinite on the shores of the finite.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a person of renunciation in the four of you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once we wake up and start to turn the ship around, it's essential that we devote some time each day exclusively to God.
[SPEAKER_01]: If we don't do that, we won't be able to remember God as we go about our daily routine.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that time for God usually takes the form of Pooja, ritualistic worship, or the repetition of God's name, or meditation, and our tradition.
[SPEAKER_01]: but not necessarily that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it doesn't matter much if we don't necessarily remember God very well during that time that we have to make our daily effort.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at times, especially at the beginning, we'll want to give up because, in fact, it goes so badly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes, you think that you're going backwards.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this shouldn't be discouraging because it's common.
[SPEAKER_01]: That you think you're going backwards when you're actually
[SPEAKER_01]: Over time, that daily effort will change us, and we'll be able to practice karma yoga and remember God more or less in our secular activities.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, as an illustration for this, now don't be confused and think that I'm giving a talk.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm actually just telling stories so you can relax.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't have to remember the thing that doesn't make that much sense.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you should, I hope that you remember the stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, in St. Louis, we had a divacy from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas who got interested in the late 40s and would come up and spend a week with us every year.
[SPEAKER_01]: Norman was a bachelor and very intellectual when we moved him from his apartment that he lived in for 60 years to the assisted living community.
[SPEAKER_01]: We saw all kinds of, you know, protests, rememberants of things passed, and all these very intellectual books that he had read, and he'd read them and correlate them with Vedanta, which was his main interest.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had a very self-deprecating, sense of humor, except about Texas.
[SPEAKER_01]: He'd say, never ask a man, where he's from.
[SPEAKER_01]: If he is from Texas, he'll tell you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if not, don't embarrass him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He actually thought it was kind of funny that people had that attitude towards Texas.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our Secretary once asked him at the dining table, Norman,
[SPEAKER_01]: Why didn't you ever get married and he looked up at at her.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had this Gialis face and he said, well, he said, I've never been a handsome man I took into the airport once.
[SPEAKER_01]: He'd always take the train To St. Louis and from St. Louis.
[SPEAKER_01]: He enjoyed that and this one time he he took the plane
[SPEAKER_01]: And I asked him, after I'd picked him up, why are you taking the plane?
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, do you know how much they're charging for that train now?
[SPEAKER_01]: So on the way back, I don't remember whether this was before after 9-11.
[SPEAKER_01]: He'd forgotten his wallet at home.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they were asking for ID, which is quite natural.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he had his credit card and he gave her whatever he had, but nothing had a picture on it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So she was getting exasperated with him and she said, don't you have anything with the picture on it?
[SPEAKER_01]: And his face bright and he says, well, he says, I do have a dollar bill with a very good portrait of George Washington.
[SPEAKER_01]: He let him on.
[SPEAKER_01]: He called himself a poor, friendless, struggling Jewish merchant.
[SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't poor, he wasn't struggling, he wasn't friendless, he wasn't merchant.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the last time he'd been to Friday night services was 56 years before the time that I asked him that question.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, he'd say, I can't meditate, but he obviously had something.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was always in a good mood, he was always cheerful, he made people around him cheerful.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had something.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, I can't meditate, well, what did he do?
[SPEAKER_01]: He read Vivekananda, that was his main spiritual practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: He, of course, he would do his a little bit of japa.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he studied Vivekananda.
[SPEAKER_01]: He developed a shorthand so that he could write it down verbatim, but not expend too much energy doing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the time I knew him in the latter part of his life, you'd be talking with him and all of a sudden, his sentence is in paragraphs from the Vivekananda would pop out verbatim.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this was his main spiritual practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I happened to be in the basement one time when he was staying there, and Neil, who just joined the monastery, was getting coined with Norman, and he said, you know, Norman, you're the only the donctist in Edinburgh, Texas, and you don't have anyone to talk to.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, don't you ever get lonely?
[SPEAKER_01]: And Norman said, well, he said, I used to get lonely, but then one day when I was reading sports illustrated, now he could address this up and said, when I was reading the scripture or Vivek cannot be said, one day when I was reading sports illustrated, all of a sudden, all I saw was love everywhere.
[SPEAKER_01]: And since that happened, I've never been lonely.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was the end of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He didn't make anything of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He never would have mentioned it otherwise.
[SPEAKER_01]: But these things can happen if you're sincere to anyone.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he didn't quit, and I'm not saying, I'm not trying to evaluate the experience, but something very positive happened to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he just went on about his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was snowed merchant.
[SPEAKER_01]: Still had to self-deprecating sense of humor.
[SPEAKER_01]: Still was a lot of fun to be with.
[SPEAKER_01]: So now when you get to the nitty gritty to the spiritual practice in our tradition, there are two things that are important.
[SPEAKER_01]: One is your chosen ideal of God.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's the aspect of divinity that draws you, their life, their teachings, their words, the stories about them.
[SPEAKER_01]: You find uplifting and just thinking about them, you feel uplifted.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as someone young coming into this, I understood that, that made sense to me, and if you think about that type of divine person intently, some of those qualities that you find so uplifting begin to kind of rub off on you, and that all made sense to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: kind of nuna, it's about Eastern traditions that was in the general mindset, you know, the Beatles had gotten interested in meditation and people were getting mantras in meditating and but it was all kind of new and I wasn't so sure about this mantra business.
[SPEAKER_01]: But at a certain point, I thought, well, maybe I, because the mantra is given related to your devotional mood, and there are various devotional moods within Hinduism.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the various ways, devotional relationships that you can use to approach God.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the mantra is tuned to that devotional mood.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, this didn't make any sense to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I thought at a certain point that I should probably say a mantra.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was living at the center and working outside.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one day, I was there.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had an evening job.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the only other person there was the old Swami.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he lived on the second floor.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I could hear him saying, with great devotion, was very beautiful.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now I've been accused on more than one occasion of walking like a cat burglar, and he was hard of hearing, so I'm sure he didn't know anyone was there.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he was saying, what appeared to be a mantra, and then the name of God, and that appealed to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: So well, that sounds pretty good, I'll say that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I started doing that and it seemed to suit me very well.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really enjoyed it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got some joy out of it and I would do it every day.
[SPEAKER_01]: Religiously and now I had a job.
[SPEAKER_01]: The job I had was
[SPEAKER_01]: working with juvenile delinquent and emotionally disturbed teenagers, pre-selected for the severity of their problems and they were all dumped together.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a hard job intellectually, emotionally and physically.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the more I did this meditation practice, the more I did this meditation practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: The more I felt like I was watching the show, you know, and I heard the kids talking about me says, ah, he's so cool, because they'd be doing something that I was supposed to get upset about, and they might be trying to upset me intentionally.
[SPEAKER_01]: They often did that, and I would just not react, and they thought, ah, he's they liked it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was so cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know the people that were paying me to work with these kids I wasn't supposed to be watching them as the witness I was supposed to do stuff So I could see this might be getting to be a problem and I might need some help with it And I went and made an appointment and talked with the old swammy And I told him what was going on and that I was He said well, how are you meditating and I told him what I was doing and he said Who told you to say that?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I explained the situation where I got the mantra and he calmed down a little bit.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, don't say that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he gave me some instruction to kind of undo the damage.
[SPEAKER_01]: And later on, I pieced it together.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been taught the path of knowledge by Swami Brahman under.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this was his mantra that I heard.
[SPEAKER_01]: And saying it, I was becoming the witness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then later on when I receive my mantra, which is more devotional.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had an entirely different effect on me.
[SPEAKER_01]: You see, when you say these mantras over time, you live in the devotional mood that the mantra engenders.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I didn't have any clue as how a word, a simple word could change your life like that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't understand it, and I still really don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: especially when it's given by someone who has that flame of divine love in them already.
[SPEAKER_01]: And oh, here's why I had that doubt about Montreux because there was a reaction going on in the general society to this invasion of eastern thought and culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some scientists had gotten a hold of some of the Sanskrit mantras that one of the Eastern traditions was giving to students maybe not giving, but students were getting these Sanskrit mantras from them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as a controlled experiment, they told people to use the Sanskrit mantra, and they had a control group that would say something secular like Coca-Cola.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they'd measure the Galvanic skin response and whatever they were doing to measure the effectiveness of meditation, and they found no difference between the Sanskrit mantra and Coca-Cola.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, well, you know, it depends on what they used to measure the effect of meditation.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, this was in the back of my mind, but after this experience that I told you about, I got on board with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now I want to talk about something that seems that'll seem a little strange, and then I'll try to connect it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's the common kind of greeting that we have in this culture.
[SPEAKER_01]: How are you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Now how do you answer that question?
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, no one really wants to know how you are.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and it's addressed to your empirical self, how are your investments, how is work, how are your near-endier ones?
[SPEAKER_01]: How are you physically psychologically?
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't want to detail the answer.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when my aunt was older and I was talking to her on the phone, I'd say, how are you, Martia?
[SPEAKER_01]: And she'd say, well, and she'd start with her four kids and go through them one after another and tell me how they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then she'd start in on our grandkids.
[SPEAKER_01]: She never got to her great grandkids.
[SPEAKER_01]: At some point, I said, well, no more, how are you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: So if she ever gets reoriented and once in mantra, I know the devotional moon that she needs.
[SPEAKER_01]: She needs a parental.
[SPEAKER_01]: and devotional relationship with the divine, and then on the other extreme, there's a divotine named Veronica from Southern California who was a World War II refugee from Hungary, and she spoke like Marlene Dietrich.
[SPEAKER_01]: hello this is Veronica how are you and she really wanted to know and it didn't matter how bad it was she wanted to know all the details and you might try to avoid her but she wasn't to be deterred.
[SPEAKER_01]: how are you from Veronica was like swallowing a prescription experiment you had to cough it up.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, something happens as we proceed along this path in bhakti, there's a shift.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our focus becomes how we're doing in our inner life, how we're doing physically, materially is there, but it becomes peripheral rather than central.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for this, I'm going to talk about maykunt's who came to Vedanta in St. Louis in January
[SPEAKER_01]: She had a high school education, but for some reason when she came that first time she was already memorizing the Bhagavad-gita in translation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Very simple person.
[SPEAKER_01]: You could not fool me.
[SPEAKER_01]: She didn't have a crookedness in her mind at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: There has been put in gas meters and took him out for the gas.
[SPEAKER_01]: company.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was strong-willed with a very practical intelligence.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I picked her up for the service, I think, one day.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she was telling me about going to the clinic.
[SPEAKER_01]: She took care of herself very well, you know, what she, the health food that she picked out, and what she cooked in, what spices she used.
[SPEAKER_01]: She took care of herself that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you get older, she needed to go to the doctor.
[SPEAKER_01]: She went to the clinic and this young doctor who hadn't seen her before asked how are you?
[SPEAKER_01]: And she had an artificial valve in her heart and arthritis, and maybe four conditions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she went through them one after another when it started up the present situation, one, two, three, four.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's paying close attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was about 89 at the time, 90.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she gets done with the narration.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she looks at him and she said, but I'm fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she giggle like a little girl and said, and he said, you should have seen him.
[SPEAKER_01]: His head tilted.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had this strange expression on his face.
[SPEAKER_01]: And her take on old age and the problems of old age in her 90s was, I can't wait to get a new body this one isn't working very well.
[SPEAKER_01]: So if we can connect somehow or other with our innate joy through spiritual practice, our health can fail, our investments can go south, everything can go south on us, and we can still be fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, Hindu iconography is extensive, and everyone has their own portfolio.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yama, the god of death, has a news.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, if we think we're the body and the body's dying, most people don't want to go.
[SPEAKER_01]: So Yama has a news to yank him out.
[SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand,
[SPEAKER_01]: If we're focused on our inner life, and we think of the body as peripheral rather than central, say the body is dying, I'm fine.
[SPEAKER_01]: We can participate actively participate in the process of dying.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a much different, and Yama doesn't have so much work.
[SPEAKER_01]: He doesn't have to be anxious out.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, one of the characteristics of an aluminum soul is that he or she doesn't trouble others, and others don't trouble him or her.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'll meet Caitanya Nanda, who I've been with for a long time, was very close to Swami Butationanda, who was president of our order for many years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Swami, Caitanya Nanda would say of Swami Butationanda, his enemy was never born.
[SPEAKER_01]: he had this
[SPEAKER_01]: beautiful smile.
[SPEAKER_01]: This amazing smile, from another dimension.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Swami Chidbashananda, who started our center in the Netherlands, was telling me, he was at headquarters in the law of this, before he was transferred to Amsterdam, that there was a Swami at headquarters,
[SPEAKER_01]: And he'd come in occasionally and say, you know, you guys are getting old.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's time that you let younger people come in and fill your shoes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so on, my mutation under was unperturbed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He never said, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why are you so ambitious?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, why don't you do your spirit?
[SPEAKER_01]: And you just unperturbed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he must have gotten more insistent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Finally, it's only a mutation under, when he came in and was going on like this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was a break in the narration, so I'm a mutation under, talked very slowly.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, our shoes aren't big enough for your feet.
[SPEAKER_01]: with all love.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, that was so meputation on this way of dealing with people who are troublesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, how can we, who aren't at that level, set aside that when we go to the altered
[SPEAKER_01]: Peter asks, Christ, how often shall my neighbor wrong me that I forgive him?
[SPEAKER_01]: Seven times.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, seven times is very generous.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the conventional wisdom then was three or four.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Christ says, up to 70 times seven.
[SPEAKER_01]: Going to the altar to worship or the shrine to meditate won't be productive with eminent enmity in our hearts.
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we keep up our, how do we keep our composure?
[SPEAKER_01]: How do we keep our devotional mood when these things are constantly coming up in our lives?
[SPEAKER_01]: In that peanut's comic strip, Lucy, was waxing eloquent about these new age concepts on Sunday one day, and facing the reader and going on and on, and pig pen comes into the frame towards the end of the strip.
[SPEAKER_01]: and disturbs her and you can see her face turned and her jaws open like this in profile and these force lines coming out of her mouth and then the next two frames pigpin is doing backward summer salts.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then she regains her composure and she looks back at the reader and says, I love mankind.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's
[SPEAKER_01]: So how do we deal with that?
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the ways is to wish them well.
[SPEAKER_01]: If they're bothering you when you sit for your meditation, you wish them well.
[SPEAKER_01]: You pray for them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as you pray for their wealth or you start feeling better, and then you can get your concentration and continue with your spiritual practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, the last example is Swami Akhandananda and he was the first of Sri Ramakrishna's monastic disciples to leave the Veronica Monastery and go out as an itinerant monk.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he went to the most difficult places to bet when it was forbidden to go to bet, Kashmir.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he did a lot of austerity.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the company of people, he lived alone for the most part he didn't carry any money.
[SPEAKER_01]: In later life, when asked if he had realized God, he said, when I was in the Himalayas, I saw God face to face.
[SPEAKER_01]: From his description, it was an undue experience, God without form and beyond quality.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, when he came back from his wandering days to the monastery, it had shifted to Allahabad, and his life was about to change dramatically.
[SPEAKER_01]: He spent the last 40 years of his life in service to human beings as living manifestations of the divine, his own narration.
[SPEAKER_01]: For six or seven years while traveling, I had not suffered from any disease worth mentioning.
[SPEAKER_01]: At Alambazarmont, an attack of malaria, kept me in bed for some days.
[SPEAKER_01]: One evening, I had a bad headache as a result of that, and my brother Subotananda painted my forehead with a paste of powdered black pepper.
[SPEAKER_01]: The irritation caused by the black pepper, kept the headache in check for some time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, the whole night long, I revolved on an idea in my mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the conclusion that I arrived at is a memorable thing in my life, and so I
[SPEAKER_01]: For that entire night, I totally forgot my suffering from malaria fever.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the point of my cogitation was this, the five modes through which a devotee approaches God with devotion, the serene mode, the servant mode, the friendly mode, the affectionate mode, and the amorous.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those modes of approaching God are nothing but an attempt on the part of the living being of the person to enjoy all the fun of life by assuming a relationship with God with the help of the devotional mood or attitude that comes easily to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's working on the non-dual here.
[SPEAKER_01]: But these devotional attitudes are nothing but Maya in a refined form.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's thinking on this all night.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I thought of the ottoman, beyond bodies, gross, subtle, and causal.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ottoman was I, I am that, so hum, lost me.
[SPEAKER_01]: There cannot be a higher and grander conclusion than this.
[SPEAKER_01]: May that he finally concluded be the final end of my life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thus absorbed in deep thinking, scarcely had I closed my eyes at daybreak when they appeared before me, a living, not a go-paw, the infant,
[SPEAKER_01]: The baby Krsna was like a big sapphire shaped on a turning wave.
[SPEAKER_01]: What a perfectly shaped, flawless, beautiful figure.
[SPEAKER_01]: The effulgence from the divine body of the baby Krsna illuminated the whole room, a radiant smile on his beautiful lips.
[SPEAKER_01]: Within me, Mother Yashota, the mother of this baby, dressed in beautiful clothes and ornaments like the ladies of Rindavan, held out food to the baby and called saying, Come, my darling, go, Paul, my gem, my only stay in life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly, as I had heard Sri Ramakrishna speak to the baby Ram, the Ramlala.
[SPEAKER_01]: While Mother Yashoda and the Sapphire colored baby gopala, where thus it play, suddenly there stood Sri Ramakrishna with the end of his usual red-border duty on his shoulder, and pointing the fourth finger of his right hand once at Mother Yashoda and next at gopal, saying to
[SPEAKER_01]: Overpowered simultaneously with wonder and joy, I spoke out, I care not for Nirvana.
[SPEAKER_01]: My Lord, I care not for Nirvana.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, what a joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would fain have hundreds of births with this devotional attitude in me.
[SPEAKER_01]: So saying, I was going to classpin my arms, the master, the baby go Paul, and the mother Hishoda, when I came back to the waking state.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now this was probably a vision rather than a dream.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had realized the non-dual brahman in the Himalayas.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw God face to face.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he next went out from Alambha's armat to wander, he didn't get very far before he found a terrible famine in Morsheedabad.
[SPEAKER_01]: People were dying.
[SPEAKER_01]: Against the wishes of his brother disciples, he stayed there, and he didn't leave until he was able to help feed the people that were starving.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he stayed there and started an orphanage for the boys who lost their parents in that famine.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he spent the next 40 years of his life, worshiping God in those boys and in the villagers as a mother worships her child.
[SPEAKER_01]: highest spiritual experience of near-guna Brahmin, and one comes back to the normal human plane.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is, this is something that happens.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Illumansoul adopts a devotional attitude, and sees God in and through the people and
[SPEAKER_01]: and the living beings that they interact with.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Stryrama Krishna called this fuller knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's the fuller on the path to Narguna Brahman.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, nothing is that infinite.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you find the infinite.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then you come back and you see the infinite in the finite.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this was Swami Vigyanananda's experience, and not even the love of his brother disciple Swami Praymananda and Swami Brahmananda could keep him away from Morshidabad where his orphans were.
[SPEAKER_01]: They couldn't keep him there, they'd try, they'd steal his cloak, they'd steal his shoes, they'd take things away from him so he couldn't go, but he always went back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even when he was president of the order, he spent a lot of time in Sargachim.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we've gone over the application of Bhakti to daily life and, you know, and kind of a messy way.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you're painting the wall of daily life with Bhakti, or when you're painting, say the wall of your house with paint,
[SPEAKER_01]: What the result you're looking for is a painted wall.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now if you start off and you dip your hands in the paint and you kind of smear it on.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then later on you finish up with a roller or spray or brushes.
[SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't matter as long as the wall gets painted.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, human life is a little messy, and this approach to God is part of human life, and it can be a little messy, but you just keep applying yourself, you keep applying Bokdi to the wall of Maya, and eventually it works.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I'll close with a prayer.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm sorry, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm,
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, my name is Ravi, keeping with you or comment about buying bucket of bhakti in a hardware store.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_05]: Not too long ago I did the Google just typed in bhakti yoga and it auto-populated by the algorithm.
[SPEAKER_05]: It says bhakti yoga near me.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: I thought it's going to be much more air-driven and spiritual.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's going to point to my shining, my own apartment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: But it didn't.
[SPEAKER_05]: It gave me two places in midtown.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then I got sidetracked, I don't know what question I wanted to ask in Bhakti yoga.
[SPEAKER_05]: But your lecture from last week and this week at the book ends, you started about yoga of necessity.
[SPEAKER_05]: Today you said application of Bhakti yoga and daily life.
[SPEAKER_05]: I remember that my question, I want to ask the A.I.
[SPEAKER_05]: And to me, they are inseparable.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the essence of the karma yoga is to spiritualize your work and the expression of love, which is the essence of bhakti yoga.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: And to the bookings of your talk, I just wanted you to answer my better than A.I.
[SPEAKER_05]: from Swamiji.
[SPEAKER_05]: The question of where is the distinction between bhakti yoga and karma yoga?
[SPEAKER_05]: In my assessment, I know the differences in one you are supposed to have emotion of love to God, another one you are going to be.
[SPEAKER_05]: Also, you will have the emotion of love to your work, to spiritualize the work to God.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'll give you the goal the same.
[SPEAKER_05]: I know there are two different paths.
[SPEAKER_05]: I find that difficult in a situation distinction between these two, but I could see
[SPEAKER_01]: And then let's give it to Bhakti and Karma.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, I simple, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you see, in the traditional view, Karma Yoga is preparatory to Bhakti yoga or Mianna yoga.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the purpose of karma yoga, this is as explained by Shankaracharya, is to purify the mind to such extent an extent that we have a natural inclination to remember our spiritual ideal or to dwell in the Atman.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when that transition appears, it's no longer necessary to practice karma yoga.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can continue to do so if your obligations are such that you need to work, but you don't have to.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can renounce the world, you can lead a forest life, you can become a monastic.
[SPEAKER_01]: when devotion or devotion to a personal god or devotion to the absolute becomes spontaneous with you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the demarcation comes at that point.
[SPEAKER_01]: When you don't need karma yoga to purify the mind anymore.
[SPEAKER_04]: No, it's this one, maji.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I must say.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, you know, I, my mind constantly, so I go to India often to listen to Pravachan, Kirtan, and I spend week there and I come back to my regular life, and I come back and I'm constantly thinking about how can I go back to that, okay?
[SPEAKER_04]: But it worries me that I don't, like, you know, as Thakur said that,
[SPEAKER_04]: the bhakti and God is here, you know.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, in other hand, I feel like I should find it here.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like I should find it at home sitting at home, but I constantly get drawn to outside, you know.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, what is wrong with my bhakti that makes me seek it outside of myself constantly?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, there are monks that travel around and go to different places of pilgrimage kind of as a spiritual practice.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there are monks that stay in one place and just practice Sadaana.
[SPEAKER_01]: This need for external atmospheres in order to engender that Bokty within will continue for some time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then once that devotion wakes up to a certain point within, you would just want to stay with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's just a natural growth process.
[SPEAKER_01]: The main thing is direction and perseverance.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's not going to be a straight line, and you're not going to be satisfied.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's okay, because yearning is the midday son that announces the dawn of knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: That yearning is what takes us to God.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you just stay with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And don't...
[SPEAKER_01]: You need some spiritual friends.
[SPEAKER_01]: You need some friends, not a lot of friends, but people who have similar interests within you can share some of these things.
[SPEAKER_01]: So they don't build up.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so you don't get too far off base.
[SPEAKER_01]: But just stay with it.
[SPEAKER_04]: So in that terms, you know, I put follow
[SPEAKER_04]: like Takur and Sharjama and I mean, at least I read, you know, I think about them.
[SPEAKER_04]: So does it help to take the Shah, or to take Mantra in that term?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that varies from person to person.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a very personal choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: how one person makes that choice and another person makes that choice as hard to generalize.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some people can make a great deal of progress without taking mantra-dukshah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And some people who take mantra-dukshah get initiation don't seem to make much progress at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's really more a matter of personal development than anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not, well, if we're ready for it, it's a great help, but the main thing is our own readiness.
[SPEAKER_01]: You see, it's not a silver bullet.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, if you're as old as I am, you'll know what that means.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not something that's going to, you know, just kind of solve the problem and then you're done with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, you need to take that and apply it and diligently.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you're not ready to apply it diligently, you should wait until the yearning is a little bit stronger.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's also important to find a teacher that you resonate with who's willing to take you on, so to speak.
[SPEAKER_01]: But
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, Swami Savi got an under in Boston who was actually Swami a condon under his disciple.
[SPEAKER_01]: He once told me, he said, I don't make much differentiation between my disciples and my students.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a matter of sincerity.
[SPEAKER_01]: So,
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I told you, don't ask me hard questions.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you, thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_06]: So when do you pronounce, thank you.
[SPEAKER_06]: Namaste.
[SPEAKER_06]: Tahu says that in this gali yoga, the path of bhakti as enjoyed by Nara is most efficacious.
[SPEAKER_06]: First of all, what is Nara's bhakti way and is there other ways which are not as efficacious?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well,
[SPEAKER_01]: But to know Nard is way, you read the Nard about these sutras, but it's, well, I think he was just saying that the path of divine love is more suited in the Kali yoga for most people, because I think he, as a corollary with that, because we have so much body
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we can't, it's harder for us to stop eating and do these austerities that you read about in the scriptures with a lot of body awareness.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Sri Lanka Krishna didn't like to see the women devotees fasting on a Kiddashi or some of the other holidays.
[SPEAKER_01]: See their faces that they were hungry and there was little pain in their faces.
[SPEAKER_01]: He says, you can't remember God, you know, when you're stomachs churning.
[SPEAKER_01]: It suits some people, but it doesn't suit most.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the other thing that he said is the truthfulness is the tapasia of the Kali yoga.
[SPEAKER_01]: So you have to take all these things into account.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's saying, you know, ultimately, you can't
[SPEAKER_01]: figure it out intellectually, you have to apply it on your life, and in that process you find out who you are and where you stand and get to know what you need next.
[SPEAKER_01]: We had a young man, a brahmachari, and St. Louis, who would listen to these, at that time we didn't have video, it was all audio, audio talks, scripture classes, Sunday lectures,
[SPEAKER_01]: He came across the statement, a good devotee should do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: They should keep their room in apple pie order, or a good devotee should do this.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he'd write it down and then he'd try to do all of them and it drove him crazy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's it's in here.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have to find out how to get that connection with the divine and how to keep it and it's an experiment and we we turn our own lives into experiments by by by developing regular habits.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of
[SPEAKER_01]: anything in a regular way, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So he gave his power of attorney to Ramakrishna, but that's very rare.
[SPEAKER_01]: For most of us, we have to...
[SPEAKER_01]: get into a regular pattern of living, a regularity of our spiritual practice, regularity of eating, regularity of sleep, and that way when things deviate, when we do something that disturbs our mind, we can very easily isolate it and change it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we're leading a half-hazard life,
[SPEAKER_01]: It's very difficult to figure out what we're doing that's upsetting the balance of our mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this is the most important thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to apply some teachings, discern what it is for you that you need, and apply those things to our lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not necessary to do everything because these virtues of spiritual life that we read about that are characteristic of the lumin souls that come naturally to a lemon souls do so because they've reached the source of virtue and they live in that divine reality from which all virtue proceeds.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if we just take one or two things as our practice, that'll bring in everything else as we proceed because they're all interconnected.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cordelia, she has a question.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, for those like Gary Schgorsch, who can't do anything, how do you surrender to God?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you practice surrender to God?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what I'm eating on to.
[SPEAKER_01]: When Cordelia lived in St. Louis, he asked her to read some books, the Unabridged Gospel, and maybe a couple of others.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he kept asking, or have you read them?
[SPEAKER_01]: When she moved here, saw me that I got an answer to read a couple of those fake books and then come in and I'll initiate you.
[SPEAKER_01]: You find a guru who suits you, and you did, that's all you need to know.
[SPEAKER_07]: Swami, so in one of your stories, you mentioned that you overheard somebody who was doing a mantra and then you thought, oh, this is really good for me.
[SPEAKER_07]: You started doing it and then you felt okay, now I'm becoming a witness.
[SPEAKER_07]: Later on you learned, okay, this was not the right mantra.
[SPEAKER_07]: I shouldn't have done it just by.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, so I never said that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't say I shouldn't have done it.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, you experienced being a witness, and then later you got another mantra, you experienced a different experience then, and the question is, how do I, or how does one find which mantra suits him, which mantra is the right one for him?
[SPEAKER_01]: That's a very good question.
[SPEAKER_01]: You leave that up to your guru instead of trying to steal them.
[SPEAKER_01]: You wait, you wait, you wait until one is given to you, and that's another thing, that's another thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I keep talking about my teacher, Swami Sat Prakashananda, and part of it is, you know, as I get older, I realize that these things are valuable and that if I don't talk about them, they won't be there for other people.
[SPEAKER_01]: And his books are there, but you don't get the full picture.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't hear the lovin' his voice that's there.
[SPEAKER_01]: You get the rationality that sometimes intimidating, but you don't feel the divine love that's wrapped up in that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when he was a young man, he got very impatient for initiation.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, and he'd already accepted Swami Brahman under as his spiritual teacher, but Swami Brahman under was not cooperating at all in terms of giving.
[SPEAKER_01]: spiritual initiation.
[SPEAKER_01]: So he got in patient, he heard that a group of young men was going to gyrombody with the intention of receiving spiritual initiation from Sri Sarada Devi, the holy mother.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he
[SPEAKER_01]: He signed on, and he went to Jiren Body.
[SPEAKER_01]: And on the way, he got blood dysentery.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of his friends who was traveling with him said, you know, he stayed behind with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he said, you shouldn't go to Holy Mother with this problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: It'll cause her a lot of trouble in her village to take care of you.
[SPEAKER_01]: He said, you should go back.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, this young man went back to Calcutta, and that didn't work out, and with not a little hesitation and trepidation, the next time he saw Swamy Brahman on to, and went into his presence, he was expecting to get quite a
[SPEAKER_01]: quite a scolding at the very least, but all Maharaj did, as he said, there are many obstacles on the path, and he treated him with a great deal of affection.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he was still in patient, this young man was still in patient, and shortly after that he saw Swami Shivananda taking a walk, and he started walking with him at a respectful distance behind him, and he was walking back and forth on the Ganges Bank, and his
[SPEAKER_01]: holy mother, and some take initiation from Swami Brahmananda.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there any difference?
[SPEAKER_01]: And Mahaparush Maharasas says, no, I don't see any difference.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same water is coming through different fountains.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he said, but why do you say take?
[SPEAKER_01]: it is given, it is given, it comes through grace.
[SPEAKER_01]: Changed his whole attitude.
[SPEAKER_01]: He went back to Swami Brahmananda and begged for initiation.
[SPEAKER_01]: Still didn't get it, had to wait.
[SPEAKER_01]: But his attitude was changed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It comes through grace, and this side of it is yearning.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, all right, enough with the simple questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm afraid you're going to start with the complicated questions for Swami Sarva Priya Nanda.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, we'll adjourn now, okay?
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.