An Introduction to Bhakti Yoga

Transcript

everyone this is the tutu Baba from night let astrology I hope you're having a nice weekend today I've put together a little bonus content for you to introduce you to my bhakti-yoga page if you haven't checked it out already so most people who like my content usually comment on the fact that they enjoy the way that I kind of blend astrology with ancient philosophy and mysticism to that end I was getting a lot of requests from people asking me to create more content directly related to yoga philosophy and bhakti yoga in particular and so I decided to make that content on a separate channel a separate page for people who are interested in checking it out and diving more deeply into yoga philosophy directly into the practices of bhakti yoga so I thought that I would give you an introduction to that page and channel if you haven't heard about it yet if you haven't checked it out so I'm sharing with you the first video that I made today which is just an introduction to bhakti yoga I hope you find it interesting and if you enjoy it and want to receive more content on bhakti yoga it's free just go to my website nightlight astrology calm click on the bhakti tab and you can sign up and get free updates free you know kirtan music you can get updated talks and interviews and lectures and all sorts of cool stuff that I put out regularly for people who are interested so I hope that you enjoy this talk on bhakti yoga and that you'll check it out alright take it easy hi everyone this is the tutor baba from nightlight astrology and this is an introduction to bhakti yoga I'm so excited to create this content for all of you as many of you know this is something that I've been talking about doing for many months now and finally able to do so after long process of building my new website this content is available exclusively for people who sign up to my newsletter and there's a few reasons that I'm doing that one I want to give a little thank-you gift to those people who to my newsletter and many of which are people who are really the engine for my annual Kickstarter campaign and supporting my work year round and the second reason perhaps even more important is that I really want people to come to this content who are interested who are seeking more knowledge or information about bhakti-yoga specifically who may resonate with that particular dimension of what I present as an astrologer you have no doubt heard me talk a lot about yoga yoga philosophy bhakti Karma devotion and things like that and many people have asked me to do more content on this material but I've I have wanted to be careful because obviously this is sacred content to me this is that my own personal spiritual faith practice and I want to share this with people who are have already sort of said you know what I'd like to learn more about that and so having people sign up for my newsletter is also a way just to kind of ensure that I have people listening who really want to be here it's important to do that not only to safeguard the sanctity of the material and my own heart you know cuz it's a little bit more vulnerable in this area but also because as Krishna tells us in the Bhagavad Gita and we should never try to you know be too over-the-top with subjects of spiritual life in in an audience of people who are not hospitable to the topic because it could actually turn them off in a deep way so as many of you know my material is replete with spiritual content but to go that next step and to really talk about the practices and commitment and the deeper nectar of bhakti-yoga you know that's something that I think people should sign up for you know they people should should want to do and so I've made it totally clear in all of my social media platforms that if people are interested they can sign up and so that's why I'm doing this also in a more private manner this is an unlisted YouTube channel private content you're free to share it if you'd like to but there's the only way to get updates about new publications that I'll have this channel and easiest way to access it will be through my newsletter so all of that being said I'm very excited to just give you in this video just a brief introduction to bhakti-yoga what it is there's a lot of content that I'll be creating on bhakti-yoga hopefully for many years to come so if you like this it'll be another way of tuning in to my work and focusing a little bit more on the spiritual side a little less on the astrological side which you'll still be able to obviously I still have tons of astrological content coming on all the time so just have two different rivers that you can draw from now hopefully so in this video I want to talk about bhakti-yoga what it is so we're gonna start by just giving very some very basic definitions what is bhakti-yoga so let's start with the word bhakti in Sanskrit the word bhakti means attachment participation fondness a fondness for something or someone homage faith love devotion worship and purity so bhakti in the simplest sense means devotion or sort of affectionate participation attachment faithfulness and things like that so that's a simple definition of bhakti but we have to put it together with bhakti and yoga so what does yoga mean well many of you may already know that Yoga means Union it means to yoke it means to unite as in two separate things that are united or joined and actually yoga is basically the Sanskrit equivalent of the word religion which from comes from the Latin and the word religion in its roots religio which means to reconnect as in like a tendon that's been severed or cut or to reconnect a bone that's been broken to reconnect or rejoin something together so religion and yoga are essentially the same thing when we think of religion we often think of an institution and so people really get rubbed the wrong way by religion but the word all the word indicates is an experience and the experience is something that we all value which is why so many of us end up saying I'm spiritual not religious but what we mean by that is really I'm interested in religious experience not in institutions of religion understandably there is something about institutions and laws and codes and doctrines and dogmas that often stifle us and keep us from the actual experience that we're trying to find which is in this sense in the sense of the word yoga union with joining with United with connected so we're seeking connection and when we put these two words together bhakti and yoga then we get the essence of what we are seeking connection with and how we're seeking it bhakti-yoga means that we are talking about attachment devotion love worship affection toward God resulting in union linking or joining with God so bhakti-yoga is the practice of becoming attached devoted loving worshipful affectionate toward God in service to God and the result of these practices are a growing sense of being in union with linked to joined with God so that's what bhakti-yoga means you could say that bhakti-yoga therefore is also the practices of loving God the science of loving God and the philosophy of loving God because there while there is in essence the experience of loving God is what we're after a part of what we'll talk about as we go on in this series of bhakti-yoga will be some of the difficulties that prevent us from doing that some of the obstacles that we face and some of the practices that we need to take up in order to help us cultivate love of God in the heart in the soul so the science of loving God meaning study of how we go about doing this and why it's difficult so the science where you could say the philosophy goes along with it now in bhakti you could say that it's a universal it's not sectarian even though much of what I'll present throughout your you know our my time producing bhakti yoga content in the months hopefully years to come is from India culturally it has its own unique philosophy practices and background that in a sense comes from India these are truly this is truly a non sectarian universal path so bhaktas will typically recognize any path of devotional love and attachment to God and so it's very ecumenical it's very universal but at the same time you know bhakti yoga specific to India will have you know its own specific science philosophy and practices and so that's what I'll be presenting but just so that you know from the get-go that this is a philosophy who's under which one can take shelter very easily and recognize the presence of bhakti in many different paths in the world so in in the particular tradition of bhakti that I belong to for example in the sort of more formal you know bylaws of the particular sort of society that you know that I belong to it said that we recognize any tradition that embraces love of God so that's the sort of universal component something else that's kind of interesting just historically and culturally is that roughly 68 percent of quote-unquote Hindus which isn't really an appropriate it's not a word that really refers to a religion as much it is a word that refers to a very wide group of people practicing a pretty wide variety of religions but roughly 68% of what we might call Hindus living in India are vice knobs and of those vice knobs many of them practice Krishna bhakti that is bhakti-yoga so it's very very common in India bhakti-yoga the devotion to Krishna who is seen as Vaishnavism of course refers to the worship of Lord Vishnu and Krishna is Vishnu and so Krishna will be talked about philosophically is slightly different from one group to another in bhakti-yoga we say that Krishna is the name of God Krishna is the name of source it gets pretty interesting when you start parsing out the intricate metaphysics of bhakti-yoga for example Krishna also is seen and worshipped in relationship to his feminine energy consort who was called Radha and so the two go together there's kind of a feminine and masculine component but at any rate all of this is just to say that a lot of people living in India will be deeply familiar with Krishna bhakti and you could also a fun comparison that I've made and if any of my teachers or elders are listening and I'm way off base on this then let me know but in a similar fashion you could say that there's Islam and then there's Sufis the Sufis are sometimes described as a mystical subset of the protec practitioners of Islam and they have actually have a lot in common with bhaktas in the sense of being devotional that's the practice of intimate personal mystical ecstatic love of God that they they practice this in particular and so Sufis are kind of this mystical subset of the larger practitioners of Islam you could say and in some ways that's similar to how the particular ecstatic practices of bhakti yoga yoga of loving God mystical sort of beautiful art of loving God are in relation to a broader population who might be considered by snobs so that's just historically speaking something that's kind of interesting now emphasis of bhakti-yoga is on the awakening of the soul the practices of bhakti-yoga are designed to do two things you could say this is again like my I'm very much a neophyte on the path so I'm just doing my best to communicate what I've understood so far but the emphasis of bhakti-yoga is on the awakening of the soul and it's simultaneous relationship with it's completely unique personal and loving relationship with God so the idea of these practices is to both awaken the remembrance that hey I'm a spirit soul I'm not ultimately this body and/or this / temporary ego form that I have and also I am in a completely and utterly wonderful and intimate relationship with mice divine source so that's the goal you could say the simplest goals of bhakti-yoga now the primary practices of bhakti-yoga in I believe it's the seventh canto of the srimad-bhagavatam called the Bhagavata Purana which captures some of its one of the like worshiped scriptures of bhakti yoga and it is complete with all sorts of instructions on how to the science of love and God and it is complete with all these beautiful stories I mean just amazingly beautiful stories about really amazing devotional beings and and people who have you know come before and taught us about this art of love and God and and I think it's a seventh canto there's a little boy named pearl odd maharaj and he's he's a little boy who has a particularly nasty father and there's a whole story about him and his father that I'm going to tell in a future video but there's a scene after his particularly demonic father has been vanquished that he explains he's sort of sort of what the processes of devotional life are what what you need to do to take to the process of bhakti-yoga he give us nine if I remember correctly but there's three of them at the top that I'm going to focus on as the primary practices and these practices are also considered and talked about by many of the acharya Zand gurus in the tradition as like the top most important so and these are what you'll also get by virtue of just taking in this material you'll be able to participate and start your own bhakti yoga practice if you want to just by doing these three things so the first one is called Shravan um in sanskrit and it means hearing it turns out that you know in the Vedic tradition in general in the yoga philosophy tradition in general that sound is so important this is why mantras are important and chanting is important and reading sacred scriptures are important Sanskrit is thought to be a kind of divine language and also the mantras that come from the spiritual that are that are used in spiritual life are thought to come from the spiritual world so there's this interesting distinction that's made between sort of material noise and spiritual sound and you know the difference because if you've ever listened to something or taken something into your ears from somebody that's filled with anger or gossip or on you know falseness or lies deception you can hear it and it affects you it's like bad juju coming into your ears you know and when you hear sacred sound vibrations it's a completely different experience and the experience is medicinal it's like the water in your body if you think about everything in your body being made water and you hear certain sounds coming across we've ever been to a sound bath or something like that you know that the sacred sound has a way of just purifying your your whole kind of being just very quickly so similarly in bhakti we say that hearing is one of the most important practices hearing is broken into a lot of different categories when we chant the names of God and mantra practice we're hearing we're hearing the sound of sacred sound vibrations when we chant kirtan being a group of people singing call-and-response devotional music we're hearing sacred sound vibration even when we keep our environments clean and filled with sacred music we're taking in and in that way we're naturally awakening the soul in its natural relationship to to God now hearing also means hearing from great teachers and great saintly people through spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita through each other in sharing our realizations and insights and reflections on spiritual life through hearing talk about God through hearing questioning about God through hearing stories about God just hearing about spiritual life in general is the number one most important things that our ears be filled with the sounds of spiritual life from Saints and gurus and teachers to plain old neophytes you know just talking about God that by doing that we start to purify ourselves and we start to awaken the heart and soul of who we are and that relationship with God that we have got in all things God as our source we start to awaken that and you know that's what that's the kind of happiness that in bhakti we say everyone is looking for so hearing is the most important thing and by even by taking in these videos you know you're gonna get a little bit of that not because of me just because the subject matter right so that's one thing that hopefully these videos will accomplish and also help give you more of more references on other talks you can two great books you can read great music you can hear things you can chance so that you hear so that's the first one Shravan 'm now chanting is kirtan 'm kirtan 'm means like kirtan if you ever heard of kirtan before on the on one level kirtan means call-and-response devotional music so you've ever been to a yoga studio and chanted in call-and-response before when we in Krishna bhakti when we sing to God we call out God's names and the the singer sings and the and the congregants chant back in response that this is the form of hearing and it's a form of saying of speaking so hearing and speaking about God and singing and chanting about God as well chanting also through in Krishna bhakti through the Maha mantra which is a specially prescribed mantra for the age of Kali Yuga the age of quarrel and conflict and this this Maha mantra is something that I will be presenting some more you know basic sort of instructions on how to chant incorporate into your daily life if you're interested and I'll be doing that in future videos but the Maha mantra I will be teaching you that I practice every day that Bach does all around the world practice every day is Hari Krishna Hari Krishna Krishna Krishna had a had a heart a Rama Hari Rama Rama Rama had a honey honey and Krishna together sort of like praising God hadhe is a little bit like hallelujah it's evocative it's calling out so it's hard a Krishna Hari Krishna and then Krishna Krishna had a had a it's repeating the same thing in some ways I had a teacher once say that you could think about it as Krishna calling back in response to us and this mood of loving exchange is being amplified through hadhe Krishna Hari Krishna Krishna Krishna Hari honey and then Heidi Rama calling out again to Rama who is like the storehouse of pleasure and bliss and goodness and strength and Rama Rama had a honey so it goes the exchange back and forth again so we say we chant the maha-mantra on beads on japa beads and that's a big practice of bhakti-yoga that again if people are interested in I'll be doing a video explaining how to chant and telling where he can get beads if you need them and stuff like that it's a really good practice to have it's completely changed my life I've had a lot of different spiritual practices over the year over the years and this is far and away the most medicinal intimate lovely practice that I've found it is a practice like anything else it takes some work but I really enjoy it and I feel like it feels like it's my very life and soul so um you know I'm really happy to hopefully share that with some of you now that's the second one kirtan oh I'm chanting and then remembering which is called Vishnu smaranam and there's a funny rule in bhakti I always liked it that I don't remember the first time I heard it but it says there's two rules in cultivating Krishna consciousness and cultivating bhakti-yoga which is never forget Krishna and always remember Krishna the first one was always remember Krishna and the second one was never forget Krishna so remembering and remembrance is if you've ever really been in love with someone you know think of how easy it is for you to think about that person that you're in love with to think about what they need or what they want or how you could help them or how you could do something sweet how you could express your love or devotion so similarly the third practice is remembering and we could say that something else that we're doing with everything in bhakti is amplifying the degree to which we naturally think of and remember as George Harrison said you know my sweet lord so how do we remember God in everything that we do and build that remembrance so that it's really our heartbeat I'm not good at it at all but you know I feel like there's nothing worth my time more than learning these things because they any tiny little speck of of the ability to with God has been real and true and uncompelled and beautiful and it's helped me to love others and to become a better person Jesus gave the essential bhakti teachings when his disciples asked him what were the most important teachings from the law and he said to love God with all that you've got that was number one and number two was like it the second most commandment important commandment was like it and it was to love others as you love yourself and so we know that when we in bhakti-yoga we say nothing that we could change externally about the world or about our lives trying to change the faults and flaws in a mechanistic way correct them will work unless we have first changed the heart the soul and the consciousness awaken the soul and it's natural loving relationship to source that from that Center that well that we draw on and give to that it's that relationship cultivation of that relationship that makes anything external that we have to share you know worth anything that it'll make it substantive and lasting so that's the kind of the you know why we do all of these things the natural byproduct and spilling over of cultivation of bhakti is that we love others and we start to see God in everything so in the weeks ahead here's what you have to look forward to you'll get to hear about bhakti just hearing about bhakti for many people including myself I mean one of the main reasons I got into it was because by hearing about it I was attracted to it it's often said that hearing about bhakti is draws people to it and people just want to keep hearing about it like the bees or Nash naturally find their way to the nectar and to the to the you know and that the bees end up naturally seeking out the flowers to land on and we start talking about bhakti we start talking about love of God we start talking about devotion in fact love of source awakening of soul that it draws us in so you'll get to hear about bhakti which is goes back to hearing you'll get to learn how to chant the second devotional process that I outlined I'll show you how to chant I can't tell you you know I I can't tell you very much because again I'm just like a total neophyte but I can tell you a few things that I've learned and that might work for you but - even just the basic like when I got my first instructions on chanting they were pretty simple here's the mantra go chant it and you know but the the chanting mantra practice is amazing so you get to learn that if you're you know again if you're interested and then you get to learn simple ways of remembering a lot of very simple ways that we can bring remembrance of God into our everyday life so that we really feel full with God in our mind in our heart in our environment and I wouldn't do this if I didn't think that it was deeply valuable and that many people who are suffering and looking for connection couldn't really benefit from it the natural disposition of the soul from the standpoint of bhakti-yoga has come all of everything I say comes from my guru or from my my gurus plural I have no number of teachers have been important to me but the my initiating guru often says that you know that the heart is like a cellphone that's always looking for a Wi-Fi signal to connect to so that saying no to the bad things in life saying I reject that I reject animal cruelty where I reject worldly consumption or I reject harm to the environment all of those things that we know are bad or that we see within ourselves I reject my judgemental Nisour I reject my impatience it's one thing to see what isn't working but the natural position of the heart isn't to reject and simply judge and condemn the hearts looking for connection and love and attachment to something that's beautiful and lasting we're all looking for that and so in bhakti we say you know all of these practices are meant to help us connect to something in the positive and so we also in bhakti-yoga we emphasize bringing all of our emotions all of the diverse energies that comprise us and that make human life what it is that we learn to see them all in relationship to God and use them all in cultivation of love of God plus you'll also get some really cool things like bhakti music I'll try to expose you guys to cool resources for music cool lectures that you can listen to cool interviews I'll try to bring some people in outside of myself to talk about bhakti so you can hear other people's perspectives including some of the beautiful men and women in the yoga community that I belong to and you'll have some instructional videos on how to do little little bhakti practices in your home you'll have if you want to you can even learn how to set up a home altar how to have an altar practice you'll get lots of philosophy storytelling and of course if you have questions about anything regarding bhakti yoga you can always ask them and I'll do QA episodes as well so that's what you have to look forward to if you have any questions about any of this already you can feel free to email me at info at night light astrology calm put bhakti question in the subject line and I will put it into a QA folder just make sure that you are comfortable with your question it'll always be asked anonymously but be comfortable with your question being asked as a part of a response in a video if you're uncomfortable with that just make sure you say that in the letter that you write so that's what I've got in bhakti yoga when we say hello and goodbye to one another general who say Hari Krishna so I will say that all to you now Hari Krishna it's very good to share all this with you I look forward to lots more in the weeks to come and thank you all for being so patient I know I said that this was coming out around the new year it's almost April now so thank you so much for your patience all right take it easy everyone hi Krishna you [Music]