Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste, and welcome to another episode of The Esoteric Teaching.
You know, for a long time, I’ve wanted to do something autobiographical; and I even started a couple of times to write an autobiography, because I thought my story would have meaning and value for others to help them in their spiritual path.
Because my story, my life, is really all about the spiritual path. But I kept running into a roadblock, a conceptual roadblock. The problem being, my life has gone through so many changes, like, what’s the context for it? How can I fit all of the experiences I’ve had into any kind of coherent form?
And of course, the answer has come out now as The Esoteric Teaching. The Esoteric Teaching is the only context big enough to hold all the experiences I’ve had and make sense out of them, to put them in some progressive order, and to also explain the different changes I’ve gone through in my life, and why I had to leave certain belief systems and go to other belief systems, and so on.
So this video started out as a request from one of our friends, that “Could you explain, in terms of a story, the different obstacles and falldowns and the advance and retreat on the Path?”
So the only way to do this, I think accurately and ethically, is to talk about my own life, my own experience. Because it’s very hard to tell what’s going on with others, although we may have a good idea. It may seem obvious, but there’s always going to be something missing from the external point of view. However, from a subjective point of view, we can know everything, and so it becomes possible to explain.
So in the beginning of my life, I was born into a pretty standard lower-middle-class East Coast family. And at the age of three, I became aware of my life’s purpose. I was sitting in the church, and my family was decorating the church for Easter. And I had nothing to do because I was too young. So I was just sitting there looking around, and I noticed this stained-glass window.
And in the window, the picture in the window showed Jesus praying in the garden with his hands like this, folded on a rock. And this light is coming down from heaven and illuminating him. And in my little three-year-old mind, I suddenly understood: “He’s talking with God.”
Cool. My very next thought was, “I want to do that. I will do that.” Because, as I had heard in the church, that very same church, that Jesus said, “Whatever I have done, you will do also.” I took that quite literally.
And so at that time was born my purpose, to encounter God, the Supreme, and to have a personal relationship, in fact, a dialogue. So the very immediate result of this experience was, I started looking for a teacher. Because I didn’t know how to talk with God.
So I started asking the people around me, “How do I talk with God?” And of course, the answer they gave me was, “You pray.” Okay, well, you pray to God and that’s you talking to God; but what about God talking to you? How does that work?
Nobody could tell me.
So really, my whole youth—as I recall from my perspective—was a search, looking for the person who could tell me, who could answer my question. Okay, I can talk with God all I want. How am I going to hear Him talking with me?
And the pat answer that I got, “Well, He speaks through the scriptures,” wasn’t enough. Because there’s Jesus in the garden, he’s talking to God in real time. He’s not reading out of a book. I wanted that direct contact, that immediate intimate relationship.
And that was my reason for basically not participating in social activities, not fully accepting the leadership of my teachers, parents, the people in the church, like the priest and the bishop and all that. I could see that—because, you know, young children are especially sensitive to others’ emotions. I certainly was. And I guess most young kids are, if they choose to be anyway.
I could see that the people around me, although they talked a good line about being religious, about being spiritual, about having a relationship with God, and so on, really didn’t have much confidence in that relationship. They weren’t free from fear, anger, greed, hate, and so on. They were hypocrites.
And to me, I mean, even in my five-year-old mind, I could tell that they were phony. They were putting up a front. I think most kids are aware of this, but they don’t really have any background for it. So that awareness eventually gets covered over with socialization, social conditioning.
Well, mine didn’t. So I was very dismissive of the adults around me, because I could see they were being run by fear, that they were afraid of the truth coming out, they didn’t want to admit what was really going on with them, they were putting up a front, and so on.
So by the time I was in high school and I was winning a lot of prizes in music and stuff, I had pretty much let go, although I continued to go to church. I didn’t really believe in what I was being told and what was in the Bible, and so on.
So as a result of my studies in music, I started to meet prominent musicians, since I lived just outside of New York City. There were many good musicians just a little bit away from me. In fact, the famous Rudy Van Gelder jazz studio was just in the next town. So people like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, and all that, used to go there all the time. It was just literally two miles away from my house.
Or I could hop on a bus, and within 25 minutes I was in Greenwich Village, where all the jazz performance took place. So through my teacher, Eric Dolphy, I got to meet a lot of the jazz greats. And these guys were reading Zen, Suzuki, Kerouac, people like that, and seriously discussing it.
One time a monk dissed me because I had said that Miles Davis had realized emptiness and you could hear it in his music. He thought this was just preposterous. But man, I was there. I heard him discussing it with other musicians. “Less is more, man. We want it to sound empty. We want a space of listening.” And nobody was more hip to that than Rudy Van Gelder, the engineer on many of those great recordings.
So the people I hung out with were already talking about Zen. They were already talking about yoga, meditation, stuff like that. A lot of this was over my head. Quite frankly, I didn’t have the background. So a lot of it was very incomprehensible and esoteric to me, but it was very influential because these guys were my role models.
So I began to get the idea that there’s this teaching out there someplace. There are these people out there someplace who know. So I started looking for those people.
But that search for a guru occupied me until I was like 27. I’m going to refer to my notes. This is a complicated story.
So I pretty much dropped conventional Christianity, sectarian Christianity, and I adopted a very open agnostic point of view, looking for some kind of higher truth. And I went to everybody, especially after I moved to the West Coast and started taking LSD and stuff like that. I went to all the popular gurus, and I knew a lot of the inner circle people from their different spiritual communities because the musicians that I hung out with knew everybody.
You know, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, people like this. I played with them. I partied with them. And they knew everybody from Ken Kesey to, you know, Richard Alpert, all these people who were very much spiritually involved, and they knew all the gurus.
And so I went on the guru trail. But I couldn’t find a guru that I felt comfortable with until my music teacher, my Indian music teacher, Ali Akbar Khan, introduced me to Śrīla Prabhupāda.
He told me one day, “You know, you’re not cut out to be a performing musician.” He said, “Your heart is too soft. You should only play music for bhakti, for spiritual purposes. I’ll introduce you to a guru who is a very accomplished musician.”
And really there were only two, Hazrat Inayat Khan and Śrīla Prabhupāda. And Islam always was, Sufism, always was, like, not on my list. I don’t know why exactly, it just didn’t resonate with me. But when I met Prabhupāda, there’s immediate deep connection there.
And I did quite a bit of service in San Francisco in the early temple there. Introducing the devotees to the Grateful Dead, helping them get set up for their first Ratha Yatra festivals and like that. But I couldn’t join, you know, I just couldn’t follow all those strict rules.
So it took a while. It took until about 1971. So in terms of the Esoteric Teaching, this was my first attempt at Right View. And when I accepted initiation from Prabhupāda in 1974, that was my first initiation. And then I went to India, spent many years serving Prabhupāda, even after he left his body.
And eventually, though, I got a feeling that I wasn’t able to proceed further. And there was a reason for that. I had realized, understood, and lived by all of the rules and so on of vaidhī-bhakti, the first stage of bhakti, the rule-based, faith-based section of bhakti.
But the next stage, rāgānugā-bhakti, spontaneous spiritual love for God, was beginning to manifest. And I didn’t have any guidelines to deal with it. There was one book written by Prabhupāda that covers that, actually a couple of books. But one of them was very badly translated, and the other one was edited to be very fundamentalist and slanted towards vaidhī-bhakti. And I already knew there was something beyond that.
So unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way forward into rāgānugā-bhakti. So instead, what happened is I bailed out. I fell down, back to Right View stage. And I continued searching while building a career in the material world and preparing financially for retirement—or beginning to, anyway.
So then, where does it go from there? I started to become involved with Tantra. Now, my mother was a Tāntrikā. She was a priestess of the Karezza Tantric cult. And she was practicing this while I was in her womb. So I was exposed to Tantra early, and I had a very strong leaning toward it.
So I started learning about Tantra and teaching it, even, in the Bay Area in the 1980s, the late 70s and 80s. And then, of course, I came in contact with Osho Rajneesh. Osho Rajneesh, in India, in 1979, was teaching from The Secret of Secrets, which is his name for The Secret of the Golden Flower. So I heard this directly from him, and I began to practice it in a limited way.
But then, after Osho moved to Oregon, I spent a lot of time there at his commune. And I began to absorb all his teachings, read his books, and, like, get into the whole community and everything. To tell you the truth, I didn’t have much use for the other ‘sannyasins’.
I felt them to be very petty, very inexperienced. I felt they had a lot of—how can I say—selfish motivations for being there. They didn’t have the background I had in bhakti. They didn’t know the ancient Vedas or Sanskrit or any kind of ceremonies or anything like that. They were mostly there for the party, as far as I could tell.
And I could also tell there was something dark going on, and that would eventually lead to the whole crisis and disintegration of Osho’s commune in Oregon. But while I was there, he treated me very special. He gave me a place way out in the desert, in the middle of nowhere, far away from everybody. I had no duties. I didn’t have to work. I could stay there as long as I wanted, and all I had to do was meditate.
So I did. I did a lot of meditation. And of course, eventually, the other ‘sannyasins’ got jealous of me and came up with some stupid excuse to kick me out. So I left there, and I went to my apartment in Oregon, in Portland.
And I just started meditating. And I meditated very intensively for about six weeks. And then I got this tremendous, dramatic realization of consciousness in everything.
Now, it’s not like I was trying to achieve this. But if you want the details of it, you can read Osho’s description of his own enlightenment experience.
Now, I was very unsophisticated at that point. I really didn’t know much about Buddhism. So I didn’t realize that what was happening to me was a well-known phenomenon called First Path realization. I assumed, like many people do, and apparently Osho also did, when I had this experience that “This is IT.” This is enlightenment.
And so, OK, I got it. I’m the guru now, yeah. But I found that in the weeks and months following that experience, it gradually faded. And even though it was a beautiful memory, I couldn’t repeat it. I couldn’t get it back.
So I was very taken aback by this. And I went on a long, wandering journey through the South Pacific, visiting many different islands and like this, and still trying to meditate and so on. But something was wrong.
So again, I slipped back. What had happened was I had gone through bhakti and into rāja-yoga. But because of a lack of right view, I attained a realization; but then afterwards, I had to go back again, all the way back to getting Right View.
So this time, I found some original bhakti scriptures from the origin of the line that I was initiated into. And these describe the phenomenon around this spontaneous level of bhakti. So I began to practice and teach that.
And at that time, I became like a guru. And I had many followers all over the world. I had a big YouTube channel. I had several āśrams in India. I had, at one point, about 20 disciples living with me in the āśram, and so on, like this.
But again, eventually, I became tired of this, because they weren’t getting it. They were getting caught up in the rules and regulations, and not realizing that to attain spontaneous devotion, you have to go beyond it.
I’ll give you an example. I was telling them, “Look, to reach spontaneous bhakti, you have to pick a form, a specific incarnation or form of God that suits you—you know, that fits you.”
I had found my iṣṭa-devatā, my personally most attractive form of God. And I was worshiping Him in a spontaneous way. They couldn’t understand this. And when I said to them, “Look, you choose which form of God you want and what kind of relationship you want.”
And I even explained the whole thing of how there are so many different kinds of relationships and so on, which I’m going to discuss later in this series on bhakti that I have planned.
They couldn’t choose. I would say, “Well, what do you want? What do you like?” They couldn’t choose. They needed somebody to guide them, to tell them what to think, what to feel, even how to worship, how to love.
Come on, man, you know. So I got tired of the whole thing and ditched it. And so again, I went back to developing Right View. At this time, after wandering around Europe for over a year, I got into the Buddha’s teaching. And I started studying the original Suttas.
I became a Buddhist monk and I went to Sri Lanka and lived in a monastery high up in the mountains for almost five years. So this was my rāja-yoga stage.
And of course, one of the first things I discovered from reading the original Suttas was that the experience I had had back in 1984 was actually First Path. First path is very dramatic. It’s almost like you expect the angels to come down out of the sky with the trumpets; you know, really dramatic.
But the other Paths are more subtle, and require really quite a good background in philosophy to recognize that. But anyway, as soon as I realized that, “Wow, that was First Path!” I got everything back. All the symptoms and everything, I was great.
So then I could go on. And within the next three years, I realized the other three Paths. But even after that, I mean, even Fourth Path, I have to tell you… I got Fourth Path on a plane on the approach into Dubai at midnight almost two years ago. I was devastated after Fourth Path.
I mean, I was like, “How can I live without a mind?” Because I didn’t have any support. The Buddhist monks around me, well, they were so neophyte, they couldn’t see where I was at. They couldn’t understand the issues I was dealing with.
They didn’t have the English communication skills either. So it was very hard to communicate. And I went, I left the monastery and I started living all alone. And then I went on a long journey, a long exploration of India.
I started in Chennai and I went up to Ahobilam, I went up to Rishikesh and then back down to Bodh Gaya, up to Nepal, back to Sri Lanka, looking for a place where I felt right.
And I didn’t find anything. So again, I was back in searching for Right View. I knew something was missing. I felt restless, I felt disconnected. But then I settled in Mahabalipuram, which is a nice place, it’s near the beach and everything, but I still felt incomplete.
So one day I got a suggestion from an astrologer. He said, “You belong in a different place. You should be in a fire place, a mountain place.” So I said, “Oh, that’s Rāmaṇa Mahārṣi’s place.”
So he said, “Yes.” I went there and I immediately felt at home. So then I began to study Rāmaṇa Mahārṣi’s teaching. So Rāmaṇa Mahārṣi’s teaching, of course, is Advaita, hardcore Advaita. So I started doing jñāna-yoga.
Now to reach the platform of jñāna-yoga, I had to go back through rāja-yoga with a different background, a different orientation, a different, a better form of Right View.
So again, I had to go back to Right View and go through the whole series of paths: bhakti, that was the Gāyatrī-yoga, now bhakti, and then rāja again, instead of the Buddhist path now searching for the Self, Brahman, and then finally into jñāna, which is realization.
And so even then I hit some obstacles and I realized, “Oh, I have to go back again to bhakti and experience ananya-bhakti, which is the third stage of bhakti: bhakti performed against a background of Advaita.
So then again, to go back to the bhakti level, and this is the series on bhakti I’m going to do soon. And then again, through the rāja-yoga, and finally to reach jñāna-yoga. And now I am situated in the jñāna-yoga realization, and I’m training on that and making it deeper and stronger.
OK, so this is my own experience and how I’ve had to go back many, many times, and start all over again from the beginning, using fresh insights to develop a better idea of the path, a better Right View.
And so this is why I say, if you get Right View from the beginning, then the whole path will go very smoothly and quickly. But if you don’t, you’ll get blocked. You’ll reach a certain point and be unable to advance any further. And then you’ll have to “go back, Jack, do it again,” to correct your view. And then you can reach the higher realizations on the Path.
ĀŪṀ Tat Sat ĀŪṀ Hariḥ ĀŪṀ