Transcriptions
Dev Priyānanda Svāmī Bhagavān
Video Link: YouTube
Namaste, and welcome to another episode of the Esoteric Teaching. Today’s the third episode where we’re answering questions from viewers. So let’s take a look at this one.
Matt writes,
“You were talking in the vid about the reoccurring falldown from rāja, meditative emptiness speculation, to bhakti. How can one prevent this falldown?
This is the first part of the question. First of all, rāja-yoga is not any kind of speculation. If it is, then it’s not rāja-yoga at all; it’s simply mental speculation.
Rāja-yoga is really emptiness, the experience of emptiness. That means dropping the mind and stopping conceptual thoughts, especially verbal thinking. So rāja-yoga is actually quite advanced.
In Buddhism, the first jhāna is conceptual thinking with words, then the second jhāna is conceptual thinking without words. And it goes on from there to get more and more subtle. So if the mind is not already tamed by practice of bhakti, one will fall down from rāja into some previous state.
Now the problem with bhakti, the way it’s ordinarily taught, is that it’s sectarian. There’s only one deity, one mantra, one belief system, and that usually doesn’t include meditation. And it almost always does not include the higher stages of bhakti, like rāgānugā, spontaneous bhakti, and ananya-bhakti, where one realizes that the god or deity that one is worshipping is actually the Self, a form emanated by the Self for the purpose of universal maintenance.
So this is a real problem, because bhakti is very powerful in its complete form. In fact, it can lead almost directly to Self-realization, and the stage of rāja-yoga can be practically nothing.
But when bhakti is immature, when only the first stage of vaidhī-bhakti, rules and regulations, is there, then one will not be able to advance into rāja because the mind will be too disturbed.
Why is that? The mind cannot be controlled by any external agency. In other words, simply making rules about what one can and cannot do is not going to control the mind. Maybe for a limited time, one can control the mind by force, but it’s not going to last. The mind will have its revenge, and the falldown that results is going to be violent.
And also we see that people in the lower stages of bhakti tend to be hypocrites. They’re talking about peace, love, and acceptance, and so on like this. But if someone goes outside of their moralistic norms, they suddenly throw away all their principles and attack that person.
It happened to me. My mother was a Tāntrikā, and so I learned just by osmosis the principles of Tantra when I was very, very young. And later on, I taught Tantra, studied with Osho, and so on.
So later on, when I was teaching some beginning students bhakti, my attitude was, “W”ell, you can follow those rules and regulations if you want, but I’m not bound by them because I have already gone to the spontaneous level of bhakti, where you make up your own relationship with God.”
Now in the beginning stages of bhakti, one needs some guidelines because we’re ignorant.
And what’s the advantage of this? The mind can be controlled only by pleasure. Pleasure attracts the mind spontaneously; following rules just causes the mind to rebel.
We don’t know about God, how many forms of God there are, millions and millions, uncountable. So within all those uncountable forms of God somewhere, there is one that’s just perfect for each of us. Each of us is unique. Each of us is different. And as there are more and more people in the world, there are more and more different types of people.
So not everyone is cut out to love Kṛṣṇa or Rāma, or this form or that form of God. Maybe we need… a specific individual may need a new form that doesn’t exist in the tradition.
That’s all right. What’s the problem? But the thing is, this should not be done whimsically or impulsively. It shouldn’t be a matter of speculation because speculation is temporary.
Now it’s okay to try. It’s okay to try out different relationships or even to create new relationships like I did with Narasiṁhadeva. The particular relationship I have with Narasiṁhadeva is not in any scripture. Maybe hints of it are, but the particular type of relationship I had is not given in any scripture.
And of course, the neophyte bhaktas find fault with me because of that. They can’t understand because they’re doing everything by the book, by external regulations rather than internal.
So when you understand your relationship with God to be internal and has to fit and satisfy your emotional needs, then you can create a very personal, unique relationship with God that is completely satisfying. That’s rāgānugā-bhakti.
And beyond that, ananya-bhakti is when one realizes that this form, this personal form is called, by the way, iṣṭa-devatā.Iṣṭa-devatā is the form of God which is perfectly suited to your particular emotional needs, and leads to the highest form of ecstasy that you are capable of experiencing. So when you realize that this form is an emanation from the Self and is actually non-different from the Self, this leads to an even higher state of ecstasy.
But right now, let’s just talk about rāgānugā-bhakti, because rāgānugā-bhakti is the minimum standard for progressing into rāja-yoga or meditation. So in rāgānugā-bhakti, there are no rules, there are no rituals; there may be mantras, or they can be adapted or even created for your particular needs.
But the thing of it is that the devotion, the emotion that’s felt is spontaneous and it completely attracts the mind. See, this is the beginning of meditation. The one-pointedness of mind which is not, again, imposed externally by will, but which arises spontaneously from the excellent qualities of the object.
That’s the trick.
So in other words, if someone is not attracted, or at least is attracted less to a classical form of God given in the tradition, it’s all right to adapt and change and add to, or even create a new form of God that does meet one’s emotional requirements. And that’s not speculation because once you arrive at it, it’s permanent.
It’s not that one should pick up the worship of one form of God and then later on drop it and take up something else. No, because the iṣṭa-devatā serves as a goal for the heart. And this is very important because the heart needs closure.
If we’re always uprooting our heart from this form to that form to some other form… like one guy I was in touch with on Facebook. His business is importing things from India and stuff. And his house is full of all kinds of statues of deities. And even when he visits India, he goes from this holy place to that holy place, from this temple to another temple to some other. And he’s always worshiping these different, different forms, different, different gurus. He cannot settle on one.
And so what does that mean? It means he remains in the neophyte stage of bhakti, or maybe even prior to the neophyte stage because he has no guru. He can’t settle on one teacher. He goes from one to another to another.
And actually there are many, many people like that. It’s really a shame because they miss out. They don’t get the benefit of bhakti, which is the security, the emotional closure that one gets from worshiping one’s real ideal. For some reason, it’s very hard for people to choose.
I’m going to do a series on bhakti-rasa, but basically bhakti-rasa means there are five different main emotional flavors in worship of God by bhakti. Five main flavors and seven secondary flavors.
So any particular form of God may be worshiped in five principal ways and many, many more subordinate ways, depending on the combinations. So basically it’s like pick your flavor, go in the ice cream store and pick your flavor.
Yeah, you can taste a little bit from here and a little bit from there. But sooner or later, you have to make up your mind in order to whole batch.
So what’s it going to be? I used to ask my disciples, huh? What form of God and what flavor of relationship with God do you want permanently? That you could… I used to put it to them this way: imagine that you leave your body and you’re going to the spiritual world and you get to name your planet, name your form of God that you want to spend eternity with and also name the type of relationship.
For example, in Kṛṣṇa’s pastimes, there are great sages who are in the mood of neutrality and then there are many, many devotees in the mood of servitorship. Then there are friends like in Vṛṇḍāvan and other places of Kṛṣṇa’s pastimes, his brothers and so on who are like equals. And then there are his parents who are like his superiors and teachers, parenthood. And finally, there are the gopīs who are in conjugal love relationships.
So which one of those do you want? None of my so-called “disciples”, quote-unquote, were able to choose. None of them could say, “Well, I like this relationship or that relationship, or actually I don’t like Kṛṣṇa; I like some other form of God.”
None of them could choose. None of them could say, “This is the form I want.” And because of that, they were stuck in vaidhī-bhakti and they never could advance to meditation.
So this is the problem. Incomplete performance of bhakti means you will always fall down from meditation. And you have to go back to the preliminary stage of bhakti until you make up your mind.
“Well, you know, you have to finally decide, pick up on one and let the other one ride. So many changes, tears you must hide. Did you ever have to make up your mind?”
ĀŪṀ Tat Sat, ĀŪṀ Hari ĀŪṀ.