The kind of bhakti we talk about in the lessons is the "up close and personal" kind. It is a non-sectarian approach. Here, bhakti is about you, your nervous system, your desires, your practices, and your experiences. When we talk about bhakti as "love of God" here, what we mean is, what is our highest desire? What is the highest ideal we aspire to for ourselves? Maybe so far it is only a question we want to answer, like, "Is there more than this?" If we ask that question in our heart with sincerity and give our emotions to it, we will have some good bhakti going. Real bhakti is very personal. It is about our innermost desire to become something more in our life. It is about wanting to know the truth and using our emotions to move toward it. It can be as simple as the bare wanting -- hungry with wanting to know. This is bhakti. Or it can be very involved as a relationship with our chosen ideal, our ishta. This is bhakti too. In whatever way it is occurring, the process is the same -- the emotions are harnessed toward an ideal, which moves energy through our nervous system, purifying and opening it.
When longing is strongly expressed deep in our heart, things happen. Answers start coming. Practices come to us. Then we begin to open and want to go higher. Then there will be more opening, more answers, more practices. Like that. Bhakti is like magic as it spirals up. It corresponds with the opening of our nervous system. We have called the nervous system the gateway to the infinite. That goes both ways. We can see out into the infinite through our nervous system as it becomes purified. And God can come in through our nervous system. God comes in as bhakti in our heart. God, the guru, and bhakti inside us are all the same thing. It is the infinite, responding to our inner cry, coming in through the gateway of our nervous system.
Advanced Yoga Practices
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