For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish

Last week, to celebrate Easter, we gave a special talk on the Sermon of the Mount from a Tantrik point of view. Not only is the Sermon on the Mount an excellent piece of spiritual literature which like the Gītā essentializes and makes practical the highest spiritual teachings of all time but also, there is a beautiful book by a similar title: "The Sermon on the Mount according to Vedanta&quot...

On behalf of this most auspicious occasion of Easter Sunday, celebrating the resurrection of Christ and the upsurge of spring-time energy in nature, we reflect a little bit on Christ as Solar Deity. Importantly, I wanted to compare the Christ's resurrection to the resurrection of Osiris in Egyptian mythology and how that might mirror not only the Tantrik understanding of Shakta Peethas (i.e t...

Today is Good Friday and since the Christ is a solar deity in a sense (the "sun" of God moving through the 12 disciples who are the 12 zodiac signs), I thought it would be nice to discuss the worship of the Sun of the Vedic and Tantrik context. In this class, which is part of our How To Do Tantrik Puja Series, we explore the sandhya vandana, the ancient practice of worshipping the sun wi...

In the profound Trika text virūpākṣapañcāśikā, we learn: vimatipadamaṅga sarvaṃ mama caitanyamātmanaḥ śarīramidam | śūnyapadādīlāvadhi dṛśyatvāt piṇḍavat siddham || 2 || O dear one, all this from the void state to the play of the Divine including even that which is heretical (i.e impure), since it appears in Consciousness, is verily established as my own body for I myself am Consciousness! sam pan...

This is perhaps one of my favorite lectures yet and one of the most foundational. In this talk, we track the idea of the "self", the most immediate reality through various different schools of philosophy: first we sketch out scientific materialism (physicalism) and use the ancient ideas of Sāmkhya philosophy to refute it. Then, we refute Sāmkhya before moving on to sketch out the Buddhis...

Last year, on Hanuman Jayanti we gave the talk The Tantrik Hanuman exploring some of the Tantrik aspects of this fierce rudra, Mahavīra! This year on Hanuman Jayanti, we decided to talk a little about what makes Hanuman so powerful!  First, we discuss the significance of Hanuman in our own lineage with a reference to Sri Ramakrishna's Hanuman sādhana and the parallels between Hanuman and Swam...

In the second to last chapter of Swami Vivekananda's Bhakti Yoga (or Volume III of the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda), Swamiji gives us a walkthrough of all the attitudes of supreme love, prema with which we can relate to God: God as quietistic ideal (shānta), God as master (dāsya), God as friend (sakya), God as child (vatśalya) and of course, God as lover (Madhura). We explore the firs...

In our Friday morning zoom satsangh, we're studying the Paramārthasāra of Abhinava Gupta , a very profound and concise introductory text for Non-Dual Shaiva/Shakta Tantra. In Verses 2 & 3 of this text, we're given a hint as to what qualifies a person to become a Tantrik Guru and what qualities are required in the student for them to be ready receptacles for the Guru's transmissi...

Because we've come to the end of Navaratri and because many are now finishing their mantra-repetition sādhana (puraścarana), I thought it would be nice to discuss the mantra for offering japa to the Divine Mother: oṁ guhyātiguhyagoptrī tvaṁ gṛhāṇāsmatkṛtaṁ japam siddhirbhavatu me devi tvatprasādān maheśvari "O You who are the Protectress of the Secret of all Secrets (i.e the sacred, inti...

This past weekend, on Saturday, we celebrated Tārā Jayanti. It felt very fitting to give a talk praising this enigmatic form of Mā!  The first thing we do in this lecture is to distinguish the very popular Tibetan Buddhist deity, Tārā from the Tantrik Hindu version.  We then trace the origins of the Tibetan Buddhist Tārā to Parā Devī, the esoteric Tantrik Sarasvatī who is the absolute conception o...

Earlier this week, we celebrated the Spring Goddess Festival, Chaitra Navarātri or the 9 nights of the Mā Durgā! Naturally, we had a conversation about the very profound and very elaborate Durgā Pūjā which is performed on the last five days of the festival. We discussed how the Durgā Pūjā is the modern equivalent of the Vedic sacrifice par excellence, the Aśvamedha Yajña (horse sacrifice) and how...

When we fall in love with a particular kind of spiritual philosophy like advaita, non-duality we tend to become a little dogmatic and reject other forms of spirituality like duality. In our discussion called The 8 Schools of Shaivism, A Non-Sectarian Approach we made the point that a real Tantrik Shaiva will see all the teachings of Shiva as equally valid and since Shiva revealed both duality and...

The past few weeks since Shiva Ratri, we've been giving a few talks on the "foundations of Tantra" both philosophically and practically to make the case that advanced transgressive, esoteric & non-dual sādhanas are best founded on firm, devotional, rule-adhering footing! We started our discussion with How To Practice Tantra Safely and then looked at the importance of duality and...

Recently, we've been asking the question How To Practice Tantra Safely and we proposed that the historical progression of ideas in Shaivism presents a kind of graded syllabus where the traditions that come earlier (like the Vedas and the Shaiva Siddhanta etc.) act as firm foundations for the traditions that emerge later, like the transgressive, non-dual Goddess-oriented traditions (Kaula etc....

Perhaps one of the most important and foundational lectures we've ever done, this talk features a broad overview of Tantrik non-duality in the beginning and then moves on to make a case for a Vedic lifestyle and basic devotion as important foundations for more dramatic, esoteric, non-dual and transgressive practices of Goddess-oriented tantra. We also study the Vedic (and pre-Vedic) roots of...

We now turn to a very sophisticated discussion about the reasons why we are not immediately, spontaneously aware of the fact that we are non-dual, pure Consciousness in which the world shines non-differently. If I am Shiva, as this tradition tells me, then why don't I know it? How does Shiva hide himself from himself? To explain the mechanism of self-concealment (and also to point the way to...

There have been many, many profound moments in Swami Vivekananda's Bhakti Yoga but this is perhaps the signature lecture: the "triangle of love". Here, Swamiji defines just what prema, true ecstatic love for God looks like: this is the kind of love that knows no bargaining and knows no fear; It has nothing to gain and nothing to lose; It is It's own Highest Ideal!  In this shor...

In our Vivekananda's Triangle of Love & How Jñāna = Bhakti we introduced Swamiji's signature idea: the three things that make love worthy of the name as well as the idea that Bhakti, Devotion and Jñāna, Philosophy are really ultimately the same thing. This is the core theme of the book, I think. Now, in this lecture, we expound on those two ideas by reading the next lecture, "Th...

In our paddathi (ritual manual), throughout the nyāsa section which we've been studying together over the past few weeks, we find these Sanskrit verses. They are all dhyāna-ślokas, meditation mantras for the Goddess of Speech, Parā Devī or Sarasvatī. This argues the case that nyāsa is not only about consecrating the body, it is also about invoking the Goddess of Speech and meditating upon her...

Last week on Friday we had a full moon and total lunar eclipse! In the light (or lack thereof) of that (haha), and because we are entering into eclipse season, we took some time on Friday to discuss the Tantrik significance of the eclipse, both lunar and solar. Who exactly is Rahu and why is he considered an inauspicious graha, planetary spirit? How does Rahu cause the eclipse? And are eclipses au...

Usually, after a slew of lectures on Sri Caitanya and Tantrik Vaishnavism, which we tend to do around Gaur Purnima, we like to bask in the afterglow by simply comparing Caitanya's philosophy to the other schools that we tend to study in our community. In last year's talk called Nārada vs Caitanya vs Rāmakrishna on Bhakti Philosophy we specifically compared the different schools based on...

After we did our series of lectures on Caitanya and the acintya bhedābedha philosophy of Bengal school of Vaishnavism last year, we did this "bonus talk" comparing Caitanya's philosophy and practice of Bhakti to that of Śrī Nāradamuni (as we see in the Nārada Bhakti Sūtra) and also to that of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa.  It's very good to do this kind of comparative work becau...

After our lecture on The 12 Secret Kālīs | & The Most Closely Guarded Secret in Tantra where we introduced the powers of non-dual consciousness which flow in a 12-step sequence (which we argued was one of the subtlest teachings of Tantrik non-duality if not THE subtlest teachings), many were asking: "how do we invoke the 12 Kālīs, worship them, relate to them and incorporate them into our...

Having explored the philosophy and life of Sri Krishna Chaitanya , and having outlined Bhakti in practice as part of last year's Gaur Purnima (Chaitanya Jayanti) celebration, we now turn to some more specialized themes in our study of Tantrik Vaishnavism beginning with some dhyāna mantras (meditation and visualization techniques) for Krishna and Rādhā Rāni!  Here is some of what we shared in...

Having explored the philosophy and lift of Sri Krishna Chaitanya, the incarnation of Rādhā and Krsna in one body, it is now time to turn to something very important: the practices! In this class, we do a quick overview of the various aspects of Bhakti sādhanā, the Path of Devotion.  Incidentally, we happened to do this class around this time last year in Lafayette in Caitanya Devī and Sumeru-ji&ap...