For the Love of Yoga with Nish the Fish

In October of 1896, in London, Swami Vivekananda gave a series of three lectures on the ancient concept of Māyā, that which causes the One to appear as Many, the Eternal to appear as the Changing and the Real to appear as the Unreal.  Naturally, since Māyā is synonymous with "Ignorance" in the Advaita Vedanta system of Srī Shankara, it is a very, very elusive concept that has eluded even...

Swami Vivekananda's Message on Individuality in Spirituality: when a seed is planted, it is nourished by soil, sun, air, light and rain. And yet the seed does not "become" soil, or sun, or air, or light or rain.  The seed becomes a plant, growing according to its own sva-dharma, its own unique law of growth.  Similarly, while the seed of spiritual aspiration is nourished by the the...

In this talk, we give a comprehensive overview of the Path of Devotion: 00:00:00 How Bhakti Yoga Works: Vaidhi Bhakti (Devotion with Rules) vs Para Bhakti (Ecstatic Love) 00:04:30 The full moon of Bhakti, the scorching sun of Jñāna 00:05:47 An outline of  Swami Vivekananda's "Bhakti Yoga": 00:07:10 The definition of Bhakti: " the genuine and earnest quest for God that begins in...

Today, on the 12th of January, we are celebrating India's National Youth Day, to commemorate the birth day by Gregorian Calendar of Swami Vivekananda, who was born on the 12th of January 1863.  Of course, in the Hindu tradition, we celebrate birthdays by tithi, that is, by moon day so this year (2025), Swami Vivekananda's birthday will be celebrated in earnest on Monday, the 20th of Janu...

We gave this lecture some time ago, in July of last year on Swami Lakshmanjoo's birthday. However it occurred to me that it would be a very good start to 2025 if we could not only review the fundamentals of spiritual life in general but also revisit the foundations, historical, philosophical and spiritual the underlie our Tantrik tradition.  Note: around 14:00 I mention a lecture I did called...

After we gave the two fiery lectures on Why You Need To Realize God Now! | The Urgency of Spiritual Life and also on The 2 Most Important Things In Spiritual Life & 7 Ways To Get Them we are all fired up to make some genuine headway into our spiritual life that we may realize God and enjoy eternal blessedness!  But how do we make spiritual progress?  In this short talk, we introduce the idea o...

After making a few comments about calendars and the power of new beginnings, we make a few points from Swami Vivekananda’s very radical lecture in San Francisco “Is Vedanta The Future Religion” to show how God, books and prophets are not actually essential to religion and if taken too seriously, can all become serious hindrances to genuine religion! Using Swami Vivekananda’s definition of the Veda...

What are the most important things in spiritual life? In Patañjali's Yoga Sutra, we find:  अभ्यासवैराग्याअभ्यां तन्निरोध: abhyāsa-vairāgya-ābhyāṁ tan-nirodhaḥ "Through yearning and renunciation, the mind can be stopped (i.e samādhi can be attained)" And in the Bhagavad Gita 6:35, we find:  श्रीभगवानुवाच | असंशयं महाबाहो मनो दुर्निग्रहं चलम्  |अभ्यासेन तु कौन्तेय वैराग्येण च गृह्यते...

While every person and every place is invariably God according to our Non-Dual View, certain places and certain people are particularly strong manifestations of God. Everything is the same in type but different in degree. For example, while every part of the cow is indeed a cow, it is really only from the udder that milk flows. As such, the Avatāra is like the udder and the entire Universe the cow...

 As we come to the end of another Gregorian calendar year, and as our body-mind rapidly comes yet another step closer to death and disintegration, we ought to reflect: what have we really accomplished in spiritual life thus far?  Undoubtedly, a lot.  But have we really attained the highest? Have we realized God? Do we feel the ineffably bliss divine flowing uninterruptedly in the chamber of the he...

There are of course innumerable similarities between the life and message of the Buddha and Swami Vivekananda: in a future lecture, I hope to sketch this out in much more detail. I think there is a particularly strong resonance between Swami Vivekananda's various spiritual experiences and realizations (and also his highest ideal of serving God as man) and the Boddhicitta/Boddhisattva ideal of...

Before we start walking a path, we should have some idea at least about why we are walking it and about where it leads. In the Buddha's eight-fold system, this is called "samyak drshti", the right view.  When we consider the lives of great masters like Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna, we are not only fired up by their fervor, intensity and renunciation but we can also learn so...

Giving in to our desires (which is to say: following them into externalized action) can sometimes be just as repressive as avoiding them altogether. In either case, the energy of desire is not fully experienced:; it is instead dissipated through repression or expression. One wonders: what would it be like to simply sit with the energy of agitation or inspiration, breathing into it and following it...

On this auspicious Mrgaśīrsha Pūrnimā (full moon) to which is ascribed Bhairavi Jayanti, Annapurna Jayanti and also Dattatreya Jayanti, we decide to say a few words about just who Mā Bhairavi might be. She is one of the most mysterious of the mahāvidyās (the ten terrifying forms of Mā). In this video, referring to the meditation mantra below, I make the case that Bhairavi is a euhemerized Tantrik...

Today we are celebrating the feast day for a very important Marian apparition that occurred on the site of a former Tonantzin temple: The Lady of Guadalupe!  This is among my favorite occurrences in Catholic history and it gives us a nice opportunity to talk about Mā beyond any one cultural context (i.e the Universal "Mā" as opposed to the particular).  As such, in this class we discuss...

Some time ago, we gave a talk on Mary of Magdalena, who I argued was the śakti (power) of Christ in the same way that Rādhā is for Krishna, Sīta is for Rāma and Sārada Mā is for Sri Ramakrishna. This argues for a "dual-aspect" to the avatāra (divine incarnation) as being both Shiva (Consciousness) and Shakti (Energy) embodied. This is of course one lecture in a series of talks on Mary. W...

As we come to the end of our 5th Gregorian Calendar Year since we started coming together as a community, I thought now would be a good (and fairly sentimental) time to do a little retrospective. Often, when we look back at where we've been and where we've come from and when we look forward to where we're going, we feel a deeper appreciation for this present moment, a moment which i...

In this talk, we discuss something very edgy and maybe even quite dark: hating God as a legitimate mode of worship! This is lesser known bhāva is called vipaksha or shatru-bhāv, the "mode of the enemy" and applies to great devotees like Mahishāsura in the Candi, Hiranyāksha, Hiranyakashipu, Kamsha and Sishupāla in the Bhāgavatam and even Jacob in the Old Testament. Importantly, a discuss...

In this talk, we discuss a very subtle, high-level and easily misunderstood mode of spiritual practice: madhura bhāva, the practice of seeing God as your lover! In Vaishnava literature this is considered the highest mood because it contains all the others and is itself the most refined and passionate of the moods. The whole soul goes to God in fiery yearning! There is actually quite a precedent fo...

On the eve of the Mrgaśirsha (9th month of the Vedic Calendar) Amāvasyā (New Moon),  we take up a reading from the beautiful book by Swami Buddhananda called "Ramprasad, The Melodious Mystic" which gives us the life story of one of the greatest devotees of Kali of all time. We didn't get all the way through the little book as I intended because we spent a lot of time commenting on t...

Many people are becoming increasingly familiar with Advaita Vedanta, the classical Non-Duality of Adi Shankaracharya but fewer people are aware that there are indeed other versions of Non-Dual spiritual philosophy and practice. In this video, we do a cursory introduction to my favorite form of Non-Duality: The Tantrik Non-Duality of Abhinava Gupta which is sometimes called The Kaula Trika, the Pra...

Time to ask a very important question: what does Mā really want? Last week, we started discussing themes of sensuality and desire in Ma Kali’s iconography alongside the equally controversial motifs of intoxication and madness. We introduced the concept of “yamala”, the sexual union of Shiva and Shakti! You can watch that lecture here:  But besides sketching out a few practices from the Vijñāna-Bha...

For the auspicious occasion of the Kāla Bhairava Jayanti which also happens to be Mā Siddheśvarī Jayanti, we offer a  rather free and somewhat loose translation of the Kāla Bhairavashtakam, the 8 Verses Praising Bhairava attributed to Sri Shankaracharya to explore some of the non-dual implications of certain phrases in the hymn. We make a few observations of Rāga Bhairava and how this hymn is conn...

After we did our class on how to worship Bhairava (which you can watch here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/secret-mantras-8-116490016?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link) we hopped into this inspired discussion about the deeper meaning of the word "Bhairava" in the context of the subtlest non-dual Tantrik teaching...

In the first verse of dhyānam (meditation mantra) in the Kālikāshtakam, a hymn to Kālī attributed to Adi Shankara we learn that Mā Kālī is ever desirous to have union with Her husband, Mahākāla (महाकालकामाकुला कालिकेयम्) and in the 8th verse of the dhyānam (meditation mantra) from Āgamavāgīś Krishnānanda's Tantrasara, we learn that Mā Kālī desires to unite with Her husband in the "revers...