The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue between Lord Krishna and Arjuna – a dialogue between Man and God. Hence it touches on all aspects of the various relationships between man and god. The dialogue is made more dramatic by the fact that it is set in the middle of a battlefield in which Arjuna, the human being, is faced with an unimaginable dilemma from which he can find no reasonable escape. The teacher, Krishna tries to bring him to a recognition of the reality of life from the highest stand- point. Thus it starts with the Advaitic or non-dualistic view that everything is the Supreme alone and that duality exists only in our minds and is only the apparent phenomenon of the world and not its actual reality. The human being is part of this phenomenon and imagines himself to be totally different from the Supreme. However the human being is potentially divine and therefore Lord Krishna urges his disciple Arjuna to discover this truth in himself.
The great sacred writings on Bhakti, especially Bhagavad Gītā, offer teachings of living the life of the heart. However, there are secret messages in these great writings that are easily and too often overlooked––yet they reveal the necessary pre-conditions of Bhakti. In this short talk, Graham w...
Since there are as many flavors of bhakti as there are human hearts wherein it abides, this talk will focus on one prominent expression of bhakti, the Krishna (Kṛṣṇa) bhakti of the 16th century Vraj (Vrindavan) tradition, as a lens into the larger multi-faceted universe of bhakti.
