To voice bhakti

Voicing bhakti, voicing devotion… 

The idea of sensing divinity is engaging the senses. There is this Sanskrit verse which Srila Prabhupada would often quote:

sarvopādhi-vinirmuktaṁ
tat-paratvena nirmalam
hṛṣīkeṇa hṛṣīkeśa-
sevanaṁ bhaktir ucyate

It is a play with the word hṛṣīka, which means senses. And it says, hṛṣīkeṇa hṛṣīkeśa-sevanaṁ. The word sevanaṁ means service. Service with the senses for the Lord of the senses. 

The Lord of the senses. We don't usually think of God as Lord of the senses. What is that all about? Well, much can be said about it, but a simple point is that since our broader theme is grace, we can say that by divine grace, we possess senses. Most of us are fortunate to have the sense of sight, and the sense of hearing, and touch, and smell, and taste. And we can understand these to be, in a sense, borrowed. They have been given to us on loan by the person who is the original sensate being, the supreme being, the supreme person, or God. God is the supreme sentient person. There are nice verses in other texts that describe how God's senses are both similar to ours and quite different from ours. The difference is that they are interchangeable. For example, God can taste with his ears. But for us who are with our borrowed senses, the idea is that bhakti is about understanding, where do I get these senses from? Well, from God, so let me (and it makes sense!) use them in God's service. All right. How do I do that? There is the whole process of bhakti. Another verse says:

ataḥ śrī-kṛṣṇa-nāmādi
na bhaved grāhyam indriyaiḥ

We cannot access God with our conditioned senses. But then it says, beginning with—of all things—the tongue, it is possible. What does that mean, beginning with the tongue? That leads into the idea of using the power of speech, and into the topic of voicing bhakti. I use this expression, voicing bhakti, in a double sense. One is just expressing devotion, and the second is also in the sense of giving a voice to devotion. To express something, we need our voice. If we, for example, practice writing, we develop our style, by which we want to be able to use words in ways that reach people. We call that the writer's voice. It seems to me that in the culture of bhakti—and it is important to think of bhakti as a culture—we are developing or trying to develop our devotional voice which reaches through the distractions of our time. 



Training the senses

[…] Bhagavad-gita gives an example of the tortoise withdrawing its limbs within the shell, which it does when it experiences or perceives danger. That example is given in the second chapter of Bhagavad-gita in a section that is especially focusing on what it calls buddhi yoga, where the emphasis is on buddhi in the sense of discrimination. Discrimination specifically for leading toward yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam, the art, yoga as the art of action, karma. 

yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam

The art of action or, better to say, the art of actions. In that context, an emphasis is there on pulling back, withdrawing the senses from sense objects which have a tendency to bind the embodied being because of its orientation towards sense objects. 

There is a certain hierarchy. On the bottom, you have the sense objects, above them the senses, above the senses the mind, above the mind the intelligence. And above the intelligence, buddhi, is the self, the atman or puruṣa. Generally, our attention tends to go downward. The senses want to engage always with the sense objects; the mind tends to go in that direction.  But that's not a good thing for practicing yoga. Therefore, the fifth limb of aṣṭāṅga-yoga is pratyāhāra. How does that fit in with bhakti and engaging the senses? This is where the main principle of bhakti is: we recognize the challenge. The senses are always tending toward connecting with sense objects. But what if we engage those sense objects for service to the supreme sensate person, or, as the Gita says, bhoktāram, the supreme enjoyer. This is one of the most radical ideas in bhakti-yoga: there is God, and he is the supreme enjoyer. Therefore, it's only possible for me to enjoy in relation to this supreme enjoyer. Once again: there's only one possibility of pleasure—in relation to the supreme recipient of it, or the supreme person engaging in, or experiencing pleasure. 

That core principle of bhakti-yoga is to turn the material system upside down and to say: Okay, let's engage everything with which I'm normally engaged in, or in this world, in such a way that it'll be pleasing to God’s senses (not to me and my senses). Or to Krishna's senses, as it is Krishna who is speaking the Bhagavad Gita. 

That means that through that process, the habits of the senses change, and the senses learn or relearn what feels really good. One becomes, in effect, a connoisseur. This may be one way to explain it, because, for example, we experience a lot of pleasure from eating. We retrain the sense of taste such that I can only really relish that which has first been tasted by the supreme person. And what will be first tasted by him is specified in the bhakti literature. We don't offer anything and everything to the Lord. We want to offer only what is very pleasing to him […]

—From the discussion on Sensing Divinity & Voicing Bhakti of HH Krishna Kshetra Swami with @happyjackyoga (Happy Jack Yoga University) during the online Bhakti Yoga Conference from Godruma Bhavan, Sri Mayapur Dhama, India, on March 9, 2025.