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Talk: “Say ‘Thou – Thee – Thine’”
Speaker: Br. Shankara
May 27, 2018
Click for PDF of Notes and Quote from this talk.
May is a month for study of Bhakti Yoga. As a bhakti yogi, you establish a devotional relationship with God through study, prayer, ritual, and worship. You practice giving every action, thought, emotion, perception and tendency “a Godward turn.” All your energies and attributes, both positive and negative, are offered to the Divine Presence. Your prayer is for self-surrender, union with your Belovèd.
What happens when you consciously, repeatedly replace the words “I – Me – Mine” with thoughts of “Thou – Thee – Thine?” Not as a pretense, but as a stand you take for what you have begun to believe is a higher Truth.
Perhaps your belief is based on what Sri Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita: “The illumined soul … thinks always, ‘I am doing nothing.’ (Ch. 5) … Every action is performed by the gunas. Man, deluded by his egoism, thinks ‘I am the doer.’ (Ch. 3)” Or perhaps you’re persuaded by Swami Sridharananda; he tells us: “The concept of “I am” is experienced by us all the time. This awareness of I am-ness has to be converted to ‘He Is.’ I don’t exist; He Is, He exists.”
Sridharanandaji says that if you are persistent in this spiritual practice, “… slowly and slowly the awareness of His presence overwhelms the awareness of my am-ness.” As Sri Krishna tells Arjuna in Ch. 9 of the Gita, “Holiness (itself) … refashions (your) nature to peace eternal …”
In this talk we explore and discuss these ideas, and tie them to what Sri Ramakrishna says in Ch. 5 of his Gospel: “Bhaktas accept all the states of consciousness. They take the waking state to be real also. They don’t think the world to be illusory, like a dream. They say that the universe is a manifestation of God’s power and glory. God has created all these — sky, stars, moon, sun, mountains, ocean, men, animals. They constitute His glory. He is within us, in our hearts …”
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