A few years ago I was sitting with my friend from India Parikshit in my house and we were watching this beautiful video and in the video there was one after another of just amazing Indian art that depicted Vishnu,
Krishna,
Shiva,
All the deities and there was this amazing music played underneath it and I was really in a state of elevation watching that and listening to that and it touched me so deeply that what I noticed in myself was I was in something I can only call belief,
I was believing this and it's not actually the same as believing something without evidence,
It's not that kind of belief but it's more a kind of a knowing of the heart and it's such a specific flavor of consciousness that I have tasted it a few times in my life and for me this is the kind of knowing that can be called a religious knowing,
It's not doctrine,
It's not dogma,
It's not something somebody tells me and I have to believe it,
That is absolutely not what it is,
That is the mind's idea of what belief is but true religious belief is a knowing of the heart,
It's almost like a synesthesia of heart and mind and for me this is an opening into understanding what bhakti means,
So bhakti is the yoga of devotion and what it means to me is,
There was this saying I'm not sure who said it but it might be Rumi it might also be Meister Eckhart but it doesn't really matter it's the idea that the love with which I love God,
That is the love with which God loves me and the christian mystic Bernadette Roberts has also said for that in us which knows God is God and so for me the translation of this knowledge of the heart and what bhakti is to me comes together in the etymology of the word belief because the word belief I believe is shares a root with the word belove,
There's no difference there you know and kindness which is everyday love let's say is a crucial part of many eastern traditions and also if you notice that kindness is also the root message of Jesus and I'm not saying we now have to all convert into some Hindu faith or now we all have to become Christians but I think that Jesus was a mystic himself if you believe Adyashanti or if you like his take he was a revolutionary mystic actually but I really don't care to land on any religion or any specific figure I think all these humans they are pointing to a very deep truth that believing doesn't mean I take something without evidence to be true but believing is believing proper is a knowing of the heart and that is beloving so it's yeah it's really a very special state that I think is rare and that's why I want to say something about it I think that the etymology that is shared with belief and beloved is not a coincidence I think it tells us something very deep about what can be experienced and also what happened to humans when we separate our mind from our heart and then the mind can go into a certain outrage against belief because it's very stupid to believe I actually had a phase in my life where I was vigilantly atheistic I found people who believed very stupid it was a phase in my life where I was having a lot of troubles with myself I think it was maybe in my early 20s or something but much before that I was actually raised atheistically but as a child I had my own intuition towards faith and towards God and I had a friend who was a Jehovah's Witness and of course this friend was not by choice but he was raised in a family of Jehovah's Witnesses and I just was attracted to that I wanted to be close to that and so then I had this phase much later of this strong atheism and I was really fan of Richard Dawkins militant atheist position but then after that actually after working with some shamanistic modalities I rediscovered this deeper dimension of faith with my friend Parikshit on the couch in Hilo and I have since come back to having faith believing this knowing of the heart which is just not you cannot tell that to somebody who's only in his mind to be in your mind and to only talk about opinions and arguments you'll never read the heart like that so it's always going to be this strawman argument against organized religion which I also have a lot of issues with there's so much wrong with organized religion throughout history and for me that has nothing to do with true religion which is the religion that we experience in our hearts organized religion is just power play in politics that's all it is true religion is a religious experience and it's not stupid at all it's actually very brave to surrender to this kind of knowledge because it takes humility and the word for bravery for courage coincidentally if you want to look again at etymology which is very interesting to do courage has the word for heart in it coeur in french is heart so all these things are pointers and I know that it's a bit foolish of me to think that I can actually convey this with words which you can't and still I want to put my voice out there and express this experience which was amazing I will stay true to knowing what belief is believing is beloving and yeah that's what I wanted to share I'm curious if you have any reactions I'm very open to hearing that and mostly I'm hoping that somehow I'm able to touch something in you some knowing that might sink down from your head to your heart thank you
