shy's journal

Being Devotional

I am writing this piece because being devotional has been a driving force behind my consistent joy and happiness. I was explaining to friends, "It just feels like miracles are happening everywhere, all the time." There were numerous times where I was just joyful for no reason, walking down the streets, smiling at the brink of tears. It's like happiness on tap. So, I hope to share this feeling with everyone, since it seems very useful!

Outline:

I know God is a loaded term these days, so please don't feel discouraged if you don't believe in God or don't like that term. We all have some concept of "God," maybe we call it Nature, a Higher Power, the Divine, or something else. So, feel free to transpose those terms whenever I say God, since I'm referring to the same thing.

As a point of methodology, I also want to ground my discussion on things that can be accessible in your direct experience. Talking about spirituality can quickly feel ungrounded (see my discussion on materiality and spirituality)1, and that problem is exacerbated when people talk about things we've never experienced before. So, as I explore these topics below, I encourage you to draw upon your direct lived experiences as I want this to be real, as opposed to fluffy and imaginary, for you.

What devotion means

To me, devotion means reverence. That could be towards God, Nature, values, ideals, some spiritual teacher, or, when you start seeing God everywhere, everything. In fact, these days, I've been feeling devotion whenever I encounter water, because it's really life-giving. Without it, not only would I be dead, I would be a pile of powder! So, we love water. ❤️💧

I first took note of devotional practice as a concept when reading Buddhist Suttas for Recitation by Bhante Gunaratana, where he said, "Devotional practice and meditation are not very different from each other." I wasn't sure what he was talking about, but I liked meditation, so I read on. He went on to discuss setting up an altar, prostrations, taking precepts and making offerings. Not being particularly religious, I just frowned and thought those practices were not quite for me2. However, the fact that devotional practices were somehow important did strike me.

Then, I heard of bhakti yoga, a form of yoga that's focused on loving devotion to God or the Divine. There are four types of yoga: karma yoga (through action), kriya yoga (through energy), bhakti yoga (through love), gnana yoga (through intellect). Bhakti yoga is one of them. There's a story of four yogis, each of the aforementioned types. Sadhguru has a great video and explainer of the story, so I encourage you to click into those if you want a superior telling of the story. Otherwise, the story goes as follows, in brief. Quotes copied exactly from their sources will be in italics, as I'll do for later stories as well:

Story: Four Yogis

The four yogis were usually never near each other, since they were disdainful of the other's practices, thinking that their own was superior. However, one day, they happened to be walking together, and a storm was approaching. Alas, they had to find somewhere to avoid the rain! They ran in the direction an ancient temple, not particularly out of a love of God, just for shelter. As the rain came down more and more heavily, the four were forced closer and closer together to escape the rain, that they eventually all hugged a central idol together. And then, God appeared! The yogis were confused. They had been practicing so hard previously, why is God appearing now? God said, "At last you four idiots got together!" Now, I again recommend Sadhguru's video and explainer, because it's fun, awesome, and superior.

Devotion is one of the pillar spiritual practices. It is a cultivation of love. I actually like Sadhguru's explanation that bhakti yoga is a practice using emotions, with love being the state where our emotions become pleasant. So, devotion is a cultivation of a pleasant emotion, love, towards God or the Divine, which is everywhere and in everything!

What devotion feels like

Now, maybe that's where I lost you. What do you mean God is everywhere and in everything? Well, I didn't really understand either, and these two stories, which I really like, help. They wouldn't explain everything, but will give you a feel for what I mean.

Story: Starving Yogananda

This is a story from Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda.

Yogananda was in a hermitage, where they had strict injunctions about food. One day, he was on a twenty-four hour fast. As he was looking forward to breaking his fast the following midday, he received news that his spiritual teacher's train was late and that he was not going to eat until the teacher had arrived. He prayed for the train to come quickly. When night came and the teacher finally reached, an instruction was given that the teacher would bathe and meditate before food was served. Finally, dinner was served at nine o'clock. When Yogananda was alone with the teacher, he asked the teacher if he had been hungry. The teacher replied that he was, having been without food or drink for the last four days.

"Certain problems of our organizational work lie on my mind. Tonight at home I neglected my dinner. What's the hurry? Tomorrow I'll make it a point to have a proper meal," he laughed merrily.

Yogananda was ashamed but also confused. While the teacher seemed undisturbed by his food situation, Yogananda offered that he would starve to death.

"Die then!" The teacher replied. "Never admit that you live by the power of food and not by the power of God! He who has created every form of nourishment, He who has bestowed appetite, will certainly see that His devotee is sustained! Do not imagine that rice maintains you, or that money or men support you! Could they aid if the Lord withdraws your life-breath? They are His indirect instruments merely. Is it by any skill of yours that food digests in your stomach? Use the sword of your discrimination, Mukunda! Cut through the chains of agency and perceive the Single Cause!"3

I really like this story because it reveals a simple truth. It is thanks to my body mechanism and my digestive processes that I can transform the food I eat–vegetables, meat, grains–into human body. This is a blessing! As Sadhguru once said, if I put food in my hand and transform it into a human being, what would you call it? A miracle. Life is full of miracles. Life has countless marvelous examples such as these.

Story: The King and the Handmaiden and the Doctor

This is a story by Rumi, a Sufi mystic, which I read from The Essential Rumi as translated by Coleman Barks. I'm going to present only the part of the story relevant to this discussion, and use this opportunity to encourage reading Rumi.

There was a handmaiden who has fallen ill, and so the king called together his doctors. They king said, "You have both our lives in your hands. Her life is my life. Whoever heals her will receive the finest treasure I have, the coral inlaid with pearls, anything!"

The doctors replied, "We'll do what we can. Each of us is the healing savior of our regions. Surely we can find a cure."

Rumi narrated, "They neglected, in the pride of their accomplishments, to say *If God wills. I don't mean that just the saying of the phrase would have helped... There are many who don't say Inshallah, and yet their whole soul resonates with it all the time!*"

That's the story!

Having a relationship with God

I think about devotion as having a relationship with God.

It's also about having a relationship with all of God's creations, which is everything in the world. You don't need to believe in a creator God. I'm not even sure what it means and the act of Creation is something outside my current direct experience. However, the creations and creatures themselves are in my experience. And they are still plenty wonderful! So, I think of "God creations" somewhat tautologically–God is (definitionally) creator of everything, and so everything is God's creations. And being devotional is having a devotional and reverent attitude towards everything–its marvels and so forth! As I notice these marvels, I feel connected to "God." That's all. Treat it as a functional or relational approach to God, if you will. But can you see why life feels constantly miraculous?4 5 It's awesome!

Being devotional also carries a sense that things are being taken care of. When you start developing that sort of faith, you feel an even more intimate connection with God. This belief might take time, and even a leap of faith! So, it's okay if you don't feel ready. But, if one day you feel so inspired, take a chance, have faith, and have patience. It doesn't need to be a particular faith or a particular religion. Religion is only one form of relationship with God, an organized form. There are many ways we can relate to God. For me, faith is the belief that the Divine has gone forth and prepared the way, that God is loving and everywhere (and in each person too!). Every morning and night when I meditate, I also see that as me cultivating a relationship with God or the Divine6. My relationship with God is to experience the Divine through non-sectarian mystical ways. Your faith could look very different, or similar7.

I actually wanted to write a bit more about acceptance, our unlimited ability to respond, and agency, as part of our relationship with God. However, this piece has gone for a bit longer than expected, so I'll stop now. I hope this post helps you notice the miracles all around life (even when you think things get tough) and feel significantly more joy! These miracles are real! They are just hiding in plain sight. Notice them, and you'll realize how much God loves you.

  1. I've presented a contrast between materialism and spirituality before. This distinction is a very useful for distinguishing between the "worldly pleasures" and "spiritual goods," especially as an instructive signpost at the beginning, when practicing non-attachment. That said, there is no duality in ultimate reality (you'll have to take my word for it at this point), and so there is ultimately no distinction between materialism and spirituality. That said, without distinction or duality, we'll have no capacity for speech: for me to say something, I'll have to give it a name, which requires me to not only take a perspective apart from the thing but also draw boundaries around the thing, which establishes at least duality. So, that's my way of punting on explaining what this union is. Nonetheless, I want to offer this point because we may have the mental model that serious spiritual lives are incompatible with normal worldly lives, like monks and nuns, and that doesn't have to be true (see story Two Zen monks in this post–feel free to just skip to that section since the post is long). Maybe I'll write about balancing the material and spiritual life some day.↩

  2. See the section "Don't believe it just because I said it" in this post)↩

  3. I removed this last line originally, but have since put it back. I had removed it because "I didn't understand it" and didn't want to share ideas I was not confident in. However, I have since decided not to edit the speech out of context, especially when the final line is clearly the teacher's core message. Personally, I want to caution against reading "Single Cause" as coming down on the question of "monotheism" and "polytheism", and thus determining that monotheistic religions like Abrahamic faiths are "correct" while polytheistic faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism are "wrong" (that's clearly a weird conclusion too, given the master's background). The Ultimate is all-inclusive. The term is not a tiebreaker. If anything, it unifies the two perspectives. It's a "Single Cause" behind both monotheistic and polytheistic faiths. That's my bungling attempt to appreciate the master's wisdom, as I respectfully preserve his key message. Apologies for omitting it previously, which could have given an incomplete picture of the master's statements.↩

  4. Language is necessarily metaphorical. We are always referring to things "like" the things that we are naming (e.g. "table"), and language is only a device (a signifier) to refer to something else (a signified). As we develop, we also gain new vocabulary to talk about things. For example, if I were to talk about electron spin to people in the Middle Ages, that would probably have been very inaccessible for them. It's possible that God or the Truth is so profound that we don't have the language for it yet, or it is not expressible with language. And so, I am going to offer a quote from the Buddha (I was looking for a different quote, but I wasn't sure where I read it, so this suffices for now). "Distinguish units of letters / units of words and phrases / people who foolishly cling to these / are like elephants in a quagmire.” – The Lankavatara Sutra, translated by Red Pine. That was a primary source I could find after only a few minutes of digging, to find the provenance for the following Buddhist teaching, "Bhikkhus, the teaching is merely a vehicle to describe the truth. Don’t mistake it for the truth itself. A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon." – Old Path White Clouds, by Thich Nhat Hanh. I hope the meaning is nonetheless clear.↩

  5. If you don't like the word "miraculous" because it feels too against scientific inquiry, feel free to replace with "marvelous." I like "miraculous" because it preserves a sense that there are many things that are wonderful whose causes I don't know (and I think it's a sentiment compatible with science too).↩

  6. As you might tell, I use the words that refer to God fairly interchangeably with other words that refer to similar concepts, so feel free to use whichever words feel most resonant for you. It's your relationship with "God" anyway, and so I want it to make sense for you. Over time, you might also notice that your language changes, and that's part of your developing relationship with God too!↩

  7. When I started having faith and being receptive to faith (that my life is taken care of and that I am taken care of), I also started experiencing more miracles. My quality of life improves–which has to be obvious, as you'd imagine for a person who believes in such wonderful things about life! If there's a voice within you that's afraid that faith is "opium of the people," that's a valid concern as there indeed runs a risk of delusion, where you no longer start seeing reality as it is. So, take care not to become hallucinatory and to instead stay grounded. I stay grounded by always verifying with my direct experience, and staying clear on what I do or do not know. I verify if a teaching or practice is for me by seeing if my life improves after adopting them for a while. That's my relationship with God. If you think faith will bring you down an awful path, then please only do what works for you. Spirituality is not really prescriptive, since it's so individual and internal. I offer my experience as a reference, and I only want to help!↩