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Bhava

Bhāva is the inner value determining all spiritual gain or loss.

Bhāva signifies devotion, love, emotion, and the inner relationship you hold sacred. Without it, nothing happens. Consider gold: its weight remains constant, but its market price fluctuates. Your financial gain or loss is in that changing value, not the metal. Similarly, the divine is constant like gold. Your benefit is determined by the bhāva you hold. If bhāva diminishes through doubt or conflict, the benefit is lost. This principle governs the relationship with a master. Losing confidence or bhāva means losing everything. Dispassion, motivation, and practice cease. You may claim the identity, but without practice, it is empty. This occurs because the foundational bhāva was lost.

"If there is no bhāva, nothing happens."

"How much bhāva you have towards God determines your benefit."

Filming location: Ljubljana, Slovenia

Bhāva has many meanings. Bhāva means devotion. Bhāva means love. Bhāva means emotion. Bhāva means values. And bhāva means your inner feelings. It signifies your inner relationship, that which you hold in high esteem. If there is no bhāva, nothing happens. I often give this example in satsaṅg. Let’s say there is gold, and one kilo of gold costs a thousand dollars. Tomorrow, the price—the bhāva of gold—goes high. It means tomorrow gold becomes ten thousand dollars per kilo. Now you have gained nine thousand dollars. The metal itself did not increase even half a gram; it is still exactly one thousand grams. Yet you gained nine thousand dollars. Or, let us say tomorrow the price, the bhāva, falls down. It becomes only one hundred dollars a kilo. You have lost nine hundred dollars. The metal did not decrease at all; it is still one kilo. So, where was the loss or the gain? Our benefit or our loss is in the value, in the price. The gold itself did not change. In the same way, God, for example, is like gold. How much bhāva you have towards God determines your benefit. Or, how much bhāva you lose—if you have doubts, conflicts, jealousy, and such things—then you lose that benefit. This same principle applies between master and disciple. As you learn from the Guru Gītā, when you lose your confidence, or you lose your bhakti, your bhāva, then you lose everything. You lose your vairāgya (dispassion), you lose your motivation. You lose your sādhanā: you don’t do your morning mala, you don’t do your kriyā, you don’t do your āsanas, you don’t do your prāṇāyāms. You turn away from your prayers. You may still say, "Yes, I am a yogi, I am doing yoga, I am Swāmījī’s disciple," but you are not practicing. How will that be? Because you lost the bhāva, something happened to you. You may not be able to explain it, or you may not understand it, but something has happened.

This text is transcribed and grammar corrected by AI. If in doubt what was actually said in the recording, use the transcript to double click the desired cue. This will position the recording in most cases just before the sentence is uttered.

The text contains hyperlinks in bold to three authoritative books on yoga, written by humans, to clarify the context of the lecture:

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