“If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst at once into the sky
that would be like the splendor
of the Might One . . .
I am Death, destroyer of worlds.”
Robert Oppenheimer quoting Bhagavad Gita (11.12 and 11.32),
New Mexico, July 16, 1945,
on the first test of an atomic bomb.
My dear friends, John and his wife, Marcia, are philosophy professors. They’re in their eighties now. They love to dance, and John once made a simple observation about dancing that marked me with its spiritual depth.
When people first learn to dance, he said, they often move mechanically, counting steps, repeating patterns, concentrating hard on “getting it right.” That stage is necessary. You have to learn the basics. But there comes a moment, if the learning has been sustained and patient, when the dancer stops practicing steps and starts being the dance. The concern over “getting it right” disappears and something freer takes over. And that, John says, is when life happens.
You can always tell the difference. A dancer who is still thinking about appearances may look good on the dance floor, but something’s missing. Dancers who don’t care about appearances and just feel the music move differently. Their bodies flow, free, loose, joyful. They’re not trying to dance. They’re dancing. In those moments, John says, we are most ourselves.
The distinction maps beautifully onto a classic idea in bhakti or devotional yoga: the difference between sadhana-bhakti, devotional life in practice, and ragatmika-bhakti, spontaneous devotion. In sadhana, daily practices such as chanting a prescribed number of mantras, studying sacred texts, showing up for worship even when the heart feels distracted or dry—that’s learning the steps. Sadhana seeks to instill discipline, repetition, structure, and intention, like a dance lesson, and it can feel mechanical at times. We follow patterns given by tradition. We imitate the great bhaktas who have progressed farther than we have. We practice not because it feels spontaneous, but because it forms us.
This stage is devotion’s foundation. Without a foundation, love and devotion have nothing to stand on. Just as no one wakes up one day dancing effortlessly. It takes practice. But sadhana is not the destination. It is the preparation for spontaneous love and devotion.
Ragatmika-bhakti describes devotion that has become internalized. Love moves the soul naturally, without calculation. In this place of spontaneous devotion, external judgements, defensive postures, and selfish interests dissolve. Devotion is no longer something we try to do. It arises on its own. The heart leans toward Krishna, the supreme being, the object of love dwelling in the hearts of all, the way a body leans toward its favorite music. There is still form, just as a skilled dancer still respects rhythm and balance, but the form is no longer constrained. It is alive.
In ragatmika-bhakti, practice shows what it has achieved. What once felt mechanical now feels alive and exciting. Devotion flows because it expresses who we have become. Neophyte dancers dance with their feet. The more seasoned dancers dance their hearts out.
John’s insight reminded me of something essential about the life of devotion that I’ve been trying to nurture for more than fifty years: spontaneity is not the opposite of discipline. It is the fruit that matures when discipline has been fully absorbed. The goal is not to remain forever counting steps, nor to abandon the steps prematurely. The goal is to practice so deeply that the practice disappears.
When devotion becomes like dancing at its best—unselfconscious, responsive, joyful—we are no longer “performing spirituality.” We are living it. And in those moments, as John says, we are finally ourselves.
I will never be sure about the events I’m about to describe. For years the images have been like pieces of stained glass in a church window, and the more I try to fit the pieces together, the more I cut my hands. But they did happen.
In February 1970, shortly after joining the London Hare Krishna devotees in their temple off Oxford Street, we were visited by a warlock, a male witch. London had an active community of occultists in those days (the Swedenborg Society, for example, named after an 18th century Swedish spirit-channeler, had its offices just next door), and the Krishna temple attracted hundreds of unusual visitors including yogis, sorcerers, and ecstatics who would pretend to fall into a trance and roll around on the carpeted temple floor. Every day we received someone new and strange, but the male witch has remained in my memory as among the most bizarre.
Male witches are rumored to have originated in Scotland. Ours was a heavyset man who sat quietly during the Sunday dinner, then insinuated himself into a discussion a few of us were having about mystic powers. In the group was Digvijaya, the temple cook. When the witch learned Digvijaya came from Scotland, he announced that he would come back that night.
“I’ll show yah a thing or tew aboot mystic powers,” he boasted. We had no idea what he meant.
This particular Sunday, there were more guests than usual. Midnight came and went, and still there were pots to wash. Digvijaya’s dedication to kitchen duties inspired me to stay and help. I also loved hearing his accent: he spoke with a beautiful Scottish brogue, and if we were admiring the stars that evening, he might say, “Ach, Yogesvara (my initiated name), ‘tis a braw, bricht, moonlicht nicht.”
His humility was as impressive as his accent. I asked him once, “Why do you like cooking for Krishna so much?” He said, “Ach, I’m not advanced enough to coook fer Krishna, but I looove coooking fer His devotees.” That was quintessential Digvijaya.
Attached to the basement kitchen was an airshaft that rose up the side of the six-story building. Around 1:00 a.m., we heard a rumble that sounded like a big wave gathering offshore. The sound grew louder, and suddenly, the door to the airshaft burst open and a blast of freezing cold air circulated fast and furious around the kitchen. Pots flew through the air as though in a hurricane.
Digvijaya dove under a table, shouting “Krishna! Krishna!” over and over.
I crept along the base of the wall and worked my way over to the airshaft. When I reached the door, I jumped up, rammed it shut, and bolted the lock. Immediately, things subsided. The pots fell to the floor, and the kitchen grew warm again.
Digvijaya and I looked at one another in shock.
“Has anything like that ever happened before?” I asked him in a whisper.
“Nooo,” he said, catching his breath, “and I surely hoope it dunna happen again.”
“Do you think it was that man who came to the feast?”
“Could be,” Digvijaya said with a shrug. “But I have a moore important question.”
“What’s that?”
“Ah cannot finish cleaning the pots muhself. Ken ya stay and help muh?”
I haven’t spoken to Digvijaya in more than a half-century, but his steadfast dedication to cooking and cleaning continues to inspire me. Even airborne witches couldn’t distract him from his prescribed duties.
Growing up in midtown New York City in the 1950s, I lived with my mother in a two-room apartment near Central Park. In those days, you could rent a small place in that neighborhood for a few hundred dollars a month. It strained our two-person budget, but she saw a chance to move us out of the slum area where we had been living downtown, and she took it.
Haircuts happened across the street from our building and next door to 1010 WINS radio, a rock ’n’ roll station back then. Next to the barbershop was a used bookstore. For twenty-five cents you could buy an ACE double-novel science fiction paperback. On the corner was a coffee shop serving bagels and coffee to riders pouring out of the 59th Street subway. And right beside our building stood the New York Coliseum.
Before it was torn down in the early 2000s, the Coliseum was the place for all the big expos and fairs. My good fortune was to make friends with a guard posted at a side entrance. Starting at age nine, I saw every show for free.
In August 1959, the Coliseum hosted the Soviet Exhibition of Science and Technology. For nine-year-old me, the biggest “wows” were two exhibits. One was a replica of Sputnik hanging near the entrance. The other was a particle accelerator. I remember it as a metal machine perhaps ten feet across, with thick copper windings, heavy magnets, and bold signs proclaiming: “This machine controls the invisible,” “This is how atoms obey us,” and “This is secret, powerful knowledge.” The message was unmistakable: the future belongs to those who master the smallest things.
Standing before that silent ring of metal and copper, I think I sensed for the first time that the most decisive forces in life were unseen. This machine claimed to reveal what could not be observed directly. The idea lodged itself in me that the cool parts of reality lived beneath the surface. If matter was animated by invisible forces, perhaps life itself contained something tiny and mysterious.
Ten years later, I was introduced to the Sanskrit wisdom text Bhagavad Gita, which described the atma, the nonmaterial self that animates mind and body. That idea felt less to me like something new than something remembered. The “wow” in the Coliseum turned out not to be about physics but about tracing consciousness back to its source. What turns matter from something inert into something living? What is that undeniable quality of inner experience that lets us know we are alive?
I didn’t understand it then, but that day at the Coliseum was a turning point. Curiosity became vocation, and the question of how things work gave way to a deeper question.
Who is it that knows?
For my 60th birthday some years ago, my wife bought a steam function for my shower. She didn’t know it would provide me with an ideal metaphor for explaining kaivalya, the state of ego dissolution that is the goal of Shankarite monistic Advaita philosophy.
“Shankarite” refers to the teachings of the 8th-century philosopher Adi Shankara, who taught Advaita philosophy, which proposes that personhood is a-dvaita, not two, meaning the individual self (atma) and the ultimate reality (brahman), the totality of all energy in creation, are, at the deepest level, identical, with liberation equating to the achievement of this oneness. “Monistic” means when one gets there, when yogis reach the ultimate perfection of their practice, egos fall away, and they become formless, featureless, and “one” with God.
Here’s where the steam shower comes in. When the steam fills the shower space, outlines soften. The walls and glass door seem to disappear. Even the sense of where one’s body ends and the space begins blurs. There is a peculiar relief in this loss of definition. The sharp edges of ordinary life, the roles, anxieties, unfinished business, loosen their grip. For a moment, you are no longer someone. You are simply warmth, breath, sensation.
That experience is wonderful and can feel genuinely liberating. No more sorrow rooted in personal history. No more tragedy born of attachment, loss, or conflict. The burden of being a distinct self with all its aches and cares dissolves.
The Bhagavad Gita offers a different diagnosis of what liberation ultimately means. According to the Gita, the nonmaterial self does not truly dissolve or disappear upon awakening. It is immortal and does not merge into brahman like a drop into the sea. A drop may no longer be visible, but it never becomes a whole sea. The self remains eternal, conscious, and irreducibly individual. What changes after liberation is not the loss of identity, but the emergence of true identity: personhood freed from the egotism of the material world.
The freedom of kaivalya, the Gita suggests, is genuine but incomplete. It is a state of release, an absence of pain rather than the presence of fulfillment. The burdens of embodied life fall away, but so do the possibilities of relationship, creativity, and love. And because consciousness is by nature active and relational, that stillness does not satisfy forever. In time, the self seeks something more than relief. It seeks positive, meaningful joy, found not in erasure, but in loving exchange.
Next time you visit, you’re welcome to try the steam shower for yourself. Then we’ll get lunch.
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
e.e. cummings (1950)
When cultural identity narrows, even a yoga mat can become a battleground.
Few health practices are more commonplace in America today than yoga. Yet what looks like simple exercise continues to provoke unease. For some parents, the Sanskrit chants, statues of deities, and talk of “union with the divine” feel foreign, even unsettling—a quiet challenge to Judeo-Christian norms.
This unease might seem minor in the larger scheme of politics, but it raises a serious question: what happens to practices such as yoga if political authority in Washington continues to consolidate and cultural identity becomes ever more narrowly defined? The Constitution was designed to safeguard pluralism, yet those safeguards are being tested with increasing frequency. Executive power expands daily. Judges earn appointments not based on experience or expertise but perceived party loyalty. And public rhetoric around national identity frames “real America” in increasingly white Christian terms.
Against this backdrop, yoga becomes a revealing test case. School districts from Alabama to California have faced lawsuits over whether yoga in classrooms violates the separation of church and state. Defenders argue it has been thoroughly Americanized and is no more religious than a push-up, but critics frame it as covert Hindu indoctrination.
Both points hold some truth. Much of the yoga in the U.S. has indeed been stripped of its philosophical roots and repackaged as wellness. Yet the suspicion it still provokes shows how vulnerable cultural practices from outside the dominant tradition can be. History offers reminders. In the 19th century, Catholic schools were accused of undermining American values, and some states tried to outlaw them as un-American. During World War II, more than 100,000 Japanese Americans—two-thirds citizens—were uprooted from their homes and sent to internment camps. In the 1950s, McCarthy-era loyalty oaths forced teachers, professors, and artists to prove their patriotism or risk their livelihoods.
Each of these episodes has since been condemned, but at the time they were defended as necessary to protect national identity. The lesson is clear: when cultural difference is cast as a threat, constitutional protections can buckle quickly.
The White House itself has, at times, embraced yoga. Michelle Obama included it in her “Let’s Move” campaign, and sessions have been held on the South Lawn. But symbolic gestures fade when political winds shift, and practices once tolerated can become flashpoints.
This isn’t just about mats and mantras. It is about whether America can still make space for multiple traditions, as it has, often haltingly, in the past. The fate of yoga may matter less than whether freedom in America is strong enough to include the unfamiliar, or so fragile that the unfamiliar must be excluded.
And once that political chakra opens, it rarely closes.
Alice Coltrane (1937-2007) was a gifted musician, visionary composer, and devoted practitioner of yoga and meditation. In January 1981, when I was living in the New York Krishna temple, it was my privilege to help organize a musical tribute to John Lennon, and she agreed to take part. The program was to be a memorial offering to John, who had been murdered one month before.
George Harrison was the Beatle most admired for writing songs that were overtly spiritual; John was the fierce, questioning heart of the band, the one who confronted war and class prejudice and pushed the Beatles’ music into deeper revolutionary waters. For those of us who grew up in the 1960s, his murder marked the end of the sixties dream, a turning point that shattered the idealism we associated with the Beatles, counterculture, and John Lennon’s advocacy for peace. We baby boomers had come of age listening to his music. A memorial concert was the least we could do, and Alice’s participation was altogether fitting.
Most everyone involved with spiritual practices in those days knew about Alice Coltrane. In 1963 she met her future husband, the legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, who credited yoga and meditation with having saved him from drug dependency. After his death in 1967, Alice became a disciple of Swami Satchidananda, founder of Integral Yoga. Soon after, she became known by the Sanskrit name Turiya Sangeetananda, meaning “the supreme being’s song of highest bliss.”
By the late 1970s, Turiya (as she was affectionately known) was a frequent visitor to Krishna temples and began incorporating the devotional music she heard there into her performances and compositions. In 1977 she sent a copy of her album “Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana,” featuring gospel-infused renditions of popular Sanskrit chants, to A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the Krishna movement. In March of that year, he sent her a letter of appreciation, praising her chanting and telling her she has become “transcendental” by chanting Govinda Jaya Jaya and the Hare Krishna maha-mantra. Shortly after, she met him in person while on a pilgrimage to Vrindavan, India.
In an interview for Integral Yoga Magazine, she described what it was like to be married to John Coltrane. “He was a very quiet, meditative person,” she said, “very pensive, very deep in thoughts. Many times, you see couples whose personalities are opposite and they clash a lot. That doesn’t make for peace in your heart and home. I felt fortunate to be with someone who had that calm and peace in his spirit. John loved to read spiritual books,” including the Bhagavad Gita and Paramahamsa Yogananda’s acclaimed Autobiography of a Yogi. “He was a person who wanted to look deeper into the esoteric side of life. We would meditate together.”
While preparing for the John Lennon tribute concert, Turiya and I discovered that we had both met Swami Satchidananda at the Unitarian Universalist Church on Central Park West in the late 1960s. “For me to walk into the church and see so many young people gathered together was quite impressive,” she said. “I would see Peter Max, Laura Nyro and others there.”
The first time I heard Swami Satchidananda speak was at the church in July 1969, shortly before the Woodstock Festival, where he gave the opening address. “America is helping everybody in the material field,” he told the Woodstock crowd of nearly a half-million festival-goers, “but the time has come for America to help the whole world with spirituality also.” Then he led the crowd in chanting “Hari Om” and “Rama Rama.”
Turiya opened the tribute at the Krishna temple with a rousing version of the Hare Krishna mantra, but it was her rendition of prayers to the plant goddess Tulasi that got the place rocking. Her lively performance on Hammond organ, supported by two backup singers, had the audience of several hundred up and dancing.
What I remember most about that afternoon was the warmth of her singing. It was clear to all who were there that spirituality had brought her to higher dimensions of musical life. Clearly, she believed Krishna was present in his names, and that anyone could realize him if they sang the names with sincerity and devotion. She credited her late husband with having shown her the power of music and mantras.
“In his heart,” she said, “especially during the last five years of his life [from the time of his acclaimed album “A Love Supreme”], “it was all spiritual songs that came out: ‘Dear Lord, dearly beloved God, Om.’ We heard music coming from him that we hadn’t ever heard before, and I believe it wasn’t all from this world. He played from another realm, a spiritual realm.”
Alice Coltrane died of respiratory failure on January 12, 2007. Her music along with John Lennon’s—music that moves us to create a better, more compassionate world—lives on.
“Embodied souls can acclimate to a life of discipline, even if taste for worldly pleasures persists. By knowing a higher taste, all other interests abate.”
Bhagavad Gita 2.59
For his acts of greed, Zeus’s mortal son, Tantalus, was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree. Whenever Tantalus reached out, the branches rose away. Whenever he bent to drink, the water receded—cursed to being forever “tantalized.” This verse from the Gita reminds us that however drawn we may be to the “fruits” of an illusory world, nothing compares to the joys of a yogic life of devotion to God.
To develop that “higher taste,” the Sanskrit texts recommend chanting the maha-mantra: Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama, Rama, Hare Hare. In the company of righteous men and women cultivating a “higher taste,” here’s a satisfying fruit within our grasp.
“Of secret things, I am silence.”
Bhagavad Gita 10.38
If Krishna describes himself as silence among secret things, it is not because he hides himself from us; rather, it is because he cannot be seen with material eyes. The alternative way of seeing divinity is through eyes of love. The great avatar Chaitanya, in his ecstatic love for Krishna, the supreme being, saw him everywhere, in everything. He would, for instance, embrace blue-bark tamala trees, as their color reminded him of blue-hued Krishna.
Develop your spiritual vision by starting each day with activities that are materially “silent” such as meditation, deep breathing, and study of the Gita. Chaitanya recommended chanting Krishna’s names. How long you chant is not as important as how intently you chant. If all you can do is five focused minutes, that’s fine, but do it every day.
Consistency is the key to success in spiritual practices.