On Jun 21, 2017 12:13 PM, "Thaths" <tha...@gmail.com> wrote:
This book seems to be the one I am looking for: A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674187466/> by John Stratton Hawley. I'm glad you found a book to your looking. Judging by the Amazon "product description", I suspect this is the kind of book I was trying to not recommend. Religion pertains to men, and spirituality to the spirit. No doubt the Bhakti movement can be dubbed a twentieth century religion as this book does, and located within the egotistical world of man, his politics, aspirations and ambitions, but the spiritual foundations of Bhakti harken back to the beginning of time. This is why I led with a recommendation for the book, The Spiritual heritage of India. It charts the course of the same essential idea being moulded and remoulded to fit the times. The Rig Veda famously affirms the idea of unity with "ekam sad vipra bahudha vadanti agnim yamam matariswanam ahuh" (meaning Truth is one, but the learned refer to it in different names like agni, yama, matariswan). The idea even back then was as old as time itself, not merely because the Vedas as a disparate set of ideas that has existed for a few thousand years already. Shamanic and animistic values had called for unity with nature and all things since time began. This is how it has always been. Yoga literally and ideologically means unity. Unity lies at the heart of any spiritual tradition. Division is violence and the way of the spirit is non violence. Whenever one sincerely enquires into the way of the spirit, the same original ideas come forth, almost as if they are born in a space in the knowing before the intellect. These ideas sound radically different when translated through the individual intellect, but they are really the same. The mystics like to say, "Listen to the space between the words, for there is the truth."
