Divine Love

Some religious groups portray God as a mighty and scary entity who sits above the clouds and casts thunderbolts to punish sinners. According to them, [...]

During our life, there will be times when we are down, yet we feel God's presence guiding, strengthening and uplifting us. However, there will also [...]

Love is one of the most common themes in popular media such as movies and novels. As today’s culture is increasingly moving toward individualism, sometimes [...]

As we are finite beings, we may sometimes commit mistakes that have devastating consequences. When we realize the gravity of our blunders, we may become [...]

When we try to grow spiritually by serving God, we may sometimes feel discouraged, “I don’t have much ability.” Thankfully, God doesn’t fixate on our [...]

Unlike some other spiritual paths, bhakti-yoga doesn’t require us to renounce all our possessions. Still, it does require us to renounce some of our conceptions [...]

Suppose we enroll for an exercise program meant to build our muscles. Suppose we are told to move some heavy objects. Moving those objects can [...]

Our conceptions of things shape our expectations from those things. Suppose we conceive of prayer as a means to get God to remove obstacles from [...]

Gratitude centers on appreciating the good things in our life. Such an attitude of gratitude is highly conducive to our emotional health; it fills us [...]

Many of us turn toward God after we have tried everything else in our quest to be happy and it all has left us disappointed. [...]

Every path expects certain abilities or qualities from its practitioners. For example, athletes need to be physically fit and agile; students need to be intellectually [...]

Many religious paths promise happiness, including happiness beyond this life. Gita wisdom explains that not all post-mortem destinations are equally good. The Gita differentiates between [...]

Various religious paths require particular resources to be successfully executed. Those resources may relate with the capacities to get expensive paraphernalia, perform elaborate rituals, engage [...]

The glories of bhakti-yoga, as explained in the Bhagavad-gita (09.20-34), can be summarized through the acronym SETU: Simple, Eternal, Transformational, Universal. As SETU means bridge [...]

The claim that devotion transcends ethics can strip devotion of all ethical content and strip ethics of all devotional relevance. Let’s consider a more holistic [...]

Spiritual reductionism refers to the tendency to reduce spirituality to some specific parameters that are deemed vital and to gauge everyone's value based on those [...]

If we are told to assess ourselves ethically, we may fear, “I already feel guilty because I can’t live up to the expected moral standard. [...]

Does the Bhagavad-gita’s concluding verse (18.66) — the surrendered are protected from karmic consequences —  license ethical exemption? To understand, let’s consider the verse’s implications [...]

Devotion automatically leads to ethical growth — we may support this claim by quoting Srimad-Bhagavatam verse (05.18.12): devotees manifest all godly qualities  But our claim [...]

Devotion is a matter of the heart. Does that make it irrelevant to ethics? No, because the heart can’t be reached as easily as we [...]