A Better Metric for Loving God
4/6/202656 min
You can check every box of religious life and still be miles from God. The real spiritual metric is simpler — and much harder. Raghunath and Kaustubha open with a passage from Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov — the dying words of the monk Father Zosima: love everything, love everyone, even in their sin, and you will perceive the divine mystery in all things. It's a vision shared across traditions — by Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, Black Elk, and Jesus himself, who loved those who were crucifying him — and it maps precisely onto a verse from the Srimad Bhagavatam, an ancient Sanskrit text on...
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First 90 secondsRaghunath· Host0:00
Sometimes in the, you know, junior concept of spirituality, it's like, "I love God, I love God, I love God," and you start to see everything as enemies. And then sometimes you start to see even your friends as enemies, or your family as enemies, or everybody's an enemy except God. And sort of like, "It's me and God versus the world. I'm sick of this world."
Kaustubha Das· Host0:20
Right.
Raghunath· Host0:20
"The world's disgusting, the world's sinful, the world's broken, but I have this deep love for God." It's, it's not a-- the best metric to measure love of God.
Kaustubha Das· Host0:29
[laughs] Oh, yes.
Raghunath· Host0:30
A, a better metric would be not, not just, yeah, you know, your passion for Jesus or God or Krishna. A better, a, a better metric would be, how do I love the people God puts in my life?
Kaustubha Das· Host0:42
Right.
Raghunath· Host0:44
Can I love the people ev- the, the great people- [laughs] ... the pretty good people- Well said ... the jerks, can I learn to love them? Very, very powerful practice. [chanting] [chanting] Live from Alachua, Florida, this is Wisdom of the Sages, a Bhakti Yoga podcast with your host Raghunath and co-host and senior educator at the Bhakti Center in New York City, Kustuba Das. Welcome to the