the wisdom of bhakti

For 99% of you, the first thing you ever knew was a face. probably your mother's, hovering above you like a warm planet. Your baby fingers reach up to grasp at her features, emanating sounds of love.

We're born into relationship - it's literally coded into our neural wiring

The mind craves entities, personalities, faces to attach to. Have you noticed how children personify everything? That stick becomes a warrior, that cloud becomes a whale. You see strange faces in cars.

Obviously, we're meaning-making machines but more specifically, we're entity-recognizing machines.

When spiritual teachers talk about "pure consciousness" or "ultimate reality" - these vast abstract concepts - it feels like trying to swallow the ocean. The mind recoils.

But a character or a person you know or a god - could make your heart open even if for a few seconds.

The genius of bhakti is that it works with our wiring instead of against it. You can spend decades trying to wrap your head around "non-dual awareness" or you can fall in love with a deity to which to dedicate your experience to. The heart knows how to dissolve into love. It's been practicing since that first face.

I used to think this was primitive, anthropomorphizing the infinite. Then I thought it was perhaps a humble flavor to worship an entity. But now I see it's a clever method to transcend ourselves. If you have an entity you call yourself, which all of us do, the antidote to the poison needs to be an entity as well. At least at first.

The mechanism of action is not dissimilar to a Zen koan.

Dedicate every thought, every feeling, every sensation, every action to an entity and see how easy it is to NOT get sucked into the vortex reality.

We're not really seeking understanding. We're seeking union.

I've spent years pulling my attention back to the breath like a kid yanking a kite string. And it works - you get these pristine moments of clarity, like when you're driving at night and suddenly the fog lifts. But there's something mechanical and impossible about it. Quick flashes. The little green sparks from chewing a wintergreen mint. So cool, but they are tiny, only visible at night, and effectively useless to brighten anything. Over time, on the cushion, it can turn into a small stable little fire but still - it takes a while.

But when you start dedicating every little thing to another being - that sandwich you're eating becomes prasad, the spreadsheet is an offering, your anxiety becomes a writhing bug you're laying at their feet.

Like a cosmic recycling program where nothing gets wasted, everything gets transformed through the alchemy of devotion.

Now for the jhanas and TWIM meditation. They're powerful tech for generating bliss. You can sit there and build these towering buildings of concentrated pleasure. But it's like having this really expensive watch that you have to take off every time it might get wet. The second you step into drama, trauma, or a mess - it doesn't survive contact with reality. Unstable isotope.

The TWIM folks talk about 6R-ing your way through daily life, catching moments of tension and releasing into that tranquil jhanic mind. But let's be real - what happens when you're balls deep in a work crisis or your girlfriend is crying about something that happened five years ago? That subtle luminous pleasure of first jhana starts feeling useless.

You end up having to choose between being present in the shitshow or floating away to your happy place. You can try to "metta your way through it" but it often becomes this dissociative escape hatch - like watching your life happen through a plate glass window. To use a reductive analogy, jhanas = a Ferrari in the showroom, bhakti = beat-up Toyota Tacoma that can handle any terrain. Both get you places, but only one can you anywhere and everywhere.

For bhakti, the bridge is already built into your nervous system. We know how to relate, how to love, how to give ourselves away. If you dedicate everything to the “beloved entity”, there's no separation between meditation and life. And the shackles of your illusionary entity that you incorrectly identify yourself with can slip away - as your hands have grasped something else.