Devotion and Spiritual Growth – do everything for, and with God.

In this talk Kriyananda goes right to the heart of the teachings: how to love God more.

He reminds us that God doesn’t care what we know, but how much we love.

Divine Mother likes simple devotion, and in prayer she responds to the quality of our hearts, not our words.

When we meditate with just our minds it doesn’t feed the soul; we must meditate with devotion!

If you knew how much God loves you, you would die for joy.

Arrive at understanding using the mind & the heart

The subject of intellect vs. heart is a very, very important one. They have found that there is a certain amount of gray matter in the heart. Western culture has been one-sided in the direction of intellect.

Yogananda said the motivation of human beings is twofold: to avoid suffering to attain happiness.

The joy of God and the joy of your soul is something that is always there, constantly bubbling in your heart.

True joy is always new, you never tire of it. It is the goal of life.

Thomas a Kempis writes in The Imitation of Christ, that delusions are so much a part of our habit structure, it is it is difficult to let go of them.

Try to focus your calm feeling and direct it to the point between the eyebrows.

Love God. It is much more important than knowing God intellectually. You can know God in the heart because God is love. You need to love Him to understand Him.

Jesus taught that the intellect alone cannot lead one to truth. Without fixity of purpose born of the heart’s devotion, the intellect wanders endlessly. It cannot settle for long on anything.

When we develop intuition we can transcend the limits of the intellect. We need to have balance in our lives with using both intuition and the intellect. Kriyananda encourages us to develop our intuition, explaining that through the intuition, we gain access to the wisdom of the universe. In fact, it is only through the intuition that we can gain complete understanding of anything. We each have our own melody to sing. May we sing in harmony with the universe.