Hari-kirtana Das ~ Dharma Decoded: Discover Your True Calling Through Ancient Wisdom

Hari-kirtana Das, a teacher and author, specializes in the spiritual philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita. A former monk in the Krishna Consciousness tradition, he has spent decades translating Bhakti Yoga principles into practical teachings. Author of Journey into the Bhagavad Gita, he offers workshops and courses exploring the Gita’s timeless wisdom.

Finding Your Dharma course here: https://hari-kirtana.com/finding-your-dharma/

Free download of the first chapter: https://hari-kirtana.com/books/

Key Takeaways:

• The Initial Challenge of the Bhagavad Gita: Das recounts his early struggles in understanding the Bhagavad Gita, eventually finding clarity through guided group study and philosophical inquiry.
• Modes of Material Nature: A significant Gita teaching, the three modes of nature—goodness, passion, and ignorance—play a crucial role in defining human behavior and consciousness.
• Dharma Definitions: Insight into the dual nature of Dharma, distinguishing between Svadharma (individual's duty) and Sanatana Dharma (eternal duty) and how this guides personal and spiritual pursuits.
• Karma Yoga: Explores how actions can be offerings to a higher purpose, connecting individual spiritual practice with a broader philosophical context.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Exploring the Bhagavad Gita's Influence on Personal and Philosophical Growth
• 7:56 Discovering the Bhagavad Gita and Long Island Roots
• 10:03 Discovering Krishna Consciousness and Embracing Bhakti Yoga
• 13:37 Experiencing Krishna Consciousness in 1970s New York City
• 19:55 Discovering Timeless Existence and Material Nature in the Gita
• 23:38 Responding to Anger Based on Its Underlying Truth
• 27:29 Understanding Dharma and Its Impact on Life and Yoga
• 35:16 Understanding Swadharma and the Modern Caste System
• 46:14 Understanding Karma Yoga and Its Spiritual Implications
• 54:42 Exploring the Bhagavad Gita Through Personal Experience and Modern Lenses
• 1:03:48 Finding Your Dharma Through Guided Introspection and Yoga Wisdom
• 1:08:48 Exploring Personal Stories and Insights With Hari-kirtana Das

Transcript

0:33

Welcome to Native Yoga Toddcast, so happy you are here. My goal with this channel is to bring inspirational speakers to the mic in the field of yoga, massage, body work and beyond. Follow us at @nativeyoga and check us out at nativeyogacenter.com. All right, let's begin. Welcome to Native Yoga Toddcast. Today I'm delighted to bring to you Hari-kirtana Das Hari is an author, a teacher. He's a public speaker. He's been practicing devotional and other yogic disciplines for over 40 years, he's lived in yoga ashrams. He's been in intentional spiritual communities. He's even worked for Fortune 500 companies and Silicon Valley startups. And he brings a wide range of spiritual knowledge and life to his classes, his workshops, and as you're going to hear here, his conversations and presentations. He is the author of the book called Journey Into the Bhagavad Gita, and he gave me the opportunity a copy I could read so I can come to the conversation with some pertinent questions. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, and click on the links below, where you can very easily access and find Hari's work. Find them at Hari-kirtana.com and again, the links are below. You'll find them on all the social media handles, and you'll also hear he talks about a lot of content that he has about the Bhagavad Gita and the teachings he's done on his YouTube channel. For those of you that are listening, go over to our YouTube channel, native yoga center, hit the subscribe button. We appreciate and have a chance to see Hari in action and or if you're listening, thank you so much. We appreciate your support and thank you for keeping yoga alive in the world, because we need it. All right, let's begin. I'm so happy to have Hari-kirtana Das here joining me today. Hari, how are you feeling? I'm feeling good. How about you? I'm really good. Because I'm excited, because we organized this a couple months ago. I have you know, got intrigued by the book that you've written, which is called Journey Into the Bhagavad Gita, a guide to exploring timeless principles of transcendental knowledge. And here's the important part, and integrating them into your life. And so when we plan to do this podcast, you were kind enough to let me read the book first. I To be very honest with you, I'm a little over 70% through, so I'm still working. I was like, this weekend, I was like, Oh man, let's go. Let's go. I gotta read. So I really, I'm really enjoying it. I think you did an incredible job, and so I'm really honored to have you here and to for both of us to be able to dive into some of these incredible topics that the Bhagavad Gita present us with. Can you tell me a little bit about what your introduction what the first time you picked up a copy of Bhagavad Gita? What was that experience like for you, the first time I found a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, it was among many books about spiritual philosophy that my friends and I were all exploring at that time in our lives. We were all teenagers in high school, and I didn't have a lot of success. I tried to read it, and it was extremely difficult. It had a lot of references to aspects of Vedic culture that I had yet to be introduced to, so I didn't understand what the references were. It seemed very theological, and at the time, I wasn't really looking for something that was the voice of a personal deity. And. And the concepts were just really, really foreign. So I was I felt an attraction to it that I really couldn't explain, which may be why I kept coming back to it after giving up on it a few times, and the third time that I attempted to read the Bhagavad Gita that was the time that actually worked for me. And the difference was that I was studying it in a systematic fashion with teachers and in a group, so that combination of people who actually did have some frame of reference for it, and Satsang, people who were also interested in pursuing knowledge of transcendental subject matter that really made a difference. Certainly the first time though I had, I think the same reaction A lot of people have, like, this is a very foreign language. I'm never going to keep be able to keep track of all of these names right up front in the first chapter it. It was not the easiest read. First time around, I agree with you. Which version of the Bhagavad Gita did you pick up? The first one I came in contact with was Bhagavad Gita, as it is by A, C, B, Bhakti Vedanta, Swami Prabhupada and Srila Prabhupada. Edition of the Gita was also very evangelical. This was obviously written by a man on a mission, and he was also coming from even at that time in the mid 70s, a somewhat to me, at least anachronistic frame of reference. Some of his examples of how to understand what was being spoken about seemed a little old timey, and so that was also part of the challenge for me, and in due course of time, I came across a few other editions of the Gita. But ironically, I suppose it was that first edition of the Gita that I came back to, and it was through that philosophical lens of Chaitanya, Vaishnavism, bhakti yoga, that I came to understand, I think, what the Bhagavad Gita was trying to tell me, and also came to be able to embrace the theological aspect of the Gita that at first I wasn't really very attracted to. I can attest to that my first introduction was with the same version as well, and I had a similar challenging experience. I'm curious, did you were you scholarly enough to decide to read the whole thing even though it was challenging, or was it one of those things where you got through to chapter one or two and said, Okay, you know, let me, let me come back later. Were you able to push through and go all the way through? I don't think so. I mean, aside from not being all that academically inclined, I don't think I had the determination or the ability to stay focused on one thing at a time at that point in my life. I think I got about as far as the fourth chapter, or maybe the fifth, sixth chapter, when it starts to speak about Dhyana yoga, the yoga of meditation and the and the kind of idea I had about yoga, which is, you go off to the forest, you set yourself up by yourself, with a very renounced kind of lifestyle, and now you're spending all of Your time meditating and doing pranayama. You know, that was more my idea of what mystic yoga was supposed to be about. And so I think I got into those chapters and stuck with it for a little while on account of thinking, Oh, this is the part that I'm actually interested in. Once it phased back to the devotional part, then I think I probably put it down. Got it did you have a theological upbringing? I wouldn't say I had a strong theological upbringing. I was raised culturally Jewish, Jewish enough to have been bar mitzvahed, something I always kind of resented because I had to go to services on Friday nights during the last season of Star Trek, which meant that I missed the whole third season. If it hadn't come out afterwards in reruns, then I never would have seen it. And even then, I. You know, I knew that I wanted something that I was not getting from the religious education, which was really more of a socializing, cultural education than a theological education at that time. So it wasn't long after my my Bar Mitzvah before I started reading Alan Watts and Lao Tzu and that sort of thing. Yes, yes, to look for, not so much theological answers, but philosophical ideas outside of the tradition in which I was raised. Do you mind me asking where you went to high school, where in the country were you living at this point? I was born in New York City, but raised for the most part on Long Island. Got it right, right at the border between Nassau County and Suffolk County. I was in Suffolk County, but when you get to part three of my book, there's a story about my going to tennis camp. The part three of my book has short autobiographical stories, and then the purpose of them is to see how I'm looking back at my life through the lens that the Gita gives us to understand ourselves and the world and such, and then there are exercises and discussion points and such like that. So in the back of the book, there's a story about tennis camp. And I met someone I lived just over the border in Suffolk County. I met someone who was I could practically run down my backyard and hang out with them, who lived in Nassau County when I went off to this tennis camp, and he went to a different high school than I did. And so the story I tell in the beginning of the book of discovering the Bhagavad Gita, amongst all these other books, it wasn't at my high school. This is something I didn't actually reveal in the book. I actually would cut school. I would leave my high school and go hang out with my friends at this other high school because they were more my tribe than a lot of the people where I went to school. So anyway, Long Island, Long Long Island is where I grew up, Long Island. Long Island. I guess I was curious about that because I was wondering if there was a Krishna Consciousness community around where you then were introduced the Bhagavad Gita. That would have given you some insight into that whole community. Did you come when did you get a chance to come across the ISKCON organization? So ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, had a temple on Henry Street in Brooklyn, and that was really the closest one. And one of my friends at the time was, I don't know how he found it, but he's the one who introduced the Bhagavad Gita, as it is, into our circle of friends, because we were all reading that kind of, those kind of books at the time, but he was really into it, so much so that he and one other friend graduated from high school one day and Were living in the temple the very next day, and during my I guess it must have been my senior year, we did go to the Brooklyn temple, and that was the first time that I met Hare Krishna devotees. And I thought the food was great. I thought, yeah, I'll live here if this is how we're going to eat every day, right? Yes, that, but that turned out not to be the case. That was the demo. Wasn't the real wasn't the real deal. It was actually much more austere than that during the week. But so that was met the first time that I met the devotees, and I couldn't really wrap my head around what I was seeing insofar as their particular practice and their particular philosophy was concerned. I came around later. I came around about three years afterwards, mostly because I needed a cheap place to live. And it was on account of that that I became introduced to the practice of bhakti yoga in the Chaitanya Vaishnava tradition. Came to understand that there was really a very comprehensive philosophy behind what appeared to be odd practice, a pretty different way of thinking about yoga. And eventually I. Realize, you know, I should stop everything else that I'm doing and spend a few years just focusing on this so that I could really learn it. And that is how I got my spiritual philosophical education. Amazing. Did you so you then, did you become a renunciate. And yes, and is that when you received your yogic name? Yes, I moved into the temple, which was now located on West 55th Street in Manhattan in 1977 and in 1978 I received a formal spiritual initiation, and that's when I was given my name, Hari kirtan Das. How? When did Srila Prabh pass away in 1977 while I was living at the temple, I moved in in the spring, and my expectation that was that I would be initiated by Srila Prabhupada. But he left this world prior to that possibility, and so the following spring, I was initiated by one of his disciples. Wow. I was curious, because I thought it was around the late 70s that that happened. So when you mentioned that you entered in around 77 I thought that there was a chance that that potentially is who you were initiated by. That's amazing. That was, that was my expectation. But I guess Krishna had another plan. Yeah. Can you paint a picture, what being in New York City in the late 70s as a Krishna devotee? What was it like New York City at that time was pretty rough around the edges. This was prior to Disney taking over Times Square, it was dirty. We had a garbage strike around that time that made it difficult to be in the city. It was it was gritty, but and there was also a blackout that summer when I was living at the temple, and that had a very peculiar vibe to it. I during that period of time to be a monk, essentially living in midtown Manhattan, was to be in the city, but not really of the city, so I was out and about in the city practically every day, but the only way I knew what was going on was by looking at the headlines on the newsstands. I wasn't watching television, I wasn't listening to the radio, I wasn't reading anything beyond the front page in the newspaper. And so it was like being in a bubble in the middle of the busiest city in the world. Perhaps, yes, time, yes. Fascinating. I hear you. I came across a Krishna, Krishna Consciousness community in Alachua Florida. So lots of trees. You know, we were chanting Hare Krishna walking through wooded forest. And that's why I'm so fascinated by the idea of being in New York City. And I would imagine it could have been a really cool place to be, too, in the sense that maybe you have a little bit of everything in New York. So perhaps people weren't really taken aback by the outfit or the hair or the be the beads or whatever that you were wearing at the time. Did you find that the reception that you received was balanced like or was it one way or the other in terms of open arms or a lot of closed doors? What was your overall feeling in terms of being a monk walking through New York City, and I'm gathering gathering, you had your robes on? Yes? No, I was a full tilt, Full Metal Jacket. Yeah, and you got both. It really depended on where you were and what time of day or which day of the week. The reason I say that is because the Hare Krishna movement in general was not a particularly mature movement at that time. You know, the oldest person was 30 years old. The most senior realized, most realized devotee at the time had been doing it for maybe five years so and there was a lot of preoccupation. Conversation with telling everyone that we weren't a cult while we were behaving in a very cultish way. So, yeah, so taking into account that we everyone was very young and very new to a very ancient and sophisticated practice that appeared a lot like popular religion, everybody's singing and dancing, as opposed to contemplative religion, where everybody's very serious and quiet and such like that. When we would go out during the day during the week to chant on the streets, we were a tourist attraction. We would go to Rockefeller Center, and we'd go chant up a storm in front of Rockefeller Center. And people would stop me on the street if I was just walking around, you know, people who were tourists from out of town, and say, Hey, can we all take a picture with you? And, you know, that sort of thing. But in our I would say misplaced enthusiasm. We would go out on Saturday nights and we'd go to the theater district without taking into account that people were trying to enjoy the theater. So we were disruptive in ways that I wish we had not been. There were plenty of things that Hari Krishnas did at that period of time that any thoughtful person now would realize that's really bad PR, you got going on there. And, you know, in my youth and naivete, I was also part of that too. So it really depended on what the circumstances were. Thank you so much for answering all those questions, because I'm so I'm always so fascinated at what I never did take the leap into becoming a monk, and I was, I was toying with the idea at the time, and so I'm always so curious when I get a chance to speak with someone like you, who really dove in and went like you said, Full Metal Jacket style, and that's so amazing. I know that that took us a little bit away from some of the concepts of the Bhagavad Gita. So on that note, I'm curious what maybe was one of the first gems when you it sounds like probably when you were then living within the community and was learning some of the deeper aspects of the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. What was something that you remember really catching your attention and making a lot of sense or helping you to feel like you are cultivating a deeper relationship with your higher power? I think the thing that attracted me overall, was the very first baseline philosophical idea that we find in the Bhagavad Gita, which appears in the 12th verse of the second chapter. That verse goes, there was never a time when I did not exist. This is Krishna speaking to his friend, Arjuna. There has never been a time when you did not exist. There has never been a time when all these kings, in other words, all the warriors assembled on the battlefield, did not exist. Nor in the future is there any possibility that any of us shall ever cease to be this really struck me even the first time I read it, because it corroborated something I had felt from the time I was a child. Someone tried to explain the law of conservation of energy to me in physics, that energy can be cannot be created or destroyed. It can only go through transformations. And my initial response to that was, well, I'm a form of energy, therefore I cannot be created or destroyed. And you know, that may have had a bit to do with the fact that I was a 10 year old boy, and 10 year old boys tend to think they're invincible. But, you know, it's something, it's something that stuck with me, and I think that's one of the reasons I kept coming back to the Gita, and then once I was really studying it in a serious way and had a little bit more of a capacity for learning, the idea that jumped out at me was this concept of the three qualities of material Nature, which I think is one of the most underestimated concepts of yoga philosophy in modern yoga, when we hear about yoga philosophy in the context of contemporary practice, these three qualities, you'll, first of all, you'll only hear about them in a yoga teacher training, and then they're kind of glossed over. It's kind of information, as opposed to being presented in a comprehensive way, as a lens through which you can look and understand why. The world is the way it is, and why am I the way I am? The concept is that these three qualities, luminance, passion and darkness, sometimes called the mode of goodness, the mode of passion, or the mode of ignorance, are like three primary colors that blend together to create the characteristics of every person, place and thing that we experience in the world, including ourselves. And these three material qualities are understood to be the material world at its most metaphysical level, and once I started wrapping my head around this idea, then I was able to understand how I'm acting under The influence of these qualities, how other people are influenced by these qualities? For me, it was almost like discovering that I was in the matrix, that everybody else was also in the matrix, but they didn't know it. So that was that was a big takeaway for me. Can you give an example today how you might use that concept when interacting with others? Is there do you have, like, a mental experience where, or a thought experience where, maybe you sit with someone and you can feel that they're in a nice, like chill space, and therefore you'll kind of feel like, well, perhaps they're feeling a sense of sattvic or like luminous feeling, and or I'm just trying to think of a way that, from a practical perspective, we could use that information to our advantage, or at least to bring clarity to the situation. Do you feel like, I mean, it makes sense to me that if somebody is coming at me with anger, I could identify, here's that rajas cult quality, here's that, like fiery, intense quality to take it to the next level. Is there something then? Is it more just purely that you find from a place of observation, like, let me just observe this, or do you? Do you try to intermingle with it to see if you can, haven't, haven't have an influence on it? Yeah, that's a really good question. Practical standpoint. If we experience someone and we think to our think, okay, which combination of the qualities of material nature are influencing someone right now, then it can inform how we respond to them. So let's say somebody's angry at me, if their anger is based on something that's true, like they have a good reason to be angry at me, and they're willing to confront me with the truth of how I have upset them, or how I have done something wrong, whatever wrong means, then it's the mode of passion, but nested in the mode of luminance, because the mode of luminance is concerned with the truth, and somebody who is influenced by the mode of luminance is going to be willing to make sacrifices for the truth. So maybe they're angry at me. They're expressing their anger. There's some risk involved about how I might respond and what that might mean to our relationship. But if they're being truthful in expressing their feelings, I'm going to respond to them one way. I'm going to acknowledge them, validate their feelings, give serious consideration to what they are saying. If, on the other hand, someone is angry at me, and it's causeless animosity, it's not based in anything true. It's based on an opinion that they are clinging to, and no amount of factuality will change that opinion. Well, I'm going to treat their anger in a totally different way. I'm not necessarily going to validate their anger. I may not choose to engage with them on the level that they're engaging with with me at all. I might just think, how do I diffuse the situation? Because trying to reason with this person is pointless. Or I might slam back at them if I think that there's some possibility that hearing a different point of view will change how they feel, et cetera. So from the standpoint of the example that you just gave anger, we can respond to. Anger differently, depending on whether that anger, which is a rajasic thing, is nested in the mode of luminance, or nested in the mode of darkness. Yes, I see that good answer one of the large overarching themes, it seems to me, in the Bhagavad Gita, which is something that I've always been I'm continuously trying to or wanting to understand more deeper, is the word dharma. Can you can you explain what your understanding of the word dharma is and how that affects your life currently andor through your progression with studying and practicing yoga, sure, the Sanskrit word dharma has multiple meanings, like a lot of Sanskrit philosophical terminology, which meaning is the correct meaning depends on the context in which it's being used, but Dharma in general is the overarching theme of the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita asks the question, what is my dharma that is the overarching question that Arjuna, a warrior who is faced with the prospect of fighting a battle he doesn't really want to fight, is is asking one of the ways we know that dharma is the overarching theme of the Gita is because it's the very first words spoken in the dialog, or the conversations of the Bhagavad Gita, and it's part of the last philosophical conclusive set of statements in the Bhagavad Gita. And it appears as the subject matter over and over again, including as the reason that Krishna, the Speaker of the Bhagavad Gita, gives for his showing up in the world in the first place in order to re establish principles of religion when they have receded. And I emphasize the word principles here, because sometimes the word dharma is translated as religion, but it doesn't mean a specific sectarian form of faith. Dharma in this context means universal principles of religion that bring about religious experience independently of any specific form of faith that one might follow. Well said, and you know that is one of the reasons why my presentation of the Bhagavad Gita is a presentation of its teachings as a non sectarian science of self realization, rather than as A literary presentation of a particular religion anyone can benefit from the science of religious experience that the Bhagavad Gita offers us. Yeah. Well said, great point when we the other part of dharma, the one not to really answer your question in terms of, how does it affect my life? Dharma also means one's essential nature, or the essential nature of a person, place or thing, the quality that makes it what it is, without which it wouldn't be what it is like. It's the dharma of the sun to shine, of rivers, to flow, of fish, to swim, that sort of thing. And I did not really know what my own Dharma was for pretty long time, even though I was trained to understand and live the Bhagavad Gita to the best of my ability, relatively early on in my life, I didn't really figure out how to apply this aspect of its teaching until a whole lot later the and then when I went back and looked At this idea again, in relationship to how my own life had unfolded and how the trajectory of my life had finally revealed to me what my essential nature was in this life, then I put everything together and. I could see how to assemble the process that the Bhagavad Gita presents in a systematic way in order to understand what is my svadharma, that is to say, my essential nature in this life, and how does it relate to my Sanatana Dharma or my eternal nature? The difference being that each of us has a distinct SVA Dharma, a unique way of being in the world that makes us what we are, and that defines what we should be doing in order to find real satisfaction in our lives, what our contribution to the world should be that will bring meaning and purpose to our lives. For all of us, it's going to be a little different. We all have a unique gift to offer the world, but we also have something that we share, something that is common to every living being, and that is our Sanatana Dharma. Sanatana means eternal so our eternal nature, or our eternal activity, is something that is common to all beings. And the thing about Dharma is we want to figure out how to harmonize our individual nature with our eternal nature, our temporal nature, I should say, because one of the interesting things about the Bhagavad Gita is that it validates our individuality on a spiritual level, which is one of the very unique and amazing things about the Bhagavad Gita is that it validates our individuality on a spiritual level, and then presents us with these two ideas, that we have a essential nature in this life and an essential nature in all lives. And harmonizing those two things is the art of yoga. Oh, man, that's so fascinating. Do you remember growing up? Because obviously we both grew up here in the US. One thing I remember is, you know, I started to contemplate, what am I going to do when I grow up? And then the idea presented that Todd, you're so lucky that you live where you live, because you get to do whatever you want. You could have been born in another country or another place or time where you would be told what to do. This is going to be your job. And so I remember thinking, wow, this is a great this is a great thing. I get to be whatever I want to be. I get to do what I want to do. And then going to the struggle of, I don't know what I want to do. I have no idea what I want to do, like, what am I supposed to do? And I love the fact that you're bringing this aspect of the Swadharma this like individual like, but on a spiritual level, like, if I were to imagine that I was planted somewhere where I was being told you're going to be a baker and you're going to be a baker your whole life, and that's just how it is. That's what you're going to do from the Swadharma perspective. And do you believe, from the teachings that Krishna is presenting here in the Bhagavad Gita, that it's saying you could still be the baker, but also be true to your Swadharma? Do you think those two could be the same? Or is there some aspect of this, like you can be whatever you want, makes for finding our Swadharma or recognizing it easier or harder? Do you have any thoughts, because there's so many questions around this, but I'm just curious if that landed, that makes sense, totally landed, and I totally relate to it, you know? I mean, one of the things that I'm very grateful to my parents for is the that they gave me this idea that I could be whatever I wanted to be and whatever I chose, they would support me. And that was great. There's so much freedom in that. And of course, yes, being born in a culture here in the United States that encourages that kind of rugged individuality and that sort of thing, you know. So okay, now I'm free to be whatever I want. Great. Yeah. Agree, that's like a blessing and a curse, isn't it? Yeah, it's like I have all these conflicting desires. You know, some of them are complimentary. I want to be a fine artist. I want to be a musician. Those two things could go together. I want to be a mad scientist. I want to be like an evil villain that doesn't really go this. So we are there's a really interesting few verses that speak to this in the Bhagavad Gita. One is one that occurs early, which is one of our junas concerns about what's going to happen if this battle goes forward. He is worried that it's not just a matter of people will die on the battlefield, but there's going to be a ripple effect that his world as he knows it is going to crumble, that society will fall apart, the family aspect that keeps a society together will fall apart, and all the all the good guys are going to die, all the unscrupulous men who will exploit women will be left, and the result of unprotected women now being exploited by unscrupulous men is that you'll have children who are confused, who have inner conflicts about who they are and what they should be doing. And you know, that's us. We said many, many, many, many, many, many, generations later, we have this, this phenomenon that, you know, many of us have internal contradictions about what we want to do with our lives, which makes us question, Who am I? You know, what? What am I really and when we ask this question, am I a baker? Am I a candlestick maker? Like, what am I? Krishna defines our svadharma as having two components, our natural aptitudes and our natural inclinations. In other words, the natural talents that we have due to the combination of the three qualities of material nature that influence us in a particular way and the kind of work that we're attracted to doing. So, so it's gunna and karma qualities. What are our natural qualities and what kind of action are we naturally attracted to? So the we are, the way we are, and if our natural aptitudes and inclinations make us attracted to and make us feel great satisfaction by making candles, that's that's what's going to determine if we're a candle maker. It may be that our satisfaction comes from something else, that our conception of success is not making candles, but making candles may be a means to an end. And so to answer your question now, whether or not making candles is our dharma, it may be our Dharma if that's where our natural aptitudes and inclinations take us and we find satisfaction in that work, or it may be the means to realizing our dharma, because our actual Dharma is to do something else or to create a different kind of success for ourselves and for other people. Great point, great breakdown. Have you? How do we in our culture, reconcile the understanding of the caste system that exists in India, and how does the Bhagavad Gita, in your opinion, address maybe what the caste system was many, many years ago, and what the caste system has become, and I know that's a little bit of a heavy question, because can make people a little bit upset when we start talking about cast. So I'm not trying to, you know, drag us through the mud with this, but I'm curious, you know, I understand the ang, the the criticism of being born and being told you cannot move forward you are going to stay in that place that we're putting you and and I read in your book, you kind of made mention that there's this idea that the caste system had. Worked differently according to dharma, and that it's been almost infiltrated, so to speak, throughout this process that we're talking about. Of like, now we're on the battlefield. You know, this is the true battlefield. So I'm curious what you think about all that. Yeah, this is a really good question, and it's actually a really, really important question, and not something to shy away from or just sort of dismiss. Because when you look at the division of society that is presented in the Bhagavad Gita, the first reaction that any reasonable person would have is to look at it and say, That's the caste system. But it's not. And the reason it's not is because your position in the social order is determined by your qualities and your actions, not by your birth. So in Krishna system, in the Bhagavad Gita system, if you are born to a candle maker, but you are academically inclined, you're happy when you're doing research and and finding out the truth about something. You're not going to be a candle maker. You're going to be a professor or a journalist or somebody who is in the field of ideas, in the field of thinking. So you're not constrained by birth in Krishna system, whereas for all of recorded history that we know of, we have this caste system that we usually associate with India naturally, because that's where it's formalized that says, whatever you're born into, that's what you're stuck with. Doesn't matter what your qualities are, or what kind of work you're attracted to. You know, if you're born in this kind of family, then that's the kind of work you're going to do, because that's what your family does, and that's just not what the Bhagavad Gita is presenting us with. The caste system that we know in the modern world is a degraded, perverted version of what we get in the Bhagavad Gita. And it's really, really important to know that, oh, man, thank you so much for clarifying that. I agree with you. I think that it's important thing to contemplate, because it is a question that comes up sometimes with the idea of, it's a showstopper. Yeah, it's a total showstopper. It's like, oh, this is advocating the caste system. I'm done with this book. I don't need it anymore. It's really, really important to know the distinction between the modern caste system that assigns you to a path according to your birth, and the system of varnas that Krishna is speaking about in the Bhagavad Gita, that is all about matching your work with your nature, with who you really are, as opposed to what society imposes on you. Gotcha. Can you speak a little bit about karma yoga and what that means to you now, I feel like in my initial idea of karma yoga, I had this thought of like, all right, I'm gonna go volunteer at the car wash for the fundraiser for my school, and that's gonna be a good karma that's gonna be good car you know, it's something good for me. Can you expound a little bit deeper on your understanding of what the practice of karma yoga can or could entail, or is, for you, sure what you just described is good karma. You know, if you're doing charitable work without any expectation of return, you're not looking for what's in it for you that's good karma. When we do a fundraiser for a worthy cause at a yoga studio, so we offer like a class that's a donation class, and all the money, instead of going to the yoga studio, is going to go to this worthy cause. That's good karma. Now it's not karma yoga. We're doing yoga and we're generating good karma, but that's not karma yoga. Karma Yoga means that we're acting in the world and offering the results of our actions to something higher than ourselves. So it begins with good karma, and because yoga means, in this sense, union, because we want to connect our actions to something higher. This is actually where the theological aspect of yoga starts to show up the ninth verse of the third chapter. So relatively early on in the Bhagavad Gita describes that if one offers one's actions to the personification of sacrifice, which indicates Vishnu, the Supreme Being. If one makes one's actions an offering to the source of our being, however one conceives of that source with a desire to make a connection between ourselves and that source, then that is a liberating action. And Krishna is pretty specific in this verse. He says, otherwise, all of your actions will bind you to this world. In other words, good karma, no matter how good it is, still has a reaction to it that we will be obliged to experience in this, or more likely, a future birth so we get entangled in this cycle of repeated birth and death called samsara, by our actions, unless we start to a detach ourselves from desiring to enjoy the results of our actions, and then B start offering the results of our actions to whatever our higher conception of Supreme Being might be, and then ultimately offering the action itself to that source of our being, and that's Karma Yoga amazing. Is there a practice, a newbie, a new practitioner that, or a yoga practitioner that is feeling like I really want to bring Karma Yoga into my forefront. Is there say, for example, I'm going in to teach a class. What would there be like a thing that I could roll through in my mind that would be like about to go in and teach a class I want to offer this class up to the highest good? And is there something that where I would maybe potentially think like, I'm, I'm, I'm not gonna worry about what type of compensation I receive from this, and I know I'm still working on, like, the more like, lower level here in terms of compensation and everything. But is there something that we can do to help to bring this into life? Yeah, yeah. That's really good question from from the standpoint of teaching, this is one of the places where this baseline philosophical idea that we are not these temporary material bodies can come into play. In the seventh chapter of the Bhagavad, Gita Krishna describes that there are two kinds of energies, and that he is the source of those energies. And the first set of energies is the material energy, earth, water, fire, air, ether, in modern parlance, solids, liquids, radians, gasses and space, plus three subtle elements, the mind, the intelligence and the false ego, or the sense of the cumulative identity you get when you put all that together. And he says, This is my temporary, separated, illusory, material energy, illusory, because it's affected by time. Now you see it now you don't you know it's like a magic trick. So when I'm teaching a class, I might encourage my attendee, anybody who's in my class, to be the observer of their bodies, and in so far as setting an intention goes, being cognizant of the fact that we didn't create this body, that we've got the all the elements that have come together to create this mind body combination we didn't make that it came from somewhere else. What is the source of that energy? If you consider that you want to do your practice as an expression of gratitude for the body that you have received, as opposed to have made yourself, then you do your practice for the sake of taking care of the gift that you've been given. You make your practice an expression of gratitude for this gift of this body. Then you can take it even a step further. There is this idea that we hear about in the Bhagavad Gita of the Paramatma, the super. Soul, the Paramount Atma, the one being within the heart of all beings, or in other words, the local aspect of Universal Consciousness situated within the heart of each individual unit of consciousness known as us. And we can think All right, well, if this person, my eternal companion, who is the universal consciousness, is here, then my body should be thought of as a temple, and I should be taking good care of it for the sake of making it a nice place for this supreme consciousness to reside. So now my practice is for the sake of maintaining a temple, a sacred place. And in this way, we can see our bodies as sacred spaces, and our self care as a ritual that is an offering to the ultimate, innermost resident of that sacred space. So those are a couple of ways that you can turn a yoga practice on the mat into karma yoga. Yes, great answers. Thank you so much. I love that Sure. I'm also amazed that you can just be like this ninth verse of the Seventh Chapter. I mean, clearly been studying this for a long time. What was the impetus for you to write your book? Because I would imagine, like personally, if you said to me, Todd, I think you're ready. You've been reading the Bhagavad Gita since this time. And I want to hear what your thoughts are on it. What? How did it come to be that you decided you know what? Now I'm going to do this. I want to present this information. I mean, one of the things that I find very helpful with your book, because I've been encouraging people to read Bhagavad Gita for years now, and I'm always wondering to myself, which book should I have them jump into? Should I give them the Prabhupada version? Should I you know, Eknath Eswaran has a very nice, condensed, you know, he's little bit easier to read for the first timer. And when I when I'm reading, I'm still reading your version. What I really like that you've done is you've presenting the information. You're presenting the actual Bhagavad Gita with the transliteration and the translation. And prior to your mentioning, look, this is what happened in the previous chapter. This is how it segues into what's about to occur in this chapter. And here's a couple of bullet points of what to look for, which I found really helpful. I'm finding that and reading your version. I mean, every time I pick up the Bhagavad Gita, I feel like, wow, I think I'm starting to get it. And I thought that way when I first picked it up when I was 18, and now I'm like, going, now I'm 51 going, Oh man, I'm just starting to get this. And then I'm sure 20 years are gonna go by 30, hopefully, maybe longer, and I'll still pick it up and feel the same way. So I I'm a little intimidated at the idea of potentially trying to explain it. So what? How did you get to this point? I will answer your question. But I want to share something else with you first about your ability to share your experience of the Bhagavad Gita. Because, yes, we will always pick up the Bhagavad Gita. And if we live to be 150 we will still think, Oh, I'm now. I am just starting to get this as a teacher, as a yoga teacher, I think it's really important to remember that you are the world's foremost expert in your lived experience, and if you are studying the Bhagavad Gita, trying to integrate it into your life, and you have some experience of what happens when you do that, you can share that experience with your students, and it's totally 100% authentic spiritual realization, not just information. Information doesn't get us very far, but realization gets us where we want to go, even if incrementally, realization after realization after Realization. And when you share your personal realizations with your students, that is going to make it real for them. It's going to reinforce your own assimilation of that experience, everybody wins, and there's no possibility of imposter syndrome, because you're not trying to teach it from some academic level. It's your lived experience. Who knows more about that than you? So that's what I have to say about any. Hesitation you might have about sharing your experience. Don't, don't think in terms of, I'm going to teach the Bhagavad Gita. Just think in terms of, I'm going to share my experience of the Bhagavad Gita with my class. Thank you, Hari. So now I wrote my book because I just saw the need. It was unbelievable. There are so many translations of the Bhagavad Gita like, really, and we need to have another one. And the answer was an emphatic yes. And the reason that that happened was because I was offering works, not just really workshops, but like discussion groups on, like, book club type stuff. And I would tell people, bring any edition of the Bhagavad Gita you have, and we'll compare. We'll learn by, like, checking out all these different translations. So people would bring Mitchell's translation and ek not East ones. And, you know, other editions, Graham schwags edition of the Bhagavad Gita, which is really, really nice edition. They'd bring all these Bhagavad Gita, and we'd look at the same verse in the different translations, and then discuss. And then, if people ask me, What? What Bhagavad Gita should I get? I would have to say, well, you need three and you need to, like, cross reference everything, yeah, and have, and then I realized, you know, that's not helpful. No one's gonna do that. So I saw, because I was teaching yoga, I could, I was hearing, what are the questions people have? What do people want to get from the Bhagavad Gita? Or what are the stumbling blocks? Or what are the showstoppers? You know, what makes, makes them put it down? So I started doing a series of online classes in 2018 where I took just a cluster of related verses and spoke for about an hour or so on Zoom. This was prior to the pandemic, so zoom was still a relatively new thing, and people came. You know, I every Thursday night I would offer a class, and I didn't plan it this way, but over two years, it worked out to exactly 108 classes. Oh, nice. I know when I saw when I was heading into the home stretch and I saw, Wow, this is gonna end at 108 classes. And during the period of those two years, that's when I did all of my own renderings of the translations and started to like write up commentaries and such. And each one of those classes, by the way, is still available on my YouTube channel. So your listeners, if they're interested in 108 classes of getting into real detail in the Gita, they'll find those classes there wonderful. And you know, at first I was thinking, I want to write a book about the Bhagavad Gita, but then I realized I actually have to include the Bhagavad Gita itself in the book. So so my motivation for writing the book in addition to just my own purification and the amount of study I would have to do for myself in order to write such a book, I wanted to be able to give yoga students in particular, what I thought they needed in order to be able to enter into the gitas world, what happens when we look at the Bhagavad Gita is we quite naturally look at the Gita from the frame of reference that the world gives us, in other words, the modern lens, a modern historical lens that's just our default, because that's the culture we're in. And the first change that we need to make in order to enter into the gitas world is an adaptive change. We need a change of mindset so that instead of looking at the Gita from the lens the modern world gives us, we need to turn around and look at the modern world through the lens that the Bhagavad Gita gives us, because the Gita is a pre modern text, it does not have the same underlying assumptions that we walk through the world with. So so this is a hard thing to do, but nevertheless, it's necessary to just try to, at least in theory, set aside all of the underlying assumptions of a modern world view, so that we can take the world view of the Bhagavad Gita for a test drive and see what that shows us, see if the world looks different when we try that. And so that was what I really tried to do with the Gita, is to be able to set people up to be. Able to do that, and that's what the whole first part of the book is about. By the time you get to the first verse of the first chapter, hopefully I have created a situation for the reader to be able to enter into the gitas world and then look back at our world through that lens. I have had a I'm having a really good experience with it, and so I'm very grateful that you've that you've put all this time and energy in, and I'm finding it really helpful the way that you are condensing it and just making it applicable. I'm, I am truly feeling like I'm getting a deeper sense of it and bringing to you, yeah, well, great job. And bringing some of these aspects that, you know, I've that I, you know, I hear about, and making it, oh, now I think I'm I'm understanding that a little differently. I'm starting to see that a little differently, or a way that I can apply that in my daily life. So I think you've done a fantastic job. At the time that this podcast is released, you made mention you have a course coming up. Can you tell me a little bit about what this new course that you're going to be conducting is going to be about, yeah, the course is called Finding your dharma. And the course, the purpose of the course is to be able to show people the system that yoga wisdom gives us in order to ascertain, first of all, what is my real essential nature in this life? What are my natural aptitudes? What are my natural inclinations? What is my conception of success? And what I've devised based on the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita is a way to do this kind of guided introspection. And what I have found when I've run this course with select students is that it's full of surprises that what we think our dharma is and what it really is may turn out to be different things. So right now, I think especially because there is so much change happening in the world right now. I think people are asking themselves, how should I be responding to the world? What is the best way for me to respond to my life in the here and now? And that's one of the meanings of dharmas. What is the best way to respond? So in terms of finding both a career path that is actually satisfying and rewarding, or that is a means to something that is satisfying and rewarding, and also aligning our work, how we make our way in the world with our lives in the bigger picture, that's really what the course is for. It's a course that will help people overcome obstacles that stand in the way of living a life that's truly inspiring and that makes you feel Yes, this is what I was meant for. This is what I should be doing, finding a way to move through the world that feels right because it actually is right. Wow, amazing. Great job. Hari. I mean, to put, I mean, I can understand where you could come, where you're coming from, the sense of, like, if I've been able to achieve some sense of I've found my dharma, or I am finding my dharma every day. I'm I'm living it, I'm feeling it. But how do I help other people do that? And I obviously that's a much more challenging endeavor, but I like that you're tackling your or maybe a different word would be like, I'm, I'm gonna engage in in this challenge. Okay, I'm gonna tackle this challenge, and I'm gonna help. I'm gonna try to help people. I'm gonna try to figure out a way to help them be able to find the same sort of satisfaction in life and or the same sort of sense of purpose and belonging. So I think, man, how cool. Great job, Hardy. I mean, I commend you. Yeah, yeah. I certainly hope that that's the effect. It has Yeah, and it when you do have that feeling like, Yeah, this is what I where I need to be. This is I am now properly situated. Then it really helps us to stay grounded when external circumstances are shaky. You know, our dharma is something that doesn't really change, and so in a world that's changing like crazy, knowing that you are connected to something change less that's not going to change is something that I think is really important for supporting us and empowering us to move through the world with a sense of stability even when the world feels anything but stable. Well said, Hardy, thank you so much for joining me today and for educating our listeners and sharing some personal stories. I really appreciate it. I've kept you longer than the time that you and I scheduled for, and so I really appreciate that. I didn't even realize that until I just looked so thank you for being patient and answering the questions, and I feel like we could keep going very easily, but I am excited to check out your YouTube channel and hear some of the lectures that you gave. I'm definitely finishing your book, and hopefully after I finish it, I can come back with a fresh set of new questions for you, if that's okay with you. Thank you so much. Yeah. Oh, this is my idea of a good time. So I agree. I didn't feel like we were in injury time or anything like that. Now this, this was a wonderful conversation, and you know if, if your listeners are interested at all, in my book, there's a way for them to get a free sample chapter. So I invite all of your listeners to do that and check it out to see if this is something that will have as much interest for them as it has had for you. And I'm very, very grateful to have this opportunity to have this conversation with you and be your guest. And it's very encouraging to hear that the impact of my book has been so positive for you. Thank you so much. Hardy, well, those links are in the description. People be able to find all your resources very easily by just clicking and thank you for offering a free chapter. And I highly recommend you check it out. It's a good one. Thank you, Hardy. I wish you well. Have a wonderful day. Namaste. Take care. Thank you. Native yoga. Todd cast is produced by myself. The theme music is dreamed up by Bryce Allen. If you like this show, let me know if there's room for improvement. I want to hear that too. We are curious to know what you think and what you want more of what I can improve. And if you have ideas for future guests or topics, please send us your thoughts to info at Native yoga center. You can find us at Native yoga center.com, and hey, if you did like this episode, share it with your friends, rate it and review and join us next time you.