Can we use self-help books that give techniques that help us in our bhakti?
Thank you so many self-help books we may find them containing some principles which can help us in our practice of bhakti also but usually those self-help books don't talk anything about transcendental principles so can we use such self-help books and the principles there answer this is the word self-help we can see it at one level as a paradox as a self-contradiction because when you read a self-help book we are actually taking the help of the author so it's not self-help in that sense strictly speaking but self-help is also valid in another sense that the author gives us tools by which we help ourselves and we could say that bhagavad-gita 6.5 is directly a call for self-help uddhare dātmana ātmānam nātmānam avasādaye ātmai vai ātmano vandur ātmai vai purātmana so there are ācāryas I think Chakravartī Pāda interprets this to mean that elevate the self with yourself and don't degrade the self with the self Prabhupāda uses the mind over there but whichever it is we could say it is the self is helping the self so it is self-help so the principle of self-help is is a ideology neutral principle in the sense that self-help is simply a person trying to do things by which they can elevate themselves so if you consider this verse in the Gita itself this is not talking about any particular parts, elevate the self with the self or use the elevate yourself with the mind and don't degrade yourself with the mind whichever way we translate it this is not recommending any path, it is not recommending ashtanga, it is not recommending jnana, it is not recommending bhakti, it is just giving a universal principle which anyone can apply and anyone can be benefited by applying so self-help is a genre that has become increasingly prominent in modern world because the society has become more competitive more insecure more stress filled and many times in today's world people are expected to perform in ways that may not have been that their ancestors had never been expected to and that puts a further demand on the human body and especially the human mind and that causes people to sometimes buckle under pressure so self-help as a need that is increasingly felt in today's world and so addressing this need there have been authors and leaders from various spiritual or religious groups who have penetrated the market of self-help so Christians have done that quite well Norman Vincent Peale was he wrote a book called The Power of Positive Thinking he is considered the pioneer of positive thinking and after him there have been many other Christian authors who have done that also so within Christianity a whole ideology has come up called as Prosperity Theology which is a part of Protestantism there are some branches of Protestantism which criticize it quite a bit so Prosperity Theology, the idea is that if you devote yourself to God with a positive attitude then God will provide you prosperity in this world and it is quite often said that America is based on prosperity American Christianity largely Prosperity Theology then there was Ralph Waldo Emerson who was quite influenced by the Upanishads and he is like one of the intellectual fathers of America and he and Henry David Thoreau they were called as the American Transcendentalists and their transcendental ideas came primarily from the Upanishads and from Buddhist literature so they also talked about how it is the power of the human thoughts by our thoughts we can elevate ourselves we can degrade ourselves and taking inspiration from them there have been or not necessarily taking inspiration from them but expanding on what they have done there have been many Buddhists as well as many impersonalists who have penetrated this genre of self-help and then if we consider their self-help books themselves the principle that they talk about for elevating the self or helping the self depending on their ideological orientation they may have a little biblical orientation or a monist orientation or a Buddhist orientation but the basic principles are meant to mold people towards sattvic living and get them a little higher than Satona towards transcendence but not really into transcendence so that's why today if we read self-help books then we will find mostly they are not talking about much transcendental things depending on the ideological orientation of the author we may find the self-help books talking about Christianity or about monism or about about Buddhism whatever, Zen Buddhism especially so we as devotees can also adapt the Krishna conscious philosophy or the bhakti philosophy and present it in self-help terms so if we do that it may require some some rejuggling of our presentation and some devotees may not be comfortable with that which is perfectly fine not everybody has to do this but it is the principle of self-help because ultimately if we say even if I have to take the help of Guru and Krishna but Prabhupada also writes in connection with that Kala Krishna's pastime that if we are not determined even the Supreme Personality of Godhead cannot help us and Uddhav Gita also talks about how ultimately we have to become our own Guru not in replacement of our spiritual master but in service to our spiritual master we have to become our own Guru that the Atma can be the Guru of the Atma that is the verse towards the end of the Ayala Gita so in principle the idea of the self-helping the self is directly from 6.5 in the Gita and that can be applied or presented or understood in bhakti terms also so for us as devotees to use self-help principles not for understanding any philosophical conclusions but for progressing towards the bhakti conclusions that is perfectly perfectly fine what can become problematic is if while reading self-help books to apply some self-help principles if we start getting impressed by the ideological orientations of those authors and then we start thinking that their conclusion is the highest conclusion then it will become a problem we have to fight a war against our mind and senses it's an inner war and our spiritual master gives us the mission to the extent we are successful in our inner war to that extent we can be successful in our outer war outer war means whatever services we are doing so our spiritual master gives us a mission to share bhakti with the world and to the extent we are winning our inner war to that extent we will be able to be more effective in our outer war so now our spiritual master cannot fight our inner war for us they may give us some guidance and instructions but we have to fight the inner war so an army may give some soldier certain weapons but if on the ground they are finding that those weapons are not helping them as much because the enemy has got some other weapons which are very difficult to deal with and then they find that at that point on the ground some other weapons help them and they get those weapons and start using them so changing weapons as a matter of strategy on the ground while fighting the war is perfectly fine but what can become a problem is while using some new weapons we start thinking that these weapons are so good that maybe those who made the weapons they must also be good maybe I should be fighting for them instead of me but change of weapons if it leads to change of affiliation then it becomes a big problem but as long as change of weapons doesn't lead to change of affiliation then using different weapons, Prabhupada presented Krishna consciousness scientifically Vishwanath Chakravarthy did not present it scientifically because science was not there at that time, so if people over there are fighting in the language of science then we have to use the language of science, if people are fighting in the language of self-help we use the language of self-help so whatever, if people are if the war is being fought or major victories are being got using the language of yoga then we use the language of yoga so change of wars, change of weapons as per whatever is the best way to win the war on the ground, that is fine what we have to be careful is that change of weapons should not lead to change of affiliation if that doesn't happen then for us to use self-help principles for I would not say principles self-help practices more, you could say principles not in terms of philosophical conclusions but principles in terms of certain ways of looking at things if those ways of looking at things can help us to become better servants of Krishna then in specific situations to use them is ok as long as our faith in the ultimate goal is not changing if we hear, read some self-help principles from a particular teacher and we find oh this teacher is, what they are teaching that must be the ultimate conclusion because these principles work so well, then we may go off track so I was with Guruji in Australia and I asked him about, he told me that he has written he writes his journals extensively and then I also write journals but I asked him, is there any shastric praman for writing journals so because anything we do, it takes time so if I spend maybe 20 minutes daily writing a journal 30 minutes writing a journal daily it is substantial amount of time so he said that Prabhupada also, we have an example of him keeping a journal but his journal is more of practical things this happened, this happened, I did this that example is there and more importantly he said is that even 100 years ago people's mind was not as disturbed as it is now Upadhruta the characters of Kali Yuga is called he says that in the past, even authors in general they would just write and it would be fairly good now when we write we do so much editing of what we write so it seems that the mental faculty has become weakened and that's why we need to do what it takes to address it so if we have practiced bhakti for a sufficient number of years and we have convinced about the goal of bhakti, then we can make out if I am journaling is that a worthwhile investment of time if I am journaling is it helping me in becoming more focused on Krishna is it helping me to become calmer so that I can do better service of Krishna and if we find that it works then we can use it so in these disturbed conditions in this age if we find a particular method useful for calming ourselves using it is ok we shouldn't publicize that method too much and certainly we should not publicize that as a superior alternative to the direct practices of bhakti we don't say just journal, don't chant just practice mindfulness no need to chant, not like that but for specific individuals in specific circumstances some of these practices may help in increasing the focus on the practice of bhakti for those specific individuals in those specific situations if the practices are useful, they can use it and then there will be in the outer world other like minded people who may also have that kind of mindset who may be very introspective, they want to journal or who may like the idea of mindfulness and those people also if we can reach out to those people in the long run that may also be a way in which what we are adopting will not just be for our own inner battles but it can help us to fight some outer battles for Krishna and win some special territories which the normal preaching strategies would not have been able to win so it's ok as long as we don't shift our affiliation because of finding certain strategies or certain weapons useful in the inner.