Harinaam Sankirtan unites dance with meditation

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna The ultimate dance where dance and meditation unite.
Dance is usually thought of as an exuberant, physical, outgoing activity whereas meditation is thought of as a peaceful, introspective, ingoing activity. Now, generally dance is associated with sensuality. When people, dance is often associated with romance and other occasions where people express their worldly emotions through exuberant dancing.
And often spirituality is thought of as a retreat from worldly emotions and worldly expressions of those emotions such as dancing. So generally when people talk about spirituality and meditation they think of sitting peacefully, motionlessly in a yogic posture and then trying to go deep into some sort of meditation. But that doesn’t have to be the only form of meditation.
Meditation, generally the essence of meditation is connecting with the spiritual level of reality. So when, one way of doing it is to disconnect ourselves from the material level of reality and then to find out how we can connect with spiritual reality. That is what meditation, conventional forms of meditation or rather inactive forms of meditation where one sits in one place and then tries to go inwards, that’s what is done.
So disconnection from the material and then seeking a connection with the spiritual. That’s what is done in these forms of meditations. But an alternative way of doing things is to connect directly with the spiritual level of reality.
How? By using our senses to connect with the spiritual level of reality. That is precisely what the ultimate dance does. When we talk about Hainam Sankirtan and especially we do Nagar Sankirtan where the devotees go out and dance.
So the senses which normally connect us with material reality we make them into vehicles to connect with spiritual reality. So with the tongues we chant the holy names, with the ears we hear the holy name. The hands and the legs move about gracefully in synchronicity with the devotional emotions that are being expressed and experienced through the singing and the hearing.
So in this way the hands, the legs, the tongue, the ears they all get absorbed in chanting of the holy names. And in this way they get absorbed in the experience of spiritual reality. And because our consciousness normally stays at the external sensory level so if through the external sensory actions we can connect with spiritual reality then spiritual connection becomes much easier and much more accessible, joyful than when the spiritual connection requires disconnection from material reality and then subsequent reconnection with spiritual reality.
So now Hainam Sankirtan is a central and very immensely appealing limb of Bhakti Yoga. Now in Bhakti Yoga the primary focus is on connecting with the Lord with devotion. So Bhakti Yoga has been practiced for millennia.
In fact Bhakti is the very nature of the soul. But Bhakti Yoga expressed through dance, through public dancing is something that has been widely popularized by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu is Krishna himself who descended in this age of Kali for sharing the love of God through the public chanting of the holy names.
And Sankirtan is a sacrifice where we offer our consciousness for the pleasure of the Supreme. In traditional fire sacrifices it is the ghee that is offered and the idea is that which is of the principle of sacrifices that which is offered that we can use for our pleasure we offer it for a higher cause. Similarly our consciousness we can use it for thinking of various things and we might get some pleasure by thinking of those things but instead when we offer our consciousness to the Supreme Lord then by that we get supreme happiness.
But that itself is a sacrifice because although at one level it requires us to give up happiness instead of thinking of other things we think about God. But when we think about Him through the medium of devotional music through devotional dancing and singing then that offering itself becomes joyful what to speak of the result of that offering. So when we offer ourselves to Krishna through spiritual music then that offering connects us with Krishna and it opens our heart the flood of love of Krishna that enters into our heart and enriches it and normally our heart is muddied, dirty, sullied by petty worldly emotions anxieties, tensions and other such things but when the flood of love of God comes into our heart then such emotions get cleansed away.
As if a person is carrying a heavy stone then the person’s moments become shackled like that we are often burdened by stone like anxieties which burden us internally but when we immerse ourselves in chanting of the holy names then the anxieties which are like boulders are swept out of our consciousness by the flood of spiritual emotions that comes through the participation of Harinama Sankirtan. Indira Gandhi Chaitanya Mahaprabhu popularized the chanting of the holy names and the public singing of the holy names that created such a flood of devotion that even after Lord Chaitanya disappeared 50 years later the Muslim emperor Akbar was ruling the world and when he heard about Chaitanya Mahaprabhu he was so fascinated so he says, hold thee, hail thee oh Chaitanya captor of my heart since of a drop of the ocean of love of God that you have Shah Akbar craves for that, for a drop