1770: The Mind of the Buddha, The Mind of the Gopī
Wisdom of the Sages
Buddhism and Bhaktivedanta share a lot of common ground. Both embrace the same radical insight — that the mind is the architect of our experience, and that what we feed it determines the life we live. But in this episode Raghunath and Kaustubha explore where Bhakti takes it one step further. Buddhism negates the names and forms of matter, freeing the mind from attachment, pointing toward liberation. Bhakti provides the positive side. Not just improved wellbeing. Not just liberation. The prema prayojana — the full awakening of divine love. The Srimad Bhagavatam shows us what that looks like...
info_outline
1769: Answer the Call of the Heart | The Bhaktivedanta Path of Renunciation
Wisdom of the Sages
Life is kind of empty if there is not something so meaningful and beautiful that we feel a calling to give everything out of love. We spend our lives looking for that higher cause — or feeling empty if we haven't found it. The total giving of the self is what Thomas Merton calls a blind spiritual instinct. And when you actually follow it, people may think you've gone crazy. Raghunath and Kaustubha explore that calling alongside Krishna's flute-song call of love to the gopis, instigating a "terrible act of thievery" by stealing their sobriety, shyness, fear and discrimination. Through this...
info_outline
1768: From Beauty to Absolute Beauty | Plato, Krishna and the Rāsa Dance
Wisdom of the Sages
Most people think of God simply as a witness or facilitator of their own romantic affairs. The Bhaktivedanta tradition reveals that the conjugal love experienced by human beings is a mere reflection of a spiritual reality in which the same love exists in an absolute, pristine state. So we don't need to turn away from beauty and love in this world. We just need to see the source and origin behind it. Raghunath and Kaustubha explore Plato's ladder of beauty alongside the bhakti path — and find they are pointing in the same direction. Every spark of beauty in this world springs from the same...
info_outline
1767: Entering the Rāsa Dance with the Eye of Love
Wisdom of the Sages
Every love story ever told — the Song of Solomon, Layla and Majnun, the Bollywood heroine running toward her true love — is a shadow of this. The desire for intimacy with the divine is the deepest longing in the human heart. And after six and a half years of reading through the Srimad Bhagavatam, Raghunath and Kaustubha have arrived at its most sacred passage — the Rāsa Līlā. The essence of the essence of the essence. Five chapters describing Krishna's circle dance with the gopis, considered the pinnacle of all Vedic literature and the ultimate expression of divine love. But this is...
info_outline
1766: When the Ego Steps Back | The Existential Sense of Being Blessed
Wisdom of the Sages
"The gift of gratitude. In order to feel it, your ego has to take a backseat.” A shift that happens when the ego stops driving. In this episode Raghunath and Kaustubha explore how gratitude isn't just an etiquette — it's a marker of spiritual depth and the default setting of the self. When the false ego dissolves, the rising of gratitude appears as a natural effect of the soul understanding itself correctly in relation with God. The conversation then moves into fascinating territory — exploring a ladder of spiritual consciousness, and how its some of its highest expressions manifest not...
info_outline
1765: Robert De Niro, Vedanta and the Art of Being Chill
Wisdom of the Sages
"Just be calm. When things are going well, be calm. Don't think you're on top of the world. Everybody is dispensable." The Bhagavad-gita calls it samathvam. Robert De Niro calls it being chill. Evenness of mind, steady in both the highs and the lows. Fame, wealth, prestige — they come and they go. And when that truth settles not just as a concept but as a genuine inner recognition, something shifts. Detachment arises — not as resignation, not as indifference, but as the fertile ground in which deeper contemplation and bhakti-yoga can take root. In this episode Raghunath and Kaustubha...
info_outline
1764: Speaking Truth to Power with Love
Wisdom of the Sages
On the appearance day of the fascinating Avatar Narasimha — the ferocious half-man, half-lion form of Krishna — Raghunath and Kaustubha explore the life and teachings of his most celebrated devotee, Sri Prahlad, the child saint who spoke truth to power without apology, yet never bore animosity toward the person trying to destroy him. His core teaching, drawn from the Srimad Bhagavatam, is more relevant than ever: except for the uncontrolled and misguided mind, there is no enemy in this world. That's not passivity. That's spiritual vision. ...
info_outline
1763: Let Go But Don't Give Up | Bhakti, Business and the Art of Surrender
Wisdom of the Sages
After twenty years of living in an ashram, Divya Alter opened a restaurant — and her spiritual practice tested new ways and taken to a whole new level. Divya — Ayurvedic chef, Sanskrit scholar, and founder of New York City's beloved Divya's Kitchen — discovered that separating her spiritual life from her business life created nothing but internal war. The moment she saw the restaurant as her devotional service, everything shifted. Raghunath and Kaustubha sit with Divya for a conversation about what a decade of serving prasadam in the most competitive restaurant city in the world teaches...
info_outline
1762: No Pride Allowed | Muhammad Ali on the Hereafter
Wisdom of the Sages
"If you've got one ounce of pride, you can't enter the hereafter." From the man who called himself the greatest, that statement lands differently. Ali understood something that took a lifetime to learn — that the gifts we're given are on loan, not owned. The strength, the beauty, the wit, the fame. None of it is ours. And the moment we claim it as ours, we cut ourselves off from the very source it came from. Raghunath and Kaustubha explore that teaching alongside one of the most tender moments in the Srimad Bhagavatam — where Krishna tells Indra directly: I stopped your sacrifice out of...
info_outline
1761: Dethroning the Ego | The Existential Apology
Wisdom of the Sages
An apology can be the turning point on a spiritual path. Through apology the ego is gently dethroned. And strangely, we feel not smaller — but freer. That insight sits at the heart of this episode, where Raghunath shares an excerpt from his upcoming book, The Six Pillars of Bhakti, on why apologizing is one of the non-negotiables of spiritual life. The longer we delay, the more the ego rewrites the story — softening our role, magnifying theirs, reframing events until we are no longer the person who caused harm but the misunderstood one. And that rewriting doesn't just damage our...
info_outlineFalse pride might be the one thing standing between you and genuine happiness. We protect it, defend it, build our identity around it — and all the while it's quietly keeping us from the love, the freedom, and the ecstasy we're actually looking for. In the Govardhan Lila of the Srimad Bhagavatam, an ancient Sanskrit text on consciousness and devotion, Krishna shuts down the worship of Indra — not out of rivalry, not out of anger, but because he loves Indra too much to keep enabling what's keeping him small. The difficult events of our lives can be understood the same way. Not as punishment. As liberation. Krishna is not taking something from you. He's removing what's in the way. Because on the other side of false pride is something the Srimad Bhagavatam describes in vivid detail — a heart so open it can feel genuine ecstasy. Wisdom of the Sages exists to help you get there.
********************************************************************
LOVE THE PODCAST? WE ARE COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AND WOULD LOVE FOR YOU TO JOIN!
Go to https://www.wisdomofthesages.com
WATCH ON YOUTUBE: https://youtube.com/@WisdomoftheSages
LISTEN ON ITUNES: https://podcasts/apple.com/us/podcast/wisdom-of-the-sages/id1493055485
CONNECT ON FACEBOOK: https://facebook.com/wisdomofthesages108
*********************************************************************