In this episode of “5 Minutes”, Dr. Robert Svoboda explores Navnath Bhaktisar.

Which is a book that was written a little over 200 years ago. Its name can be translated as the Essence of Devotion to the nine Nathas or the essence of the devotion of the nine Naths. It is about the nine Nathas: the nine great masters, the nine Immortals, who as a group circulate around India purifying pilgrimage locations. Why do the pilgrimage locations need to be purified? Because human beings go there and drop off their bad s. And so the Naths go around and help those pilgrimage locations to digest those bad kamas so more people can come and drop off their bad kamas there.

The Naths are interested in helping out human beings, and they have done this in many ways, and one way is to inspire people like Malu Narhari son of Dundee of the narhari lineage who wrote Navnath Bhaktisar. It was written in Marathi. It is not quite 8,000 verses and it’s divided up into 40 chapters. It is a good example of a type of upaya, a remedy for problems in your life. The s Shani Mahatmya, the Greatness of Saturn is another example of this kind of upaya that is a katha.

A katha means a story. So by reading the story with devotion, with attention, it is possible that you may gain the attention of one of the Naths, who then may be willing to assist you with whatever kind of problem it is that you’re trying to solve. So in the case of the s Shani Mahatmya, you’re mainly dealing with Shani and the seven and a half year period where Saturn is transiting your moon. In the case of the bhakti sara there are 40 different chapters.

Each chapter has a result applied to it, and you examine the 40 chapters for what result you would like to achieve, and you focus on that chapter and you focus on the Naths that are in that chapter.

And you focus on that story and what you do is you try to open yourself up as a listener so that you will be able to permit that timeless story to remanifest itself in the time and space that you need some assistance with the kamas that you were having to deal with so Navnath Bhaktisar was written in Marathi and Vimalananda gave a copy of it to his foster daughter and said, hold onto, it’ll be useful to you in, in the future.

And she said, how will that happen? I can’t understand Marathi? Shut up, he explained and do, as I tell you, she put it aside after he passed on, she showed me, here it is and my mati is not good enough to read all the way through it. So I said, well, let’s see what happens. Fast forward 30 or 40 years to about 10 years ago, and a young friend of ours who has some psychic ability says, take that out now.

Pay attention to it. So we took it out, we paid attention to it. We still couldn’t read it. But then just a couple of months later, we were in Ahmedabad and we found a Hindi translation of it, which we then could read. And I have now just finished an English translation of it so that other people will be able to make use of these stories that are remedies that are so Vimalananda encouraged that book to be present in a place where hopefully now its knowledge can be spread to many other people and the Naths will be able to assist those people.