Upasana literally means “sitting close to God”. It is also refers to a body of practices prescribed in sacred Hindu texts for worship. Upasana is thus the effort undertaken by a devotee as an expression of his love and yearning for union with the divine.
According to the scriptures, the benefits of regular upasana are manifold. Worship cleanses the heart and stabilizes the mind. Communing with the divine fills the devotee with pure love and destroys extreme and negative passions. Upasana encourages the mind to contemplate itself, an inward turning that eventually frees the soul from the cycle of rebirth.
We are what we think upon – by this analogy, upasana brings together the worshipper and the worshipped. Upasana is an essential component in spiritual advancement and importantly, open to all kinds of people. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Lord Krishna says: “…by devotion to Me alone, I may thus be perceived, O Arjuna; and known and seen and entered…”
Upasana is what distinguishes human beings from animals – while hunger, thirst, sexual desire, sleep and fear are common to both, religious consciousness is present only in man. Thus, those who live only by the dictates of their sensual needs without performing upasana are no better than animals, though they wear the appearance of humans.
There are two ways to practice upasana. Worship through meditating upon religious idols or pictures, kirtana (singing the Lord’s names), offering flowers, chanting mantras, service to humanity in the name of the Lord, all these and more are Saguna-upasana or a concrete form of prayer. Nirguna-upasana or meditation upon the formless, abstract Brahman constitutes practices like mental chanting (Om japa) and intense meditation; it is the more difficult of the two as it demands single-minded effort and relinquishing all material attachments.
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