Bhakti Yoga is the “yoga of devotion”, and the devotion in this case also has connotations of service and affection. In the Bhagavad Gita, it is one of the forms of yoga that Krishna tells the archer Arjuna that is superior to (but also complementary to, and combinable with) other forms of yoga: karma yoga, or the yoga of action / service; and jnana yoga, the yoga of intellect. When all else is unclear, when discernment of the right action is unclear, and intelligence also fails to provide the answer, actions infused with dedication and devotion to a higher truth and soul will provide a path.
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For fighters and warriors, for those enmeshed in struggle, Bhakti can become even more crucial. Getting to the nitty gritty of necessary action can make one feel confused, can make even questions of morality and ethics weigh heavily and tax the heart. But actions taken in service to the higher truth, the higher dharma — and sometimes, even the higher divinity — removes oneself and self-serving motives from the confusion.
Knights, when they are anything more than glorified mercenaries, serve a higher duty than their own best interest. Ideally, they serve a higher duty than their worldly and political lords as well, though reality and all the authentic grime of actual history contains ample evidence of knights who cynically had no such higher law, principal, or even divinity to whom their ultimate allegiance was sworn. For every knight of the church, there were as many (or more) knights bound only to the office or throne keeping them fed and equipped.
When we dedicate ourselves to a fight, to a struggle, or even to our own spiritual struggles, we do well to have a higher truth to which we ultimately subordinate ourselves. Even in the secular versions of European Grail stories venerating authentic human compassion and love as the highest ideals, those ideals themselves were also a continuum of something crucial but lost in spiritual life at the time. Obscured but potent dimensions of transcendent spirituality and natural harmony had been washed out of the hollowed-out church-dominated landscape of that era, and the essence of The Grail was reconnecting with those obscured dimensions.
When you fight, do you do it for your own glory, like the Ancient greeks of The Iliad? Seeing nothing else on the horizon of this life? Do you combine a nihilism and ego-driven passion into what you do, thinking that there is nothing else real, nothing greater for which your efforts can serve? Are you making it about you? Are you so lost in your own struggle that you forget what it can feel like to struggle for something that may even outlive your own mortality?
Your Bhakti doesn’t have to be to God, but devotion something greater than yourself (and probably: something that even transcends the merely political) can take you further than motivations for glory. It can make you capable of more. It can make your spirit grow. It can make even efforts to improve yourself and your abilities more effective than motivations driven by your own ego; however powerful pure unadulterated ambition has proven in some aspects of our lives and of our collective histories. Ideas live longer. Fellowships of believers, committed to transcendent beliefs, live longer.
A whole world can become a greater context and set of bounding coordinates for your notion of your “self”; for example, “I am fighter [your name], knight of the World,” even if “knight of God” sits strangely on your lips and hearts. Because as large as your own spirit is (and it may indeed be colossal): it’s not all about you.
When you find your higher truth, to be a bhakta of this higher truth, imagine it saying: “whenever you fight, do it in service to me” and you may, like so many countless before you, literally experience the feelings of strength refilling your tired spirit, when you might otherwise falter.
