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bhakta. ::: a devotee; a follower of the path of bhakti; one who wants to please the Guru
bhakta ::: a lover and devotee of the Divine.
bhakta ::: devotee, God-lover.
TERMS ANYWHERE
3. the dharma-wheel of thorough delineations (S. *suvibhaktadharmacakra/pravicayadharmacakra; T. legs par rnam par phye ba'i chos 'khor; C. [shan] fenbie falun/shan bian falun [善]分別法輪/善辯法輪)
adoration ::: 1. The act of paying honour, as to a divine being; worship. 2. Reverent homage. 3. Fervent and devoted love. **adoration"s.*Sri Aurobindo: "Especially in love for the Divine or for one whom one feels to be divine, the Bhakta feels an intense reverence for the Loved, a sense of something of immense greatness, beauty or value and for himself a strong impression of his own comparative unworthiness and a passionate desire to grow into likeness with that which one adores.” Letters on Yoga*
ADORATION. ::: In Love for the Divine or for one whom one feels to be divine, the Bhakta feels an intense reverence for the Lord, a sense of something of immense greatness, beauty or value and for himself a strong impression of his own comparative unworthiness and a passionate desire to grow into likeness with that which one adores.
alaksanadharmacakra. (T. mtshan nyid med pa'i chos 'khor; C. wuxiang falun; J. muso horin; K. musang pomnyun 無相法輪). In Sanskrit, lit. "the dharma wheel of signlessness"; the second of the three turnings of the wheel of the dharma (DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANA) described in the SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA. The sutra, an important source for YOGACARA doctrine, explains that the Buddha turned the wheel of the dharma three times. According to the commentators on the sutra, in the first turning of the wheel, called "the dharma wheel of the four noble truths" (CATUḤSATYADHARMACAKRA), the Buddha taught that dharmas exist in reality. This wheel is described as provisional (NEYARTHA). The second turning of the wheel, delivered on Vulture's Peak (GṚDHRAKutAPARVATA) near RAJAGṚHA, is called "the dharma wheel of signlessness" (alaksanadharmacakra). Here, the Buddha taught that no dharmas exist. The sutra also identifies this wheel as a provisional teaching (NEYARTHA). The third turning of the wheel is described as "well-differentiated" (suvibhakta), with the Buddha explaining that some dharmas exist and some do not. This wheel is described as definitive (NĪTARTHA). The description of the third wheel is an important scriptural source for the YogAcAra doctrine of the three natures (TRISVABHAVA). Commentators identify this second turning of the wheel, the alaksanadharmacakra, with the MahAyAna doctrine set forth in the PRAJNAPARAMITASuTRAs (perfection of wisdom sutras) that all dharmas, even buddhahood and NIRVAnA, are without any intrinsic nature (NIḤSVABHAVA). In Tibet, the schools of interpretation of the sutra divided evenly into two camps: some (like TSONG KHA PA) assert that the SaMdhinirmocanasutra's second turning of the wheel is the definitive teaching of the Buddha and that the third turning is an inferior YOGACARA teaching;, others (like DOL PO PA) assert that the third turning of the wheel is a definitive teaching and the second turning of the wheel is provisional. See also *SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA.
avibhakhtam ca bhutesu vibhaktam iva ca sthitam ::: indivisible but as if divided in beings. [Gita 13. 17]
Bhakta: Devotee; votary.
Bhakta: Sanskrit for devotee.
bhakta. ::: a devotee; a follower of the path of bhakti; one who wants to please the Guru
bhakta ::: a lover and devotee of the Divine.
bhakta ::: devotee, God-lover.
Bhava-samadhi: Superconscious state attained by Bhaktas or devotees through intense divine emotion.
catuḥsatyadharmacakra. (T. bden bzhi'i chos 'khor; C. sidi falun; J. shitai horin; K. saje pomnyun 四諦法輪). In Sanskrit, lit. "the dharma wheel of the four truths"; the wheel of the dharma (DHARMACAKRA) delivered in ṚsIPATANA. In this first turning of the wheel of dharma, the Buddha set in motion a wheel with twelve aspects, by setting forth the four noble truths three separate times. He addressed the original group of five disciples (PANCAVARGIKA), telling them that they should not fall into extremes of asceticism or indulgence, and laid out for them the eightfold noble path (AstAnGIKAMARGA). He set forth the four truths the first time by saying that the five aggregates (SKANDHA) qualified by birth, aging, sickness, and death are the noble truth of suffering, craving is the noble truth of their origination, the elimination of that craving is the noble truth of their cessation, and that the eightfold noble path is the noble truth of the path leading to their cessation. He set forth the four truths a second time when, in the same extended discourse, he said, "I knew well that the truth of suffering was what I had to comprehend; I knew well that the truth of the origin was what I had to eliminate; I knew well that the truth of cessation was what I had to realize; and I knew well that the truth of the path was what I had to cultivate." He then set forth the four truths a third and final time when he said, "I comprehended the truth of suffering, I eliminated the true origin of suffering, I realized the true cessation of suffering, and I cultivated the true path." There are twelve aspects to this triple wheel because for each of the three stages there is (1) a vision that sees reality directly with the wisdom eye that is free from contaminants, (2) a knowledge that is free from doubt, (3) an understanding of the way things are, and (4) an intellectual comprehension of an idea never heard of before. ¶ The SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA calls the triple turning of the catuḥsatyadharmacakra with its twelve aspects the "first turning of the wheel." According to its commentaries, it is a demonstration that all dharmas, the skandhas, sense-fields (AYATANA), elements (DHATU), and so forth, exist. This teaching is provisional (NEYARTHA) because it must be interpreted in order to understand what the Buddha really means. A second "middle" dispensation, called "the dharma wheel of signlessness" (ALAKsAnADHARMACAKRA), is the teaching of the MahAyAna doctrine, as set forth in the PRAJNAPARAMITA SuTRAs, that all dharmas, even buddhahood and NIRVAnA, are without any intrinsic nature (NIḤSVABHAVA). The first turning of the wheel is directed toward the sRAVAKAs and PRATYEKABUDDHAs, who tremble at this doctrine of emptiness (suNYATA). The second turning is also not a final, definitive (NĪTARTHA) teaching. The ultimate teaching is the final turning of the wheel of dharma, called "the dharma wheel that makes a fine delineation" (*SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA), i.e., the SaMdhinirmocanasutra itself. Here the Buddha, through his amanuensis ParamArthasamudgata, sets forth in clear and plain language what he means: that dharmas are endowed with three natures (TRISVABHAVA) and each of those is, in a distinctive way, free from intrinsic nature (niḥsvabhAva). The doctrine of the first, middle, and final wheels of dharma is not intended to be a historical presentation of the development of Buddhist doctrine, but the first turning does loosely equate to the early teachings of the Buddha, the second to early MahAyAna, and the third to the emergence of the later YOGACARA school of MahAyAna philosophy. In Tibet, there is no argument over this first turning of the wheel of dharma: it is always understood to refer to the basic teachings of the Buddha for those of a HĪNAYANA persuasion. There is, however, substantial argument over the status of the second and third turnings of the wheel.
Chos kyi 'byung gnas. (Chokyi Jungne) (1700-1774). Tibetan Buddhist scholar recognized as the eighth TAI SI TU incarnation, remembered for his wide learning and his editorial work on the Tibetan Buddhist canon. He traveled extensively throughout his life, maintaining strong relationships with the ruling elite of eastern Tibet and the Newar Buddhists of the Kathmandu Valley. Born in the eastern Tibetan region of SDE DGE, Chos kyi 'byung gnas was recognized as a reincarnate lama (SPRUL SKU) by the eighth ZHWA DMAR, from whom he received his first vows. He would go on to study with KAḤ THOG Rigs 'dzin Tshe dbang nor bu (1698-1755), from whom he learned about GZHAN STONG ("other emptiness"). At the age of twenty-one, he accompanied several important Bka' brgyud hierarchs, the Zhwa dmar and the twelfth KARMA PA, to Kathmandu, a journey that was to have a profound impact on the young Si tu's life. He returned to eastern Tibet in 1724, where he was received favorably by the king of Sde dge, Bstan pa tshe ring (Tenpa Tsering, 1678-1738). Under the latter's patronage, Chos kyi 'byung gnas founded DPAL SPUNGS monastery in 1727, which became the new seat for the Si tu lineage (they are sometimes called the Dpal spungs si tu). Between the years 1731 and 1733, he undertook the monumental task of editing and correcting a new redaction of the BKA' 'GYUR section of the Tibetan Buddhist canon, to be published at the printing house of Sde dge. Although in his day Tibetan knowledge of Indian linguistic traditions had waned, Chos kyi 'byung gnas devoted much of his later life to the study of Sanskrit grammar and literature, which he had first studied with Newar panditas during his time in Kathmandu. He sought out new Sanskrit manuscripts in order to establish more precise translations of Sanskrit works already translated in the Tibetan canon; he is esteemed in Tibet for his knowledge of Sanskrit grammar. In addition to his prolific scholarly work, Chos kyi 'byung gnas was an accomplished painter as well as a gifted physician, much sought after by the aristocracy of eastern Tibet. In 1748, he visited Nepal once again, where he translated the SvayambhupurAna, the legends concerning the SVAYAMBHu STuPA, into Tibetan. He was received amicably by the rulers JayaprakAsamalla (1736-1768) of Kathmandu, Ranajitamalla (1722-1769) of what is now Bhaktapur, and PṛthvīnArAyana sAha, who would unify the Kathmandu Valley under Gorkhali rule several decades later. Chos kyi 'byung gnas' collected writings cover a vast range of subjects including lengthy and detailed diaries and an important history of the KARMA BKA' BRGYUD sect coauthored by his disciple Be lo Tshe dbang kun khyab (Belo Tsewang Kunkyap, b. 1718). He is retrospectively identified as an originator of what would become known as Khams RIS MED movement, which gained momentum in early nineteenth century Sde dge.
chŭngjon pomnyun 證轉法輪. See *SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA
devan devayajo yanti madbhakta yanti mam api ::: [they who worship the gods go to the gods, but My devotees come to Me]. [Gita 7.23]
dharmacakrapravartana. (P. dhammacakkappavattana; T. chos 'khor bskor ba; C. zhuan falun; J. tenborin; K. chon pomnyun 轉法輪). In Sanskrit, "turning the wheel of the DHARMA"; a term used generally to describe the Buddha's teaching; specifically, it refers the Buddha's first sermon, delivered at the Deer Park (S. MṚGADĀVA) in ṚsIPATANA, the modern SĀRNĀTH, as described in the Pāli DHAMMACAKKAPPAVATTANASUTTA (S. Dharmacakrapravartanasutra), when he first declared the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS (catvāry āryasatyāni) and the noble eightfold path (ĀRYĀstĀnGAMĀRGA). As Buddhist doctrine expanded exponentially in size and complexity, Buddhists were hard put to explain the apparent divergences in the teachings found in various recensions of the sutras. In order to account for the critical differences in these sutra explications of the Buddhist teachings, different traditions began to suggest that the Buddha had actually "turned the wheel of the dharma" more than one time. Certain perfection of wisdom (PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ) sutras refer to the Buddha's teaching of the perfection of wisdom as the second turning of the wheel of dharma. The SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA posits that the Buddha actually turned the wheel of the dharma three separate times, a description that came to figure prominently in MAHĀYĀNA scholastic literature: the first, called CATUḤSATYADHARMACAKRA, when he taught the four noble truths of the HĪNAYĀNA traditions; the second, called the ALAKsAnADHARMACAKRA ("dharma-wheel of signlessness"), when he taught the emptiness (suNYATĀ) doctrine as understood by the MADHYAMAKA school; and a third, the *SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA ("dharma-wheel possessed of good differentiation"), when he taught the Yogācāra TRISVABHĀVA doctrine. The SaMdhinirmocanasutra claims that the teachings of the first two dharma-wheels were provisional (NEYĀRTHA), while the third was definitive (NĪTĀRTHA). This threefold taxonomy of the Buddhist teachings was one of the most influential hermeneutical schema (see JIAOXIANG PANSHI) created in the Mahāyāna and elicited extensive commentary in India, Tibet, and East Asia. Proponents of the Madhyamaka, who identified the second wheel with the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀSuTRAs, claimed to the contrary that the second wheel was definitive and the first and third were provisional.
DIVINE AND FORM. ::: The personal realisation of the Divine may be sometimes with Form, sometimes without Form. Without Form, it is the Presence of the living Divine Person, felt in everything. With Form, it comes with the image of the One to whom worship is offered. The Divine can always manifest himself in a form to the Bhakta or seeker. One sees him in the form in which one worships or seeks him or in a form suitable to the Divine Personality who is the object of the adoration. How it manifests depends upon many things and it is too various to be reduced to a single rule. Sometimes it is in the heart that the Presence with the form is seen, sometimes in any of the other centres, sometimes above and guiding from there, sometimes it is seen outside and in front as if an embodied person. Its advantages are an intimate relation and constant guidance or if felt or seen within, a very strong and concrete realisation of the constant Presence. But one must be very sure of the purity of one’s adoration and seekings for the disadvantage of this kind of embodied relation is that other Forces can imitate the Form or counterfeit the voice and the guidance and this gets more force if it is associated with a constructed image which is not the true thing. Several have been misled in this way because pride, vanity or desire was strong in them and robbed them of the fine psychic perception that is not mental.
jnani (bhaktah) ::: [one of the four classes of devotees]: the Godlover who has the knowledge. [Gita 7.16]
legs par rnam par phye ba dang ldan pa'i chos 'khor. See *SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA
na me bhaktah pranasyat ::: he who loves Me [My bhakta] will not perish. [Gita 9.31]
Narad ::: “A well-known Rishi and VaishnavaBhakta who moves about in the various worlds playing on a lute and having a special role in bringing about events according to the Divine Will.” Glossary and Index of Proper Names In Sri Aurobindo’s Works
narad ::: "A well-known Rishi and Vaishnava Bhakta who moves about in the various worlds playing on a lute and having a special role in bringing about events according to the Divine Will.” *Glossary and Index of Proper Names In Sri Aurobindo"s Works
paramārthaviniscayadharmacakra. (T. don dam rnam par nges pa'i chos 'khor). In Sanskrit, "the dharma wheel for ascertaining the ultimate," the third of three turnings of the wheel of the dharma (DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANA). The SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA describes three turnings of the wheel of the dharma by the Buddha: in the first, he taught the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS (catvāry āryasatyāni); in the second, he taught emptiness (suNYATĀ); and in the third, he taught what was "well differentiated" (suvibhakta). The third of the three turnings of the wheel of the dharma was delivered in VAIsĀLĪ. The sutra identifies it as a teaching for BODHISATTVAs and classifies it as definitive (NĪTĀRTHA); this third turning of the wheel is the teaching of the SaMdhinirmocanasutra itself. According to the commentators, this third wheel accounts for the Buddha's provisional (NEYĀRTHA) statements in the first wheel of the dharma (see CATUḤSATYADHARMACAKRA), namely, that the four noble truths exist; and his apparently contradictory statement in his second wheel of the dharma in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ SuTRAs (perfection of wisdom sutras) (see ALAKsAnADHARMACAKRA) that all dharmas are "unproduced, unceased, primordially peaceful, and naturally passed beyond sorrow." Here, in this third and definitive teaching, also called "the dharma wheel that makes a fine delineation" (*SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA), he says that dharmas have three natures (TRISVABHĀVA), and each of those in its own way lacks an intrinsic nature (SVABHĀVA). The three natures are the PARIKALPITA or imaginary nature of dharmas, the PARATANTRA or dependently arisen nature of dharmas, and the PARINIsPANNA or consummate nature of dharmas. In Tibet, there was a debate that extended over centuries as to whether the paramārthaviniscayadharmacakra, this third turning of the wheel, according to the SaMdhinirmocanasutra, was provisional or definitive. See RANG STONG GZHAN STONG.
rang stong gzhan stong. (rang dong shen dong). In Tibetan, lit. "self-emptiness, other-emptiness," an important and persistent philosophical debate in Tibetan Buddhism, dating to the fifteenth century. The opposing factions are the DGE LUGS sect on one side and the JO NANG sect on the other, with support from certain BKA' BRGYUD and RNYING MA authors. The debate concerns issues fundamental to their understanding of what constituted enlightenment and the path to its achievement. For the Dge lugs, the most profound of all Buddhist doctrines is that all phenomena in the universe are empty of an intrinsic nature (SVABHĀVA), that the constituents of experience are not naturally endowed with a defining characteristic. Emptiness (suNYATĀ) for the Dge lugs is the fact that phenomena do not exist in and of themselves; emptiness is instead the lack of intrinsic existence. The Dge lugs then, are proponents of "self-emptiness," and argue that the hypostatized factor that an object in reality lacks (i.e., is empty of) is wrongly believed by the unenlightened to be intrinsic to the object itself. Everything, from physical forms to the omniscient mind of the Buddha, is thus equally empty. This emptiness is described by the Dge lugs as a non-affirming or simple negation (PRASAJYAPRATIsEDHA), an absence with nothing else implied in its place. From this perspective, the Dge lugs judge the sutras of the second of the three turnings of the wheel of the dharma as described in the SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA, "the dharma wheel of signlessness" (ALAKsAnADHARMACAKRA), to contain the definitive expression of the Buddha's most profound intention. By contrast, the Jo nang look for inspiration to the third turning of the wheel, "the dharma wheel for ascertaining the ultimate" (PARAMĀRTHAVINIsCAYADHARMACAKRA; see also *SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA), especially to those statements that describe the nonduality of subject and object to be the consummate nature (PARINIsPANNA) and the understanding of that nonduality to be the highest wisdom. They describe this wisdom in substantialist terms, calling it eternal, self-arisen, and truly established. This wisdom consciousness exists autonomously and is thus not empty in the way that emptiness is understood by the Dge lugs. Instead, this wisdom consciousness is empty in the sense that it is devoid of all afflictions and conventional factors, which are extraneous to its true nature. Hence, the Jo nang speak of the "emptiness of the other," the absence of extrinsic and extraneous qualities. The Dge lugs cannot deny the presence of statements in the MAHĀYĀNA canon that speak of the TATHĀGATAGARBHA as permanent, pure, blissful, and endowed with self. But they argue that such statements are provisional, another example of the Buddha's expedient means of attracting to the faith those who find such a description appealing. The true tathāgatagarbha, they claim, is the emptiness of the mind; it is this factor, present in all sentient beings, that offers the possibility of transformation into an enlightened buddha. This is the view of CANDRAKĪRTI, they say, whom they regard as the supreme interpreter of the doctrine of emptiness. The Jo nang do not deny that this is Candrakīrti's view, but they deny Candrakīrti the rank of premier expositor of NĀGĀRJUNA's thought. For them, Candrakīrti teaches an emptiness which is a mere negation of true existence, which they equate with nihilism, or else a preliminary stage of negation that precedes an understanding of the highest wisdom. Nor do they deny that such an exposition is also to be found in Nāgārjuna's philosophical corpus (YUKTIKĀYA). But those texts, they claim, do not represent Nāgārjuna's final view, which is expressed instead in his devotional corpus (STAVAKĀYA), notably the DHARMADHĀTUSTAVA ("Praise of the Sphere of Reality"), with its more positive exposition of the nature of reality. Those who would deny its ultimate existence, such as Candrakīrti, they classify as "one-sided Madhyamakas" (phyogs gcig pa'i dbu ma pa) as opposed to the "great Madhyamakas" (DBU MA PA CHEN PO), among whom they would include the Nāgārjuna of the four hymns and ĀRYADEVA, as well as thinkers whom the Dge lugs classify as YOGĀCĀRA or SVĀTANTRIKA-MADHYAMAKA: e.g., ASAnGA, VASUBANDHU, MAITREYANĀTHA, and sĀNTARAKsITA. The Dge lugs attempt to demonstrate that the nature of reality praised by Nāgārjuna in his hymns is the same emptiness that he describes in his philosophical writings.
SaMdhinirmocanasutra. (T. Mdo sde dgongs 'grel; C. Jieshenmi jing; J. Gejinmikkyo; K. Haesimmil kyong 解深密經). In Sanskrit, variously interpreted to mean the sutra "Unfurling the Real Meaning," "Explaining the Thought," or "Unraveling the Bonds"; one of the most important Mahāyāna sutras, especially for the YOGĀCĀRA school. The sutra is perhaps most famous for its delineation of the three turnings of the wheel of the dharma (DHARMACAKRAPRAVARTANA), which would become an influential schema for classifying the teachings of the Buddha. The sutra has ten chapters. The first four chapters deal with the nature of the ultimate (PARAMĀRTHA) and how it is to be understood. The fifth chapter discusses the nature of consciousness, including the storehouse consciousness (ĀLAYAVIJNĀNA) where predispositions (VĀSANĀ) are deposited and ripen. The sixth chapter discusses the three natures (TRISVABHĀVA). In the seventh chapter, the division of the Buddha's teachings into the provisional (NEYĀRTHA) and the definitive (NĪTĀRTHA) is set forth. The eighth chapter explains how to develop sAMATHA and VIPAsYANĀ. The ninth chapter describes the ten bodhisattva BHuMIs and the final chapter describes the nature of buddhahood. Each of these chapters contains important passages that are cited in subsequent commentaries and treatises. ¶ Perhaps the most influential of all the sutra's chapters is the seventh, which discusses the three turnings of the wheel of the dharma (dharmacakrapravartana). There, the bodhisattva Paramārthasamudgata explains that the first turning of the wheel had occurred at ṚsIPATANA (the Deer Park at SĀRNĀTH), where the Buddha had taught the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS to those of the sRĀVAKA ("listener, disciple") vehicle. This first turning of the wheel is called the CATUḤSATYADHARMACAKRA, the "dharma wheel of the four truths." The bodhisattva says, "This wheel of dharma turned by the Buddha is surpassable, an occasion [for refutation], provisional, and subject to dispute." Referring presumably to the perfection of wisdom (PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ) sutras, the bodhisattva then goes on to explain that the Buddha then turned the wheel of dharma a second time for those who had entered the Mahāyāna, teaching them the doctrine of emptiness (suNYATĀ), that phenomena are "unproduced, unextinguished, originally quiescent, and inherently beyond sorrow." Commentators would call this second turning of the wheel the ALAKsAnADHARMACAKRA, "the dharma wheel of signlessness." But this wheel also is provisional. The Buddha finally turned the wheel of doctrine a third time for those of all vehicles, clearly differentiating how things exist. "This wheel of doctrine turned by the BHAGAVAT is unsurpassed, not an occasion [for refutation], of definitive meaning; it is indisputable." Commentators would call this third turning of the wheel the PARAMĀRTHAVINIsCAYADHARMACAKRA, "the dharma wheel for ascertaining the ultimate"; it is also called "the dharma wheel that makes a fine delineation" (*SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA). The sutra thus takes something of an historical perspective on the Buddha's teaching, declaring both that his first sermon on the four noble truths addressed to srāvakas and his teaching of the perfection of wisdom addressed to bodhisattvas was not his final and most clearly delineated view. That consummate view, his true intention, is found in the third turning of the wheel of dharma, a wheel that includes, at very least, the SaMdhinirmocanasutra itself. The SaMdhinirmocanasutra was translated into Chinese four times: by GUnABHADRA, BODHIRUCI, PARAMĀRTHA, and XUANZANG. Of these recensions, the translations by Bodhiruci and Xuanzang are complete renderings of the sutra and circulated most widely within the East Asian tradition; the other two renderings were shorter digests of the sutra.
shotenporin 證轉法輪. See *SUVIBHAKTADHARMACAKRA
*suvibhaktadharmacakra
*suvibhaktadharmacakra. (T. legs par rnam par phye ba dang ldan pa'i chos 'khor; C. zhengzhuan falun; J. shotenporin; K. chŭngjon pomnyun 證轉法輪). In Sanskrit, lit., "the dharma wheel that makes a fine delineation"; the third of the three turnings of the wheel of the dharma described in the SAMDHINIRMOCANASuTRA, said to have been delivered in VAIsĀLĪ. It is also known as the PARAMĀRTHAVINIsCAYADHARMACAKRA, or "the dharma wheel for ascertaining the ultimate," as the pravicayadharmacakra, or "the dharma wheel of investigation," and simply as the antyadharmacakra or "final wheel of the dharma." The sutra identifies this as a teaching for bodhisattvas and classifies it as definitive (NĪTĀRTHA); this third turning of the wheel is the teaching of the SaMdhinirmocanasutra itself. According to the commentators, in this sutra the Buddha, through his anamuensis Paramārthasamudgata, sets forth in clear and plain language what he means by his provisional statements in the first wheel of the dharma (see CATUḤSATYADHARMACAKRA), namely, that the FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS exist; and his statement in his middle wheel of the dharma in the PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ SuTRAs (perfection of wisdom sutras) (see ALAKsAnADHARMACAKRA) that no dharmas exist. Both of the first two wheels are declared to be provisional (NEYĀRTHA). Here, in this definitive teaching called "the dharma wheel that makes a fine delineation," he says that dharmas have three natures (TRISVABHĀVA), and each of those in its own way lacks an intrinsic nature (SVABHĀVA). The three natures are the PARIKALPITA or imaginary nature, the PARATANTRA or dependent nature, and the PARINIsPANNA or consummate nature. ¶ In Tibet there were different schools of interpretation of the three wheels of doctrine. The third Karma pa RANG 'BYUNG RDO RJE, DOL PO PA SHES RAB RGYAL MTSHAN, and the nineteenth-century RIS MED masters assert that the SaMdhinirmocanasutra's third wheel of dharma is definitive and teaches a great MADHYAMAKA (DBU MA CHEN PO). They say this great Madhyamaka is set forth with great clarity in the sRĪMĀLĀDEVĪSIMHANĀDASuTRA and, particularly, in the RATNAGOTRAVIBHĀGA ("Delineation of the Jewel Lineage"; alt. title, Uttaratantra). They argue that in the second turning of the wheel, the prajNāpāramitā sutras, the Buddha uses apophatic language to stress the need to eliminate KLEsAs and false superimpositions. He does not clearly delineate, as he does in the third turning, the TATHĀGATAGARBHA, which is both empty (sunya) of all afflictions (klesa) and nonempty (asunya), viz., full of all the Buddha's virtues. Hence they assert that the third turning of dharma in the Samdhinirmocanasutra sets forth the "great Madhyamaka" (dbu ma chen po), and is a definitive teaching that avoids both apophatic and kataphatic extremes. Others, most notably TSONG KHA PA, disagree, asserting that the SaMdhinirmocanasutra's second turning of the wheel is the definitive teaching of the Buddha, and say that its third turning, i.e., the presentation of Buddhist tenets in the SaMdhinirmocanasutra, is a Yogācāra teaching intended for those temporarily incapable of understanding Madhyamaka.
" The natural attitude of the psychic being is to feel itself as the Child, the Son of God, the Bhakta; it is a portion of the Divine, one in essence, but in the dynamics of the manifestation there is always even in identity a difference.” Letters on Yoga
“The natural attitude of the psychic being is to feel itself as the Child, the Son of God, the Bhakta; it is a portion of the Divine, one in essence, but in the dynamics of the manifestation there is always even in identity a difference.”
9 Swami Vivekananda
7 Sri Aurobindo
2 Sri Srimad Bhaktivedanta Narayana Gosvami Maharaja
2 Sri Ramakrishna
1:A true Bhakta is greater than God, for he is a giver and not a taker. ~ Swami Ramakrishnananda,
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2:The person who aspires to be a Bhakta must be cheerful. ~ Swami Vivekananda, (C.W. III. 69),
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3:The supreme faith is that which sees God in all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Way and the Bhakta,
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4:The final demand of the Bhakta is simply that his bhakti may never cease or diminish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, cwsa, 24, 569,
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5:The ant loses its life in the syrup but never leaves it. So the Bhakta cleaves unto God forever and leaves all else ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
#KEYS
6:The lord makes the Bhakta the heir of His infinite glories and gives the realization of God Personal as well as God Impersonal. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
#KEYS
7:The Bhakta does not long for Brahma-Jnana, the realization of the impersonal, but remains content with realizing the divine mother. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
#KEYS
8:To a Bhakta, the Lord manifests in various forms. To one who reaches Jnana (Samadhi), he is the formless Nirguna Brahman once more. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
#KEYS
9:The indefinable Oneness accepts all that climb to it, but offers no help of relation and gives no foothold to the climber. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Way and the Bhakta,
#KEYS
10:The perfect union is that which meets the Divine at every moment, in every action and with all the integrality of the nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Way and the Bhakta,
#KEYS
11:A bhakta surrenders to God and rests secure in His protection
A jnani knows that there is nothing beside the Self and so remains happy.
One must adhere firmly to either of these courses. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Conscious Immortality, Ch.5.
#KEYS
12:One cannot become a bhakta just by uttering a few devotional words or shedding a few tears. Only one in whom genuine devotion has blossomed is a true bhakta. When one attains such devotion, one becomes God-like; no hatred, jealousy, or egotism can remain in such a person ~ Swami Adbhutananda,
#KEYS
13:You partake of the nature of him on whom you meditate. By worshipping Śiva you acquire the nature of Śiva. Jnāna is the characteristic of Śiva, and bhakti of Vishnu. One who partakes of Śiva's nature becomes a Jnāni, and one who partakes of Vishnu's nature becomes a bhakta ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
#KEYS
14:You partake of the nature of him on whom you meditate. By worshipping Siva you acquire the nature of Siva. A devotee of Rama meditated on Hanuman day and night. He used to think he had become Hanuman. In the end he was firmly convinced that he had even grown a little tail. Jnana is the characteristic of Siva, and bhakti of Vishnu. One who partakes of Siva's nature becomes a jnani, and one who partakes of Vishnu's nature becomes a bhakta. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
#KEYS
15:Someone told me that Ramana Maharshi lives on the overmental plane or that his realisation is on the same level as Shankara's. How is it then that he is not aware of the arrival of the Divine, while others, for instance X's Guru, had this awareness?
I can't say on what plane the Maharshi is, but his method is that of Adwaita Knowledge and Moksha - so there is no necessity for him to recognise the arrival of the Divine. X's Guru was a bhakta of the Divine Mother and believed in the dynamic side of existence, so it was quite natural for him to have the revelation of the coming of the Mother. 23 January 1936 ~ Sri Aurobindo,
#KEYS
16:the omnipresent Trinity :::
In practice three conceptions are necessary before there can be any possibility of Yoga; there must be, as it were, three consenting parties to the effort,-God, Nature and the human soul or, in more abstract language, the Transcendental, the Universal and the Individual. If the individual and Nature are left to themselves, the one is bound to the other and unable to exceed appreciably her lingering march. Something transcendent is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension. It is this truth which makes necessary to every philosophy of Yoga the conception of the Ishwara, Lord, supreme Soul or supreme Self, towards whom the effort is directed and who gives the illuminating touch and the strength to attain. Equally true is the complementary idea so often enforced by the Yoga of devotion that as the Transcendent is necessary to the individual and sought after by him, so also the individual is necessary in a sense to the Transcendent and sought after by It. If the Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks and yearns after the Bhakta. There can be no Yoga of knowledge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of knowledge; no Yoga of devotion without the human God-lover, the supreme object of love and delight and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment; no Yoga of works without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic maybe our intellectual conception of the highest truth of things, in practice we are compelled to accept this omnipresent Trinity.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga,
#KEYS
17:the ways of the Bhakta and man of Knowledge :::
In the ordinary paths of Yoga the method used for dealing with these conflicting materials is direct and simple. One or another of the principal psychological forces in us is selected as our single means for attaining to the Divine; the rest is quieted into inertia or left to starve in its smallness. The Bhakta, seizing on the emotional forces of the being, the intense activities of the heart, abides concentrated in the love of God, gathered up as into a single one-pointed tongue of fire; he is indifferent to the activities of thought, throws behind him the importunities of the reason, cares nothing for the mind's thirst for knowledge. All the knowledge he needs is his faith and the inspirations that well up from a heart in communion with the Divine. He has no use for any will to works that is not turned to the direct worship of the Beloved or the service of the temple. The man of Knowledge, self-confined by a deliberate choice to the force and activities of discriminative thought, finds release in the mind's inward-drawn endeavour. He concentrates on the idea of the self, succeeds by a subtle inner discernment in distinguishing its silent presence amid the veiling activities of Nature, and through the perceptive idea arrives at the concrete spiritual experience. He is indifferent to the play of the emotions, deaf to the hunger-call of passion, closed to the activities of Life, -- the more blessed he, the sooner they fall away from him and leave him free, still and mute, the eternal non-doer. The body is his stumbling-block, the vital functions are his enemies; if their demands can be reduced to a minimum, that is his great good fortune. The endless difficulties that arise from the environing world are dismissed by erecting firmly against them a defence of outer physical and inner spiritual solitude; safe behind a wall of inner silence, he remains impassive and untouched by the world and by others. To be alone with oneself or alone with the Divine, to walk apart with God and his devotees, to entrench oneself in the single self-ward endeavour of the mind or Godward passion of the heart is the trend of these Yogas. The problem is solved by the excision of all but the one central difficulty which pursues the only chosen motive-force; into the midst of the dividing calls of our nature the principle of an exclusive concentration comes sovereignly to our rescue.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration. 76-77,
#KEYS
18:All Yoga is a turning of the human mind and the human soul, not yet divine in realisation, but feeling the divine impulse and attraction in it, towards that by which it finds its greater being. Emotionally, the first form which this turning takes must be that of adoration. In ordinary religion this adoration wears the form of external worship and that again develops a most external form of ceremonial worship. This element is ordinarily necessary because the mass of men live in their physical minds, cannot realise anything except by the force of a physical symbol and cannot feel that they are living anything except by the force of a physical action. We might apply here the Tantric gradation of sadhana, which makes the way of the pasu, the herd, the animal or physical being, the lowest stage of its discipline, and say that the purely or predominantly ceremonial adoration is the first step of this lowest part of the way. It is evident that even real religion, - and Yoga is something more than religion, - only begins when this quite outward worship corresponds to something really felt within the mind, some genuine submission, awe or spiritual aspiration, to which it becomes an aid, an outward expression and also a sort of periodical or constant reminder helping to draw back the mind to it from the preoccupations of ordinary life. But so long as it is only an idea of the Godhead to which one renders reverence or homage, we have not yet got to the beginning of Yoga. The aim of Yoga being union, its beginning must always be a seeking after the Divine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness or possession. When this comes on us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship; we begin to make ourselves a temple of the Divine, our thoughts and feelings a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, our whole life an external service and worship. It is as this change, this new soul-tendency grows, that the religion of the devotee becomes a Yoga, a growing contact and union. It does not follow that the outward worship will necessarily be dispensed with, but it will increasingly become only a physical expression or outflowing of the inner devotion and adoration, the wave of the soul throwing itself out in speech and symbolic act. Adoration, before it turns into an element of the deeper Yoga of devotion, a petal of the flower of love, its homage and self-uplifting to its sun, must bring with it, if it is profound, an increasing consecration of the being to the Divine who is adored. And one element of this consecration must be a self-purifying so as to become fit for the divine contact, or for the entrance of the Divine into the temple of our inner being, or for his selfrevelation in the shrine of the heart. This purifying may be ethical in its character, but it will not be merely the moralist's seeking for the right and blameless action or even, when once we reach the stage of Yoga, an obedience to the law of God as revealed in formal religion; but it will be a throwing away, katharsis, of all that conflicts whether with the idea of the Divine in himself or of the Divine in ourselves. In the former case it becomes in habit of feeling and outer act an imitation of the Divine, in the latter a growing into his likeness in our nature. What inner adoration is to ceremonial worship, this growing into the divine likeness is to the outward ethical life. It culminates in a sort of liberation by likeness to the Divine,1 a liberation from our lower nature and a change into the divine nature.
Consecration becomes in its fullness a devoting of all our being to the Divine; therefore also of all our thoughts and our works. Here the Yoga takes into itself the essential elements of the Yoga of works and the Yoga of knowledge, but in its own manner and with its own peculiar spirit. It is a sacrifice of life and works to the Divine, but a sacrifice of love more than a tuning of the will to the divine Will. The bhakta offers up his life and all that he is and all that he has and all that he does to the Divine. This surrender may take the ascetic form, as when he leaves the ordinary life of men and devotes his days solely to prayer ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Devotion, 571 [T1],
#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:He who wants to become a Bhakta must be strong, must be healthy. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
2:The Bhakta (devotee) renounces all little loves for the almighty and omnipresent love. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
3:The test of ahimsa is the absence of jealousy. The man whose heart never cherishes even the thought of injury to anyone, who rejoices at the prosperity of even his greatest enemy, that man is the bhakta, he is the yogi, he is the guru of all. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
4:By work alone, men may get to where Buddha got largely by meditation or Christ by prayer. Buddha was a working Jnani, Christ was a Bhakta, but the same goal was reached by both of them. Good motives, sincerity, and infinite love can conquer the world. One single soul possessed of these virtues can destroy the dark designs of millions of hypocrites and brutes. ~ swami-vivekananda, @wisdomtrove
5:Even after attaining samadhi, some retain the "servant ego," or the "devotee ego." The bhakta keeps this "I-consciousness." He says, "0 God, Thou art the Master and I am Thy servant; Thou art the Lord and I am Thy devotee," He feels that way even after the realization of God. His "I" -is not completely effaced. Again, by constantly practicing this kind of consciousness," one ultimately attains God... ~ sri-ramakrishna, @wisdomtrove
*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:The person who aspires to be a Bhakta must be cheerful. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
#NFDB
2:He who wants to become a Bhakta must be strong, must be healthy. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
#NFDB
3:The Bhakta (devotee) renounces all little loves for the almighty and omnipresent love. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
#NFDB
4:The highest form of worship that had been laid down by the Bhakta was the worship of man. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
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5:The supreme faith is that which sees God in all. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Way and the Bhakta,
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6:The final demand of the Bhakta is simply that his bhakti may never cease or diminish. ~ Sri Aurobindo, cwsa, 24, 569,
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7:The indefinable Oneness accepts all that climb to it, but offers no help of relation and gives no foothold to the climber. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Way and the Bhakta,
#NFDB
8:The perfect union is that which meets the Divine at every moment, in every action and with all the integrality of the nature. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, The Way and the Bhakta,
#NFDB
9:I am not a Bhakta, I am not a Jnani, I am not a worker for the Lord. What am I then ? A tool in the hands of my master , a flute blown upon by the Divine Herd-Boy, a leaf driven by the breath of the Lord . ~ Sri Aurobindo#SriAurobindo,
#NFDB
10:The test of ahimsa is the absence of jealousy. The man whose heart never cherishes even the thought of injury to anyone, who rejoices at the prosperity of even his greatest enemy, that man is the bhakta, he is the yogi, he is the guru of all. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
#NFDB
11:By work alone, men may get to where Buddha got largely by meditation or Christ by prayer. Buddha was a working Jnani, Christ was a Bhakta, but the same goal was reached by both of them. Good motives, sincerity, and infinite love can conquer the world. One single soul possessed of these virtues can destroy the dark designs of millions of hypocrites and brutes. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
#NFDB
12:He who does not depend on anything, who is pure and active, who does not care whether good comes or evil, and never becomes miserable, who has given up all efforts for himself; who is the same in praise or in blame, with a silent, thoughtful mind, blessed with what little comes in his way, homeless, for the whole world is his home, and who is steady in his ideas, such a one is My beloved Bhakta." Such alone become Yogis. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
#NFDB
13:Until a bhakta has not abandoned himself and his life to you, so that he is yours and you his, the passions of his heart are his enemies, his home is a prison, and all his attachments are bondage. Once the surrender is effected, and all these old enemies turned over to you, they transform themselves into the most potent gifts for the life of devotion. When the Lord becomes one’s own! With such bhakti, a man becomes a natural Sannyasi. ~ Ramesh Menon,
#NFDB
14:You partake of the nature of him on whom you meditate. By worshipping Siva you acquire the nature of Siva. A devotee of Rama meditated on Hanuman day and night. He used to think he had become Hanuman. In the end he was firmly convinced that he had even grown a little tail. Jnana is the characteristic of Siva, and bhakti of Vishnu. One who partakes of Siva's nature becomes a jnani, and one who partakes of Vishnu's nature becomes a bhakta. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
#NFDB
15:Vairâgya or renunciation is the turning point in all the various Yogas. The Karmi (worker) renounces the fruits of his work. The Bhakta (devotee) renounces all little loves for the almighty and omnipresent love. The Yogi renounces his experiences, because his philosophy is that the whole Nature, although it is for the experience of the soul, at last brings him to know that he is not in Nature, but eternally separate from Nature. The Jnâni (philosopher) renounces everything, because his philosophy is that Nature never existed, neither in the past, nor present, nor will It in the future. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
#NFDB
16:Karma-Yoga, therefore, is a system of ethics and religion intended to attain freedom through unselfishness, and by good works. The Karma-Yogi need not believe in any doctrine whatever. He may not believe even in God, may not ask what his soul is, nor think of any metaphysical speculation. He has got his own special aim of realising selflessness; and he has to work it out himself. Every moment of his life must be realisation, because he has to solve by mere work, without the help of doctrine or theory, the very same problem to which the Jnâni applies his reason and inspiration and the Bhakta his love. ~ Swami Vivekananda,
#NFDB
17:Someone told me that Ramana Maharshi lives on the overmental plane or that his realisation is on the same level as Shankara's. How is it then that he is not aware of the arrival of the Divine, while others, for instance X's Guru, had this awareness?
I can't say on what plane the Maharshi is, but his method is that of Adwaita Knowledge and Moksha - so there is no necessity for him to recognise the arrival of the Divine. X's Guru was a bhakta of the Divine Mother and believed in the dynamic side of existence, so it was quite natural for him to have the revelation of the coming of the Mother. 23 January 1936 ~ Sri Aurobindo,
#NFDB
18:Once I was chastising Maharajji for giving photos to people who were worldly and didn’t care about him. He said, “You don’t understand me. If I tell a man he is a great bhakta (devotee). I am planting a seed. If a person already has the seed planted and growing, why should I plant another?” I said, “You are telling these drunkards, liars, and dacoits that they are real bhaktas. They will just go home and carry on their old behaviors.” Maharajji said, “Some of them will remember what I said of them, and it will make them want to develop this quality in themselves. If ten out of a hundred are inspired in this way, it is a very good thing. ~ Ram Dass,
#NFDB
19:No one can say with finality that God is only 'this' and nothing else. He is formless, and again He has forms. For the bhakta He assumes forms. But He is formless for the jnani, that is, for him who looks on the world as a mere dream. The bhakta feels that he is one entity and the world another. Therefore God, reveals Himself to him as a Person. But the jnani — the Vedantist, for instance — always reasons, applying the process of 'Not this, not this'. Through this discrimination he realizes, by his inner perception, that the ego and the universe are both illusory, like a dream. Then the jnani realizes Brahman in his own consciousness. He cannot describe what Brahman is. ~ Sri Ramakrishna,
#NFDB
20:. If there is a picture on the wall of a room, everyone in that room thinks the person in the picture is looking at him. Similarly, in whichever way we look at Krsna He reciprocates. He is the most complete in everything. He is the most complete in beauty, the most complete politician, and He has the most complete affection for His devotees. For example, Bhismadeva took a vow during the battle of Kurukshetra, “I am not the son of Maharaja Santanu until I can make Krsna take up a weapon.” Krsna thus gave up His own promise in the battle, just for the happiness of Bhismadeva. Therefore, how He is bhakta-vatsala, how kind He is to His devotees! ~ Sri Srimad Bhaktivedanta Narayana Gosvami Maharaja,
#NFDB
21:. If there is a picture on the wall of a room, everyone in that room thinks the person in the picture is looking at him. Similarly, in whichever way we look at Krsna He reciprocates. He is the most complete in everything. He is the most complete in beauty, the most complete politician, and He has the most complete affection for His devotees. For example, Bhismadeva took a vow during the battle of Kurukshetra, “I am not the son of Maharaja Santanu until I can make Krsna take up a weapon.” Krsna thus gave up His own promise in the battle, just for the happiness of Bhismadeva. Therefore, how He is bhakta-vatsala, how kind He is to His devotees! ~ Sri Srimad Bhaktivedanta Narayana Gosvami Maharaja,
#NFDB
22:One of the strangest controversies in the history of Orientalism turned upon the “origin of bhakti”, as if devotion had at some given moment been a new idea and thenceforth a fashionable one. It would have been simpler to observe that the word bhakti means primarily a given share, and therefore also the devotion or love that all liberality presupposes; and so that inasmuch as one “gives God his share” (bhagam), i.e. sacrifces, one is his bhakta. Thus in the hymn, “If thou givest me my share” amounts to saying “If thou lovest me”. It has often been pointed out that the Sacrifice was thought of as a commerce between Gods and men: but not often realised that by introducing into traditional conceptions of trade notions derived from our own internecine commercial transactions, we have falsified our understanding of the original sense of such a commerce, which was actually more of the potlatsh type, a competition in giving, than like our competitions in taking. ~ Ananda K Coomaraswamy,
#NFDB
23:the omnipresent Trinity :::
In practice three conceptions are necessary before there can be any possibility of Yoga; there must be, as it were, three consenting parties to the effort,-God, Nature and the human soul or, in more abstract language, the Transcendental, the Universal and the Individual. If the individual and Nature are left to themselves, the one is bound to the other and unable to exceed appreciably her lingering march. Something transcendent is needed, free from her and greater, which will act upon us and her, attracting us upward to Itself and securing from her by good grace or by force her consent to the individual ascension. It is this truth which makes necessary to every philosophy of Yoga the conception of the Ishwara, Lord, supreme Soul or supreme Self, towards whom the effort is directed and who gives the illuminating touch and the strength to attain. Equally true is the complementary idea so often enforced by the Yoga of devotion that as the Transcendent is necessary to the individual and sought after by him, so also the individual is necessary in a sense to the Transcendent and sought after by It. If the Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks and yearns after the Bhakta. There can be no Yoga of knowledge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of knowledge; no Yoga of devotion without the human God-lover, the supreme object of love and delight and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment; no Yoga of works without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic maybe our intellectual conception of the highest truth of things, in practice we are compelled to accept this omnipresent Trinity.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Introduction - The Conditions of the Synthesis, The Systems of Yoga,
#NFDB
24:the ways of the Bhakta and man of Knowledge :::
In the ordinary paths of Yoga the method used for dealing with these conflicting materials is direct and simple. One or another of the principal psychological forces in us is selected as our single means for attaining to the Divine; the rest is quieted into inertia or left to starve in its smallness. The Bhakta, seizing on the emotional forces of the being, the intense activities of the heart, abides concentrated in the love of God, gathered up as into a single one-pointed tongue of fire; he is indifferent to the activities of thought, throws behind him the importunities of the reason, cares nothing for the mind's thirst for knowledge. All the knowledge he needs is his faith and the inspirations that well up from a heart in communion with the Divine. He has no use for any will to works that is not turned to the direct worship of the Beloved or the service of the temple. The man of Knowledge, self-confined by a deliberate choice to the force and activities of discriminative thought, finds release in the mind's inward-drawn endeavour. He concentrates on the idea of the self, succeeds by a subtle inner discernment in distinguishing its silent presence amid the veiling activities of Nature, and through the perceptive idea arrives at the concrete spiritual experience. He is indifferent to the play of the emotions, deaf to the hunger-call of passion, closed to the activities of Life, -- the more blessed he, the sooner they fall away from him and leave him free, still and mute, the eternal non-doer. The body is his stumbling-block, the vital functions are his enemies; if their demands can be reduced to a minimum, that is his great good fortune. The endless difficulties that arise from the environing world are dismissed by erecting firmly against them a defence of outer physical and inner spiritual solitude; safe behind a wall of inner silence, he remains impassive and untouched by the world and by others. To be alone with oneself or alone with the Divine, to walk apart with God and his devotees, to entrench oneself in the single self-ward endeavour of the mind or Godward passion of the heart is the trend of these Yogas. The problem is solved by the excision of all but the one central difficulty which pursues the only chosen motive-force; into the midst of the dividing calls of our nature the principle of an exclusive concentration comes sovereignly to our rescue.
~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Self-Consecration. 76-77,
#NFDB
25:All Yoga is a turning of the human mind and the human soul, not yet divine in realisation, but feeling the divine impulse and attraction in it, towards that by which it finds its greater being. Emotionally, the first form which this turning takes must be that of adoration. In ordinary religion this adoration wears the form of external worship and that again develops a most external form of ceremonial worship. This element is ordinarily necessary because the mass of men live in their physical minds, cannot realise anything except by the force of a physical symbol and cannot feel that they are living anything except by the force of a physical action. We might apply here the Tantric gradation of sadhana, which makes the way of the pasu, the herd, the animal or physical being, the lowest stage of its discipline, and say that the purely or predominantly ceremonial adoration is the first step of this lowest part of the way. It is evident that even real religion, - and Yoga is something more than religion, - only begins when this quite outward worship corresponds to something really felt within the mind, some genuine submission, awe or spiritual aspiration, to which it becomes an aid, an outward expression and also a sort of periodical or constant reminder helping to draw back the mind to it from the preoccupations of ordinary life. But so long as it is only an idea of the Godhead to which one renders reverence or homage, we have not yet got to the beginning of Yoga. The aim of Yoga being union, its beginning must always be a seeking after the Divine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness or possession. When this comes on us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship; we begin to make ourselves a temple of the Divine, our thoughts and feelings a constant prayer of aspiration and seeking, our whole life an external service and worship. It is as this change, this new soul-tendency grows, that the religion of the devotee becomes a Yoga, a growing contact and union. It does not follow that the outward worship will necessarily be dispensed with, but it will increasingly become only a physical expression or outflowing of the inner devotion and adoration, the wave of the soul throwing itself out in speech and symbolic act. Adoration, before it turns into an element of the deeper Yoga of devotion, a petal of the flower of love, its homage and self-uplifting to its sun, must bring with it, if it is profound, an increasing consecration of the being to the Divine who is adored. And one element of this consecration must be a self-purifying so as to become fit for the divine contact, or for the entrance of the Divine into the temple of our inner being, or for his selfrevelation in the shrine of the heart. This purifying may be ethical in its character, but it will not be merely the moralist's seeking for the right and blameless action or even, when once we reach the stage of Yoga, an obedience to the law of God as revealed in formal religion; but it will be a throwing away, katharsis, of all that conflicts whether with the idea of the Divine in himself or of the Divine in ourselves. In the former case it becomes in habit of feeling and outer act an imitation of the Divine, in the latter a growing into his likeness in our nature. What inner adoration is to ceremonial worship, this growing into the divine likeness is to the outward ethical life. It culminates in a sort of liberation by likeness to the Divine,1 a liberation from our lower nature and a change into the divine nature.
Consecration becomes in its fullness a devoting of all our being to the Divine; therefore also of all our thoughts and our works. Here the Yoga takes into itself the essential elements of the Yoga of works and the Yoga of knowledge, but in its own manner and with its own peculiar spirit. It is a sacrifice of life and works to the Divine, but a sacrifice of love more than a tuning of the will to the divine Will. The bhakta offers up his life and all that he is and all that he has and all that he does to the Divine. This surrender may take the ascetic form, as when he leaves the ordinary life of men and devotes his days solely to prayer ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Way of Devotion, 571 [T1],
44 Sri Aurobindo
42 Sri Ramakrishna
17 Swami Vivekananda
8 The Mother
6 A B Purani
5 Sri Ramana Maharshi
5 Nirodbaran
4 Satprem
4 Nolini Kanta Gupta
2 Swami Sivananda Saraswati
2 Mahendranath Gupta
41 The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
16 Bhakti-Yoga
10 The Synthesis Of Yoga
7 Talks
7 Letters On Yoga II
6 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
5 Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo
5 Essays On The Gita
3 Letters On Yoga IV
2 Some Answers From The Mother
2 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
2 Amrita Gita
2 Agenda Vol 03
0.00 - INTRODUCTION, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
One day, listening to a recitation of the Bhagavata on the verandah of the Radhakanta temple, he fell into a divine mood and saw the enchanting form of Krishna. He perceived the luminous rays issuing from Krishna's Lotus Feet in the form of a stout rope, which touched first the Bhagavata and then his own chest, connecting all three — God, the scripture, and the devotee. "After this vision", he used to say, "I came to realize that Bhagavan, Bhakta, and Bhagavata — God, Devotee, and Scripture — are in reality one and the same." --- VEDANTA --
In the beginning of September 1885 Sri Ramakrishna was moved to Syampukur. Here Narendra organized the young disciples to attend the Master day and night. At first they concealed the Master's illness from their guardians; but when it became more serious they remained with him almost constantly, sweeping aside the objections of their relatives and devoting themselves whole-heartedly to the nursing of their beloved guru. These young men, under the watchful eyes of the Master and the leadership of Narendra, became the antaranga Bhaktas, the devotees of Sri Ramakrishna's inner circle. They were privileged to witness many manifestations of the Master's divine powers. Narendra received instructions regarding the propagation of his message after his death.
The Holy Mother — so Sarada Devi had come to be affectionately known by Sri Ramakrishna's devotees — was brought from Dakshineswar to look after the general cooking and to prepare the special diet of the patient. The dwelling space being extremely limited, she had to adapt herself to cramped conditions. At three o'clock in the morning she would finish her bath in the Ganges and then enter a small covered place on the roof, where she spent the whole day cooking and praying. After eleven at night, when the visitors went away, she would come down to her small bedroom on the first floor to enjoy a few hours' sleep. Thus she spent three months, working hard, sleeping little, and praying constantly for the Master's recovery.
0.00 - THE GOSPEL PREFACE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Though his children received proper attention from him, his real family, both during the Master's lifetime and after, consisted of saints, devotees, Sannysins and spiritual aspirants. His life exemplifies the Master's teaching that an ideal householder must be like a good maidservant of a family, loving and caring properly for the children of the house, but knowing always that her real home and children are elsewhere. During the Master's lifetime he spent all his Sundays and other holidays with him and his devotees, and besides listening to the holy talks and devotional music, practised meditation both on the Personal and the Impersonal aspects of God under the direct guidance of the Master. In the pages of the Gospel the reader gets a picture of M.'s spiritual relationship with the Master how from a hazy belief in the Impersonal God of the Brahmos, he was step by step brought to accept both Personality and Impersonality as the two aspects of the same Non-dual Being, how he was convinced of the manifestation of that Being as Gods, Goddesses and as Incarnations, and how he was established in a life that was both of a Jnni and of a Bhakta. This Jnni- Bhakta outlook and way of living became so dominant a feature of his life that Swami Raghavananda, who was very closely associated with him during his last six years, remarks: "Among those who lived with M. in latter days, some felt that he always lived in this constant and conscious union with God even with open eyes (i.e., even in waking consciousness)." (Swami Raghavananda's article on M. in Prabuddha Bharata vol. XXXVII. P. 442.)
Besides undergoing spiritual disciplines at the feet of the Master, M. used to go to holy places during the Master's lifetime itself and afterwards too as a part of his Sdhan.
0.04 - The Systems of Yoga, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga Bhakta seeks and yearns after Bhagavan, Bhagavan also seeks and yearns after the Bhakta.1 There can be no Yoga of knowledge without a human seeker of the knowledge, the supreme subject of knowledge and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of knowledge; no Yoga of devotion without the human God-lover, the supreme object of love and delight and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of spiritual, emotional and aesthetic enjoyment; no Yoga of works without the human worker, the supreme Will, Master of all works and sacrifices, and the divine use by the individual of the universal faculties of power and action. However Monistic may be our intellectual conception of the highest truth of things, in practice we are compelled to accept this omnipresent Trinity.
For the contact of the human and individual consciousness with the divine is the very essence of Yoga. Yoga is the union of that which has become separated in the play of the universe with its own true self, origin and universality. The contact may take place at any point of the complex and intricately organised consciousness which we call our personality. It may be effected in the physical through the body; in the vital through the action of
0.06 - Letters to a Young Sadhak, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
what he receives and knows of the Divine. The Bhakta meets
a Divine full of affection and sweetness, the wise man will find
0.10 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
the love of the Bhakta for his God is a diminution and often is
tainted by egoism. But as one tends quite naturally to become
like what one loves, the Bhakta, if he is sincere, begins to become
like the Divine whom he adores, and thus his love becomes purer
0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I had a VERY interesting experienceit was last year or the year before, I dont recall, but after I retired to my room upstairs.6 You know that during pujas these goddesses come all the timethey dont enter the body and tie themselves to it, but they do come and manifest. Well, this time I think it must have been for last years pujaDurga came (she always arrives a few days in advance and remains in the atmosphere; she is present, like thisgesture as if Durga were walking up and down with Mother). I was in touch with her during my meditations upstairs, and this new Power in the body was in me then as it is in me now, and (how to put it?) I made her participate in this concept of surrender. What an experience she had, mon petit! An extraordinary experience of the joy of being connected with That. And she declared, From now on, I am a Bhakta of the Lord.
It was beautiful.
0 1962-03-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only its perfectly true that to deal with those realms one must either be fully protected by a guru, a real guru, a man with knowledge, or else have purity (not saintliness), an unmixed vital and mental purity. Very, very often, Bhaktas [devotees] of Sri Aurobindo or mewhen they are sincere, truly sincere, that is, people of great spiritual purityhave dozens of beings appear to them, saying, I am Sri Aurobindo. It happens all the time, with all the right external appearancesits very easy for such beings to put on a disguise. It takes the inner psychic purity not to be deceivedyou invariably FEEL something that makes it impossible for you to be duped. But otherwise, many, many people are taken in.
I dont like to talk about this because people here have no discrimination; they would be left with nothing but fear and would no longer believe in anything, forever asking me, Oh, isnt this a trick? Which paralyzes everything. Thats why I didnt speak about that in this Talk.
0 1962-07-21, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
The old way of yoga failed to bring about the harmony or unity of Spirit and life: it instead dismissed the world as Maya [Illusion] or a transient Play. The result has been loss of life-power and the degeneration of India. As was said in the Gita, These peoples would perish if I did not do worksthese peoples of India have truly gone down to ruin. A few sannyasins and bairagis [renunciants] to be saintly and perfect and liberated, a few Bhaktas [lovers of God] to dance in a mad ecstasy of love and sweet emotion and Ananda [Bliss], and a whole race to become lifeless, void of intelligence, sunk in deep tamas [inertia]is this the effect of true spirituality? No, we must first attain all the partial experiences possible on the mental level and flood the mind with spiritual delight and illumine it with spiritual light, but afterwards we must rise above. If we cannot rise above, to the supramental level, that is, it is hardly possible to know the worlds final secret and the problem it raises remains unsolved. There, the ignorance which creates a duality of opposition between the Spirit and Matter, between truth of spirit and truth of life, disappears. There one need no longer call the world Maya. The world is the eternal Play of God, the eternal manifestation of the Self. Then it becomes possible to fully know and fully realize Godto do what is said in the Gita, To know Me integrally. The physical body, the life, the mind and understanding, the supermind and the Ananda these are the spirits five levels. The higher man rises on this ascent the nearer he comes to the state of that highest perfection open to his spiritual evolution. Rising to the Supermind, it becomes easy to rise to the Ananda. One attains a firm foundation in the condition of the indivisible and infinite Ananda, not only in the timeless Parabrahman [Absolute] but in the body, in life, in the world. The integral being, the integral consciousness, the integral Ananda blossoms out and takes form in life. This is the central clue of my yoga, its fundamental principle.
This is no easy change to make. After these fifteen years I am only now rising into the lowest of the three levels of the Supermind and trying to draw up into it all the lower activities. But when this siddhi will be complete, then I am absolutely certain that through me God will give to others the siddhi of the Supermind with less effort. Then my real work will begin. I am not impatient for success in the work. What is to happen will happen in Gods appointed time. I have no hasty or disorderly impulse to rush into the field of work in the strength of the little ego. Even if I did not succeed in my work I would not be shaken. This work is not mine but Gods. I will listen to no other call; when God moves me then I will move.
0 1970-03-21, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
407I am not a Bhakta [lover of the Divine], for I have not renounced the world for God. How can I renounce what He took from me by force and gave back to me against my will? These things are too hard for me.
(Mother laughs) So T. asks me what he means. Then, there is another.
02.11 - Hymn to Darkness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Ramprasad the Bhakta thus speaks of Kali, his dark Mother: the poem itself is very dark, that is to say, the meaning is dark, and the style, the phrasing is darker still. A literal translation is out of question. A very free rendering is only possible:
I have brooded over it and I am utterly confused;
04.01 - The March of Civilisation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Turning to India we find a fuller and completerif not a globalpicture of the whole movement. India, we may say, is the spiritual world itself: and she epitomised the curve of human progress in a clearer and more significant manner. Indian history, not its political but its cultural and spiritual history, divides itself naturally into great movements with corresponding epochs each dwelling upon and dealing with one domain in the hierarchy of man's consciousness. The stages and epochs are well known: they are(l) Vedic, (2) Upanishadic, (3) Darshanasroughly from Buddha to Shankara, (4) Puranic, (5) Bhagavataor the Age of Bhakti, and finally (6) the Tantric. The last does not mean that it is the latest revelation, the nearest to us in time, but that it represents a kind of complementary movement, it was there all along, for long at least, and in which the others find their fruition and consummation. We shall explain presently. The force of consciousness that came and moved and moulded the first and the earliest epoch was Revelation. It was a power of direct vision and occult will and cosmic perception. Its physical seat is somewhere behind and or just beyond the crown of the head: the peak of man's manifest being that received the first touch of Surya Savitri (the supreme Creative Consciousness) to whom it bowed down uttering the invocation mantra of Gayatri. The Ray then entered the head at the crown and illumined it: the force of consciousness that ruled there is Intuition, the immediate perception of truth and reality, the cosmic consciousness gathered and concentrated at that peak. That is Upanishadic knowledge. If the source and foundation of the Vedic initiation was occult vision, the Upanishad meant a pure and direct Ideation. The next stage in the coming down or propagation of the Light was when it reached further down into the brain and the philosophical outlook grew with rational understanding and discursive argumentation as the channel for expression, the power to be cultivated and the limb to be developed. The Age of the Darshanas or Systems of Philosophy started with the Buddha and continued till it reached its peak in Shankaracharya. The age sought to give a bright and strong mental, even an intellectual body to the spiritual light, the consciousness of the highest truth and reality. In the Puranic Age the vital being was touched by the light of the spirit and principally on the highest, the mental level of that domain. It meant the advent of the element of feeling and emotiveness and imagination into the play of the Light, the beginning of their reclamation. This was rendered more concrete and more vibrant and intense in the next stage of the movement. The whole emotional being was taken up into the travailing crucible of consciousness. We may name it also as the age of the Bhagavatas, god-lovers, Bhaktas. It reached its climax in Chaitanya whose physical passion for God denoted that the lower ranges of the vital being (its physical foundations) were now stirred in man to awake and to receive the Light. Finally remains the physical, the most material to be worked upon and made conscious and illumined. That was the task of the Tantras. Viewed in that light one can easily understand why especial stress was laid in that system upon the esoteric discipline of the five m's (pancha makra),all preoccupied with the handling and harnessing of the grossest physical instincts and the most material instruments. The Tantric discipline bases itself upon Nature Power coiled up in Matter: the release of that all-conquering force through a purification and opening into the consciousness of the Divine Mother, the transcendent creatrix of the universe. The dynamic materialising aspect of consciousness was what inspired the Tantras: the others forming the Vedantic line, on the whole, were based on the primacy of the static being, the Purusha, aloof and withdrawing.
The Indian consciousness, we say, presented the movement as an intensive and inner, a spiritual process: it dealt with the substance itself, man's very nature and sought to know it from within and shape it consciously. In Europe where the frontal consciousness is more stressed and valued, the more characteristic feature of its history is the unfoldment and metamorphosis of the forms and expressions, the residuary powers, as it were, of man's evolving personality, individual and social.
05.21 - Being or Becoming and Having, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Again, in this ceaseless continuity of progression it is indeed not necessary at all to stop a while or somewhere and become something for one's perfection or fulfilment. The normal ideal that is placed before man or which he himself seeks is that he should become something, a definite pattern of some particular achievement, and possess something in the sense of an acquisition. An ordinary man must have an occupation and even an extraordinary man, the saint or the sage, must embody, that is to say, enchain himself in the name and form of a particular realisationa siddhnta or a siddhi. A man has to be -a soldier, a merchant, a politician or a poet, a philosopher: even so he has to be a Bhaktaor a jni, a maunior a vksiddha. Each human being should have a ticket and a roll number, an identity card. Now, for the soul of man none of these or other adjuncts are necessary: its progress and its growth are independent of such auxiliaries or correlates. A soul can be and even express itself perfectly at the highest point of its being without formulating itself, binding itself in a scheme of some external achievement or functioning. The soul need not possess any of the gloriesaiwaryasto realise itself, in order to be the abode of the Divine. Its very existence is full to the brim of the substance of the truth and its simple living marks the law or rhythm of that Truth.
A soulful man, whatever he says, thinks, feels or acts, always embodies wholly the Divine. Not that because he says, acts, thinks or feels in a certain manner that he has attained perfection or is in dynamic union with the summit a d integral consciousness. As the Mother brings out the distinction, although in a somewhat different context, the perfect soul-existence .cannot be judged by the forms it takes, the forms themselves have to be judged by the soul-existence.
10.02 - Beyond Vedanta, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The relation between the Supreme (over and above the creation) and the individual in the creation representing the creation is sometimes described in human terms to give it a concrete and graphic form. This relationship characteristically indicates the fundamental nature of the Reality it deals with. Thus in the Vedantic tradition the Supreme is worshipped as the Father (pit no asi). It is also a relation of Master and disciple, the leader and the led. Ii brings out into prominence the Purusha aspect of the Reality. In the Tantra the relation is as between Mother and child. The supreme Reality is the Divine Mother holding the universe in her arms. The individual worships and adores the Supreme Prakriti as a human child does. The Vaishnava makes the relation as between the lover and the beloved, and the love depicted is intensely vital and even physical, as intense and poignant as the ordinary ignorant human passion. It is to show that the Love Divine can beat the human love on its own ground, that is to say, it can be or it is as passionately sweet and as intensely intimate as any human love. It is why Bhakta Prahlad said to his beloved Vishnu "O Lord, what ordinary men feel and enjoy in and through their physical senses, may I have the same enjoyment in and through Thee."
Still the Vaishnava love in its concrete reality is a manifestation in a subtle world, the world of an inner physical consciousness.
1.01 - Prayer, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
There is a little difference in opinion between the teachers of knowledge and those of love, though both admit the power of Bhakti. The Jnanis hold Bhakti to be an instrument of liberation, the Bhaktas look upon it both as the instrument and the thing to be attained. To my mind this is a distinction without much difference. In fact, Bhakti, when used as an instrument, really means a lower form of worship, and the higher form becomes inseparable from the lower form of realisation at a later stage. Each seems to lay a great stress upon his own peculiar method of worship, forgetting that with perfect love true knowledge is bound to come even unsought, and that from perfect knowledge true love is inseparable.
Bearing this in mind let us try to understand what the great Vedantic commentators have to say on the subject. In explaining the Sutra vrittirasakridupadesht (Meditation is necessary, that having been often enjoined.), Bhagavn Shankara says, "Thus people say, 'He is devoted to the king, he is devoted to the Guru'; they say this of him who follows his Guru, and does so, having that following as the one end in view. Similarly they say, 'The loving wife meditates on her loving husband'; here also a kind of eager and continuous remembrance is meant." This is devotion according to Shankara.
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In commenting on the Sutra of Patanjali, Ishvara pranidhndv, i.e. "Or by the worship of the Supreme Lord" Bhoja says, "Pranidhna is that sort of Bhakti in which, without seeking results, such as sense-enjoyments etc., all works are dedicated to that Teacher of teachers." Bhagavan Vysa also, when commenting on the same, defines Pranidhana as "the form of Bhakti by which the mercy of the Supreme Lord comes to the Yogi, and blesses him by granting him his desires". According to Shndilya, "Bhakti is intense love to God." The best definition is, however, that given by the king of Bhaktas, Prahlda:
"That deathless love which the ignorant have for the fleeting objects of the senses as I keep meditating on Thee may not that love slip away from my heart!" Love! For whom? For the Supreme Lord Ishvara. Love for any other being, however great cannot be Bhakti; for, as Ramanuja says in his Shri Bhshya, quoting an ancient chrya, i.e. a great teacher:
1.02 - Self-Consecration, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
12:In the ordinary paths of Yoga the method used for dealing with these conflicting materials is direct and simple. One or another of the principal psychological forces in us is selected as our single means for attaining to the Divine; the rest is quieted into inertia or left to starve in its smallness. The Bhakta, seizing on the emotional forces of the being, the intense activities of the heart, abides concentrated in the love of God, gathered up as into a single one-pointed tongue of fire; he is indifferent to the activities of thought, throws behind him the importunities of the reason, cares nothing for the mind's thirst for knowledge. All the knowledge he needs is his faith and the inspirations that well up from a heart in communion with the Divine. He has no use for any will to works that is not turned to the direct worship of the Beloved or the service of the temple. The man of Knowledge, self-confined by a deliberate choice to the force and activities of discriminative thought, finds release in the mind's inward-drawn endeavour. He concentrates on the idea of the self, succeeds by a subtle inner discernment in distinguishing its silent presence amid the veiling activities of Nature, and through the perceptive idea arrives at the concrete spiritual experience. He is indifferent to the play of the emotions, deaf to the hunger-call of passion, closed to the activities of Life, -- the more blessed he, the sooner they fall away from him and leave him free, still and mute, the eternal non-doer. The body is his stumbling-block, the vital functions are his enemies; if their demands can be reduced to a minimum, that is his great good fortune. The endless difficulties that arise from the environing world are dismissed by erecting firmly against them a defence of outer physical and inner spiritual solitude; safe behind a wall of inner silence, he remains impassive and untouched by the world and by others. To be alone with oneself or alone with the Divine, to walk apart with God and his devotees, to entrench oneself in the single self-ward endeavour of the mind or Godward passion of the heart is the trend of these Yogas. The problem is solved by the excision of all but the one central difficulty which pursues the only chosen motive-force; into the midst of the dividing calls of our nature the principle of an exclusive concentration comes sovereignly to our rescue.
13:But for the Sadhaka of the integral Yoga this inner or this outer solitude can only be incidents or periods in his spiritual progress. Accepting life, he has to bear not only his own burden, but a great part of the world's burden too along with it, as a continuation of his own sufficiently heavy load. Therefore his Yoga has much more of the nature of a battle than others'; but this is not only an individual battle, it is a collective war waged over a considerable country. He has not only to conquer in himself the forces of egoistic falsehood and disorder, but to conquer them as representatives of the same adverse and inexhaustible forces in the world. Their representative character gives them a much more obstinate capacity of resistance, an almost endless right to recurrence. Often he finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he has still to win it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe.
1.02 - The Philosophy of Ishvara, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Who is Ishvara? Janmdyasya yatah "From whom is the birth, continuation, and dissolution of the universe," He is Ishvara "the Eternal, the Pure, the Ever-Free, the Almighty, the AllKnowing, the All-Merciful, the Teacher of all teachers"; and above all, Sa Ishvarah anirvachaniyapremasvarupah "He the Lord is, of His own nature, inexpressible Love." These certainly are the definitions of a Personal God. Are there then two Gods the "Not this, not this," the Sat-chit-nanda, the Existence-Knowledge-Bliss of the philosopher, and this God of Love of the Bhakta? No, it is the same Sat-chit-ananda who is also the God of Love, the impersonal and personal in one. It has always to be understood that the Personal God worshipped by the Bhakta is not separate or different from the Brahman. All is Brahman, the One without a second; only the Brahman, as unity or absolute, is too much of an abstraction to be loved and worshipped; so the Bhakta chooses the relative aspect of Brahman, that is, Ishvara, the Supreme Ruler. To use a simile: Brahman is as the clay or substance out of which an infinite variety of articles are fashioned. As clay, they are all one; but form or manifestation differentiates them. Before every one of them was made, they all existed potentially in the clay, and, of course, they are identical substantially; but when formed, and so long as the form remains, they are separate and different; the clay-mouse can never become a clay-elephant, because, as manifestations, form alone makes them what they are, though as unformed clay they are all one.
Ishvara is the highest manifestation of the Absolute Reality, or in other words, the highest possible reading of the Absolute by the human mind. Creation is eternal, and so also is Ishvara.
1.02 - The Recovery, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
We reached the month of April. Sri Aurobindo's rapid progress became widely known and people began to clamour for a Darshan; they had already missed two of them, and for the next one in August it would be too painfully long to wait. The Mother also began to plead on behalf of the Bhaktas, though not much pleading was needed. For we know that when the Mother's heart had melted, the Father's would not take long to do so. Besides, the Mother probably wanted Sri Aurobindo to take up his regular activities as soon as possible. Even for him she would not make any exception. Her dynamic nature cannot brook too long an ease. April 24th was then fixed for the Darshan, as it was the day of the Mother's final arrival in Pondicherry. Thenceforth the April Darshan became a permanent feature. The date well suited the professors and students, since it fell within the span of the summer holidays. But the darshan time had to be changed from the morning to the afternoon and it would be a darshan in the true sense of the word. For the devotees would simply come and stand for a brief while before the Mother and the Master, have their darshan and quietly leave. Sri Aurobindo tersely remarked, "No more of that long seven-hour darshan!" Formerly the Darshan was observed with a great ceremonial pomp. Starting at about 7.30 a.m., it ran with one breathing interval, up to 3 p.m. The devotees offered their garlands and flowers, did two, even three or four pranams to the Mother and the Master who remained glued to one place throughout the ordeal, and endured another martyrdom under this excessive display of bhakti even as Raman Maharshi suffered from the "plague of prasads". Now, all that was cut down at one stroke by the force of external circumstances, and all expression transformed into a quiet inner adoration which is a characteristic of this Yoga. Sri Aurobindo's accident made the ceremonial Darshan a thing of past history.
On the eve of the Darshan, the Mother washed Sri Aurobindo's hair with our help. It was such an elaborate and complicated affair that had it been left in our hands, it would have ended in confusion, particularly because it had to be done in the bedroom. Hot and cold water, basins, soap, powder, etc., etc., had to be kept ready. What a ceremony really, this washing was! No wonder ladies go in for bob or shingle. Formerly, Sri Aurobindo, it seems, used to wash his long hair every night, but I am sure he did without all this paraphernalia. His secluded life had, of course, simplified the whole complex process. Later on when a bathroom adjoining his living room was built, washing lost its formidable character. Sri Aurobindo bore all this torture as a part of the game, I suppose.
The Darshan day at last! In the morning, the Mother arrived in his room with a flower, probably a red lotus, knelt before the Lord, placed the lotus on his bed and bowed down to receive his blessings and his sweet smile. This was the second time I saw her doing pranam to him. The first time was on her birthday, February 21. It was a revelation to me, for I did not expect her to bow down in the Indian way. On every Darshan day since then I enjoyed the sight. On other days she used to take his hand and lightly kiss it. With her customary drive, she chalked out the Darshan programme, the time for Sri Aurobindo's lunch and of her coming for the Darshan. We had to be ready and keep the Master ready too. From the early morning time began to move fast, the Mother was seen rushing about, she had so many things to attend to! Everything finished, clad in a lovely sari, a crown adorning her shapely head, looking like a veritable Goddess, she entered Sri Aurobindo's room with brisk steps, earlier than the appointed time, as was her wont. She gave a quick glance at us. We were all attention. The entire group was present, it being the first Darshan after the accident. She was pleased to find us ready. Sri Aurobindo was dressed in an immaculate white dhoti, its border daintily creased, as is the custom in Bengal; a silk chaddar across his chest and his long shining hair flowing down a picture that reminded us of Shiva and Shakti going out to give darshan to their Bhaktas; Sri Aurobindo was in front and the Mother behind. They sat together as on other Darshan days, she on his right, a glorious view, and the ceremony began.
It was, however, a simple Darshan. One by one the sadhaks stood for a brief moment before the One-in-Two, and passed on quietly thrilled and exalted by their silent look and gracious smile. The feelings of the sadhaks can be imagined when they saw their beloved Master restored to his normal health! The Darshan was over within an hour, and when Sri Aurobindo was back in his room Dr. Rao remarked in his childlike manner, "Sir, you looked grand at the Darshan!" Sri Aurobindo smiled and we retorted, just to tease him, "At other times he doesn't?" Rao, nonplussed, replied, "No, no, I did not mean that." Truly, Rao had expressed the sentiments of hundreds of devotees who had a glimpse of him during the Darshan. What a grandeur and majesty in his simple silent pose! What a power, as if he held the whole world in the palm of his hand! If ever a human being could attain the stature of a god, he was there for all to see and be blessed by. Many have had a deep change after just one touch of his God-like magnificence. "A touch can alter the fixed front of Fate." Many had visions and boons they had long been seeking for, and for the sadhaks each Darshan was a step to a further milestone towards the Eternal. Sri Aurobindo had said: "Darshans are periods of great descents!" It was not for nothing that Hitler chose the 15th of August for his royal ascension in Buckingham Palace and got the first heavy blow. Nor was it for nothing that India gained her independence on that immortal day.
--
There was a rush to buy the book and get Sri Aurobindo's autograph in the bargain! For a divine policy was announced whose brain-wave it was, I do not know that all buyers would be favoured with the autograph of the Master. Volume after volume began to pour in with the names of the buyers appended to them. The names were sometimes quite long, such as Purushottamdas Thakurdas Chintamani Patil, and he would ask, "Am I to write all that?" And there were fanciful spellings to boot! Dates as well! At times the names of the husband and his wife together! If sometimes a name struck his fancy he would ask, "Who the devil is he?" or "Who is this Lord Shiva?" or we, would ourselves say that he was so and so. Many were the Bhaktas who could not understand a word of the book but bought it for the sake of his blessings. For us sadhaks who could not afford to buy it, the book was given free on our birthday, with the autograph added to it. Later all the books of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo when published, were given to us according to our needs, on our birthdays. The Mother would ask, "Do you want any book? Have you got this book?" One wonders how much money was spent on this; and the custom continues even now, though in a modified form.
When Vol. III came out, it being the bulkiest, Sri Aurobindo remarked, "What a fat elephant!" And when they entered the room in packs and were heaped on the side-couch waiting for the autograph, they made an impressive herd and thrilled us with joy that The Life Divine had at last been delivered on this woe-begone planet of ours! But with the encroaching dimness of his eye-sight, the Mother stopped the practice of giving autographs altogether.
1.03 - Spiritual Realisation, The aim of Bhakti-Yoga, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
To the Bhakta these dry details are necessary only to streng then his will; beyond that they are of no use to him. For he is treading on a path which is fitted very soon to lead him beyond the hazy and turbulent regions of reason, to lead him to the realm of realisation. He, soon, through the mercy of the Lord, reaches a plane where pedantic and powerless reason is left far behind, and the mere intellectual groping through the dark gives place to the daylight of direct perception. He no more reasons and believes, he almost perceives. He no more argues, he senses. And is not this seeing God, and feeling God, and enjoying God higher than everything else? Nay, Bhaktas have not been wanting who have maintained that it is higher than even Moksha liberation. And is it not also the highest utility? There are people and a good many of them too in the world who are convinced that only that is of use and utility which brings to man creature-comforts. Even religion, God, eternity, soul, none of these is of any use to them, as they do not bring them money or physical comfort. To such, all those things which do not go to gratify the senses and appease the appetites are of no utility. In every mind, utility, however, is conditioned by its own peculiar wants. To men, therefore, who never rise higher than eating, drinking, begetting progeny, and dying, the only gain is in sense enjoyments; and they must wait and go through many more births and reincarnations to learn to feel even the faintest necessity for anything higher. But those to whom the eternal interests of the soul are of much higher value than the fleeting interests of this mundane life, to whom the gratification of the senses is but like the thoughtless play of the baby, to them God and the love of God form the highest and the only utility of human existence. Thank God there are some such still living in this world of too much worldliness.
Bhakti-Yoga, as we have said, is divided into the Gauni or the preparatory, and the Par or the supreme forms. We shall find, as we go on, how in the preparatory stage we unavoidably stand in need of many concrete helps to enable us to get on; and indeed the mythological and symbological parts of all religions are natural growths which early environ the aspiring soul and help it Godward. It is also a significant fact that spiritual giants have been produced only in those systems of religion where there is an exuberant growth of rich mythology and ritualism. The dry fanatical forms of religion which attempt to eradicate all that is poetical, all that is beautiful and sublime, all that gives a firm grasp to the infant mind tottering in its Godward way the forms which attempt to break down the very ridge-poles of the spiritual roof, and in their ignorant and superstitious conceptions of truth try to drive away all that is life-giving, all that furnishes the formative material to the spiritual plant growing in the human soul such forms of religion too soon find that all that is left to them is but an empty shell, a contentless frame of words and sophistry with perhaps a little flavour of a kind of social scavengering or the socalled spirit of reform.
1.04 - ADVICE TO HOUSEHOLDERS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
At dawn some of the devotees were up. They saw the Master, naked as a child, pacing up and down the room, repeating the names of the various gods and goddesses. His voice was sweet as nectar. Now he would look at the Ganges, now stop in front of the pictures hanging on the wall and bow down before them, chanting all the while the holy names in his sweet voice. He chanted: "Veda, Purana, Tantra; Gita, Gayatri; Bhagavata, Bhakta, Bhagavan." Referring to the Gita, he repeated many times, "Tagi, tagi, tagi."
Now and then he would say: "O Mother, Thou art verily Brahman, and Thou art verily akti. Thou art Purusha and Thou art Prakriti. Thou art Virat. Thou art the Absolute, and Thou dost manifest Thyself as the Relative. Thou art verily the twenty-four cosmic principles."
1.04 - The Divine Mother - This Is She, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
I remember Nishikanto, a sadhak-poet, who fell seriously ill after being cured of an equally serious illness. The Mother giving the occult reason told me that when he came to her on his birthday, she saw a definite crack in his faith. But a man of quite a different temperament, he pulled himself up, while the cancer-patient could not. "Why take up such a case at all?" one may ask. Well, it was the patient who made the choice; he had no faith in the usual medico-surgical treatment whose efficacy is at best doubtful. Here, he had at least the unique opportunity to live under the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's direct care and supervision. For a Bhakta, there cannot be a greater boon. If he lives, it will be glorious; if he dies, he will have a better life in the next birth.
Some years ago the Mother said in connection with another cancer case that was referred to her from outside, that cancer has been conquered in the subtle world and the conquest will soon materialise here.
1.05 - Bhakti Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
28. A realised Bhakta is free from lust, egoism, mine-ness, hatred, jealousy, greed. He is full of humility, compassion and kindness. He sees God in all beings, in all objects. He has equal vision and a balanced mind.
29. Draupadi was an Arta-Bhaktini; Nachiketas was Jijnasu- Bhakta; Dhruva was an Arthar thee- Bhakta; Suka Deva was a Jnani- Bhakta; Prahlada was an absolutely Nishkama Bhakta.
30. Bhakti is immortalising nectar. It transmutes a man into divinity. It makes him perfect. It bestows on him everlasting peace and bliss.
1.05 - Qualifications of the Aspirant and the Teacher, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Bhagavn Ramakrishna used to tell a story of some men who went into a mango orchard and busied themselves in counting the leaves, the twigs, and the branches, examining their colour, comparing their size, and noting down everything most carefully, and then got up a learned discussion on each of these topics, which were undoubtedly highly interesting to them. But one of them, more sensible than the others, did not care for all these things. and instead thereof, began to eat the mango fruit. And was he not wise? So leave this counting of leaves and twigs and note-taking to others. This kind of work has its proper place, but not here in the spiritual domain. You never see a strong spiritual man among these "leaf counters". Religion, the highest aim, the highest glory of man, does not require so much labour. If you want to be a Bhakta, it is not at all necessary for you to know whether Krishna was born in Mathur or in Vraja, what he was doing, or just the exact date on which he pronounced the teachings of the Git. You only require to feel the craving for the beautiful lessons of duty and love in the Gita. All the other particulars about it and its author are for the enjoyment of the learned. Let them have what they desire. Say "Shntih, Shntih" to their learned controversies, and let us "eat the mangoes".
The second condition necessary in the teacher is sinlessness. The question is often asked,
1.05 - THE MASTER AND KESHAB, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"He who is called Brahman by the jnanis is known as tman by the yogis and as Bhagavan by the Bhaktas. The same brahmin is called priest, when worshipping in the temple, and cook, when preparing a meal in the kitchen. The jnani sticking to the path of knowledge, always reasons about the Reality, saying, 'Not this, not this'. Brahman is neither 'this' nor 'that'; It is neither the universe nor its living beings. Reasoning in this way, the mind becomes steady. Then it disappears and the aspirant goes into samdhi.
This is the knowledge of Brahman. It is the unwavering conviction of the jnani that Brahman alone is real and the world illusory. All these names and forms are illusory, like a dream. What Brahman is cannot be described. One cannot even say that Brahman is a Person. This is the opinion of the jnanis, the followers of Vedanta philosophy.
"But the Bhaktas accept all the states of consciousness. They take the waking state to be real also. They don't think the world to be illusory, like a dream. They say that the universe is a manifestation of God's power and glory. God has created all these - sky, stars, moon, sun, mountains, ocean, men, animals. They constitute His glory. He is within us, in our hearts. Again, He is outside. The most advanced devotees say that He Himself has become all this - the twenty-four cosmic principles, the universe, and all living beings. The devotee of God wants to eat sugar, not to become sugar. (All laugh.)
"Do you know how a lover of God feels? His attitude is: 'O God, Thou are the Master, and I am Thy servant. Thou art the Mother, and I am Thy child.' Or again: 'Thou art my Father and Mother. Thou art the Whole, and I am a part.' He doesn't like to say, 'I am Brahman.'
--
"Karmayoga is very hard indeed. In the Kaliyuga it is extremely difficult to perform the rites enjoined in the scriptures. Nowadays man's life is centred on food alone. He cannot perform many scriptural rites. Suppose a man is laid up with fever. If you attempt a slow cure with the old-fashioned indigenous remedies, before long his life may be snuffed out. He can't stand much delay. Nowadays the drastic 'D Gupta' mixture is appropriate. In the Kaliyuga the best way is bhaktiyoga, the path of devotion-singing the praises of the Lord, and prayer. The path of devotion alone is the religion for this age. (To the Brahmo devotees) Yours also is the path of devotion. Blessed you are indeed that you chant the name of Hari and sing the Divine Mother's glories. I like your attitude. You don't call the world a dream like the non-dualists. You are not Brahmajnanis like them; you are Bhaktas, lovers of God. That you speak of Him as a Person is also good. You are devotees. You will certainly realize Him if you call on Him with sincerity and earnestness."
The boat cast anchor at Kayalaghat and the passengers prepared to disembark. On coming outside they noticed that the full moon was up. The trees, the buildings, and the boats on the Ganges were bathed in its mellow light. A carriage was hailed for the Master, and M. and a few devotees got in with him. The Master asked for Keshab.
1.06 - Raja Yoga, #Amrita Gita, #Swami Sivananda Saraswati, #Hinduism
39. A Bhakta gets Bhava-Samadhi, a Jnani gets Badha-Samadhi, a Raja Yogi gets Nirodha Samadhi.
THUS ENDS RAJA YOGA
1.06 - THE MASTER WITH THE BRAHMO DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "No one can say with finality that God is only 'this' and nothing else. He is formless, and again He has forms. For the Bhakta He assumes forms. But He is formless for the jnani, that is, for him who looks on the world as a mere dream. The Bhakta feels that he is one entity and the world another. Therefore God reveals Himself to him as a Person. But the jnani-the Vedantist, for instance-always reasons, applying the process of 'Not this, not this'. Through this discrimination he realizes, by his inner perception, that the ego and the universe are both illusory, like a dream. Then the jnani realizes Brahman in his own consciousness. He cannot describe what Brahman is.
"Do you know what I mean? Think of Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute, as a shoreless ocean. Through the cooling influence, as it were, of the Bhakta's love, the water has frozen at places into blocks of ice. In other words, God now and then assumes various forms for His lovers and reveals Himself to them as a Person. But with the rising of the sun of Knowledge, the blocks of ice melt. Then one doesn't feel any more that God is a Person, nor does one see God's forms. What He is cannot be described. Who will describe Him? He who would do so disappears. He cannot find his 'I' any more.
Illusoriness of "I"
--
"The Saguna Brahman is meant for the Bhaktas. In other words, a Bhakta believes that God has attributes and reveals Himself to men as a Person, assuming forms. It is He who listens to our prayers. The prayers that you utter are directed to Him alone. You are Bhaktas, not jnanis or Vedantists. It doesn't matter whether you accept God with form or not. It is enough to feel that God is a Person who listens to our prayers, who creates, preserves, and destroys the universe, and who is endowed with infinite power.
"It is easier to attain God by following the path of devotion."
--
It was about half past eight when the evening worship began in the prayer hall. Soon the moon rose in the autumn sky and flooded the trees and creepers of the garden with its light. After prayer the devotees began to sing. Sri Ramakrishna was dancing, intoxicated with love of God. The Brahmo devotees danced around him to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals. All appeared to be in a very joyous mood. The place echoed and reechoed with God's holy name. When the music had stopped, Sri Ramakrishna prostrated himself on the ground and, making salutations to the Divine Mother again and again, said: "Bhagavata- Bhakta-Bhagavan! My salutations at the feet of the jnanis! My salutations at the feet of the Bhaktas! I salute the Bhaktas who believe in God with form, and I salute the Bhaktas who believe in God without form. I salute the knowers of Brahman of olden times. And my salutations at the feet of the modern knowers of Brahman of the Brahmo Samaj!"
Then the Master and the devotees enjoyed a supper of delicious dishes, which Benimadhav, their host, had provided.
1.07 - Raja-Yoga in Brief, #Raja-Yoga, #Swami Vivkenanda, #unset
"He who hates none, who is the friend of all, who is merciful to all, who has nothing of his own, who is free from egoism, who is even-minded in pain and pleasure, who is forbearing, who is always satisfied, who works always in Yoga, whose self has become controlled, whose will is firm, whose mind and intellect are given up unto Me, such a one is My beloved Bhakta. From whom comes no disturbance, who cannot be disturbed by others, who is free from joy, anger, fear, and anxiety, such a one is My beloved. He who does not depend on anything, who is pure and active, who does not care whether good comes or evil, and never becomes miserable, who has given up all efforts for himself; who is the same in praise or in blame, with a silent, thoughtful mind, blessed with what little comes in his way, homeless, for the whole world is his home, and who is steady in his ideas, such a one is My beloved Bhakta." Such alone become Yogis.
- - -
1.07 - THE MASTER AND VIJAY GOSWAMI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Even after attaining samdhi, some retain the 'servant ego' or the 'devotee ego'. The Bhakta keeps this 'I-consciousness'. He says, 'O God, Thou art the Master and I am Thy servant; Thou art the Lord and I am Thy devotee.' He feels that way even after the realization of God. His 'I' is not completely effaced. Again, by constantly practising this kind of 'I-consciousness', one ultimately attains God. This is called bhaktiyoga.
"One can attain the Knowledge of Brahman, too, by following the path of bhakti. God is all-powerful. He may give His devotee Brahmajnna also, if He so wills. But the devotee generally doesn't seek the Knowledge of the Absolute. He would rather have the consciousness that God is the Master and he the servant, or that God is the Divine Mother and he the child."
1.08a - The Ladder, #A Garden of Pomegranates - An Outline of the Qabalah, #Israel Regardie, #Occultism
heart and soul to its worship until it blossoms within his own heart. He must look upon this ideal in various ways, as his Master, his Friend, his Parent, his Beloved, or himself as the Priest of his God. This is Bhakta Yoga, union by the Path of Devotion.
In the first instance, he gives up all consideration of per- sonal comfort and reward for His sake ; and in the second case, looks upon his chosen God as his dearest friend, feel- ing no constraint in His presence. There is no trace of awe in his love, for he looks upon himself as the child of his
1.08 - Attendants, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
By the very mould of his nature a Bhakta, he came into our midst by his innate right, as I have said. Not a Bhakta of the traditional type, but one who has chosen service as the means of self-expression and fundamental realisation. Even the word realisation may not be correct, for self-giving alone is what counts with him. Service is his very food. If any of us did his part of the job, he would get annoyed and exclaim, "You are depriving me of my food; I can remain without food but not without work." That sums up Champaklal and that is exactly the spirit he maintained unflinchingly throughout the long decade that we lived and worked together. The Mother had entire trust in him and putting him in Sri Aurobindo's service along with us, felt quite at ease. Sri Aurobindo also relied on him for all necessary information regarding the Mother and other particulars. Once the Mother came to Sri Aurobindo's room and sat as usual on the couch opposite. We were just watching. Sri Aurobindo signed to Champaklal turning his glance towards the Mother. Champaklal understood and jumped up and put some cushions at the Mother's back. That is their way!
I am firmly convinced that through the ages he has been closely connected with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, otherwise how could he have been selected as Sri Aurobindo's personal attendant, even as a young man, as soon as he arrived? When he came to see Sri Aurobindo for the first time, he lay prostrate at his feet for an hour, all bathed in happy tears! And when he was leaving, Sri Aurobindo asked one of his older companions to bring him back with him! It is he who first accepted Sri Aurobindo as the Divine Father and called him Father, accepted the Mother as the Divine Mother and began to call her Mother. When he offered to wash the 'Father's' clothes, Sri Aurobindo warned him that he would be mocked at, but that did not deter him. He had gone without food and sleep, had not moved from his place lest the Master should need something or should even have to wait a minute more. To serve Sri Aurobindo was in one way quite easy, for he would never make any demands on us, was content with the main necessities being met and would never express any displeasure if we failed him. This very easiness kept us alert, for one who didn't ask for more than the bare minimum, needed a careful, vigilant watch so that he could be given a little more comfort and ease. Champaklal kept that vigilant eye always. He was more familiar with Sri Aurobindo's nature and temperament by love and long experience and felt his needs on his very pulse. If he saw that Sri Aurobindo needed some side pillows, he got them made; if his footstool was a bit high or low, he adjusted it to the required height. He put a time-piece by his side, for he knew that Sri Aurobindo was in the habit of frequently seeing the time. Such small things that would pass unnoticed because our imaginative perception was perhaps dull, were caught by his sensitive insight and he tried to make "happy and comfortable" the life of the impersonal Brahman. Sri Aurobindo, when he sat on the edge of the bed and had to wait long for the Mother's arrival, seemed to feel drowsy; his body would lean backwards and would then right itself. Still, he would not ask for any assistance but this, not from any sense of egoism. He would put up with any inconvenience but if we offered him some help, he did not refuse it. We simply looked on without knowing how to meet the situation, but Champaklal rose to the occasion: he made a pile of pillows to serve as his back-rest and to prevent them from tumbling down, supported them from behind. To observe economy due to the War, the Mother advised us not to change Sri Aurobindo's bed-sheets too often, but if there was a tiny stain on an otherwise clean white sheet, Champaklal would hesitate to use it, saying, "How can we use anything unclean for the Lord?" His making the bed was a sight worth seeing. I wonder if even an expert housewife would do it so perfectly! The bed-sheet had not the slightest crease anywhere, it shone with a marble smoothness. In everything his aim was to be flawless. Thus it put others who had to work with him into a very difficult corner. He claimed to have acquired this thoroughness under the apprenticeship of the Mother. I sometimes got my share of rebuke from him if I was not tidy or clean enough: "You are a doctor and you still don't wash your hands?" he would say. The fact in his case was that over and above his own training he belonged to a very orthodox Brahmin family and had meticulously observed all the practices ordained by the Shastras and enjoined upon the children by his orthodox priest-father. We were quite modern people having our own ideas of things, so sometimes clash and conflict would arise. Besides, he was in some parts sensitive like a child. We had to be very careful not to upset him and to spare his feelings as much as we could. He could not understand jokes or any round-about manner. He told me that Sri Aurobindo had once spoken about this to the Mother. It was just after he had settled here. His father wrote a letter to Sri Aurobindo saying that Champaklal's marriage had been fixed; he had only to go, undergo the marriage ceremony and then come back. Sri Aurobindo gravely said, "I suppose we have to send back Champaklal." He was much perturbed to hear it. Then Sri Aurobindo added, "He doesn't understand jokes." He knew, however, how to get things done by the Divine, blessings written on a book, for instance, an autograph on a photo. If asked by Champaklal, Sri Aurobindo would not refuse. The Mother too has to accede to the wishes of her Bhakta, her "most faithful child".
One day he conceived the idea of getting Sri Aurobindo's footprints; but how was he to do it without troubling him in any way or without informing him in advance? He had a brain-wave. He kept a white sheet of paper and pencil ready. As soon as Sri Aurobindo sat on the chair, he pushed the sheet of paper under his feet and asked, "May I draw your footprint?" Sri Aurobindo not only consented but later wrote "Love and Blessings" on the drawing. Let us not forget, by the way, that Champaklal is an artist. Whenever he saw Sri Aurobindo in what seemed to him statuesque poses his heart would go into rapture and he would call us to share his joy. He would exclaim, "Ah, if a photograph could be taken of this marvellous pose!" The Mother has said that he has "a natural talent already developed to an unusual degree". On one of his birthdays he painted two lotuses, white and red, and offered the pictures to the Mother. She was very pleased and said she would take them to Sri Aurobindo and ask him to write something. He wrote under the painting of the white lotus: Aditi, The Divine Mother. And the Mother wrote on the other: The Avatar. But she forbade Champaklal to show them to anyone, for people would not understand what they meant.
--
I shall quote another instance at the risk of being mocked at by the rationalists and being dubbed an apostate, for was I not once a materialist myself? As I have said, Sri Aurobindo used to take a peppermint pastille while he was dictating Savitri and Champaklal's role was to offer it, when wanted. He would wait and wait even if not called at the due hour, he would sometimes hurry his meal so as not to miss the occasion. I thought, "Why should I not get one chance, at least?" But my friend would hear the call even if it was whispered and would run from wherever he might be in the room. Here again, Sri Aurobindo consciously or unconsciously responded to my silent wish by asking one day for the pastille much earlier than the usual time, when Champaklal was not present. He came up and waited for the call. I put on a very innocent face though now and again a mischievous smile tried to betray it. Then at last, very much piqued, Champaklal asked me, "What's the matter? He is not asking for the pastille?" I could not help breaking into laughter. He understood but enquired exactly when he had asked, who had given it, etc., etc. All these incidents were our little pranks played among ourselves and between us and the Master. I shall not protest if anyone calls me too credulous and finds these as nothing but sentimental outpourings of Bhaktas. These instances do illustrate why I call Champaklal a real Bhakta and have looked upon his service as having the true spirit. No wonder that the Lord, during his last hours, amply recompensed him by repeatedly embracing him, to our great bewildered delight.
Some critics might find this a very rosy picture of Champaklal, drawn, as one would expect, by a colleague who would keep the thorns out of their sight. Thorns he has, who has not? In 1935, when I knew very little of him, I wrote to Sri Aurobindo, "Champaklal came to the Dispensary and had an outburst with me. I am sure he will tell the Mother about it." He replied, "Champaklal does not usually tell Mother about these things outbursts of that kind are too common with him. And when heat meets heat It is almost midsummer now." Champaklal is himself aware of his defects and repents them very much. Sometimes on the verge of despair, he confesses that complete change of nature is impossible except by the Divine Grace. More than once after losing his temper with me, not always without cause, he regretted his explosion and said, "I hope you won't mind; you know my nature," and became his old sweet self. He has a streak of Bholanath in him, and says that he must have been an avadht[2] in his previous life. He has prayed again and again to the Mother for the removal of this weakness in his nature. He is outspoken, very straightforward the Mother has vouched for it he cannot bear any kind of insincerity. He cannot make or even see any compromise made with falsehood; his nature is alien to the ways of the world. Much of his apparent rudeness and ill temper stems from this uncompromising spirit. This, of course, does not save him from misjudging people at times, but when shown his fault, he never tries to cover it up. I believe that there should be someone who is upright and unsparing, and as firm as steel when all around there is such a mixture of motives. He serves as the gate-keeper of Heaven. Parodying Sri Aurobindo's verse, "None can reach Heaven who has not passed through Hell," I would mutter, "None can go to the Mother who has not passed through Champaklal!"
--
Such appalling mist could only be dissolved by counterbalancing incidents like the one of our old doctor Becharlal, a true Bhakta by nature. Sri Aurobindo remarked that his bhakti was genuine. How many times he was on the point of shedding tears on seeing his "Bhagawan suffer"! Apart from his age, his emotional nature rendered him incapable of doing anything but light work and we gave him only such work. Neither would he ask for more, since he knew himself quite well. If he could just breathe the nearness of the Lord, that was all he wanted. That was his lifelong aspiration, it appeared, and it was fulfilled. He was called Dadaji by us and given his due respect. During the early days of the accident, in the tranquil atmosphere of the room, we would hear some sudden sobbing trying in vain to control itself. It was our doctor who had been moved to sorrow by the "painful condition" of his beloved Lord! Or sometimes there were tears of spiritual fervour.
When after his bath Sri Aurobindo lay down for a little rest, our doctor would squat behind or beside him and gaze on the reclining god who was in serene repose with both hands locked above the head. Becharlal said that at those moments especially, Sri Aurobindo appeared to him just like Lord Shiva and he felt a great impulse to embrace him. Stretched at full length on the bed, his well-formed body almost filling it without any covering on the upper part, the large full head and the radiant face, caring nothing for earthly vanities, yet the Lord of the world, captured not only Dr. Becharlal's heart but ours as well. Dr. Becharlal would be full of peace and rapture in his presence but could not stay long because of his old-age infirmities. Dr. Manilal remarked to Sri Aurobindo that among all of us Dr. Becharlal profited most from his association with Sri Aurobindo.
1.08 - THE MASTERS BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Likewise, through the cooling influence of bhakti, one sees forms of God in the Ocean of the Absolute. These forms are meant for the Bhaktas, the lovers of God. But when the Sun of Knowledge rises, the ice melts; it becomes the same water it was before. Water above and water below, everywhere nothing but water. Therefore a prayer in the Bhagavata says: 'O Lord, Thou hast form, and Thou art also formless. Thou walkest before us, O Lord, in the shape of a man; again, Thou hast been described in the Vedas as beyond words and thought.'
"But you may say that for certain devotees God assumes eternal forms. There are places in the ocean where the ice doesn't melt at all. It assumes the form of quartz."
1.09 - The Chosen Ideal, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
The next thing to be considered is what we know as Ishta-Nishth. One who aspires to be a Bhakta must know that "so many opinions are so many ways". He must know that all the various sects of the various religions are the various manifestations of the glory of the same Lord. "They call You by so many names; they divide You, as it were, by different names, yet in each one of these is to be found Your omnipotence....You reach the worshipper through all of these, neither is there any special time so long as the soul has intense love for You. You are so easy of approach; it is my misfortune that I cannot love You." Not only this, the Bhakta must take care not to hate, nor even to criticise those radiant sons of light who are the founders of various sects; he must not even hear them spoken ill of. Very few indeed are those who are at once the possessors of an extensive sympathy and power of appreciation, as well as an intensity of love. We find, as a rule, that liberal and sympathetic sects lose the intensity of religious feeling, and in their hands, religion is apt to degenerate into a kind of politico-social club life.
On the other hand, intensely narrow sectaries, whilst displaying a very commendable love of their own ideals, are seen to have acquired every particle of that love by hating every one who is not of exactly the same opinions as themselves. Would to God that this world was full of men who were as intense in their love as worldwide in their sympathies! But such are only few and far between. Yet we know that it is practicable to educate large numbers of human beings into the ideal of a wonderful blending of both the width and the intensity of love; and the way to do that is by this path of the Istha-Nishtha or "steadfast devotion to the chosen ideal". Every sect of every religion presents only one ideal of its own to mankind, but the eternal Vedantic religion opens to mankind an infinite number of doors for ingress into the inner shrine of divinity, and places before humanity an almost inexhaustible array of ideals, there being in each of them a manifestation of the Eternal One. With the kindest solicitude, the Vedanta points out to aspiring men and women the numerous roads, hewn out of the solid rock of the realities of human life, by the glorious sons, or human manifestations, of God, in the past and in the present, and stands with outstretched arms to welcome all to welcome even those that are yet to be to that Home of Truth and that Ocean of Bliss, wherein the human soul, liberated from the net of My, may transport itself with perfect freedom and with eternal joy.
1.1.01 - Seeking the Divine, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
All this, however, has nothing to do with what the Mother wished to say in the morning. What she told you was that you seemed to have a fixed notion about the Divine, as of a rather distant Being somewhere whom you expect to give you an article called Ananda, and, when there is some prospect of his giving it to you, you are on good terms with him, but when he doesn't, you quarrel and revolt and call him names! And she said a notion of the kind was in itself an obstacle, - because it is rather far from the Truth, - in the way of realising the Divine. What is this Ananda that you seek, after all? The mind can see in it nothing but a pleasant psychological condition, - but if it were only that, it would not be the rapture which the Bhaktas and the mystics find in it. When the Ananda comes into you, it is the Divine who comes into you; just as when the Peace flows into you, it is the Divine who is invading you, or when you are flooded with Light, it is the flood of the Divine Himself that is around you. Of course, the Divine is something much more; many other things besides and in them all a Presence, a
Being, a Divine Person; for the Divine is Krishna, is Shiva, is the Supreme Mother But through the Ananda you can perceive the Anandamaya Krishna; for the Ananda is the subtle body and being of Krishna; through the Peace you can perceive the
Shantimaya Shiva; in the Light, in the delivering Knowledge, the Love, the fulfilling and uplifting Power you can meet the presence of the Divine Mother It is this perception that makes the experiences of the Bhaktas and mystics so rapturous and enables them to pass more easily through the nights of anguish and separation - when there is this soul-perception, it gives to even a little or brief Ananda a force or value it would not otherwise have and the Ananda itself gathers by it a growing power to stay, to return, to increase.This was what the Mother meant
Seeking the Divine
1.10 - THE MASTER WITH THE BRAHMO DEVOTEES (II), #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"I give the Brahmos the illustration of water and ice. Satchidananda is like an endless expanse of water. The water of the great ocean in cold regions freezes into blocks of ice. Similarly, through the cooling influence of divine love, Satchidananda assumes forms for the sake of the Bhaktas. The rishis had the vision of the supersensuous Spirit-form and talked with It. But devotees acquire a 'love body', and with its help they see the Spirit-form of the Absolute.
"It is also said in the Vedas that Brahman is beyond mind and words. The heat of the sun of Knowledge melts the ice-like form of the Personal God. On attaining the Knowledge of Brahman and communing with It in nirvikalpa samdhi, one realizes Brahman, the Infinite, without form or shape and beyond mind and words.
1.10 - The Methods and the Means, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
The question of food has always been one of the most vital with the Bhaktas. Apart from the extravagance into which some of the Bhakti sects have run, there is a great truth underlying this question of food. We must remember that, according to the Sankhya philosophy, the Sattva, Rajas, and Tamas, which in the state of homogeneous equilibrium form the Prakriti, and in the heterogeneous disturbed condition form the universe are both the substance and the quality of Prakriti. As such they are the materials out of which every human form has been manufactured, and the predominance of the Sattva material is what is absolutely necessary for spiritual development. The materials which we receive through our food into our body-structure go a great way to determine our mental constitution; therefore the food we eat has to be particularly taken care of. However, in this matter, as in others, the fanaticism into which the disciples invariably fall is not to be laid at the door of the masters.
And this discrimination of food is, after all, of secondary importance. The very same passage quoted above is explained by Shankara in his Bhshya on the Upanishads in a different way by giving an entirely different meaning to the word hra, translated generally as food. According to him, "That which is gathered in is Ahara. The knowledge of the sensations, such as sound etc., is gathered in for the enjoyment of the enjoyer (self); the purification of the knowledge which gathers in the perception of the senses is the purifying of the food (Ahara). The word 'purification-of-food' means the acquiring of the knowledge of sensations untouched by the defects of attachment, aversion, and delusion; such is the meaning. Therefore such knowledge or Ahara being purified, the Sattva material of the possessor it the internal organ will become purified, and the Sattva being purified, an unbroken memory of the Infinite One, who has been known in His real nature from scriptures, will result."
--
The test of Ahimsa is absence of jealousy. Any man may do a good deed or make a good gift on the spur of the moment or under the pressure of some superstition or priestcraft; but the real lover of mankind is he who is jealous of none. The so-called great men of the world may all be seen to become jealous of each other for a small name, for a little fame, and for a few bits of gold. So long as this jealousy exists in a heart, it is far away from the perfection of Ahimsa. The cow does not eat meat, nor does the sheep. Are they great Yogis, great non-injurers (Ahimsakas)? Any fool may abstain from eating this or that; surely that gives him no more distinction than to herbivorous animals. The man who will mercilessly cheat widows and orphans and do the vilest deeds for money is worse than any brute even if he lives entirely on grass. The man whose heart never cherishes even the thought of injury to any one, who rejoices at the prosperity of even his greatest enemy, that man is the Bhakta, he is the Yogi, he is the Guru of all, even though he lives every day of his life on the flesh of swine. Therefore we must always remember that external practices have value only as helps to develop internal purity. It is better to have internal purity alone when minute attention to external observances is not practicable.
But woe unto the man and woe unto the nation that forgets the real, internal, spiritual essentials of religion and mechanically clutches with death-like grasp at all external forms and never lets them go.
--
Physical strength, therefore, is absolutely necessary. It is the strong body alone that can bear the shock of reaction resulting from the attempt to control the organs. He who wants to become a Bhakta must be strong, must be healthy. When the miserably weak attempt any of the Yogas, they are likely to get some incurable malady, or they weaken their minds. Voluntarily weakening the body is really no prescription for spiritual enlightenment.
The mentally weak also cannot succeed in attaining the Atman. The person who aspires to be a Bhakta must be cheerful. In the Western world the idea of a religious man is that he never smiles, that a dark cloud must always hang over his face, which, again, must be long drawn with the jaws almost collapsed. People with emaciated bodies and long faces are fit subjects for the physician, they are not Yogis. It is the cheerful mind that is persevering. It is the strong mind that hews its way through a thousand difficulties. And this, the hardest task of all, the cutting of our way out of the net of Maya, is the work reserved only for giant wills.
Yet at the same time excessive mirth should be avoided (Anuddharsha). Excessive mirth makes us unfit for serious thought. It also fritters away the energies of the mind in vain. The stronger the will, the less the yielding to the sway of the emotions. Excessive hilarity is quite as objectionable as too much of sad seriousness, and all religious realisation is possible only when the mind is in a steady, peaceful condition of harmonious equilibrium.
1.11 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Ramprasad sang in one of his songs, 'This world is a framework of illusion.' Another devotee gave the reply, 'This very world is a mansion of mirth.' As the saying goes, 'The devotee of Kali, free while living, is full of Eternal Bliss.' The Bhakta sees that He who is God has also become maya. Again, He Himself has become the universe and all its living beings. The Bhakta sees God, maya, the universe, and the living beings as one. Some devotees see everything as Rma: it is Rma alone who has become everything. Some see everything as Radha and Krishna. To them it is Krishna alone who has become the twenty-four cosmic principles. It is like seeing everything green through green glasses.
"But the Bhakti scriptures admit that the manifestations of Power are different in different beings. It is Rma who has become everything, no doubt; but He manifests Himself more in some than in others. There is one kind of manifestation of Rma in the Incarnation of God, and another in men. Even the Incarnations are conscious of the body. Embodiment is due to maya. Rma wept for Sita. But the Incarnation of God puts a bondage over His eyes by His own will, like children playing blindman's buff. The children stop playing when their mother calls them. It is quite different, however, with the ordinary man. The cloth his eyes are bandaged with is fastened to his back with screws, as it were. There are eight fetters. Shame, hatred, fear, caste, lineage, good conduct, grief, and secretiveness-these are the eight fetters. And they cannot be unfastened without the help of a guru.
--
" 'I am He', 'I am the Pure Self'-that is the conclusion of the jnanis. But the Bhaktas say, 'The whole universe is the glory of God.' Who would recognize a wealthy man without his power and riches? But it is quite different when God Himself, gratified by the aspirant's devotion, says to him, 'You are the same as Myself.' Suppose a king is seated in his court, and his cook enters the hall, sits on the throne, and says, 'O King, you and I are the same!' People will certainly call him a madman. But suppose one day the king, pleased with the cook's service, says to him: 'Come, sit beside me. There is nothing wrong in that. There is no difference between you and me.' Then, if the cook sits on the throne with the king, there is no harm in it. It is not good for ordinary people to say, 'I am He'. The waves belong to the water. Does the water belong to the waves?
Result of yoga through bhakti
1.12 - God Departs, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
We could not say then that this change of mood had any connection with the disease. Not only with us, but with the Mother too, he became very reticent. However, with regard to his work, there was no flagging. Even when a little time was at our disposal and I was reluctant to bring out the numerous files containing the Savitri manuscript, just for half an hour, he would say, "We shall work a little." This provoked my other colleagues, particularly Champaklal, to an impish mirth, for they loved work and I did not, at least I did not then. And almost till his withdrawal the miscellaneous literary works and the labour on Savitri were carried on in full swing in spite of the discomfort caused by the gradual increase of the symptoms. In addition to these, when at this stage an importunate call came from an outside sadhika in Northern India to save her life from a dreaded and strange illness, he took great pains to cure her, especially as she was an intimate friend of an old sadhak who had made a desperate appeal to Sri Aurobindo's compassion. The story is rather long but intriguing. The doctors, as usual, differed about the diagnosis. Cancer, ulcer, T. B., none was found to be the case. One prominent symptom was profuse bleeding through the mouth but without any definite lesion of any organ. All kinds of tests and treatment failed. At last the patient gave up all treatment and said that she would depend entirely on Sri Aurobindo, even if she were to die. Sri Aurobindo then took up the responsibility at the supplication of the sadhak- Bhakta, I believe, but on one condition that regular news must be supplied to him. The Bhakta himself went from Pondicherry to the patient's place with a view to fulfil the condition. News began to stream in by letters, wires about her daily progress. Suddenly it stopped. Sri Aurobindo became anxious and enquired again and again if any news had come. I tried to plead on their behalf and give the usual excuses for the delay. At last he remarked, "How am I to save her if I have no news?" After two or three days, information began to flow in and very soon the patient recovered completely and came to settle in the Ashram. Her illness turned out to be a case of black magic. That is why the symptoms were erratic and there was no definite lesion in spite of their gravity. That was what probably made Sri Aurobindo so anxious about the case. We modern people may scoff at such unscientific superstition, but in this case, there was very solid ground in favour of such a belief. Though Sri Aurobindo took charge of the case, at each fresh arrival of news, he would ask me to keep the Mother informed. "Have you informed the Mother?" he would repeat. I did not understand why he was so insistent on the point; it was not his nature. Did he suspect that I might not, and I really felt no necessity, such was my human stupidity, trying to be wiser than the Guru! The reason for it became clear when he left the body. He had already taken the decision and wanted the Mother to know all about the case in anticipation of possible future developments.
The revision of Savitri was going on apace with regular unabated vigour. Book after Book was getting done and fascicules of them released for publication. Some 400-500 lines of The Book of Everlasting Day were dictated on successive days, since we could not spare more than an hour a day for the monumental work and that too had often to be cut short to meet other demands. We were, nevertheless, progressing quite steadily. I marvelled at the smooth spontaneous flow of verse after verse of remarkable beauty. Once I had complained to him in my correspondence why, having all the planes of inspiration at his command, should he still labour like us mortals at his Savitri.Why should not the inspiration burst out like the "champagne bottle"? Now I witnessed that miracle and imagined that it also must have been the way Valmiki composed his Ramayana. At this rate, I thought, Savitri would not take long to finish. On everyone's lips was the eager query, "How far are you with Savitri?"
--
Before this, for four days, the disciples, the people of the town, Ashram employees had the unique Darshan and paid their homage. Bhaktas had come from different parts of India for the benediction of the last Darshan of the Guru. Many of them felt the room surcharged with peace, force, light or bliss. Some saw Sn Aurobindo sitting on the bed and saying, "I am here, I am here!" as if to falsify Nature's decree. Dilip happened to be away. On receiving the news, he arrived posthaste and utterly broke down. The Mother tenderly consoled and assured him, "How can I not love someone whom Sri Aurobindo loved? What do you think we are here for? Only to please Sri Aurobindo." He told me, "You don't know, Nirod, what I have lost." Amal Kiran too was not there. He had just left on the night of 3rd December for Bombay after meeting the Mother. He flew back as soon as he got the news. He was in the Ashram on the morning of the 6th. He has written in his reminiscences entitled The Grace of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother:
"I who had depended so much on Sri Aurobindo in all my writing work when he had woken to inspiration the labouring poet, stirred to literary insight the fumbling critic, shaped out of absolute nothing the political commentator I who had almost every day despatched to him some piece of writing for consideration felt a void at the thought that he would not be in that room of his, listening so patiently to my poetry or prose and sending me by letter or telegram his precious guidance. A fellow-sadhak, Udar, spoke to the Mother about my plight. On December 12, the inmates of the Ashram met her again and each received from her hands a photograph of Sri Aurobindo taken after his passing. It was dusk, as far as I recollect. She must have seen a certain helplessness on my face. Smiling as she alone can do, she looked me in the eyes and said, 'Nothing has changed. Call for inspiration and help as you have always done. You will get everything from Sri Aurobindo as before.'"
1.12 - THE FESTIVAL AT PNIHTI, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Only for Thy Bhaktas' sake dost Thou assume Thy various forms;
But when Thy devotee's five senses merge in the five elements, Mother, it is Thyself alone that he beholds as formless Truth.
--
"One day when Keshab was here with his disciples, I said to him that I would like to hear him preach. He delivered a lecture in the chandni. Then we all sat by the bathing-ghat and had a long conversation. I said to him: 'It is Bhagavan alone who in one form appears as Bhakta, and in another as the Bhagavata. Please repeat "Bhagavata- Bhakta-Bhagavan".' Keshab and his disciples repeated the words. Then I asked him to repeat 'Guru-Krishna-Vaishnava'. Thereupon Keshab said: 'Sir, I should not go so far now.
People will say that I have become an orthodox Hindu.'
1.13 - Conclusion - He is here, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
Again the unexpected! All of a sudden the curtain dropped on the divine drama that had been unrolled for twelve years. Who could have foreseen it? The Supreme Actor who had apparently been quite well and given darshan to the Bhaktas on his birthday, August 15, as well as on November 24, most unexpectedly left the stage! When the news was announced on the radio, it came as a heart-rending to the devotees all over the world and just at a time when his name spelt a word of hope to aspiring humanity, as a Yogi, Rishi, poet, philosopher, lover of mankind and bringer of new Light. It was hard to believe and many rushed to Pondicherry by whatever means available to have the last darshan of the Sage.
It is now twenty-two years since he left us; His Birth Centenary in which the Government of India is taking a significant part as a modest recognition of Sri Aurobindo's greatness, is going to be observed all over India and in many parts of the world. Meanwhile the Supramental Manifestation has taken place and the Ashram in consequence has come to be regarded by the world as a spiritual institution from which a new Light is radiating upon earth. Politically, India is gaining a world-status and a serious obstacle to her greatness has been partially removed fulfilling his prophecy. We see then the purpose for which Sri Aurobindo took birth and the dreams he cherished and worked for are on their way to realisation. He did not come for a few individuals only, or for a single nation or race; he came for the transformation of earth-nature which had been abandoned to herself by God and man. God-men came to give some relief to the suffering humanity or to show it a door of escape from suffering, but none before Sri Aurobindo, the Supramental Avatar, accepting Matter as essentially Brahman, came to divinise it. When the work was going apace the curtain dropped, all of a sudden.
1.13 - THE MASTER AND M., #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "However much a Bhakta may experience physical joy and sorrow, he always has knowledge and the treasure of divine love. This treasure never leaves him. Take the Pandava brothers for instance. Though they suffered so many calamities, they did not lose their God-Consciousness even once. Where can you find men like them, endowed with so much knowledge and devotion?"
Just then Narendra and Colonel Viswanath Upadhyaya entered the room. Narendra was then twenty-two years old and studying in college. They saluted the Master and sat down. The Master requested Narendra to sing. The Tnpura hung on the west wall of the room. The devotees fixed their eyes on Narendra as he began to tune the drums.
--
Ideals of Jnni and Bhakta
"The Jnni experiences God-Consciousness within himself; it is like the upper Ganges, flowing in only one direction. To him the whole universe is illusory, like a dream; he is always established in the Reality of Self. But with the lover of God the case is different.
--
Brahman and akti are not different "The Jnni seeks to realize Brahman. But the ideal of the Bhakta is the Personal God-a God endowed with omnipotence and with the six treasures. Yet Brahman and akti are, in fact, not different. That which is the Blissful Mother is, again, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute. They are like the gem and its lustre. When one speaks of the lustre of the gem, one thinks of the gem; and again, when one speaks of the gem, one refers to its lustre. One cannot conceive of the lustre of the gem without thinking of the gem, and one cannot conceive of the gem without thinking of its lustre.
"Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute is one, and one only. But It is associated with different limiting adjuncts on account of the different degrees of Its manifestation. That is why one finds various forms of God. The devotee sings, 'O my Divine Mother, Thou art all these!' Wherever you see actions, like creation, preservation, and dissolution, there is the manifestation of akti. Water is water whether it is calm or full of waves and bubbles. The Absolute alone is the Primordial Energy, which creates, preserves, and destroys. Thus it is the same 'Captain', whether he remains inactive or performs his worship or pays a visit to the Governor General. Only we designate him by different names at different times."
1.14 - INSTRUCTION TO VAISHNAVS AND BRHMOS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Another day, in the Bhaktas' procession,
Gora was sweetly singing the kirtan;
1.1.5 - Thought and Knowledge, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
To turn all actions automatically into worship cannot be done by thought control only; there must be a strong aspiration in the heart which will bring about some realisation or feeling of the presence of the One to whom worship is offered. The Bhakta does not rely on his own effort alone, but on the grace and power of the Divine whom he adores.
***
1.16 - WITH THE DEVOTEES AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Ater a time Sri Ramakrishna asked M. to read from the Bhaktamala, a book about the Vaishnava saints.
Story of a Vaishnava devotee
--
M. had been staying at Dakshineswar with Sri Ramakrishna. The Master was sitting in his room, listening to the life of Prahlada, which Ramlal was reading from the Bhaktamala. M. was sitting on the floor. Rkhl, Ltu, and Harish were also in the room, and Hazra was on the verandah. While listening to the story of Prahlada's love for God, Sri Ramakrishna went into an ecstatic mood.
Hiranyakasipu, the king of the demons and father of Prahlada, had put his son to endless torture to divert the boy's mind from the love of God. But through divine grace all the king's attempts to kill Prahlada were ineffective. At last God appeared, assuming the form of Nrisimha, the Manlion, and killed Hiranyakasipu. The gods were frightened at the rage and roaring of the Manlion and thought that the destruction of the world was imminent.
1.17 - M. AT DAKSHINEWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"One should not discuss the discipline of the Impersonal God or the path of knowledge with a Bhakta. Through great effort perhaps he is just cultivating a little devotion. You will injure it if you explain away everything as a mere dream.
"Kabir was a worshipper of the Impersonal God. He did not believe in iva, Kli, or Krishna. He used to make fun of them and say that Kli lived on the offerings of rice and banana, and that Krishna danced like a monkey when the gopis clapped their hands. ( All laugh).
1.17 - The Divine Birth and Divine Works, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
These three are always the necessary elements of the work of the Avatar. He gives a dharma, a law of self-discipline by which to grow out of the lower into the higher life and which necessarily includes a rule of action and of relations with our fellowmen and other beings, endeavour in the eightfold path or the law of faith, love and purity or any other such revelation of the nature of the divine in life. Then because every tendency in man has its collective as well as its individual aspect, because those who follow one way are naturally drawn together into spiritual companionship and unity, he establishes the sangha, the fellowship and union of those whom his personality and his teaching unite. In Vaishnavism there is the same trio, bhagavata, Bhakta, bhagavan, - the bhagavata, which is the law of the Vaishnava dispensation of adoration and love, the Bhakta representing the fellowship of those in whom that law is manifest, bhagavan, the divine Lover and
Beloved in whose being and nature the divine law of love is founded and fulfils itself. The Avatar represents this third element, the divine personality, nature and being who is the soul of the dharma and the sangha, informs them with himself, keeps them living and draws men towards the felicity and the liberation.
1.18 - M. AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "Well, what suits your taste-God with form or the formless Reality? But to tell you the truth, He who is formless is also endowed with form. To His Bhaktas He reveals Himself as having a form. It is like a great ocean, an infinite expanse of water, without any trace of shore. Here and there some of the water has been frozen. Intense cold has turned it into ice. Just so, under the cooling influence, so to speak, of the Bhakta's love, the Infinite appears to take a form. Again, the ice melts when the sun rises; it becomes water as before. Just so, one who follows the path of knowledge -the path of discrimination-does not see the form of God any more. To him everything is formless.
The ice melts into formless water with the rise of the Sun of Knowledge. But mark this: form and formlessness belong to one and the same Reality."
--
MASTER (to Jaygopal): "One should not harbour malice toward any person or any opinion. The believers in the formless God and the worshippers of God with form are all, without exception, going toward God alone. The Jnni, the yogi, the Bhakta-all, without exception, are seeking Him alone. The follower of the path of knowledge calls Him 'Brahman'. The yogi calls Him 'tman' or 'Paramatman'. The Bhakta calls Him 'Bhagavan'. Further, it is said that there is the Eternal Lord and His Eternal Servant."
JAYGOPAL: "How can we know that all paths are true?"
1.19 - Equality, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
God in the world. For he is a Bhakta, a lover and devotee of the Divine, as well as a sage and a Yogin, a lover who loves
God wherever he finds Him and who finds Him everywhere; and what he loves, he does not disdain to serve, nor does action carry him away from the bliss of union, since all his acts proceed from the One in him and to the One in all they are directed. The equality of the Gita is a large synthetic equality in which all is lifted up into the integrality of the divine being and the divine nature.
1.19 - THE MASTER AND HIS INJURED ARM, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"The Mother has kept me in the state of a Bhakta, a vijnni. That is why I joke with Rkhl and the others. Had I been in the condition of a Jnni I couldn't do that.
"In this state I realize that it is the Mother alone who has become everything. I see Her everywhere. In the Kli temple I found that the Mother Herself had become everything-even the wicked, even the brother of Bhagavat Pundit.
--
"Without desires the body cannot live. (Smiling) I had one or two desires. I prayed to the Mother, 'O Mother, give me the company of those who have renounced "woman and gold".' I said further: 'I should like to enjoy the society of Thy jnanis and Bhaktas. So give me a little strength that I may walk hither and thither and visit those people.' But She did not give me the strength to walk."
TRAlLOKYA (smiling): "Have all the desires been fulfilled?"
--
"Why then do I take care of the body? It is to enjoy God, to sing His name and glories, and to go about visiting His jnanis and Bhaktas."
Master's sympathy for Narendra's suffering
--
O Thou who stealest Thy Bhaktas' hearts,
Drown me deep in the Sea of Thy love!
1.2.04 - Sincerity, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is difficult for the ordinary Christian to be of a piece, because the teachings of Christ are on quite another plane from the consciousness of the intellectual and vital man trained by the education and society of Europe - the latter, even as a minister or priest, has never been called upon to practise what he preached in entire earnest. But it is difficult for the human nature anywhere to think, feel and act from one centre of true faith, belief or vision. The average Hindu considers the spiritual life the highest, reveres the Sannyasi, is moved by the Bhakta; but if one of the family circle leaves the world for spiritual life, what tears, arguments, remonstrances, lamentations! It is almost worse than if he had died a natural death. It is not conscious mental insincerity - they will argue like Pandits and go to Shastra to prove you in the wrong; it is unconsciousness, a vital insincerity which
Letters on Yoga - II
1.2.08 - Faith, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
I am rather surprised at Krishnaprem's surprise about my statement of faith. I thought he had said once you should not hanker after experiences. As for experience being necessary for faith and no faith possible without it, that contradicts human psychology altogether. Thousands of people have faith before they have experience and it is the faith that helps them to the experience. The doctrine "No belief without proof" applies to physical science, it would be disastrous in the field of spirituality - or for that matter in the field of human action. The saints or Bhaktas have the faith in God long before they get the experience of God - the man of action has the faith in his cause long before his cause is crowned with success - otherwise they would not have been able to struggle persistently towards their end in spite of defeat,
Faith
1.21 - A DAY AT DAKSHINESWAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"According to the Puranas, the Bhakta and the Bhagavan are two separate entities. 'I'
am one and 'You' are another. The body is a plate, as it were, containing the water of mind, intelligence, and ego. Brahman is like the sun. It is reflected in the water.
1.240 - 1.300 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: Swa swarupanusandhanam bhaktirityabhidheeyate (Reflection on one's own Self is called bhakti). Bhakti and Self-Enquiry are one and the same. The Self of the Advaitins is the God of the Bhaktas.
D.: Is there a spiritual hierarchy of all the original propounders of religions watching the spiritual welfare of the humans?
1.240 - Talks 2, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
M.: Swa swarupanusandhanam bhaktirityabhidheeyate (Reflection on ones own Self is called bhakti). Bhakti and Self-Enquiry are one and the same. The Self of the Advaitins is the God of the Bhaktas.
D.: Is there a spiritual hierarchy of all the original propounders of religions watching the spiritual welfare of the humans?
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Sphurana. This is natural to the Jnani and is itself called jnana by jnanis, or bhakti by Bhaktas. Though ever present, including
Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi in sleep, it is not perceived. It cannot be known in sleep all at once. It must first be realised in the waking state, for it is our true nature underlying all the three states. Efforts must be made only in the jagrat state and the Self realised here and now. It will afterwards be understood and realised to be continuous
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M.: The yogis call it Kundalini Sakti. It is the same as vritti 1 of the form of God (Bhagavatakara vritti) of the Bhaktas and vritti of the form of Brahman (Brahmakara vritti) of the jnanis. It must be preliminary to Realisation. The sensation produced may be said to be hot.
D.: Kundalini is said to be of the shape of a serpent but vrittis cannot be so.
1.24 - PUNDIT SHASHADHAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"But the Bhakta wants to realize the Personal God endowed with form and talk to Him.
He seldom seeks the Knowledge of Brahman. But God, who does everything at His pleasure, can make His devotee the heir to His infinite glories if it pleases Him. He gives His devotee both the Love of God and the Knowledge of Brahman. If one is able somehow to reach Calcutta, one can see the Maidan and the museum and other places too. The thing is how to reach Calcutta.
1.25 - ADVICE TO PUNDIT SHASHADHAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "Though they were jnanis, yet they kept the 'I' of the Bhakta. Haven't you read the Bhagavata?"
PUNDIT: "I have read only part of it, not the whole."
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"Sankaracharya kept the 'ego of Knowledge' in order to teach people. God keeps in many people the 'ego of a Jnni' or the 'ego of a Bhakta' even after they have attained Brahmajnana. Hanuman, after realizing God in both His Personal and His Impersonal aspect, cherished toward God the attitude of a servant, a devotee. He said to Rma: 'O
Rma, sometimes I think that You are the whole and I am a part of You. Sometimes I think that You are the Master and I am Your servant. And sometimes, Rma, when I contemplate the Absolute, I see that I am You and You are I.'
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"Those who reason and speculate following the process of 'Neti, neti' do not accept the Incarnation of God. Hazra says well that Divine Incarnation is only for the Bhakta, and not for the Jnni, because the Jnni is quite contented with his ideal, 'I am He'."
Sri Ramakrishna and the devotees remained silent awhile. The pundit resumed the conversation.
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MASTER (to Balarm's father and the others): "The Bhaktamala is one of the Vaishnava books. It is a fine book. It describes the lives of the various Vaishnava devotees. But it is one-sided. At one place the author found peace of mind only after compelling Bhagavati, the Divine Mother, to take Her initiation according to the Vaishnava discipline.
"Once I spoke highly of Vaishnavcharan to Mathur and persuaded him to invite Vaishnavcharan to his house. Mathur welcomed him with great courtesy. He fed his guest from silver plates. Then do you know what happened? Vaishnav said in front of Mathur, 'You will achieve nothing whatsoever in spiritual life unless you accept Krishna as your Ideal.' Mathur was a follower of the Sakta cult and a worshipper of the Divine Mother. At once his face became crimson. I nudged Vaishnavcharan.
1.300 - 1.400 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Sphurana. This is natural to the Jnani and is itself called jnana by jnanis, or bhakti by Bhaktas. Though ever present, including
278
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M.: The yogis call it Kundalini Sakti. It is the same as vritti 1 of the form of God (Bhagavatakara vritti) of the Bhaktas and vritti of the form of Brahman (Brahmakara vritti) of the jnanis. It must be preliminary to Realisation. The sensation produced may be said to be hot.
D.: Kundalini is said to be of the shape of a serpent but vrittis cannot be so.
1.4.03 - The Guru, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
What X quotes about the limitation of the power of the Guru to that of a teacher who shows the way but cannot help or guide is the conception of certain paths of Yoga such as the pure Adwaitin and the Buddhist which say that you must rely upon yourself and no one can help you; but even the pure Adwaitin does in fact rely upon the Guru and the chief mantra of Buddhism insists on saran.am to Buddha. For other paths of sadhana, especially those which like the Gita accept the reality of the individual soul as an "eternal portion" of the Divine or which believe that Bhagavan and the Bhakta are both real, the help of the Guru has always been relied upon as an indispensable aid.
I don't understand the objection to the validity of Vivekananda's experience; it was exactly the realisation which is described in the Upanishads as a supreme experience of the Self.
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The Bhakta and the Disciple
It does not strike me that Krishnaprem's letters are admirable as an apercu of current thoughts and general tendencies; it was rather his power to withdraw so completely from these thoughts and tendencies and look from a (for him) new and an abiding source of knowledge that impressed me as admirable. If he had remained interested and in touch with these current human movements, I don't suppose he would have done better with them than Romain Rolland or another. But he has gone to the
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I would explain his progressing so far not entirely by his own superiority in the sense of a general fitness for Yoga but by the quickness and completeness with which he has taken inwardly the attitude of the Bhakta and the disciple. That is a rare achievement for a modern mind, be he European or "educated" Indian; for the modern mind is analytic, dubitative, instinctively "independent" even when it wants to be otherwise; it holds itself back and hesitates in front of the Light and Influence that comes to it; it does not plunge into it with a simple directness, crying, "Here I am, ready to throw from me all that was myself or seemed to be, if so I can enter into Thee; remake my consciousness into the Truth in thy way, the way of the Divine." There is something in us that is ready for it, but there is this element that intervenes and makes a curtain of non-receptivity; I know by my own experience with myself and others how long it can make a road that could never perhaps, for us who seek the entire truth, have been short and easy, but still we might have been spared many wanderings and stand-stills and recoils and detours. All the more I admire the ease with which Krishnaprem seems to have surmounted this formidable obstacle.
I do not know if his Guru falls far short in any respect, but with the attitude he has taken, her deficiencies, if any, do not matter. It is not the human defects of the Guru that can stand in the way when there is the psychic opening, confidence and surrender. The Guru is the channel or the representative or the manifestation of the Divine, according to the measure of his personality or his attainment; but whatever he is, it is to the
1.439, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Bhakti helps concentration. People fall at the feet of the Bhakta. If it does not happen he feels disappointed and his bhakti fades.
M.: The longing for happiness never fades. That is bhakti.
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M.: Yes. That happens to Bhaktas.
D.: A man dreams of a tiger, takes fright and wakes up. The dreamtiger appears to the dream ego who is also frightened. When he wakes up how is it that that ego disappears, and the man wakes up as the waking ego?
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I am a Bhakta, I am a satsangi?
M.: The method is pointed out to the seeker. The seeker has certainly not lost his individuality so far. Otherwise the question would not have arisen. The way is shown to effect the loss of individuality of the seeker. It is thus appropriate.
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He thus became one of the most famous Bhaktas and was much sought after. He led a vigorous and active life; went on pilgrimage to several places in South India. He got married in his sixteenth year. The bride and the bridegroom went to have darsan of God in the local temple soon after the marriage ceremonies were over. A large party went with them. When they reached the temple the place was a blaze of light and the temple was not visible. There was however a passage visible in the blaze of light. Jnanasambandar told the people to enter the passage. They did so. He himself went round the light with his young wife, came to the passage and entered it as the others had done earlier. The Light vanished leaving no trace of those who entered it.
The temple again came into view as usual. Such was the brief but very eventful life of the sage.
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Jnanasambandar is contained in 300 slokas in Upamanyus Bhakta
Charita. One of the Archakas of the temple had it with him and showed it to Sri Bhagavan on the occasion of the temple suit within the last few months. Sri Bhagavan copied the slokas.
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Many visitors came on one occasion and they all saluted Sri Bhagavan with the single prayer, Make me a Bhakta. Give me moksha. After they left Sri Bhagavan said, thinking aloud: All of them want bhakti and moksha. If I say to them, Give yourself to me they will not. How then can they get what they want?
Talk 544.
On one occasion a few devotees were discussing among themselves the relative merits of some famous Bhaktas. They did not agree among themselves and referred the matter to Sri Bhagavan. He remained silent. The discussion grew hot.
Finally Sri Bhagavan said: One cannot know about another nor can confer bondage or release on another. Each one desires to become famous in the world. It is natural for man. But that desire alone does not bring about the end in view. He who is not accepted by God is certainly humiliated. He who has surrendered himself, body and mind, to God becomes famous all over the world.
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When Sri Bhagavan was taking His bath a few Bhaktas were around
Him, speaking to themselves. Then they asked Him about the use of ganja (hashish). Sri Bhagavan had finished His bath by that time. He said: Oh ganja! The users feel immensely happy when they are under its influence. How shall I describe their happiness! They simply shout ananda! ananda ... Saying so, He walked as if tipsy. The Bhaktas laughed. He appeared as if He stumbled, placed His hands round A and cried ananda! ananda!
A records that his very being was transformed from that time. He had remained an inmate for the past eight years. He further says that his mind now remains at peace.
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M.: Srimad Bhagavad Gita says that a Jnani is the true yogi and also a true Bhakta. Yoga is only a sadhana and jnana is the siddhi.
D.: Is yoga necessary?
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Sri Bhagavan shows great humour at times: He read Upamanya Bhakta
Vilas which contains a passage where Arunachalesvara is said to have
1.450 - 1.500 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
Bhakti helps concentration. People fall at the feet of the Bhakta. If it does not happen he feels disappointed and his bhakti fades.
460
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M.: Yes. That happens to Bhaktas.
D.: A man dreams of a tiger, takes fright and wakes up. The dreamtiger appears to the dream ego who is also frightened. When he wakes up how is it that that ego disappears, and the man wakes up as the waking ego?
1.550 - 1.600 Talks, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
When Sri Bhagavan was taking His bath a few Bhaktas were around
Him, speaking to themselves. Then they asked Him about the use of ganja (hashish). Sri Bhagavan had finished His bath by that time. He said: "Oh ganja! The users feel immensely happy when they are under its influence. How shall I describe their happiness! They simply shout ananda! ananda ..." Saying so, He walked as if tipsy. The Bhaktas laughed. He appeared as if He stumbled, placed His hands round 'A' and cried "ananda! ananda!"
'A' records that his very being was transformed from that time. He had remained an inmate for the past eight years. He further says that his mind now remains at peace.
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M.: Srimad Bhagavad Gita says that a Jnani is the true yogi and also a true Bhakta. Yoga is only a sadhana and jnana is the siddhi.
D.: Is yoga necessary?
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Sri Bhagavan shows great humour at times: He read Upamanya Bhakta
Vilas which contains a passage where Arunachalesvara is said to have robbed Tirujnanasambandar and his group of followers of all their possessions by His bhutaganas disguised as dacoits. Sri Bhagavan remarked: "Siva Himself was waylaid in Tiruvudal Utsava and He practised the same trick on His devotees. Can it be so?"
1970 03 19?, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
408I am not a Bhakta, for I have not renounced the world for God. How can I renounce what He took from me by force and gave back to me against my will? These things are too hard for me.
409I am not a Bhakta, I am not a Jnani, I am not a worker for the Lord. What am I then? A tool in the hands of my Master, a flute blown upon by the divine Herd-Boy, a leaf driven by the breath of the Lord.
410Devotion is not utterly fulfilled till it becomes action and knowledge. If thou pursuest after God and canst overtake Him, let Him not go till thou hast His reality. If thou hast hold of His reality, insist on having also His totality. The first will give thee divine knowledge, the second will give thee divine works and a free and perfect joy in the universe.
2.01 - The Preparatory Renunciation, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Of all renunciations, the most natural, so to say, is that of the Bhakti-Yogi. Here, there is no violence, nothing to give up, nothing to tear off, as it were, from ourselves, nothing from which we have violently to separate ourselves; the Bhaktas renunciation is easy, smooth, flowing, and as natural as the things around us. We see the manifestation of this sort of renunciation, although more or less in the form of caricatures, every day around us. A man begins to love a woman; after a while he loves another, and the first woman he lets go. She drops out of his mind smoothly, gently, without his feeling the want of her at all. A woman loves .a man; she then begins to love another man, and the first one drops off from her mind quite naturally. A man loves his own city, then he begins to love his country; and the intense love for his little city drops off smoothly, naturally. Again, a man learns to love the whole world; his love for his country, his intense, fanatical patriotism drops off without hurting him, without any manifestation of violence. An uncultured man loves the pleasures of the senses intensely; as he becomes cultured, he begins to love intellectual pleasures, and his sense-enjoyments become less and less. No man can enjoy a meal with the same gusto or pleasure as a dog or a wolf; but those pleasures which a man gets from intellectual experiences and achievements, the dog can never enjoy. At first, pleasure, is in association with the lower senses; but as soon as an animal reaches a higher plane of existence, the lower kind of pleasures becomes less intense. In human society, the nearer the man is to the animal, the stronger is his pleasure in the senses; and the higher and the more cultured the man is, the greater is his pleasure in intellectual. and such other finer pursuits. So, when a man gets even higher than the plane of the intellect, higher than that of mere thought, when he gets to the plane of spirituality and of divine inspiration, he finds there a state of bliss, compared with which all the pleasures of the senses, or even of the intellect, are as nothing. When the moon shines brightly, all the stars become dim; and when the sun shines, the moon herself becomes dim. The renunciation necessary for the attainment of Bhakti is not obtained by killing anything, but just comes, in as naturally as in the presence of an increasingly stronger light, the less intense ones become dimmer and dimmer until they vanish away completely. So this love of the pleasures of the senses and of the intellect js all made dim and thrown aside and cast into the shade by the love of God Himself. That love of God grows and assumes a form which, is called Para-Bhakti, or supreme devotion. Forms vanish, rituals flyaway, books are superseded, images, temples, churches, religions and sects, countries and nationalitiesall these little limitations, and bondages fall off by their own nature from him who knows this love of God. Nothing remains to bind him or fetter his freedom. A ship, all of a sudden, comes near a .magnetic rock; and its iron bolts and bars are all attracted and drawn out, and the planks get loosened and freely float on the water. Divine grace thus loosens the binding bolts and bars of the soul, and it becomes free. So in this renunciation, auxiliary to devotion, there is no harshness, no dryness, no struggle, nor repression or suppression. The Bhakta has not to suppress any single one of his emotions, he only strives to intensify them and direct them to God.
2.01 - The Yoga and Its Objects, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For he has repeatedly given the abhaya vacana, the assurance of safety. "Pratijanhi," he says in the Gita, "na me Bhaktah. pran.asyati, he who is devoted to Me cannot perish."
The third stage comes out of the second, by full realisation of God, or of itself by the grace of God. Not only will the
2.02 - The Bhakta.s Renunciation results from Love, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism object:2.02 - The Bhakta.s Renunciation results from Love author class:Swami Vivekananda
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THE BhaktaS RENUNCIATION RESULTS FROM LOVE
We see love everywhere in nature. Whatever in society is good and great and sublime is the working out of that love; whatever in society is very bad, nay diabolical, is also the ill-directed working out of the same emotion of love. It is this same emotion that gives us the pure and holy conjugal love between husb and and wife, as well as the sort of love which goes to satisfy the lowest forms of animal passion. The emotion is the same, but its manifestation is different in different cases. It is the same feeling of love, well or illdirected, that impels one man to do good and to give all he has to the poor, while it makes another man cut the throats of his brethren and take away all their possessions. The former loves others as much as the latter loves himself. The direction of the love is bad in the case of the latter but it is right and proper in the other case. The same fire that cooks a meal for us may bum a child, and it is no fault of the fire if it does so; the difference lies in the way in which it is used.
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The Bhakti-Yogi, however, knows the meaning of life's struggles; he understands it. He has passed through a long series of these struggles, and knows what they mean, and earnestly desires to be free from the friction thereof; he wants to avoid the clash and go direct to the centre of all attraction, the great Hari. This is the renunciation of the Bhakta: this mighty attraction in the direction of God makes all other attraction vanish for him; this mighty infinite love of God which enters his heart leaves no place for any other love to live there. How can it be otherwise? Bhakti fills his heart with the divine waters of the ocean of love, which is God Himself; there is no place there for little loves. That is to say, the Bhakta's renunciation is that Vairagya, or non-attachment for all things, that are not God, which results from Anuraga or great attachment to God.
This is the ideal preparation for the attainment of the supreme Bhakti. When this renunciation comes, the gate opens for the soul to pass through and reach the lofty regions of Supreme Devotion or Para-Bhakti. Then it is that we begin to understand what Para-Bhakti is; and the man who has entered into the inner shrine of the Para-Bhakti, alone has the right to say that all forms and symbols are useless to him as aids to religious realisation. He alone has attained. that supreme state of love commonly called the brotherhood of man; the rest only talk. He sees no distinctions; the mighty ocean of love has entered Into h Im, and he sees not man in man, but beholds his Beloved everywhere. Through every face shines to him his Hari. The light in the sun or the moon is all His manifestation. Wherever there is beauty or sublimity, to him it is all His. Such Bhaktas are still living; the world is never without them. Such, though bitten by a serpent, only say that a messenger came to them from their Beloved. Such men alone have the right to talk of universal brotherhood.
They feel no resentment; their minds never react in the form of hatred or jealousy. The external, the sensuous; has vanished from them for ever. How can they be angry when, through their love, they are always able to see the Reality behind the scenes ?
2.02 - THE DURGA PUJA FESTIVAL, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
According to the Git, the Jnni himself does not eat; his eating is an offering to the Kundalini. But that does not apply to a Bhakta. The present state of my mind is such that I cannot eat any food unless it is first offered to God by a brahmin priest. Formerly my state of mind was such that I would enjoy inhaling the smell of burning corpses, carried by the wind from the other side of the Ganges. It tasted very sweet to me. But nowadays I cannot eat food touched by anybody and everybody. No, I cannot. But once in a while I do. One day I was taken to see a performance of a play at Keshab's house.
They gave me luchi and curries to eat. I didn't know whether the food was handed to me by a washerman or a barber; but I ate quite a little (all laugh). Rkhl had asked me to eat.
2.02 - The Synthesis of Devotion and Knowledge, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
For note that it is bhakti with knowledge which the Gita demands from the disciple and it regards all other forms of devotion as good in themselves but still inferior; they may do well by the way, but they are not the thing at which it aims in the soul's culmination. Among those who have put away the sin of the rajasic egoism and are moving towards the Divine, the Gita distinguishes between four kinds of Bhaktas. There are those who turn to him as a refuge from sorrow and suffering in the world, arta. There are those who seek him as the giver of good in the world, artharth. There are those who come to him in the desire for knowledge, jijnasu. And lastly there are those who adore him with knowledge, jnan. All are approved by the
Gita, but only on the last does it lay the seal of its complete sanction. All these movements without exception are high and good, udarah. sarva evaite, but the bhakti with knowledge excels them all, visis.yate. We may say that these forms are successively the bhakti of the vital-emotional and affective nature,3 that of the
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the God-lover who has the knowledge, jnan Bhakta. And this knower, says the Godhead in the Gita, is my self; the others seize only motives and aspects in Nature, but he the very self-being and all-being of the Purushottama with which he is in union.
His is the divine birth in the supreme Nature, integral in being, completed in will, absolute in love, perfected in knowledge. In him the Jiva's cosmic existence is justified because it has exceeded itself and so found its own whole and highest truth of being.
2.03 - Karmayogin A Commentary on the Isha Upanishad, #Isha Upanishad, #unset, #Zen
Shiva, the Master of utter Samadhi; to the Bhakta He appears
in whatever form appeals most to the spiritual emotions of His
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from all that is phenomenal and seeking the One reality in himself, enters into the being of the Eternal. The Bhakta envisages
only two realities, God & himself, and by the ecstatic union
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the Bhakta is not very different; "Let us leave the things of the
world," he cries, "let us forget all else and think and speak only
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Yogin, be he Jnani, Bhakta, or Karmi, must devote whatever
work he may be doing to the Eternal. To the Karmayogin indeed
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becomes the disciple of a great Bhakta, however submissively
he may accept his Master's teachings, however largely he may
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love of God, and love gives knowledge, so it is with the Bhakta;
the love of God will of itself direct all his works to God and
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right hand, the Bhakta the left hand and the Karmayogin walks
in the middle; while on the way each prefers his own choice as
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The Jnani & Bhakta shrink from the idea of Karma as a
means of salvation. Unillumined Karma is such a stumbling
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the Bhakta or Jnani do not bind him because he has attained
the Eternal and by the strength of that attainment becomes free
2.03 - On Medicine, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: In that case the Bhaktas have a very good chance.
Sri Aurobindo: Again you want to make another law! You can't say that the devotees have more chance. All you can say is, "Such and such things happen." God's Grace is without any reason. There are no mental laws governing it. Even in Yoga what His Grace does is much more than what can be done by personal effort.
2.03 - THE MASTER IN VARIOUS MOODS, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
The music was over Sri Ramakrishna bowed to the Divine Mother and said, "Bhagavata- Bhakta-Bhagavan. My salutations to the jnanis, my salutations to the yogis, my salutations to the Bhaktas."
The Master was seated on the semicircular porch with Nilkantha and the other devotees.
2.03 - The Naturalness of Bhakti-Yoga and its Central Secret, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
This is the great danger in Jnana-Yoga. But Bhakti-Yoga is natural, sweet, and gentle; the Bhakta does not take such high flights as the Jnana-Yogi, and, iherefore, he is. not apt to have such big falls. Until the bondages of the soul pass away, it cannot of course be free, whatever may be the nature of the path that the religious man takes. Here is a passage showing how, in the case of one of the blessed Gopis, the soul-binding chains of both merit and demerit were broken. The intense pleasure in meditating on God took away the binding effects of her good deeds. Then her intense misery of soul in not attaining unto Him washed off all her sinful propensities; and then she became free. (Vishnu-Purna).
In Bhakti-Yoga the central secret is, therefore, to know that the various passions, and feelings, and emotions in the human heart are not wrong in themselves; only they have to be carefully controlled and given a higher and higher direction, until they attain the very highest condition of excellence.
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Still, pain has its uses. Let a man feel pain that he has not reached the Highest, that he has not reached God, and that pain will be to his salvation. When you become glad that you have a handful of coins, it is a wrong direction given to the faculty of joy; it should be given a higher direction, it must be made to serve the Highest Ideal. Pleasure in that kind of ideal must surely be our highest joy. This same thing is true of all our other feelings. The Bhakta says that not one of them is wrong, he gets hold of them all and points them unfailingly towards God.
2.04 - The Forms of Love-Manifestation, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
It is natural for the hunlan heart to do so, because all such teachers preach the Lord. At bottom, reverence is a growth out of love; we can none of us revere him whom we do not love. Then comes Pritipleasure in God. What an immense pleasure men take in the objects of the senses! They go anywhere, run through any danger, to get the thing which they love, the thing which their senses like. What is wanted of the Bhakta is this very kind of intense love which has, however, to be directed to God. Then there is the sweetest of pains, Viraha, the intense misery due to the absence of the beloved. When a man feels intense misery because he has not attained to God, has not known that which is the only thing worthy to be known, and becomes in consequence very dissatisfied and almost mad then there is Viraha ; and this state of the mind makes him feel disturbed in the presence of anything other than the beloved (@kritiyicikTsa). In earthly love we see how often this Viraha comes. Again, when men are really and intensely in love with women, or women with men, they feel a kind of natural annoyance in the presence of all those whom they do not love. Exactly the same state of impatience, in regard to things that are not loved, comes to the mind when Para-Bhakti holds sway over it; even to talk about things other than God becomes distasteful then.
Think of Him, think of Him alone, and give up all other vain words (ANya vacae ivmu< cw). Those who talk of Him alone, the Bhakta finds to be friendly to him; while those who talk of anything else appear to him to be unfriendly. A still higher stage of love is reached when life itself is maintained for the sake of the one Ideal of Love, when life itself is considered beautiful and worth living only on account of that Love (tdwRa[s Bhaktas live on just to worship Him. That is the bliss, the only pleasure in life, which they will not give up. Oh king, such is the blessed quality of Hari that even those, who have become satisfied with everything, all the knots of whose hearts have been cut asunder, even they love the Lord for loves sake the Lord Whom all the gods worship, all the lovers of liberation, and all the knowers of the Brahman (Nri. Tap. Up.) Such is the power of love. When a man has forgotten himself altogether and does not feel that ahything belongs to him, then he acquires the state of Tadiyata; everything is sacred to him, because it belongs to the Beloved. Even in regard to earthly love, the lover thinks that everything belonging to his beloved is sacred and so dear to him. He loves even a piece of the cloth belonging to the darling of his heart. In the same way, when a person loves the Lord, the whole universe becomes dear to him, because it is all His.
2.05 - Universal Love and how it leads to Self-Surrender, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
The Bhakta wishes to realise that one generalised abstract Person in loving whom he loves the whole universe. The Yogi wishes to have possession of that one generalised form of power, by controlling which he controls this whole universe. The Indian mind, throughout its history, has been directed to this kind of singular search after the universal in everythingin science, in psychology, in love, in philosophy. So the conclusion to which the Bhakta comes is, that, if you go on merely loving one person after another, you may go on loving them so for an infinite length of time, without being in the least able to love the world as a whole.
When, at last, the central idea is, however, arrived at, that the sum total of all love is God, that the sum total of the aspirations of all the souls in the universe, whether they be free, or bound, or struggling towards liberation, is God, then alone it becomes possible for anyone to put forth universal love. God is the Samashti, and this visible universe is God differentiated and made manifest. If we love this sum total, we love everything. Loving the world and doing it good will all come easily then; we have to obtain this power only by loving God first; otherwise it is no joke to do good to the world. Everything is His and He is my Lover; I love Him, says the Bhakta. In this way everything becomes sacred to the Bhakta, because all things are His. All are His children,
His body, His manifestation. How then may we hurt any one? How then may we not love anyone? With the love of God will come, as a sure effect, the love of everyone in the universe. The nearer we approach God, the more do we begin to see that all things are in Him. When the soul succeeds in appropriating the bliss of this supreme love, it also begins to see Him in everything. Our heart will thus become an eternal fountain of love. And when we reach even higher states of this love, all the little differences between the things of the world are entirely lost; man is seen no more as man, but only as God; the animal is seen no more as animal, but as God; even the tiger is no more a tiger but manifestation of God. Thus in this intense state of Bhakti, worship is offered to every one, to every life, and to every being.
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As a result of this kind of intense, all-absorbing love, comes the feeling of perfect self-surrender, the conviction that nothing that happens is against us(Aprtikulya). Thcn the loving soul is able to say, if pain comes, Welcome pain. If misery comes, it will say, Welcome misery, you are also from the Beloved. If a serpent comes, it will say, Welcome serpent. If death comes, such a Bhakta will wekome it with a smile. Blessed am I that they all come to me; they are all welcome. The Bhakta in this state of perfect resignation, arising out of intense love to God and to all that are His, ceases to distinguish between pleasure and pain in so far as they affect him. He does not know what it is to complain of pain or misery; and this kind of uncomplaining resignation to the will of God, who is all love, is indeed a worthier acquisition than all the glory of grand and heroic performances.
To the vast majority of mankind, the body is everything; the body is all the universe to them; bodily enjoyment is their all in all. This demon of the worship of the body and of the things of the body has entered into us all. We may indulge in tall talk, and take very high flights, but we are like vultures all the same; our mind is directed to the piece of carrion down below. Why should our body be saved, say, from the tiger? Why may we not give it over to the tiger?
The tiger will thereby be pleased, and that is not altogether so very far from self-sacrifice and worship. Can you reach the realisation of such an idea in which all sense of self is completely lost? It is a very dizzy height on the pinnacle of the religion of love, and few in this world have ever climbed up to it; but until a man reaches that highest point of everready and ever-willing self-sacrifice, he cannot become a perfect Bhakta. We may all manage to maintain our bodies more or less satisfactorily and for longer or shorter intervals of time. Nevertheless, our bodies have to go; there is no permanence about them. Blessed are they whose bodies get destroyed in the service of others. Wealth, and even life itself, the sage always holds ready for the service of others.
In this world, there being one thing certain, viz. death, it is far better that this body dies in a good cause than in a bad one. We may drag our life on for fifty years or a hundred years; but after that, what is it that happens? Everything that is the result of combination must get dissolved and die.
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Jesus and Buddha. and Mohammed are all dead; all the great Prophets and Teachers of the world are dead. In this evanescent world, where everything is falling to pieces, we have to make the highest use of what time we have, says the Bhakta; and really the highest use of life is to hold it at the service of all beings. It is the horrible body-idea that breeds all the selfishness in the world, just this one delusion that we are wholly the body we own, and that we must by all possible means try our very best to preserve and to please it. If you know that you are positively other than your body, you have then none to fight with or struggle against; you are dead to all ideas of selfishness. So the Bhakta declares that we have to hold ourselves as if we are altogether dead to all the things of the world; and that is indeed self-surrender. Let things come as they may. This is the meaning of Thy will be done; not going about fighting and struggling and thinking all the while that God wills all our own weaknesses and worldly ambitions. It may be that good comes even out of our selfish struggles; that is, however, Gods look-out. The perfected Bhaktas idea must be never to will and work for himself.
Lord, they build high temples in Your name; they make large gifts in Your name; I am poor; I have nothing; so I take this body of mine and place it at Your feet. Do not give me up, O Lord. Such is the prayer proceeding out of the depths of the Bhaktas heart. To him who has experienced it, this eternal sacrifice of the self unto the Beloved Lord is higher by far than all wealth and power, than even all soaring thoughts of renown and enjoyment. The peace of the Bhaktas calm resignation is a peace that passeth all understanding, and is of incomparable yalue. His Aprtikulya is a state of the mind in which it has no interests, and naturally knows nothing that is opposed to it. In this state of sublime resignation everything in the shape of attachment goes away completely, except that one all-absorbing love to Him in whom all things live and move and have their being. This attachment of love to God is indeed one that does not bind the soul but effectively breaks all its bondages.
2.05 - VISIT TO THE SINTHI BRAMO SAMAJ, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
O Thou who stealest Thy Bhaktas' hearts,
Drown me deep in the Sea of Thy love!
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"There is another path, the path of knowledge, which is very difficult. You members of the Brahmo Samaj are not jnanis. You are Bhaktas. The Jnni believes that Brahman alone is real and the world illusory as a dream. To him, 'I' and 'you' are illusory as a dream.
"God is our Inner Controller. Pray to Him with a pure and guileless heart. He will explain everything to you. Give up egotism and take refuge in Him. You will realize everything."
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MASTER: "God incarnates Himself for the Bhakta and not for the Jnni."
PUNDIT: "'I incarnate Myself in every age for the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked, and for the establishment of dharma.' God becomes man, first, for the joy of the Bhakta, and secondly, for the destruction of the wicked. The Jnni has no desire."
MASTER (smiling): "But I have not got rid of all desires. I have the desire for love of God." The pundit's son entered the room. He saluted the Master and took a seat.
2.06 - The Higher Knowledge and the Higher Love are one to the true Lover, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
The Upanishads distinguish between a higher knowledge and a lower knowledge; and to the Bhakta there is really no dfference between this higher knowledge and his higher love (Par-Bhakti). The Mundaka Upanishad says: The knowers of Brahman declare that there are two kinds of knowledge worthy to be known. namely, the Higher (Par) and the Lower (Apar). Of these the Lower (knowledge) consists of the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Smaveda, the Atharvaveda, the Shiksh (or the science dealing with pronunciation and accent), the Kalpa (or the sacrificial liturgy), Grammar, the Nirukta (or the science dealing with etymology and the meaning of words), Prosody, and Astronomy; and the Higher (knowledge) is that by which that unchangeable is known. The higher knowledge is thus clearly shown to be the knowledge of Brahman: and the Devi-Bhgavata gives us the following definition of the higher love (Par-Bhakti):As oil poured from one vessel to another falls in an unbroken line, so, when the mind in an unbroken stream thinks of the Lord, we have what is called Para-Bhakti or supreme love. This kind of undisturbed and ever steady direction of the mind and the heart to the Lord with an inseparable attactment is indeed the highest manifestation of mans love to God. All other forms of Bhakti are only preparatory to the attainment of this highest form thereof, viz. the Par-Bhakti which is also known as the love that comes after attachment (Rgnug). When this supreme love once comes into the heart of man, his mind will continuously think of God and remember nothing else.
He will give no room in himself to thoughts other than those of God, and his soul will be unconquerably pure, and will alone break all the bonds of mind and matter and become serenely free. He alone can worship the Lord in his own heart; to him, forms, symbols, books, and doctrines are all unnecessary and are incapable of proving serviceable in any way. It is not easy to love the Lord thus. Ordinarily human love is seen to flourish only in places where it is returned; where love is not returned for love, cold indifference is the natural result. There are, however, rare instances in which we may notice love exhibiting itself even where there is no return of love. We may compare this kind of love, for purposes of illustration, to the love of the moth for the fire; the insect loves the fire, falls into it and dies. It is indeed in the nature of this insect to love so. To love, because it is the nature of love to love, is undeniably the highest and the most unselfish manifestation of love that may be seen in the world. Such love working itself out on the plane of spirituality necessarily leads to the attainment of ParaBhakti.
2.06 - WITH VARIOUS DEVOTEES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: 'The jnanis regard everything as illusory, like a dream; but the Bhaktas accept all the states. The milk flows only in dribblets from the Jnni. (All laugh.) There are some cows that pick and choose their fodder; hence their milk flows only in dribblets. But cows that don't discriminate so much, and eat whatever they get, give milk in torrents. A superior devotee of God accepts both the Absolute and the Relative; therefore he is able to enjoy the Divine even when his mind comes down from the Absolute. Such a devotee is like the cows that give milk in torrents." (All laugh.) MAHIMA: "But the milk of a cow that eats without discrimination smells a little."
(Laughter.)
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VIJAY: 'There is a nice story about that in the Bhaktamala."
MASTER: "Tell it to us."
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"The Bhaktas retain 'I-consciousness'; the jnanis do not. Nangta used to teach how to establish oneself in the true Self, saying, 'Merge the mind in the buddhi and the buddhi in the tman; then you will be established in your true Self."
"But the 'I' persists. It cannot be got rid of. Imagine a limitless expanse of water: above and below, before and behind, right and left, everywhere there is water. In that water is placed a jar filled with water. There is water inside the jar and water outside, but the jar is still there. The 'I' is the jar.
2.07 - BANKIM CHANDRA, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
The singing and dancing over, the Master touched the ground with his forehead, saying, 'Bhagavata - Bhakta - Bhagavan! Salutations to the jnanis, yogis, and Bhaktas!
Salutations to all!" He sat down again and all sat around him.
2.07 - The Mother Relations with Others, #Words Of The Mother I, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Only, when this force or this presence, which is the same, passes through your individual consciousness, it puts on a form, an appearance which differs according to your temperament, your aspiration, your need, the particular turn of your being. Your individual consciousness is like a filter, a pointer, if I may say so; it makes a choice and fixes one possibility out of the infinity of divine possibilities. In reality, the Divine gives to each individual exactly what he expects of Him. If you believe that the Divine is far away and cruel, He will be far away and cruel, because it will be necessary for your ultimate good that you feel the wrath of God; He will be Kali for the worshippers of Kali and Beatitude for the Bhakta. And He will be the All-knowledge of the seeker of Knowledge, the transcendent Impersonal of the illusionist; He will be atheist with the atheist and the love of the lover. He will be brotherly and close, a friend always faithful, always ready to succour, for those who feel Him as the inner guide of each movement, at every moment. And if you believe that He can wipe away everything, He will wipe away all your faults, all your errors, tirelessly, and at every moment you can feel His infinite Grace.
The Divine is indeed what you expect of Him in your deepest aspiration.
2.07 - The Triangle of Love, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
There can be no triangle without all its three angles; and there can be no true love without its three following characteristics. The first angle of our triangle of love is, that love knows no bargaining. Wherever there is any seeking for something in return, there can be no real love; it becomes a mere matter of shopkeeping, As long as there is in us any idea of deriving this or that favour from God in return for our respect and allegiance to Him, so long there can be no true love growing in our hearts. Those who worship God because they wish Him to bestow favours on them, are sure not to worship Him, if those favours are not forthcoming. The Bhakta loves the Lord because He is lovable; there is no other motive originating or directing this divine emotion of the true devotee. We have heard it said that a great king once went into a forest and there met a sage. He talked with the sage a little and was very much pleased with his purity and wisdom.
The king then wanted the sage to oblige him by receiving a present from him. The sage refused to do so, saying, The fruits of the forest are enough food for me; the pure streams of water flowing down from the mountains give enough of drink for me; the barks of the trees supply me with enough of covering; and the caves of the mountains form my home. Why Should I take any present from you or from anybody? The king said, Just to benefit me, sir, please take something from my hands, and please come with me to the city and to my palace. After much persuasion, the sage at last consented to do as the king desired and went with him to his palace. Before offering the gift to the sage the king repeated his prayers, saying, Lord, give me more children; Lord, give me more wealth; Lord, give me more territory ; Lord, keep my body in better health, and so on. Before the king finished saying his prayer, the sage had got up and walked away from the room quietly. At this the king became perplexed and began to follow him, crying aloud, Sir, you are going away, you have not received my gifts. The sage turned round to him and said, I do not beg of beggars. You are yourself nothing but a beggar; and how can you give me anything? I am no fool to think of taking anything from a beggar like you. Go away, do not follow me. There is well brought out the distinction between mere beggars and the real lovers of God.
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Love knows no reward. Love is always for loves sake. The Bhakta loves because he cannot help loving. When you see a beautiful scenery and fall in love with it, you do not demand anything in the way of favour from the scenery; nor does the scenery demand anything from you. Yet the vision thereof brings you to a blissful state of the mind, it tones down all the friction in your soul, it makes you calm, almost raises you, for the time being, beyond your mortal nature, and places you in a condition of quite divine ecstasy. This nature of real love is the first angle of our triangle. Ask not anything in return for your love; let your position be always that of the giver; give your love unto God, but do not ask anything in return even from Him.
The second angle of the triangle of love is, that love knows no fear. Those that love God through fear are the lowest of human beings, quite undeveloped as men. They worship God from fear of pumshment. He is a great being to them, with a whip in one hand and the sceptre in the other; if they do not obey Him they are afraid they will be whipped.
2.08 - AT THE STAR THEATRE (II), #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "These are the characteristics of the highest Bhakta."
M. again read from the book:
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"You partake of the nature of him on whom you meditate. By worshipping iva you acquire the nature of iva. A devotee of Rma meditated on Hanuman day and night. He used to think he had become Hanuman. In the end he was firmly convinced that he had even grown a little tail. Jnna is the characteristic of iva, and bhakti of Vishnu. One who partakes of iva's nature becomes a Jnni, and one who partakes of Vishnu's nature becomes a Bhakta."
Chaitanya & The Divine Incarnation and the ordinary man M: "But what about Chaitanyadeva? You said he had both knowledge and devotion."
2.08 - The God of Love is his own proof, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
What is the ideal of the lover who has quite passed beyond beyond the idea of selfishness, of bartering and bargaining, and who knows no fear? Even to the great God such a man will say, I will give You my all, and I do not want anything from You; indeed there is nothing that I can call my own. When a man has acquired this conviction, his ideal becomes one of perfect love, one of perfect fearlessness of love. The highest ideal of such a person has no narrowness of particularity about it; it is love universal, love without limits and bonds, love itself, absolute love. This grand ideal of the religion of love is worshipped and loved absolutely as such without the aid of any symbols or suggestions. This is the highest form of Para-Bhakti, the worship of such an all-comprehending ideal as the ideal; all the other forms of Bhakti are only stages on the way to reach it. All our failures and all our successes in following the religion of love are on the road to the reallsatlon of that one ideal. Object after object is taken up, and the inner ideal is successively projected on them all; and all such external objects are found inadequate as exponents of the everexpanding inner ideal, and are naturally rejected one after another. At last the aspirant begins to think that it is vain to try to realise the ideal in external objects, that all external objects are as nothing when compared with the ideal itself; and, in course of time, he acquires the power of realising the highest and the most generalised abstract ideal entirely as an abstraction that is to him quite alive and real. When the devotee has reached this point, he is no more impelled to ask whether God can be demonstrated or not, whether He is omnipotent and omniscient or not. To him He is only the God of Love: He is the highest ideal of love, and that is sufficient for all his purposes; He, as love, is self-evident; it requires no proofs to demonstrate the existence of the beloved to the lover. The magistrate-Gods of other forms of religion may require a good deal of proof to prove Them; but the Bhakta does pot and cannot think of such Gods at all. To him God exists entirely as love. None, O beloved, loves the husb and for the husbands sake, but it is for the sake of the Self who is in the husb and that the husb and is loved; none, O beloved, loves the wife for the wifes sake, but it is for the sake of the Self who is in the wife that the wife is loved. It is said by some that selfishness is the only motive power in regard to all human activities. That also is love lowered by being particularised. When I think of myself as comprehending the Universal, there can surely be no selfishness in me; but when I, by mistake, think that I am a little something, my love becomes particularised and narrowed.
The mistake consists in making the sphere of love narrow and contracted. All things in the universe are of divine origin and deserve to be loved; it has, however, to be borne in mind that the love of the whole includes the love of the parts. This whole is the God of the Bhaktas and all the other Gods, Fathers in Heaven, or Rulers, or Creators, and all theories and doctrines and books have no purpose and no meaning for them, seeing that they have, through their supreme love and devotion, risen above those things altogether. When the heart is purified and cleansed and filled to the brim with the divine nectar of love, all other ideas of God become simply puerile, and are rejected as being inadequate or unworthy. Such is indeed the power of Para-Bhakti or Supreme Love; and the perfected Bhakta no more goes to see God in temples and churches; he knows no place where he will not find Him. He finds Him in the temple as well as out of the temple; he finds Him in the saints saintliness as well as in the wicked mans wickedness, because he has Him already seated in glory in his own heart, as the one Almighty, inextinguishable Light of Love, which is ever shining and eternally present.
2.09 - Human representations of the Divine Ideal of Love, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
It is impossible to express the nature of this supreme and absolute ideal of love in human language. Even the highest flight of human imagination is incapable of comprehending it in all its infinite perfection and beauty. Nevertheless, the followers of the religion of love, in its .higher as well as its lower forms, in all countries, have all along had to use the inadequate human language to comprehend and to define their own ideal of love. Nay more; human love itself, in all its varied forms, has been made to typify this inexpressible divine love. Man can think of divine things only in his own human way; to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our relative language. The whole universe is to us a writing of the Infinite in the language of the finite. Therefore Bhaktas make use of all the common i terms associated with the common love of humanity in relation to God and His worship through love. Some of the great writers on ParaBhakti have tried to understand and experience this divine love in so many different ways. The lowest form in which this love is apprehended is what they call the peaceful the Shnta (zaNt). When a man worships God without the fire of love in him, without its madness in his brain, when his love is just the calm commonplace love, a little higher than mere forms and ceremonies and symbols, but not at all characterised by the madness of intensely active love, it is said to be Shnta. We see some people in the world who like to move on slowly, and others who come and go like the whirlwind. The Shnta- Bhakta is calm, peaceful, gentle. The next higher type is that of Dsya (daSy) i.e. servantship; it comes when a man thinks he is the servant of the Lord. The attachment of the faithful servant unto the master is his ideal.
The next type of love is Sakhya (sOy), friendship Thou art our beloved friend. Just as a man opens his heart to his friend and knows that the friend will never chide him for his faults, but will always try to help him, just as there is the idea of equality between him and his friend, so equal love flows in and out between the worshipper and his friendly God. Thus God becomes our friend, the friend who is near, the friend to whom we may freely tell all the tales of our lives! The innermost secrets of .our hearts we may place before Him with the great assurance of safety and support; He is the friend whom the devotee accepts as an equal; God is viewed here as our playmate. We may well say that we are all playing in this universe. Just as children play their games, just as the most glorious kings and emperors play their own games, so is the Beloved Lord Himself in sport with this universe. He is perfect; He does not want anything.
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One who has been kissed by Thee, has his thirst for Thee increasing for ever, all his sorrows vanish, and he forgets all things except Thee alone. Aspire after that kiss of the Beloved, that touch of His lips which makes the Bhakta mad, which makes of man a god. To him, who has been blessed with such a kiss, the whole of nature changes, worlds vanish, suns and moons die out, and the universe itself melts away into that one infinite ocean of love. That is the perfection of the madness of love. Aye; the true spiritual lover does not rest even there; even the love of husb and and wife is not mad enough for him. The Bhaktas take up also the idea of illegitimate love, because it is so strong; the impropriety of it is not at all the thing they have in view. The nature of this love is such that the more obstructions there are for its free play, the more passionate it becomes. The love between husb and and wife is smooth, there are no obstructions there.
So the Bhaktas take up the idea of a girl who is in love with her own beloved, and her mother or father or husb and objects to such love; and the more anybody obstructs the course of her love, so much the more is her love tending to grow in strength.
Human language cannot describe how Krishna in the groves of Vrind was madly loved, how at the sound of his voice the ever-blessed Gopis rushed out to meet him, forgetting everything, forgetting this world and its ties, its duties, its joys, and its sorrows. Man, O man, you speak of divine love and at the same time are able to attend to all the vanities of this world-are you sincere? Where Rma is, there is no room for any desire;where desire is, there is no room for Rma; these never co-existlike light and darkness they are never together.
2.09 - On Sadhana, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: There are many moods: there is the light mood, the angry mood, the emotional mood you would be a great Bhakta if you got into the last.
Disciple: Drinking had no effect on me: I simply used to get giddy.
2.09 - THE MASTERS BIRTHDAY, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "Reasoning is one of the paths; it is the path of the Vedantists. But there is another path, the path of bhakti. If a Bhakta, weeps longingly for the Knowledge of Brahman, he receives that as well. These are the two paths: jnna and bhakti.
The ego of the Divine Incarnation
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"Since one cannot easily get rid of the ego, a Bhakta does not explain away the states of waking, dream, and deep sleep. He accepts all the states. Further, he accepts the three Guns-sattva, rajas, and tamas. A Bhakta sees that God alone has become the twenty-four cosmic principles, the universe, and all living beings. He also sees that God reveals Himself to His devotees in a tangible form, which is the embodiment of Spirit.
"The Bhakta takes shelter under Vidy-my. He seeks holy company, goes on pilgrimage, and practises discrimination, devotion, and renunciation. He says that, since a man cannot easily get rid of his ego, he should let the rascal remain as the servant of God, the devotee of God.
Meaning of liberation
"But a Bhakta also attains the Knowledge of Oneness; he sees that nothing exists but God. He does not regard the world as a dream, but says that it is God Himself who has become everything. In a wax garden you may see various objects, but everything is made of wax.
"But a man realizes this only when his devotion to God has matured. One gets jaundice when too much bile accumulates. Then one sees everything as yellow. From constantly meditating on Krishna, Radhika saw everything as Krishna; moreover, she even felt that she herself had become Krishna. If a piece of lead is kept in a lake of mercury a long time, it turns into mercury. The cockroach becomes motionless by constantly meditating on the kumira worm; it loses the power to move. At last it is transformed into a kumira.
Similarly, by constantly meditating on God the Bhakta loses his ego; he realizes that God is he and he is God. When the cockroach becomes the kumira everything is achieved.
Instantly one obtains liberation.
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MASTER: "True, true. But a man realizes that when he has the Knowledge of Brahman; But for a Bhakta, who follows the path of divine love, both exist-Vidy-my and Avidy-
my.
2.1.01 - The Central Process of the Sadhana, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It [the value of work in sadhana] depends more on the intensity of the spirit put into it than on the intensity of the work itself. As for the line on which most stress is laid, it depends on the nature. There are some people who are not cut out for meditation and it is only by work that they can prepare themselves; there are also those who are the opposite. As for the enormous development of egoism, that can come whatever one follows. I have seen it blossom in the dhyn as well as in the worker; Krishnaprem says it does so in the Bhakta. So it is evident that all soils are favourable to this Narcissus flower. As for no need of sadhana, obviously one who does not do any sadhana cannot change or progress. Work, meditation, bhakti, all must be done as sadhana.
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2.10 - Conclusion, #Bhakti-Yoga, #Swami Vivekananda, #Hinduism
Be Thou ever and ever my Love. Who cares to become sugar, says the Bhakta, I want to taste sugar. Who will then desire to become free and one with God? I may know that I am He, yet will I take myself away from Him and become different, so that I may enjoy the Beloved. That is what the Bhakta says. Love for loves sake is his highest enjoyment. Who will not be bound hand and foot a thousand times over to enjoy the Beloved? No Bhakta cares for anything except love, except to love and to be loved. His unworldly love is like the tide rushing up the river; this lover goes up the river, against the current. The world calls him mad. I know one whom the world used to call mad, and this was his answer: My friends, the whole world is a lunatic asylum; some are mad after worldly love, some after name, some after fame, some after money, some after salvation and going to heaven. In this big lunatic asylum I am also mad, I am mad after God. If you are mad after money, I am mad after God. You are mad; so am I. I think my madness is after all the best. The true Bhaktas love is this burning madness, before which everything else vanishes for him.
The whole universe is to him full of love and love alone; that is how it seems to the lover. So when a man has this love in him, he becomes eternally blessed, eternally happy; this blessed madness of divine love alone can cure for ever the disease of the world that is in us. With desire, selfishness has vanished. He has drawn near to God, he has thrown off all those vain desires of which he was full before, We all have to begin as dualists in the religion of love.
2.10 - THE MASTER AND NARENDRA, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"I-consciousness"after God-realization "The Bhakta feels, 'O God, Thou art the Lord and I am Thy devotee.' This 'I' is the 'ego of bhakti'. Why does such a lover of God retain the 'ego of Devotion'? There is a reason.
The ego cannot begot rid of; so let the rascal remain as the servant of God, the devotee of God.
2.11 - The Vision of the World-Spirit - The Double Aspect, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
it is possible to be one with all, yet above all, to exceed world and yet embrace the whole nature at once of the cosmic and the supracosmic Godhead. This is difficult indeed for limited man imprisoned in his mind and body: but, says the Godhead, "be a doer of my works, accept me as the supreme being and object, become my Bhakta, be free from attachment and without enmity to all existences; for such a man comes to me." In other words superiority to the lower nature, unity with all creatures, oneness with the cosmic Godhead and the Transcendence, oneness of will with the Divine in works, absolute love for the One and for God in all, - this is the way to that absolute spiritual self-exceeding and that unimaginable transformation.
2.12 - THE MASTERS REMINISCENCES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Bright as the moon, in the Bhakta's heart!
Sri Ramakrishna left the room for a minute. The women devotees were seated near the screen. They were eager to see Sri Ramakrishna. Trailokya went on with his music.
2.12 - The Way and the Bhakta, #Essays On The Gita, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga object:2.12 - The Way and the Bhakta author class:Sri Aurobindo
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The Way and the Bhakta
N THE eleventh chapter of the Gita the original object of the teaching has been achieved and brought up to a certain completeness. The comm and to divine action done for the sake of the world and in union with the Spirit who dwells in it and in all its creatures and in whom all its working takes place, has been given and accepted by the Vibhuti. The disciple has been led away from the old poise of the normal man and the standards, motives, outlook, egoistic consciousness of his ignorance, away from all that had finally failed him in the hour of his spiritual crisis. The very action which on that standing he had rejected, the terrible function, the appalling labour, he has now been brought to admit and accept on a new inner basis. A reconciling greater knowledge, a diviner consciousness, a high impersonal motive, a spiritual standard of oneness with the will of the Divine acting on the world from the fountain light and with the motive power of the spiritual nature, - this is the new inner principle of works which is to transform the old ignorant action. A knowledge which embraces oneness with the Divine and arrives through the Divine at conscious oneness with all things and beings, a will emptied of egoism and acting only by the comm and and as an instrumentation of the secret
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The Way and the Bhakta
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The Way and the Bhakta
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The Way and the Bhakta
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The Way and the Bhakta
403
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What then will be the divine nature, what will be the greater state of consciousness and being of the Bhakta who has followed this way and turned to the adoration of the Eternal? The Gita in a number of verses rings the changes on its first insistent demand, on equality, on desirelessness, on freedom of spirit. This is to be the base always, - and that was why so much stress was laid on it in the beginning. And in that equality bhakti, the love and
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adoration of the Purushottama must rear the spirit towards some greatest highest perfection of which this calm equality will be the wide foundation. Several formulas of this fundamental equal consciousness are given here. First, an absence of egoism, of Iness and my-ness, nirmamo nirahankarah.. The Bhakta of the
Purushottama is one who has a universal heart and mind which has broken down all the narrow walls of the ego. A universal love dwells in his heart, a universal compassion flows from it like an encompassing sea. He will have friendship and pity for all beings and hate for no living thing: for he is patient, longsuffering, enduring, a well of forgiveness. A desireless content is his, a tranquil equality to pleasure and pain, suffering and happiness, the steadfast control of self and the firm unshakable will and resolution of the Yogin and a love and devotion which gives up the whole mind and reason to the Lord, to the Master of his consciousness and knowledge. Or, simply, he will be one who is freed from the troubled agitated lower nature and from its waves of joy and fear and anxiety and resentment and desire, a spirit of calm by whom the world is not afflicted or troubled, nor is he afflicted or troubled by the world, a soul of peace with whom all are at peace.
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The Way and the Bhakta
405
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This is the foundation, the condition, the means by which the supreme spiritual perfection is to be won, and those who have it in any way are all dear to me, says the Godhead, bhaktiman me priyah.. But exceedingly dear, atva me priyah., are those souls nearest to the Godhead whose love of me is completed by the still wider and greatest perfection of which I have just shown to you the way and the process. These are the Bhaktas who make the Purushottama their one supreme aim and follow out with a perfect faith and exactitude the immortalising Dharma described in this teaching. Dharma in the language of the Gita means the innate law of the being and its works and an action proceeding from and determined by the inner nature, svabhava-niyatam karma. In the lower ignorant consciousness of mind, life and body there are many dharmas, many rules, many standards and laws because there are many varying determinations and types
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2.13 - On Psychology, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: The Gita speaks of four kinds of Bhaktas: rta distressed, jijsu seeking knowledge, arthrth one who wants to serve some purpose, and jn the man of knowledge. What is the meaning of arthrth?
Sri Aurobindo: When you want God for serving some of your own aims.
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Sri Aurobindo: Then I was an arthrth Bhakta.
Disciple: A mixture of jn and arthrth.
2.13 - THE MASTER AT THE HOUSES OF BALARM AND GIRISH, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Ah, what a state of mind I passed through! My mind would lose itself in the Indivisible Absolute. How many days I spent that way! I renounced bhakti and Bhakta, devotion and devotee. I became inert. I could not feel the form of my own head. I was about to die. I thought of keeping Ramlal's aunt near me.
"I ordered the removal of all pictures and portraits from my room. When I regained outer consciousness, when the mind climbed down to the ordinary level, I felt as if I were being suffocated like a drowning person. At last I said to myself, 'If I can't bear people, then how shall I live?' Then my mind was again directed to bhakti and Bhakta.
'What has happened to me?' I kept asking people. Bholanath said to me, 'This state of mind has been described in the Mahabharata.' How can a man live, on coming down from the plane of samdhi? Surely he requires devotion to God and the company of devotees. Otherwise, how will he keep his mind occupied?"
--
"Again, jnna and bhakti are twin paths. Whichever you follow, it is God that you will ultimately reach. The Jnni looks on God in one way and the Bhakta looks on Him in another way. The God of the Jnni is full of brilliance, and the God of the Bhakta full of sweetness."
Bhavanth was seated near the Master, listening to these words.
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"By coming down a step or two from samdhi I enjoy bhakti and Bhakta.
Vidy-my and Avidy-my
2.14 - AT RAMS HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
MASTER: "It can't be said that Bhaktas need Nirvna. According to some schools there is an eternal Krishna and there are also His eternal devotees. Krishna is Spirit embodied, and His Abode also is Spirit embodied. Krishna is eternal and the devotees also are eternal. Krishna and the devotees are like the moon and the stars-always near each other. You yourself repeat: 'what need is there of penance if God is seen within and without?' Further, I have told you that the devotee who is born with an element of Vishnu cannot altogether get rid of bhakti.
Once I fell into the clutches of a Jnni, who made me listen to Vednta for eleven months. But he couldn't altogether destroy the seed of bhakti in me. No matter where my mind wandered, it would come back to the Divine Mother. Whenever I sang of Her, Nangta would weep and say, 'Ah! What is this?' You see, he was such a great Jnni and still he wept. (To the younger Naren and the others) Remember the popular saying that if a man drinks the juice of the lekh creeper, a plant grows inside his stomach. Once the seed of bhakti is sown, the effect is inevitable: it will gradually grow into a tree with flowers and fruits.
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MASTER: "It is the Bhakta, and not the Jnni, who discriminates between holiness and unholiness. Vijay's mother-in-law said to me: 'How little I have achieved of my spiritual ideal! I cannot take food from everybody.' I said to her: 'Is eating everybody's food a sign of jnna? A dog eats anything and everything. Does that make it a Jnni?'
(To M.) "Why do I eat a variety of dishes? In order not to become monotonous.
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"Formerly I had the state of mind of a Jnni: I couldn't enjoy the company of men. I would hear that a Jnni or a Bhakta lived at a certain place; then, a few days later, I would learn that he was dead. Everything seemed to me impermanent; so I couldn't enjoy people's company. Later the Mother brought my mind down to a lower plane; She so changed my mind that I could enjoy love of God and His devotees."
Divine Incarnation
--
MASTER: "Whole and part are like fire and its sparks. An Incarnation of God is for the sake of the Bhaktas and not of the jnanis. It is said in the Adhytma Rmyana that Rma alone is both the Pervading Spirit and everything pervaded. 'You are the Supreme Lord distinguished as the Vachaka, the signifying symbol, and the Vachya, the object signified.'"
CAPTAIN: "The 'signifying symbol' means the pervader, and the 'object signified' means the thing pervaded."
2.15 - CAR FESTIVAL AT BALARMS HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Many the forms Thou dost assume, fulfilling Thy Bhaktas'
prayers.
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"As long as 'I-consciousness' exists, one should have the attitude of a Bhakta; one should not say, 'I am God.' A man aware of his body should feel that he is not Krishna Himself, but His devotee. But if God draws the devotee to Himself, then it is different. It is like the master saying to his beloved servant: 'Come, take your seat near me. You are the same as I.'
"The waves are part of the Ganges, but the Ganges is not part of the waves.
2.15 - On the Gods and Asuras, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Sri Aurobindo: I think so. One cannot see that unless one passes entirely out of the human consciousness. They have forms by which they distinguish themselves from other Gods and also through which they express what they are. It seems there are three elements that enter into this question: first, the form we see may be the reflection of the true or nitya form which may not be entire and which may not be the sarfie for all the planes. It may vary according to the plane on which it is reflected. Secondly, the mind or consciousness of the Bhakta may contribute something to it. Thirdly, it may be a mixture of the two.
Disciple: Have the forms of the Gods any resemblance to the human form?
2.16 - VISIT TO NANDA BOSES HOUSE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"You must go to the Kalpataru and pray. Only then will you obtain the fruits. Only then will the fruits fall from the tree. Only then will you be able to gather them. There are four fruits: dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. The jnanis seek the fruit of liberation; and the Bhaktas, love of God, love without any motive behind it. They seek neither dharma nor artha nor kama.
About the after-life
2.17 - THE MASTER ON HIMSELF AND HIS EXPERIENCES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
But did Mahimacharan understand the import of these words? Even after hearing them, he said to the Master, "These things have happened to you on account of your meritorious actions in your past births." Mahima still thought that Sri Ramakrishna was a sdhu or a devotee of God. The Master nodded assent to Mahima's words and said: "Yes, the result of past actions. God is like an aristocrat who has many mansions. Here [referring to himself] is one of His drawing-rooms. The Bhakta is God's drawing-room."
It was nine o'clock in the evening. Sri Ramakrishna was sitting on the small couch. It was Mahimacharan's desire to form a brahmachakra in the presence of the Master.
2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
Disciple: Some Sufis and Bhaktas take illness and other troubles as gifts from the Beloved, the Divine. So, can one say that everything comes from the Divine?
Sri Aurobindo: They are right in a way. They take everything as coming from the Divine and it is a very good attitude if one can truly take it. Whatever happens is with the sanction of the Supreme. If you neglect the chain of intermediate causes there is a Superior Cause to everything.
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Sri Aurobindo: I said that about the Bhakta, not about everybody. For the Bhakta what happens is the best and he takes it in that light.
For the Yogi who has to conquer these things they will come, otherwise there would be nothing to overcome. It would be no real conquest at all. One can always feel the difficulties as opportunities, and in one sense one can say that whatever happens is for the best. Hostile forces are recognised as hostile, but from another standpoint they become the Divine power throwing out attacks for the work to be done. Ultimately all powers are from the Divine, they assist in the work. They throw up difficulties to test the strength. It is the Divine that has created the opposition and it is the Divine who sends you the defeat so that you may conquer the difficulties hereafter. This is necessary also to counter the egos sense of responsibility.
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Sri Aurobindo: In the case of psychic individuality the man may feel the ego of the Sadhu, the Saint, the Bhakta, or the virtuous man. He may also get rid of egoism by imposing on his nature the One Spirit and a feeling of sympathy for all humanity. But that is not the same as getting rid entirely of the ego. The psychic clears the way for the removal of the ego.
Disciple: What happens when one realises the Spirit?
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Sri Aurobindo: The psychic transformation is the first one. Many yogis achieve this transformation. All saints have psychic transformation: it is the pure Bhakta-nature. But all spiritual men are not saints. Of course, both can go together sometimes.
Disciple: Is there a distinction between saints and spiritual persons?
2.18 - SRI RAMAKRISHNA AT SYAMPUKUR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"Yes, God has form and, again, He has none. Do you know how it is? Brahman, Existence-Knowledge-Bliss Absolute, is like a shoreless ocean. In the ocean visible blocks of ice are formed here and there by intense cold. Similarly, under the cooling influence, so to speak, of the bhakti of Its worshippers, the Infinite transforms Itself into the finite and appears before the worshipper as God with form. That is to say, God reveals Himself to His Bhaktas as an embodied Person. Again, as, on the rising of the sun, the ice in the ocean melts away, so, on the awakening of Jnna, the embodied God melts back into the infinite and formless Brahman."
DOCTOR: "Yes. When the sun is up, the ice melts; and what is more, the heat of the sun turns the water into invisible vapour."
2.19 - THE MASTER AND DR. SARKAR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
Though free of limitations, beginningless and without end, Yet for Thy loving Bhaktas' sake Thou wearest varying forms.
The terrors of this world Thou dost remove, and Thou dost dwell
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O Thou who stealest Thy Bhaktas' hearts,
Drown me deep in the Sea of Thy love!
2.20 - THE MASTERS TRAINING OF HIS DISCIPLES, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M: "But with him the meaning of Kli is different. What the Vedas call the Supreme Brahman, he calls Kli. What the Mussulmans call Allah and the Christians call God, he calls Kli. He does not see many gods; he sees only one God. What the Brahma jnanis of olden times called Brahman, what the yogis call tman and the Bhaktas call the Bhagavan, he calls Kli.
Depth of Sri Ramakrishna's experiences
2.21 - IN THE COMPANY OF DEVOTEES AT SYAMPUKUR, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"When the mind is united with God, one sees Him very near, in one's own heart. But you must remember one thing. The more you realize this unity, the farther your mind is withdrawn from worldly things. There is the story of Vilwamangal in the Bhaktamala. He used to visit a prostitute. One night he was very late in going to her house. He had been detained at home by the sraddha ceremony of his father and mother. In his hands he was carrying the food offered in the ceremony, to feed his mistress. His whole soul was so set upon the woman that he was not at all conscious of his movements. He didn't even know how he was walking. There was a yogi seated on the path, meditating on God with eyes closed. Vilwamangal stepped on him. The yogi became angry, and cried out: 'What? Are you blind? I have been thinking of God, and you step on my body!' 'I beg your pardon,' said Vilwamangal, 'but may I ask you something? I have been unconscious, thinking of a prostitute, and you are conscious of the outer world though thinking of God. What kind of meditation is that?' In the end Vilwamangal renounced the world and went away in order to worship God. He said to the prostitute: 'You are my guru. You have taught me how one should yearn for God.' He addressed the prostitute as his mother and gave her up."
DR. SARKAR: "To address a woman as mother is the Tantrik form of worship."
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"A genuine Bhakta dwells sometimes on the Absolute and sometimes on the Relative.
Both the Absolute and the Relative belong to one and the same Reality. It is all one-neither two nor many."
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M: "Yes, sir. Undoubtedly he is a Bhakta."
MASTER: "How guileless he is!"
2.22 - THE MASTER AT COSSIPORE, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
"The Bhakta, however, does not ignore maya. He worships Mahamaya. Taking refuge in Her, he says: 'O Mother, please stand aside from my path. Only if You step out of my way shall I have the Knowledge of Brahman.' The jnanis explain away all three states — waking, dream, and deep sleep. But the Bhaktas accept them all. As long as there is the ego, everything else exists. So long as the 'I' exists, the Bhakta sees that it is God who has become maya, the universe, the living beings, and the twenty-four cosmic principles."
Narendra and the other devotees sat silently listening.
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Sri Ramakrishna affectionately stroked Narendra's face and hands, and said: "Your face and hands show that you are a Bhakta. But the jnani has different features; they are dry.
"Even after attaining jnana, the jnani can live in the world, retaining vidyamaya, that is to say, bhakti, compassion, renunciation, and such virtues. This serves him two purposes: first, the teaching of men, and second, the enjoyment of divine bliss. If a jnani remains silent, merged in samadhi, then men's hearts will not be illumined. Therefore Sankaracharya kept the 'ego of Knowledge'. And further, a jnani lives as a devotee, in the company of Bhaktas, in order to enjoy and drink deep of the Bliss of God.
"The 'ego of Knowledge' and the 'ego of Devotion' can do no harm; it is the 'wicked I' that is harmful. After realizing God a man becomes like a child. There is no harm in the 'ego of a child'. It is like the reflection of a face in a mirror: the reflection cannot call names. Or it is like a burnt rope, which appears to be a rope but disappears at the slightest puff. The ego that has been burnt in the fire of Knowledge cannot injure anybody. It is an ego only in name.
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"But if one retains vidyamaya one comes back to this world. The Avatars keep this vidyamaya. So long as a man has even the slightest desire, he must be born again and again. When he gets rid of all desires, then he is liberated. But the Bhaktas do not seek liberation.
"If a person dies in Benares he attains liberation; he is not born again. Liberation is the goal of the jnanis."
2.23 - THE MASTER AND BUDDHA, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M. (to himself): "Yes, after realizing all those ideals, he is now living as a Bhakta, a devotee of God."
MASTER: "Someone seems to be holding me to a lower plane."
2.25 - AFTER THE PASSING AWAY, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
M. (to himself): "Ah! The Master used to say that those who seek God pass through the state that Prasanna is now experiencing. In that state sometimes one doubts the very existence of God. I understand that Tarak is now reading Buddhistic philosophy. That is why he says that according to the jnani God does not exist. But Sri Ramakrishna used to say that the jnani and the Bhakta will ultimately arrive at the same destination."
Narendra and Prasanna were talking in the meditation room. Rakhal, Harish, and the younger Gopal were seated in another part of the room. After a while the elder Gopal came in.
2.25 - List of Topics in Each Talk, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
| 22-06-26 | Inner being, psychic being. Supermind, krana sharira; liberation;aspiration, psychic being, spirituality and suffering; Gandhi,Christianity, Patanjali; kinds of Bhaktas |
| 25-06-26 | Suffering, asceticism; historicity of Christ, Rama, Krishna |
2.25 - The Triple Transformation, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A second approach made by the soul to the direct contact is through the heart: this is its own more close and rapid way because its occult seat is there, just behind in the heart-centre, in close contact with the emotional being in us; it is consequently through the emotions that it can act best at the beginning with its native power, with its living force of concrete experience. It is through a love and adoration of the All-beautiful and Allblissful, the All-Good, the True, the spiritual Reality of love, that the approach is made; the aesthetic and emotional parts join together to offer the soul, the life, the whole nature to that which they worship. This approach through adoration can get its full power and impetus only when the mind goes beyond impersonality to the awareness of a supreme Personal Being: then all becomes intense, vivid, concrete; the heart's emotion, feeling, spiritualised sense reach their absolute; an entire selfgiving becomes possible, imperative. The nascent spiritual man makes his appearance in the emotional nature as the devotee, the Bhakta; if, in addition, he becomes directly aware of his soul and its dictates, unites his emotional with his psychic personality and changes his life and vital parts by purity, God-ecstasy, the love of God and men and all creatures into a thing of spiritual beauty, full of divine light and good, he develops into the saint and reaches the highest inner experience and most considerable change of nature proper to this way of approach to the Divine Being. But for the purpose of an integral transformation this too is not enough; there must be a transmutation of the thinking mind and all the vital and physical parts of consciousness in their own character.
This larger change can be partly attained by adding to the experiences of the heart a consecration of the pragmatic will which must succeed in carrying with it - for otherwise it cannot be effective - the adhesion of the dynamic vital part which supports the mental dynamis and is our first instrument of outer action. This consecration of the will in works proceeds by a gradual elimination of the ego-will and its motive-power of desire; the ego subjects itself to some higher law and finally effaces itself, seems not to exist or exists only to serve a higher Power or a higher Truth or to offer its will and acts to the Divine Being as an instrument. The law of being and action or the light of Truth which then guides the seeker, may be a clarity or power or principle which he perceives on the highest height of which his mind is capable; or it may be a truth of the divine Will which he feels present and working within him or guiding him by a Light or a Voice or a Force or a divine Person or Presence. In the end by this way one arrives at a consciousness in which one feels the Force or Presence acting within and moving or governing all the actions and the personal will is entirely surrendered or identified with that greater Truth-Will, Truth-Power or Truth-Presence. A combination of all these three approaches, the approach of the mind, the approach of the will, the approach of the heart, creates a spiritual or psychic condition of the surface being and nature in which there is a larger and more complex openness to the psychic light within us and to the spiritual Self or the Ishwara, to the Reality now felt above and enveloping and penetrating us.
2.3.02 - The Supermind or Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Form, it comes with the image of the One to whom worship is offered. The Divine can always manifest himself in a form to the Bhakta or seeker. One sees him in the form in which one worships or seeks him or in a form suitable to the Divine
Personality who is the object of the adoration. How it manifests depends on many things and it is too various to be reduced to a single rule. Sometimes it is in the heart that the Presence with the form is seen, sometimes in any of the other centres, sometimes above and guiding from there; sometimes it is seen outside and in front as if an embodied Person. Its advantages are an intimate relation and constant guidance or if felt or seen within, a very strong and concrete realisation of the constant Presence. But one must be very sure of the purity of one's adoration and seeking
2.4.02 - Bhakti, Devotion, Worship, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
2) The Asura is the best Bhakta. The Gita is quite wrong in holding up the Deva nature as the condition of realisation and the Asura nature as contrary to it. It is the other way round.
3) Ravana, Hiranyakashipu, Shishupala were the greatest devotees of the Divine because they were capable of hostility to the Divine and so were liberated in a few livescompared with them the great Rishis and Bhaktas were very poor spiritual vessels. I am aware of the paradox about Ravana in the Purana, but let me point out that these Asuras and Rakshasas did not pretend to be disciples or worshippers of Rama or Krishna or Vishnu or use their position as disciples to get moksha by revolt they got it by being enemies and getting killed and absorbed into the Godhead.
4) Obedience to the Guru, worship of the Divine are all tommy rot and fit only for sheep, not men. To turn round furiously on the Guru or the Divine, abuse him, express contempt, challenge his sincerity, declare his actions to be wrong, foolish or a trickto assert oneself as right at every point and his judgment as mistaken, prejudiced, absurd, false, a support of devils etc. etc. is the best way of devotion and the true relation between Guru and Shishya. Disobedience is the highest respect to the Guru, anger and revolt are the noblest worship one can give to the Divine.
2.4.2 - Interactions with Others and the Practice of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
And if some find that retirement is the best way of giving oneself to the Higher, to the Divine by avoiding as much as possible occasions for the bubbling up of the lower, why not? The aim they have come for is that and why blame or look with distrust and suspicion on the means they find best or daub it with disparaging adjectives to discredit itgrim, inhuman and the rest? It is your vital that shrinks from it and your vital mind that supplies these epithets which express only your shrinking and not what the retirement really is. For it is the vital or the social part of it that shrinks from solitude; the thinking mind does not but rather courts it. The poet seeks solitude with himself or with Nature to listen to his inspiration; the thinker plunges into solitude to meditate on things and commune with a deeper knowledge; the scientist shuts himself up in his laboratory to pore by experiment into the secrets of Nature; these retirements are not grim and inhuman. Neither is the retirement of the sadhak into the exclusive concentration of which he feels the need; it is a means to an end, to the end on which his whole heart is set. As for the Yogin or Bhakta who has already begun to have the fundamental experience, he is not in a grim and inhuman solitude. The Divine and all the world are there in the being of the one, the supreme Beloved or his Ananda is there in the heart of the other.
I say this as against your depreciation of retirement founded on ignorance of what it really is; but I do not, as I have often said, recommend a total seclusion, for I hold that to be a dangerous expedient which may lead to morbidity and much error. Nor do I impose retirement on anyone as a method or approve of it unless the person himself seeks it, feels its necessity, has the joy of it and the personal proof that it helps to the spiritual experience. It is not to be imposed on anyone as a principle, for that is the mental way of doing things, the way of the ordinary mindit is as a need that it has to be accepted, when it is felt as a need, not as a general law or rule.
3.03 - The Godward Emotions, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Certainly, fear enters into the relations of the master and the servant and even of the father and the child, but only when they are on the human level, when control and subjection and punishment figure predominantly in them and love is obliged to efface itself more or less behind the mask of authority. The Divine even as the Master does not punish anybody, does not threaten, does not force obedience. It is the human soul that has freely to come to the Divine and offer itself to his overpowering force that he may seize and uplift it towards his own divine levels, and give it that joy of mastery of the finite nature by the Infinite and of service to the Highest by which there comes freedom from the ego and the lower nature. Love is the key of this relation, and this service, dasyam, is in Indian Yoga the happy service of the divine Friend or the passionate service to the divine Beloved. The Master of the worlds who in the Gita demands of his servant, the Bhakta, to be nothing more in life than his instrument, makes this claim as the friend, the guide, the higher Self, and describes himself as the Lord of all worlds who is the friend of all creatures, sarvalokamahesvaram smhrdanl suhrdam sarvabhutaman; the two relations in fact must go together and neither can be perfect without the other. So too it is not the fatherhood of God as the Creator who demands obedience because he is the maker of our being, but the fatherhood of love which leads us towards the closer soul-union of Yoga. Love is the real key in both, and perfect love is inconsistent with the admission of the motive of fear. Closeness of the human soul to the Divine is the object, and fear sets always a barrier and a distance; even awe and reverence for the divine Power are a sign of distance and division and they disappear in the intimacy of the union of love.
Moreover, fear belongs to the lower nature, to the lower self, and in approaching the higher Self must be put aside before we can enter into its presence.
This relation of the divine fatherhood and the closer relation with the Divine as the Mother Soul of the universe have their springs in another early religious motive. One type of the Bhakta, says the Gita, is the devotee who comes to the Divine as the giver of his wants, the giver of his good, the satisfier of the needs of his inner and his outer being. "I bring to my Bhakta", says the Lord, "his getting and his having of good, yogaksemam vahamyaham." The life of man is a life of wants and needs and therefore of desires, not only in his physical and vital, but in his mental and spiritual being. When he becomes conscious of a greater Power governing the world, he approaches it through prayer for the fulfilment of his needs, for help in his rough journey, for protection and aid in his struggle. Whatever crudities there may be in the ordinary religious approach to God by prayer, and there are many, especially that attitude which imagines the Divine as if capable of being propitiated, bribed, flattered into acquiescence or indulgence by praise, entreaty and gifts and has often little regard to the spirit in which he is approached, still this way of turning to the Divine is an essential movement of our religious being and reposes on a universal truth.
The efficacy of prayer is often doubted and prayer itself supposed to be a thing irrational and necessarily superfluous and ineffective. It is true that the universal will executes always its aim and cannot be deflected by egoistic propitiation and entreaty, it is true of the Transcendent who expresses himself in the universal order that, being omniscient, his larger knowledge must foresee the thing to be done and it does not need direction or stimulation by human thought and that the individual's desires are not and cannot be in any world-order the true determining factor. But neither is that order or the execution of the universal will altogether effected by mechanical Law, but by powers and forces of which for human life at least, human will, aspiration and faith are not among the least important. Prayer is only a particular form given to that will, aspiration and faith. Its forms are very often crude and not only childlike, which is in itself no defect, but childish; but still it has a real power and significance. Its power and sense is to put the will, aspiration and faith of man into touch with the divine Will as that of a conscious Being with whom we can enter into conscious and living relations. For our will and aspiration can act either by our own strength and endeavour, which can no doubt be made a thing great and effective whether for lower or higher purposes, -and there are plenty of disciplines which put it forward as the one force to be used, -- or it can act in dependence upon and with subordination to the divine or the universal Will. And this latter way, again, may either look upon that Will as responsive indeed to our aspiration, but almost mechanically, by a sort of law of energy, or at any rate quite impersonally, or else it may look upon it as responding consciously to the divine aspiration and faith of the human soul and consciously bringing to it the help, the guidance, the protection and fruition demanded, yogaksemam vahamyaham.
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But the highest and the greatest relation is that which starts from none of the ordinary religious motives, but is rather of the very essence of Yoga, springs from the very nature of love itself; it is the passion of the Lover and the Beloved. Wherever there is the desire of the soul for its utter union with God, this form of the divine yearning makes its way even into religions which seem to do without it and give it no place in their ordinary system. Here the one thing asked for is love, the one thing feared is the loss of love, the one sorrow is the sorrow of separation of love; for all other things either do not exist for the lover or come in only as incidents or as results and not as objects or conditions of love. All love is indeed in its nature self-existent because it springs from a secret oneness in being and a sense of that oneness or desire of oneness in the heart between souls that are yet able to conceive of themselves as different from each other and divided. Therefore all these other relations too can arrive at their self-existent motiveless joy of being for the sake of love alone. But still they start from and to the end they, to some extent, find a satisfaction of their play in other motives. But here the beginning is love and the end is love and the whole aim is love. There is indeed the desire of possession, but even this is overcome in the fullness of the self-existent love and the final demand of the Bhakta is simply that his Bhakti may never cease nor diminish. He does not ask for heaven or for liberation from birth or for any other object, but only that his love may be eternal and absolute.
Love is a passion and it seeks for two things, eternity and intensity, and in the relation of the Lover and Beloved the seeking for eternity and for intensity is instinctive and self-born. Love is a seeking for mutual possession, and it is here that the demand for mutual possession becomes absolute. Passing beyond desire of possession which means a difference, it is a seeking for oneness, and it is here that the idea of oneness, of two souls merging into each other and becoming one finds the acme of its longing and the utterness of its satisfaction. Love, too, is a yearning for beauty, and it is here that the yearning is eternally satisfied in the vision and the touch and the joy of the All-beautiful. Love is a child and a seeker of Delight, and it is here that it finds the highest possible ecstasy both of the heart-consciousness and of every fibre of the being. Moreover, this relation is that which as between human being and human being demands the most and, even while reaching the greatest intensities, is still the least satisfied, because only in the Divine can it find its real and its utter satisfaction. Therefore it is here most that the turning of human emotion Godwards finds its full meaning and discovers all the truth of which love is the human symbol, all its essential instincts divinised, raised, satisfied in the bliss from which our life was born and towards which by oneness it returns in the Ananda of the divine existence where love is absolute, eternal and unalloyed.
3.04 - The Way of Devotion, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Consecration becomes in its fullness a devoting of all our being to the Divine; therefore also of all our thoughts and our works. Here the Yoga takes into itself the essential elements of the Yoga of works and the Yoga of knowledge, but in its own manner and with its own peculiar spirit. It is a sacrifice of life and works to the Divine, but a sacrifice of love more than a tuning of the will to the divine Will. The Bhakta offers up his life and all that he is and all that he has and all that he does to the Divine. This surrender may take the ascetic form, as when he leaves the ordinary life of men and devotes his days solely to prayer and praise and worship or to ecstatic meditation, gives up his personal possessions and becomes the monk or the mendicant whose one only possession is the Divine, gives up all actions in life except those only which help or belong to the communion with the Divine and communion with other devotees, or at most keeps the doing{|50c-} from the secure fortress of the ascetic life of those services to men which seem peculiarly the outflowing of the divine nature of love, compassion and good. But there is the wider self-consecration, proper to any integral Yoga, which, accepting the fullness of life and the world in its entirety as the play of the Divine, offers up the whole being into his possession; it is a holding of all one is and has as belonging to him only and not to ourselves and a doing of all works as an offering to him. By this comes the complete active consecration of both the inner and the outer life, the unmutilated self-giving. There is also the consecration of the thoughts to the Divine. In its inception this is the attempt to fix the mind on the object of adoration,--for naturally the restless human mind is occupied with other objects and, even when it is directed upwards, constantly drawn away by the world,--so that in the end it habitually thinks of him and all else is only secondary and thought of only in relation to him. This is done often with the aid of a physical image or, more intimately and characteristically, of a mantra or a divine name through which the divine being is realised. There are supposed by those who systematise to be three stages of the seeking through the devotion of the mind, first, the constant hearing of the divine name, qualities and all that has been attached to them, secondly, the constant thinking on them or on the divine being or personality, thirdly, the settling and fixing of the mind on the object; and by this comes the full realisation. And by these, too, there comes when the accompanying feeling or the concentration is very intense, the Samadhi, the ecstatic trance in which the consciousness passes away from outer objects. But all this is really incidental; the one thing essential is the intense devotion of the thought in the mind to the object of adoration. Although it seems akin to the contemplation of the way of knowledge, it differs from that in its spirit. It is in its real nature not a still, but an ecstatic contemplation; it seeks not to pass into the being of the Divine, but to bring the Divine into ourselves and to lose ourselves in the deep ecstasy of his presence or of his possession; and its bliss is not the peace of unity, but the ecstasy of union. Here, too, there may be the separative self-consecration which ends in the giving up of all other thought of life for the possession of this ecstasy, eternal afterwards in planes beyond, or the comprehensive consecration in which all the thoughts are full of the Divine and even in the occupations of life every thought remembers him. As in the other Yogas, so in this, one comes to see the Divine everywhere and in all and to pour out the realisation of the Divine in all one's inner activities and outward actions. But all is supported here by the primary force of the emotional union: for it is by love that the entire self-consecration and the entire possession is accomplished, and thought and action become shapes and figures of the divine love which possesses the spirit and its members.
This is the ordinary movement by which what may be at first a vague adoration of some idea of the Divine takes on the hue and character and then, once entered into the path of Yoga, the inner reality and intense experience of divine love. But there is the more intimate Yoga which from the first consists in this love and attains only by the intensity of its longing without other process or method. All the rest comes, but it comes out of this, as leaf and flower out of the seed; other things are not the means of developing and fulfilling love, but the radiations of love already growing in the soul. This is the way that the soul follows when, while occupied perhaps with the normal human life, it has heard the flute of the Godhead behind the near screen of secret woodlands and no longer possesses itself, can have no satisfaction or rest till it has pursued and seized and possessed the divine fluteplayer. This is in essence the power of love itself in the heart and soul turning from earthly objects to the spiritual source of all beauty and delight. There live in this seeking all the sentiment and passion, all the moods and experiences of love concentrated on a supreme object of desire and intensified a hundredfold beyond the highest acme of intensity possible to a human love. There is the disturbance of the whole life, the illumination by an unseized vision, the unsatisfied yearning for a single object of the heart's desire, the intense impatience of all that distracts from the one preoccupation, the intense pain of the obstacles that stand in the way of possession, the perfect vision of all beauty and delight in a single form. And there are all the many moods of love, the joy of musing and absorption, the delight of the meeting and fulfilment and embrace, the pain of separation, the wrath of love, the tears of longing, the increased delight of reunion. The heart is the scene of this supreme idyll of the inner consciousness, but a heart which undergoes increasingly an intense spiritual change and becomes the radiantly unfolding lotus of the spirit. And as the intensity of its seeking is beyond the highest power of the normal human emotions, so also the delight and the final ecstasy are beyond the reach of the imagination and beyond expression by speech. For this is the delight of the Godhead that passes human understanding. Indian bhakti has given to this divine love powerful forms, poetic symbols which are not in reality so much symbols as intimate expressions of truth which can find no other expression. It uses human relations and sees a divine person, not as mere figures, but because there are divine relations of supreme Delight and Beauty with the human soul of which human relations are the imperfect but still the real type, and because that Delight and Beauty are not abstractions or qualities of a quite impalpable metaphysical entity, but the very body and form of the supreme Being. It is a living Soul to which the soul of the Bhakta yearns; for the source of all life is not an idea or a conception or a state of existence, but a real Being. Therefore in the possession of the divine Beloved all the life of the soul is satisfied and all the relations by which it finds and in which it expresses itself, are wholly fulfilled; therefore, too, by any and all of them can the Beloved be sought, though those which admit the greatest intensity, are always those by which he can be most intensely pursued and possessed with the profoundest ecstasy. He is sought within in the heart and therefore apart from all by an inward-gathered concentration of the being in the soul itself; but he is also seen and loved everywhere where he manifests his being. All the beauty and joy of existence is seen as his joy and beauty; he is embraced by the spirit in all beings; the ecstasy of love enjoyed pours itself out in a universal love; all existence becomes a radiation of its delight and even in its very appearances is transformed into something other than its outward appearance. The world itself is experienced as a play of the divine Delight, a Lila, and that in which the world loses itself is the heaven of beatitude of the eternal union.
3.05 - The Divine Personality, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
On the other hand, the way of devotion is impossible if the personality of the Divine cannot be taken as a reality, a real reality and not a hypostasis of the illusion. There can be no love without a lover and beloved. If our personality is an illusion and the Personality to whom our adoration rises only a primary aspect of the illusion, and if we believe that, then love and adoration must at once be killed, or can only survive in the illogical passion of the heart denying by its strong beats of life the clear and dry truths of the reason. To love and adore a shadow of our minds or a bright cosmic phenomenon which vanishes from the eye of Truth, may be possible, but the way of salvation cannot be built upon a foundation of wilful self-deception. The Bhakta indeed does not allow these doubts of the intellect to come in his way; he has the divinations of his heart, and these are to him sufficient. But the sadhaka of the integral Yoga has to know the eternal and ultimate Truth and not to persist to the end in the delight of a Shadow. If the impersonal is the sole enduring truth, then a firm synthesis is impossible. He can at most take the divine personality as a symbol, a powerful and effective fiction, but he will have in the end to overpass it and to abandon devotion for the sole pursuit of the ultimate knowledge. He will have to empty being of all its symbols, values, contents in order to arrive at the featureless Reality.
We have said, however, that personality and impersonality, as our minds understand them, are only aspects of the Divine and both are contained in his being; they are one thing which we see from two opposite sides and into which we enter by two gates. We have to see this more clearly in order to rid ourselves of any doubts with which the intellect may seek to afflict us as we follow the impulse of devotion and the intuition of love or to pursue us into the joy of the divine union. They fall away indeed from that joy, but if we are too heavily weighted with the philosophical mind, they may follow us almost up to its threshold. It is well therefore to discharge ourselves of them as early as may be by perceiving the limits of the intellect, the rational philosophic mind, in its peculiar way of approaching the truth and the limits even of the spiritual experience which sets out from the approach through the intellect, to see that it need not be the whole integrality of the highest and widest spiritual experience. Spiritual intuition is always a more luminous guide than the discriminating reason, and spiritual intuition addresses itself to us not only through the reason, but through the rest of our being as well, through the heart and the life also. The integral knowledge will then be that which takes account of all and unifies their diverse truths. The intellect itself will be more deeply satisfied if it does not confine itself to its own data, but accepts truth of the heart and the life also and gives to them their absolute spiritual value.
3.06 - The Delight of the Divine, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Once it is active in us, all other ways of Yoga convert themselves, as it were, to its law and find by it their own richest significance. This integral devotion of our being to God does not turn away from knowledge; the Bhakta of this path is the God-lover who is also the God-knower, because by knowledge of his being comes the whole delight of his being; but it is in delight that knowledge fulfils itself, the knowledge of the transcendent in the delight of the Transcendent, the knowledge of the universal in the delight of the universal Godhead, the knowledge of the individual manifestation in the delight of God in the individual, the knowledge of the impersonal in the pure delight of his impersonal being, the knowledge of the personal in the full delight of his personality, the knowledge of his qualities and their play in the delight of the manifestation, the knowledge of the qualityless in the delight of his colourless existence and non-manifestation.
So too this God-lover will be the divine worker, not for the sake of works or for a self-regarding pleasure in action, but because in this way God expends the power of his being and in his powers and their signs we find him, because the divine Will in works is the outflowing of the Godhead in the delight of its power, of divine Being in the delight of divine Force. He will feel perfect joy in the works and acts of the Beloved, because in them too he finds the Beloved; he will himself do all works because through those works too the Lord of his being expresses his divine joy in him: when he works, he feels that he is expressing in act and power his oneness with that which he loves and adores; he feels the rapture of the will which he obeys and with which all the force of his being is blissfully identified. So too, again, this God-lover will seek after perfection, because perfection is the nature of the Divine and the more he grows into perfection, the more he feels the Beloved manifest in his natural being. Or he will simply grow in perfection like the blossoming of a flower because the Divine is in him and the joy of the Divine, and as that joy expands in him, soul and mind and life too expand naturally into their godhead. At the same time, because he feels the Divine in all, perfect within every limiting appearance, he will not have the sorrow of his imperfection.
3.2.08 - Bhakti Yoga and Vaishnavism, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Your whole-hearted acceptance of the Vaishnava idea and bhakti becomes rather bewildering when it is coupled with an insistence that love cannot be given to the Divine until one has experience of the Divine. For what is more common in the Vaishnava attitude than the joy of bhakti for its own sake? Give me bhakti, it cries, whatever else you may keep from me. Even if it is long before I can meet you, even if you delay to manifest yourself, let my bhakti, my seeking for you, my cry, my love, my adoration be always there. How constantly the Bhakta has sung, All my life I have been seeking you and still you are not there, but still I seek and cannot cease to seek and love and adore. If it were really impossible to love God unless you first experience him, how could this be? In fact your mind seems to be putting the cart before the horse. One seeks after God first, with persistence or with passion, one finds him afterwards, some sooner than others, but most after a long seeking. One does not find him first, then seek after him. Even a glimpse only comes after long or fervent seeking. One has the love of God or at any rate some hearts desire for him and afterwards one becomes aware of Gods love, its reply to the hearts desire, its response of the supreme joy and Ananda. One does not say to God, Show your love for me first, shower on me the experience of yourself, satisfy my demand, then I will see whether I can love you so long as you deserve it. It is surely the seeker who must seek and love first, follow the quest, become impassioned for the Sought then only does the veil move aside and the Light be seen and the Face manifest that alone can satisfy the soul after its long sojourn in the desert.
Then again you may say, Yes, but whether I love or not, I want, I have always wanted and now I want more and more, but I get nothing. Yes, but wanting is not all. As you now begin to see, there are conditions that have to be metlike the purification of the heart. Your thesis was, Once I want God, God must manifest to me, come to me, at least give glimpses of himself to me, the real solid concrete experiences, not mere vague things which I cant understand or value. Gods Grace must answer my call for it, whether I yet deserve it or notor else there is no Grace. Gods Grace may indeed do that in certain cases, but where does the must come in? If God must do it, it is no longer Gods Grace, but Gods duty or an obligation or a contract or a treaty. The Divine looks into the heart and removes the veil at the moment which he knows to be the right moment to do it. You have laid stress on the bhakti theory that one has only to call his name and he must reply, he must at once be there. Perhaps, but for whom is this true? For a certain kind of Bhakta surely who feels the power of the Name, who has the passion of the Name and puts it into his cry. If one is like that, then there may be the immediate replyif not, one has to become like that, then there will be the reply. But some go on using the Name for years, before there is an answer. Ramakrishna himself got it after a few months, but what months! and what a condition he had to pass through before he got it! Still he succeeded quickly because he had a pure heart already and that divine passion in it.
It is not surely the Bhakta but the man of knowledge who demands experience first. He can say, How can I know without experience?, but even he goes on seeking like Tota Puri even though for thirty years, striving for the decisive realisation. It is really the man of intellect, the rationalist who says, Let God, if he exists, prove himself to me first, then I will believe, then I will make some serious and prolonged effort to explore him and see what he is like.
All this does not mean that experience is irrelevant to sadhana I certainly cannot have said such a stupid thing. What I have said is that the love and seeking of the Divine can be and ordinarily is there before the experience comesit is an instinct, an inherent longing in the soul and it comes up as soon as certain coverings of the soul disappear or begin to disappear. The next thing I have said is that it is better to get the nature ready first (the purified heart and all that) before the experiences begin rather than the other way round and I base that on the many cases there have been of the danger of experiences before the heart and vital are ready for the true experience. Of course in many cases there is a true experience first, a touch of the Grace, but it is not something that lasts and is always there, but rather something that touches and withdraws and waits for the nature to get ready. But this is not so in every case, not even in many cases, I believe. One has to begin with the souls inherent longing, then the struggle with the nature to get the temple ready, then the unveiling of the Image, the permanent Presence in the sanctuary.
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At any rate Ramakrishna told the story of Narada and the ascetic Yogi and the Vaishnava Bhakta with approval of its moral. I put it in my own language but keep the substance. Narada on his way to Vaikuntha met a Yogi practising hard tapasya on the hills. O Narada, cried the Yogi, you are going to Vaikuntha and will see Vishnu. I have been practising terrific austerities all my life and yet I have not even now attained to Him. Ask Him at least for me when I shall reach Him. Then Narada met a Vaishnava, a Bhakta who was singing songs to Hari and dancing to his own singing, and he cried also, O Narada, you will see my Lord, Hari. Ask my Lord when I shall reach Him and see His face. On his way back Narada came first to the Yogi. I have asked Vishnu; you will realise Him after six more lives. The Yogi raised a cry of loud lamentation, What, so many austerities! such gigantic endeavours! and my reward is realisation after six long lives! O how hard to me is the Lord Vishnu. Next Narada met again the Bhakta and said to him, I have no good news for you. You will see the Lord, but only after a lakh of lives. But the Bhakta leapt up with a great cry of rapture, Oh, I shall see my Lord Hari! after a lakh of lives I shall see my Lord Hari! How great is the grace of the Lord. And he began dancing and singing in a renewed ecstasy. Then Narada said, Thou hast attained. Today thou shalt see the Lord! Well, you may say, What an extravagant story and how contrary to human nature! Not so contrary as all that and in any case hardly more extravagant than the stories of Harishchandra and Shivi. Still I do not hold up the Bhakta as an example, for I myself insist on the realisation in this life and not after six or a lakh of births more. But the point of these stories is in the moral and surely when Ramakrishna told it, he was not ignorant that there was a sunlit path of Yoga! He even seems to say that it is the quicker way as well as the better! You are quite mistaken in thinking that the possibility of the sunlit path is a discovery or original invention of mine. The very first books on Yoga I read more than thirty years ago spoke of the dark and sunlit way and emphasised the superiority of the second over the other.
It is not either because I have myself trod the sunlit way or flinched from difficulty and suffering and danger. I have had my full share of these things and the Mother has had ten times her full share. But that was because the finders of the Way had to face these things in order to conquer. No difficulty that can come on the sadhak but has faced us on the path; against many we have had to struggle hundreds of times (in fact that is an understatement) before we could overcome; many still remain protesting that they have a right until the perfect perfection is there. But we have never consented to admit their inevitable necessity for others. It is in fact to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden. It was with that object that the Mother once prayed to the Divine that whatever difficulties, dangers, sufferings were necessary for the path might be laid on her rather than on others. It has been so far heard that as a result of daily and terrible struggles for years those who put an entire and sincere confidence in her are able to follow the sunlit path and even those who cannot, yet when they do put the trust find their path suddenly easy and, if it becomes difficult again, it is only when distrust, revolt, abhiman, or other darknesses come upon them. The sunlit path is not altogether a fable.
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After all, one has not a right to call on the Divine to manifest himself; it can come only as a response to a spiritual or psychic state of consciousness or to a long course of sadhana rightly done; or, if it comes before that or without any apparent reason, it is a grace; but one cannot demand or compel grace; grace is something spontaneous which wells out from the Divine Consciousness as a free flower of its being. The Bhakta looks for it, but he is ready to wait in perfect reliance, even if need be all his life, knowing that it will come, never varying in his love and surrender because it does not come now or soon. That is the spirit of so many songs of the devotees, which you have sung yourself; I heard one such song from you in a record some time ago and a very beautiful song it was and beautifully sungEven if I have not won thee, O Lord, still I adore.
What prevents you from having that, is the restless element of vital impatience and ever recurring or persisting disappointment at not having what you want from the Divine. It is the idea, I wish so much for it, surely I ought to have it; why is it withheld from me? But wanting, however strongly, is not a passport to getting; there is something more to it than that. Our experience is that too much vital eagerness and insistence often blocks the way, it makes a sort of obstructing mass or a whirl of restlessness and disturbance which leaves no quiet space for the Divine to get in or for the thing wished for to come. Often it does come, but when the impatience has been definitely renounced and one waits, quietly open, for whatever may be (or for the time not be) given. But so often when you are preparing for a greater progress in the true devotion the habit of this vital element stands up and takes hold and interrupts the progress made.
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In this later Vaishnava tradition the sadhana takes the form of an application of human vital love in all its principal turns to the Divine; viraha, abhimna, even complete separation (like the departure of Krishna to Mathura) are made prominent elements of this Yoga. But all that was only meantin the sadhana itself, not in the Vaishnava poemsas a passage of which the end is milana or complete union; but the stress laid on the untoward elements by some would almost seem to make strife, separation, abhimna, the whole means if not the very object of this kind of prema-yoga. Again, this method was only applied to the inner, not to a physically embodied Divine and had a reference to certain states and reactions of the inner consciousness in its seeking after the Divine. In the relations with the embodied Divine manifestation, or, I may add, of the disciple with the Guru, such things might rise as a result of human imperfection, but they were not made part of the theory of the relations. I do not think they formed a regular and authorised part of the relations of the Bhaktas to Chaitanya or of the disciples at Dakshineshwar towards Ramakrishna! On the contrary, the relation of the disciple to the Guru in the Guruvada is supposed always to be that of worship, respect, complete happy confidence, unquestioning acceptance of the guidance. The application of the unchanged vital relations to the embodied Divine or the Guru may lead and has led to movements which are not conducive to the progress of the Yoga.
Ramakrishnas Yoga was also turned only to an inner realisation of the inner Divine,nothing less but also nothing more. I believe his sentence about the claim of the sadhak on the Divine for whom one has sacrificed everything was the assertion of an inner and not an outer claim, on the inner rather than on any physically embodied Divine: it was a claim for the full spiritual union, the God-lover seeking the Divine, but the Divine also giving himself and meeting the God-lover. There can be no objection to that; such a claim all seekers of the Divine have; but as to the modalities of this Divine meeting, it does not carry us much farther. In any case, my object is a realisation on the physical plane and I cannot consent merely to repeat Ramakrishna. I seem to remember too that for a long time he was withdrawn into himself, all his life was not spent with his disciples! He got his siddhi first in retirement and when he came out and received everyonewell, a few years of it wore out his body. To that, I suppose, he had no objection; he even pronounced a theory, when Keshav Chandra was dying, that spiritual experience ought to wear out the body! But at the same time, when asked why he got his illness in the throat, he answered that it was the sins of his disciples which they threw upon him and he had to swallow! Not being satisfied, as he was, with an inner liberation alone, I cannot accept these ideas or these results, for it does not sound to me like a successful meeting of the Divine and the sadhak on the physical plane, however successful it might have been for the inner life. Krishna did great things and was very clearly a manifestation of the Divine. But I remember a passage of the Mahabharata in which he complains of the unquiet life his followers and adorers gave him, their constant demands, reproaches, their throwing of their unregenerate vital nature upon him. And in the Gita he speaks of this human world as a transient and sorrowful affair and, in spite of his gospel of divine action, seems almost to admit that to leave it is after all the last solution! The traditions of the past are very great in their own place,in the past; but I do not see why we should merely repeat them and not go farther. In the spiritual development of the consciousness upon earth the great past ought to be followed by a greater future.
--
If Krishna was always and by nature cold and distant (Lord, what a discoveryKrishna of all people!), how could human devotion and aspiration come near himhe and it would soon be like the North and South Pole, growing icier and icier, always facing each other but never seeing because of the earths bulge. Also, if Krishna did not want the human Bhakta as well as the Bhakta wanting him, who could get at him?he would be always sitting on the snows of the Himalayas like Shiva. History describes him otherwise and he is usually charged with being too warm and sportive.
***
3.4.1.01 - Poetry and Sadhana, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Literature and art are or can be first introductions to the inner being the inner mind and vital; for it is from there that they come. And if one writes poems of bhakti, poems of divine seeking etc., or creates music of that kind, it means that there is a Bhakta or seeker inside who is supporting himself by that self expression. There is also the point of view behind Leles answer to me when I told him that I wanted to do Yoga but for work, for action, not for Sannyasa and Nirvana,but after years of spiritual effort I had failed to find the way and it was for that I had asked to meet him. His first answer was, It should be easy for you as you are a poet. But it was not from any point of view like that that Nirod put his question and it was not from that point of view that I gave my answer. It was about some special character-making virtue that he seemed to attribute to literature.
18 November 1936
--
If such poems are put as a claim, or vaunted as a personal experience of Yoga, they may be objected to on that ground. But a poet is not bound to confine himself to his personal experience. A poet writes from inspiration or from imagination or vision. Milton did not need to go to Heaven or Hell or the Garden of Eden before he wrote Paradise Lost. Are all Dilips bhakti poems an exact transcription of his inner state? If so, he must be a wonderful Yogi and Bhakta.
14 April 1938
3.8.1.01 - The Needed Synthesis, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The synthesis then of religious aspiration and scientific faculty, as a beginning; and in the resultant progress an integrality also of the inner existence. Love and knowledge, the delight of the Bhakta and the divine science of the knower of Brahman, have to effect their unity; and both have to recover the fullness of Life which they tend to banish from them in the austerity of their search or the rapture of their ecstasy.
The heart and the mind are one universal Deity and neither a mind without a heart nor a heart without a mind is the human ideal. Nor is any perfection sound and real unless it is also fruitful. The integral divine harmony within, but as its result a changed earth and a nobler and happier humanity.
4.10 - The Elements of Perfection, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
When the self is purified of the wrong and confused action of the instrumental Nature and liberated into its self-existent being, consciousness, power and bliss and the Nature itself liberated from the tangle of this lower action of the struggling gunas and the dualities into the high truth of the divine calm and the divine action, then spiritual perfection becomes possible. Purification and freedom are the indispensable antecedents of perfection. A spiritual self-perfection can only mean a growing into oneness with the nature of divine being, and therefore according to our conception of divine being will be the aim, effort and method of our seeking after this perfection. To the Mayavadin the highest or rather the only real truth of being is the impassive, impersonal, self-aware Absolute and therefore to grow into an impassive calm, impersonality and pure self-awareness of spirit is his idea of perfection and a rejection of cosmic and individual being and a settling into silent self-knowledge is his way. To the Buddhist for whom the highest truth is a negation of being, a recognition of the impermanence and sorrow of being and the disastrous nullity of desire and a dissolution of egoism, of the upholding associations of the Idea and the successions of Karma are the perfect way. Other ideas of the Highest are less negative; each according to its own idea leads towards some likeness to the Divine, sadrsya, and each finds its own way, such as the love and worship of the Bhakta and the growing into the likeness of the Divine by love. But for the integral Yoga perfection will mean a divine spirit and a divine nature which will admit of a divine relation and action in the world; it will mean also in its entirety a divinising of the whole nature, a rejection of all its wrong knots of being and action, but no rejection of any part of our being or of any field of our action. The approach to perfection must be therefore a large and complex movement and its results and workings will have an infinite and varied scope. We must fix in order to find a clue and method on certain essential and fundamental elements and requisites of perfection, siddhi; for if these are secured, all the rest will be found to be only their natural development or particular working. We may cast these elements into six divisions, interdependent on each other to a great extent but still in a certain way naturally successive in their order of attainment. The movement will start from a basic equality of the soul and mount to an ideal action of the Divine through our perfected being in the largeness of the Brahmic unity.
The first necessity is some fundamental poise of the soul both in its essential and its natural being regarding and meeting the things, impacts and workings of Nature. This poise we shall arrive at by growing into a perfect equality, samata. The self, spirit or Brahman is one in all and therefore one to all; it is, as is said in the Gita which has developed fully this idea of equality and indicated its experience on at least one side of equality, the equal Brahman, samam brahma; the Gita even goes so far in one passage as to identify equality and yoga, samatvam yoga ucyate. That is to say, equality is the sign of unity with the Brahman, of becoming Brahman, of growing into an undisturbed spiritual poise of being in the Infinite. Its importance can hardly be exaggerated; for it is the sign of our having passed beyond the egoistic determinations of our nature, of our having conquered our enslaved response to the dualities, of our having transcended the shifting turmoil of the gunas, of our having entered into the calm and peace of liberation. Equality is a term of consciousness which brings into the whole of our being and nature the eternal tranquillity of the Infinite. Moreover, it is the condition of a securely and perfectly divine action; the security and largeness of the cosmic action of the Infinite is based upon and never breaks down or forfeits its eternal tranquillity. That too must be the character of the perfect spiritual action; to be equal and one to all things in spirit, understanding, mind, heart and natural consciousness, -- even in the most physical consciousness, -- and to make all their workings, whatever their outward adaptation to the thing to be done, always and imminuably full of the divine equality and calm must be its inmost principle. That may be said to be the passive or basic, the fundamental and receptive side of equality, but there is also an active and possessive side, an equal bliss which can only come when the peace of equality is founded and which is the beatific flower of its fullness.
4.1.1 - The Difficulties of Yoga, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This Yoga is certainly difficult, but is any Yoga really easy? You speak of the lure of liberation into the extracosmic Absolute, but how many who set out on the path of Nirvana attain to it in this life or without a long, strenuous and difficult endeavour? Which of the paths has not to pass through the dry desert in order to reach the promised land? Even the path of Bhakti which is said to be the easiest is full of the lamentations of the Bhaktas complaining that they call but the Beloved eludes their grasp, the place of meeting is prepared but even now Krishna does not come. Even if there is the joy of a brief glimpse or the passion of milana, it is followed by long periods of viraha. It is a mistake to think that any path of Yoga is facile, that any is a royal road or short cut to the Divine, or that like a system of French made easy or French without tears, so there can be a system of Yoga made easy or Yoga without tears. A few great souls prepared by past lives or otherwise lifted beyond the ordinary spiritual capacity may attain realisation more swiftly; some may have uplifting experiences at an early stage, but for most the siddhi of the path, whatever it is, must be the end of a long, difficult and persevering endeavour. One cannot have the crown of spiritual victory without the struggle or reach the heights without the ascent and its labour. Of all it can be said, Difficult is that road, hard to tread like the edge of a razor.
You find the path dry precisely because you have not yet touched the fringe of it. But all paths have their dry periods and for most though not for all it is at the beginning. There is a long stage of preparation necessary in order to arrive at the inner psychological condition in which the doors of experience can open and one can walk from vista to vistathough even then new gates may present themselves and refuse to open until all is ready. This period can be dry and desert-like unless one has the ardour of self-introspection and self-conquest and finds every step of the effort and struggle interesting or unless one has or gets that secret of trust and self-giving which sees the hand of the Divine in every step of the path and even in the difficulty the grace or the guidance. The description of Yoga as bitter like poison in the beginning because of the difficulty and struggle but in the end sweet as nectar because of the joy of realisation, the peace of liberation or the divine Ananda and the frequent description by sadhaks and Bhaktas of the periods of dryness shows sufficiently that it is no unique peculiarity of this Yoga. All the old disciplines recognised this and it is why the Gita says that Yoga should be practised patiently and steadily with a heart that refuses to be overcome by despondency. It is a recommendation applicable to this path but also to the way of the Gita and to the hard razor path of the Vedanta, and to every other. It is quite natural that the higher the Ananda to come down, the more difficult may be the beginning, the drier the deserts that have to be crossed on the way.
Certainly, the supramental manifestation does not bring peace, purity, force, power of knowledge only; these give the necessary conditions for the final realisation, are part of it, but Love, Beauty and Ananda are the essence of its fulfilment. And although the supreme Ananda comes with the supreme fulfilment, there is no real reason why there should not be the love and Ananda and beauty of the way also. Some have found that even at an early stage before there was any other experience. But the secret of it is in the heart, not the mind the heart that opens its inner door and through it the radiance of the soul looks out in a blaze of trust and self-giving. Before that inner fire the debates of the mind and its difficulties wither away and the path however long or arduous becomes a sunlit road not only towards but through love and Ananda.
4.3.2.02 - Breaking into the Spiritual Consciousness, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
line of pure experience in which, especially if it is the Bhakta way,
one gets easily swallowed up in the rapids (did not Chaitanya
--
is extraordinarily seizing. It is not only the Bhakta's rapture,
but the jnani's plunge into Brahma-Nirvana or Brahmananda or
--
the Bhakta just as water rushes over Niagara Falls. In the second stage the water flows
through great pipes into mighty turbines which supply a continent with power. - Ed.
--
cannot find fault with the Sannyasi lost in his laya or the Bhakta
lost in his ecstasy; they remain there probably because they are
4.3 - Bhakti, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
407. I am not a Bhakta, for I have not renounced the world for
God. How can I renounce what He took from me by force and gave back to me against my will? These things are too hard for me.
408. I am not a Bhakta, I am not a Jnani, I am not a worker for the Lord. What am I then? A tool in the hands of my Master, a flute blown upon by the divine Herd-Boy, a leaf driven by the breath of the Lord.
409. Devotion is not utterly fulfilled till it becomes action and knowledge. If thou pursuest after God and canst overtake Him, let Him not go till thou hast His reality. If thou hast hold of His reality, insist on having also His totality. The first will give thee divine knowledge, the second will give thee divine works and a free and perfect joy in the universe.
9.99 - Glossary, #The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism Bhakta: A follower of the path of bhakti, divine love; a worshipper of the Personal God.
bhakti: Love of God; single-minded devotion to one's Chosen Ideal.
--
ego of Knowledge (of Devotion): The ego purified and illumined by the Knowledge (or Love) of God. Some souls, after realizing their oneness with Brahman in samadhi, come down to the plane of relative consciousness. In this state they retain a very faint feeling of ego so that they may teach spiritual knowledge to others. This ego, called by Sri Ramakrishna the "ego of Knowledge", does not altogether efface their knowledge of oneness with Brahman even in the relative state of consciousness. The Bhakta, the lover of God, coming down to the relative plane after having attained samadhi, retains the "I-consciousness" by which he feels himself to be a lover, a child, or a servant of God. Sri Ramakrishna called this the "devotee ego", the "child ego", or the "servant ego".
eight fetters: Namely, hatred, shame, lineage, pride of good conduct, fear, secretiveness, caste, and grief.
APPENDIX I - Curriculum of A. A., #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Philosophy
Liber XLVI. (46) [] - The Key of the Mysteries. ::: A Translation of "La Clef des Grands Mysteres", by Eliphas Levi. Specially adapted to the task of the Attainment of Bhakta-Yoga. Equinox X, Supplement.
Liber XLIX. (49) [] - Collected writings of Jack Parsons, The
--
Liber CLXXV. (175) [D] - Astarte vel Liber Berylli. ::: An instruction in attainment by the method of devotion, or Bhakta-Yogi. Equinox VII, p. 37.
Liber CLXXXV. (185) [] - Liber Collegii Sancti. ::: Being the tasks of the Grades and their Oaths proper to Liber XIII. This is the official paper of the various grades. It includes the Task and Oath of a Probationer. Unpublished. [note by shawn: Since released in Gems from the Equinox, Israel Regardie, ed.]
Diamond Sutra 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
In the afternoon: The text is ambiguous here. The Sanskrit pashcad Bhakta-pinda-pata, literally means after eating food. However, since this is already expressed in the previous phrase by krta Bhakta-krtyas (eating his meal of rice), this second expression, according to Edgerton, simply indicates time and was often used as a stock term to indicate the period after the noon meal. Whereas both Conze and Mller agree with this interpretation of the text, all Chinese translations, except that of Dharmagupta, have the Buddha eating his meal after he returns, which remains the practice called for in the Vinaya for monks and nuns. However, as the Buddhas reputation grew, he and his disciples were often invited to take their noon meal in the homes of wealthy householders, and perhaps this was such an occasion.
Put his robe and bowl away: The robe and bowl are the two most important possessions of a monk or nun. Hence, they were put away after use. They also represent the spirit of ones teacher, and in the Zen sect they became the symbols by which transmission of the patriarchship was established and, for a while, maintained.
--
(from door to door). After bringing the Buddha back from town to eat his meal, Paramartha adds yu chung-hou shih (at the end of the noon hour), as if to account for his earlier omission of Bhaktapinda-pata (in the afternoon). Kumarajiva omits the last sentence of this section.
A number of bhikshus then came up to where the Bhagavan was sitting. After touching their heads to his feet, they walked around him to the right three times and sat down to one side.
Liber 111 - The Book of Wisdom - LIBER ALEPH VEL CXI, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
perfect thy Dragon, thou hast Bhakta Yoga for the Eagle therein, and
Hatha Yoga for the Serpent. Yet mark thou well how all these interfuse,
Liber, #Liber Null, #Peter J Carroll, #Occultism
@Liber XLVI. (46) [] - The Key of the Mysteries. ::: A Translation of "La Clef des Grands Mysteres", by Eliphas Levi. Specially adapted to the task of the Attainment of Bhakta-Yoga. Equinox X, Supplement.
@Liber XLIX. (49) [] - Collected writings of Jack Parsons, The ::: Io Pan!
--
@Liber CLXXV. (175) [D] - Astarte vel Liber Berylli. ::: An instruction in attainment by the method of devotion, or Bhakta-Yogi. Equinox VII, p. 37.
@Liber CLXXXV. (185) [D] - Liber Collegii Sancti. ::: Being the tasks of the Grades and their Oaths proper to Liber XIII. This is the official paper of the various grades. It includes the Task and Oath of a Probationer. Unpublished. [note by shawn: Since released in Gems from the Equinox, Israel Regardie, ed.]
Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna (text), #Sayings of Sri Ramakrishna, #Sri Ramakrishna, #Hinduism
one with It; he is the liberated man. The second represents the Bhakta or the true lover of God, who is
full of Divine bliss and knowledge. And the third represents the worldly man who will not admit even a
--
A devotee: Were Narada and others only Bhaktas, or were they Jnanis also?
The Master: Narada and others had attained the highest Knowledge (Brahmajnana). But still they went
--
does not like to relate to anyone but a true Bhakta the ecstatic joy that he experiences in Divine
communion; nay, sometimes he is impatient to relate his experiences to such a person and feels happy
--
he offers the food as an oblation in the fire of Kundalini. But for a Bhakta, it is different. A Bhakta should
eat only pure food, such food as he can freely offer to his beloved Lord. Animal food is not for a Bhakta.
At the same time I must say that if a man loves God, even while living upon pork, he is blessed; and
--
651. Bhagavan (the Lord), Bhagavata (His word or scripture) and Bhakta (devotee) are all one and the
same.
--
temperaments of the Jnani and the Bhakta-IV. Path of Work:
What is Karma Yoga?-Bhakti as a safeguard in Karma Y-Yoga Work as service equal to worship-Work a
--
compared to the flame of a lamp which illumines only the interior of a room. The Jnana of a Bhakta
(devotee) is a stronger light. It may be compared to the light of the moon which reveals things both
--
761. Q, Why does a Bhakta forsake everything for the sake of God ?
A. The insect flies from darkness as soon as it sees a light; the ant loses its life in the syrup without
leaving it. So does the Bhakta cling to God for ever, and leaves all else.
762. The Master: Does the moth seek darkness once it has seen a light?
--
the Bhaktas. The same Brahman is called priest when he conducts worship, and cook when he is
employed in the kitchen.
--
given to him to realise Brahman; the Lord willing, he will also realise the Personal God of the Bhakta.
The Bhakta, on the other hand, is generally content to see and realise the Personal God, the Saguna
Brahman of the Upanishads, Yet the Lord makes him heir to His infinite glory and grants him Bhakti as
--
802. The Bhakta, as a rule, does not long for Brahmajnana (the realisation of the Impersonal), but
remains content with realising the Divine Person alone-my Divine Mother, or any of Her infinite forms of
--
Difference in the Temperaments of the Jnani and the Bhakta
804. One meets with two classes of spiritual aspirants.
--
80S. The jnani says, "I am He, I am that pure Atman;" but the Bhakta declares, "Ah, all these are His
glory!"
--
813. A Jnani and a Bhakta were once passing through a forest. On the way they saw a tiger. The Jnani
said: "There is no reason why we should flee; the Almighty God will certainly protect us." The Bhakta
said: "No, brother, no, let us run away. Why should we trouble the Lord when we can accomplish a thing
--
880. To a Bhakta the Lord manifests Himself in various forms. But to a person who reaches the height of
Brahmajnana in Samadhi, He is the attri buteless Brahman once more, formless and unconditioned.
--
likewise. Be a Jnani and a Bhakta in one."
CHAPTER XIX
--
999. She has placed me in the state of a Bhaktaof a Vijnani. Hence it is that I can joke and make fun
with Rakhal and others. Had I been in the condition of a Jnani, that would not have been possible. In this
--
The first man was a Bhakta and had the faith of a child.
Nothing is impossible to the Lord, nor can anyone know His nature fully. Everything of Him cannot be
Talks 051-075, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
siddhissiddhis. There Siva says that His Bhakta never wastes a thought on them. Again Siva says that He never grants boons. The desires of the devotees are fulfilled according to their prarabdha only. When
Iswara Himself says so, what of others? In order to display siddhis there must be others to recognise them. That means there is no jnana in the one who displays them. Therefore siddhis are not worthy of any thought. Jnana alone is to be aimed at and gained.
Talks 076-099, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
The Master relating some stories of the Bhaktas told how Sri Krishna served Eknath for twelve years, how Panduranga relieved Sakku Bai from her home prison and enabled her to visit Pandharpur.
Then he recollected the appearance of a mysterious Moulvi on his way from Madura to Tiruvannamalai in 1896, how he appeared, spoke and disappeared suddenly.
Talks 100-125, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
Five years ago he took up the study of devotional literature. He is a Bhakta of Sri Krishna. He could feel Krishna in all that he saw. Krishna often appeared to him and made him happy. His work was going on without any effort on his part. Everything seemed to be done for him by Krishna himself.
Later he came in contact with a Mahatma who advised him to study
Talks 151-175, #Talks, #Sri Ramana Maharshi, #Hinduism
D.: Is a karma yogi or a Bhakta too subject to trance?
M.: When you concentrate on one point you merge in it, and this merging is called trance. The other features disappear and the Self alone remains over. The karmi or Bhakta also must experience the same.
Talk 160.
Talks 500-550, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
"I am a Bhakta", "I am a satsangi"?
M.: The method is pointed out to the seeker. The seeker has certainly not lost his individuality so far. Otherwise the question would not have arisen. The way is shown to effect the loss of individuality of the seeker. It is thus appropriate.
--
He thus became one of the most famous Bhaktas and was much sought after. He led a vigorous and active life; went on pilgrimage to several places in South India. He got married in his sixteenth year. The bride and the bridegroom went to have darsan of God in the local temple soon after the marriage ceremonies were over. A large party went with them. When they reached the temple the place was a blaze of light and the temple was not visible. There was however a passage visible in the blaze of light. Jnanasambandar told the people to enter the passage. They did so. He himself went round the light with his young wife, came to the passage and entered it as the others had done earlier. The Light vanished leaving no trace of those who entered it.
The temple again came into view as usual. Such was the brief but very eventful life of the sage.
--
Jnanasambandar is contained in 300 slokas in Upamanyu's Bhakta
Charita. One of the Archakas of the temple had it with him and showed it to Sri Bhagavan on the occasion of the temple suit within the last few months. Sri Bhagavan copied the slokas.
--
Many visitors came on one occasion and they all saluted Sri Bhagavan with the single prayer, "Make me a Bhakta. Give me moksha." After they left Sri Bhagavan said, thinking aloud: All of them want bhakti and moksha. If I say to them, 'Give yourself to me' they will not. How then can they get what they want?
Talk 544.
On one occasion a few devotees were discussing among themselves the relative merits of some famous Bhaktas. They did not agree among themselves and referred the matter to Sri Bhagavan. He remained silent. The discussion grew hot.
532
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
DR. SATYENDRA: Some Sufis and Bhaktas take illness and other such things as
coming from the Divine.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: I was speaking about the Bhakta. For the Bhakta whatever
happens is for the best and he takes everything in that light. For the Yogi
--
saint ego, the Bhakta ego, the ego of the Sadhu or the virtuous man: as Ramakrishna says, " Bhakta ami, das ami" (" Bhakta I, servant I") and Ramprasad says, "I want to eat sugar, not be sugar." The psychic of course opens
the way to the realisation of the spiritual Self by which the ego can go. By
--
SATYENDRA: No, sir, he was a Bhakta also.
PURANI: He had two strains: intellectual and emotional.
--
SRI AUROBINDO: Many Yogis have had that. All saints had the psychic transformation: they have the pure Bhakta nature. But many spiritual men have
not had such transformation. All spiritual men are not saints. Of course one
--
are Bhaktas.
SATYENDRA: It is not very clear to me, Sir.
--
DR. MANILAL: But he can't be vindictive to a Bhakta for such things.
SRI AUROBINDO: It depends on the mood the Divine is in.
--
things"? Go to Dilip. He will say, "Whether a man is a Bhakta or not can be
judged only by his dealing with money. Money is the test. If you can't offer
--
CHAMPAKLAL: There are plenty of people who are Bhaktas, but when the
money-question comes, their Bhakti disappears. (Sri Aurobindo was enjoying the talk.)
DR. MANILAL: If money is the test, then robbers also are Bhaktas. Some of
them rob people and offer part of their plunder to their god. Is that Bhakti?
--
SATYENDRA (to Dr. Manilal): Like the Sufis and the Bhaktas you should rejoice in the suffering and think that it is a message of the Beloved.
NIRODBARAN: God may have given you suffering in order to help the growth
Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
whole of life and brought in a new current everywhere. The saints and Bhaktas can't exert that kind of influence because their urge doesn't pervade the
whole of life. It is confined to religion and hence degeneration may come in
the life of a nation in spite of its saints and Bhaktas.
Anilbaran's point about Russian religion being mere superstition is only
--
is the egoism of the Bhakta. Besides, one may say that the ego-sense has
gone, while in fact it may be there. We have seen a number of cases like that
The Riddle of this World, #unknown, #Unknown, #unset
European Bhakta or mystic are precisely the same in substance,
however differing in names, forms, religious colouring, etc., as those of
the mediaeval Indian Bhakta or mystic - yet these people were not
corresponding with one another or aware of each other's experiences
