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persons of demoniacal nature who think the care-taking of
the body to be the be-all and the end-all of existence, and
persons of godly nature who realise that the body is simply a
means to an end, an instrument intended for the culture of
the soul. The devil can and indeed does quote the scriptures
for his own purpose ; and thus the way of knowle.dge
appears to offer justification to. what the bad man does. as
much as it offers inducements to what the good man does.
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-Purâna).
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tdàaiÝmh u> oivTnIrnze;patka.
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66 BHAKTI YOGA
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.
The highest direction is that which takes us to God; every
other direction is lower. We find that pleasures and pains are
very common and oft-recurring feelings in our lives. When a
man feels pain, because he has not wealth or some such
worldly thing, he is giving a wrong direction to the feeling.
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.
THE FORMS OF LOVE-MANIFESTATION
Here are some of the forms in which love manifests itself.
First there is reverence. Why do people show reverence to
temples and holy places? Because He is worshipped there,
and His presence is associated with all such places. Why do
people in every country pay reverence to teachers of religion?
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 Priti pleasure 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
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68 BHAKTI YOGA
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
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 (tdwR
àa[s
would not remain even for a moment. Life is sweet because
it thinks of the Beloved. Tadiyata (tdIyta = His-ness )
comes when a man becomes perfect according to Bhakti
when he has become blessed, when he has attained God,
when he has touched the feet of God, as it were. Then his
whole nature is purified and completely changed. All his
purpose in life then becomes fulfilled. Yet many such
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
love s sake the Lord Whom all the gods worship, all the
lovers of liberation, and all the knowers of the Brahman
y
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
THE FORMS OF LOVE-MANIFESTION 69
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.
UNIVERSAL LOVE AND
HOW IT LEADS TO SELF-SURRENDER
How can we love the Vyashti, the particular, without first
loving the Samashti, the universal? God is the Samashti, the
generalised and the abstract universal whole; and the universe
that we see is the Vyashti, the particularised thing. To love
the whole universe is possible only by way of loving the
Samashti the universal which is, as it were, the one unity
in which are to be found millions and millions of smaller
unities. The philosophers of India do. not stop I at the
particulars; they cast a hurried glance at the particulars, and
immediately start to find the generalised forms whieh will
include all the particulars. The search after the universal is
the one search of Indian philosophy and religion. The Jnâni
aims at the wholeness of things, at that one absolute and
generalised Being, knowing which he knows everything.
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
everything in science, in psychology, in love, in philo-
sophy. 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.
70
UNIVERSAL LOVE AND SELF-SURRENDER 71
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
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