OF DEVOTEES AND DEVOTION ... 1
All of life is a continuous trading with fellow humans for securing selfish ends. Let us admit it and stop pretending that we are devotees. After all, the relation between two individuals who are in a bond of love is so refined that there can be no expectation of the exchange of commodity and the defining principle, if there be any, is the give and take of pure and undiluted love.
There can be no trade transaction whatsoever in this sublime self-giving of lovers for whom the world has dissolved as so much constraint to close communion. Impediments gone, the devotee and the Divine stand in a purely spiritual relation shorn of all traces of matter and the subliminal current of consciousness unites them in a torrent of blissful love. There is no motive to this impulse which is spontaneous and free of all external pressures, for it is at once natural and deeply involved in its concentrated core where the faintest shadow of this world fails to cast its darkening impression and the luminous essence of existence shines in its nascent manifestation as the virgin rays of the sun of love. Such is devotion and none else. Let us aspire to it in the rightful mode and not pretend to be in its presence as yet. In it will lie the expression of truth and in it will lie the real possibility of rising to the melt of the individual personality whence love flows in abundance careless of return. That is Prema Bhakti and that is all there is to devotion.
In his last days at the Cossipore (Kashipur) Garden House, one day Sri Ramakrishna called out to Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi thus : "Listen Sarada, Vaidhi Bhakti (ritualistic devotion) is not bhakti (devotion for the divine) at all, only Prema Bhakti (the devotion that is pure love) is bhakti." This was God speaking to His eternal consort on what He considers devotion to be.
Written by Sugata Bose
All of life is a continuous trading with fellow humans for securing selfish ends. Let us admit it and stop pretending that we are devotees. After all, the relation between two individuals who are in a bond of love is so refined that there can be no expectation of the exchange of commodity and the defining principle, if there be any, is the give and take of pure and undiluted love.
There can be no trade transaction whatsoever in this sublime self-giving of lovers for whom the world has dissolved as so much constraint to close communion. Impediments gone, the devotee and the Divine stand in a purely spiritual relation shorn of all traces of matter and the subliminal current of consciousness unites them in a torrent of blissful love. There is no motive to this impulse which is spontaneous and free of all external pressures, for it is at once natural and deeply involved in its concentrated core where the faintest shadow of this world fails to cast its darkening impression and the luminous essence of existence shines in its nascent manifestation as the virgin rays of the sun of love. Such is devotion and none else. Let us aspire to it in the rightful mode and not pretend to be in its presence as yet. In it will lie the expression of truth and in it will lie the real possibility of rising to the melt of the individual personality whence love flows in abundance careless of return. That is Prema Bhakti and that is all there is to devotion.
In his last days at the Cossipore (Kashipur) Garden House, one day Sri Ramakrishna called out to Holy Mother Sri Sarada Devi thus : "Listen Sarada, Vaidhi Bhakti (ritualistic devotion) is not bhakti (devotion for the divine) at all, only Prema Bhakti (the devotion that is pure love) is bhakti." This was God speaking to His eternal consort on what He considers devotion to be.
Written by Sugata Bose
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