Bhakti yoga: The nature of devotion

There are only four realities in your life: body, mind, emotion, and energy. Whatever you wish to do with yourself, it must be on these four levels.

If you use your emotions and try to reach the ultimate, we call this bhakti yoga, the path of devotion. If you use your intelligence and try to reach the ultimate, we call this gnana yoga, the path of intelligence. If you use your body, or physical action to reach the ultimate, we call this karma yoga, the path of action.

If you transform your energies and try to reach the ultimate, we call this kriya yoga, that means internal action. These are the only four ways you can work with yourself.

Most people are not able to get their physical body to a high level of intensity. It takes a lot of effort to keep the body intense. People can keep the mind intense off and on, but very few people are capable of just simply keeping the mind intense.

In energy, people are generally not at all intense. They know only certain moments of intensity, not a steady state of intensity. But emotion can get very intense. So emotion has always been the dominant factor in human beings.

The only thing is, emotion can take different forms. It can take very sweet and wonderful forms, it can take absolutely nasty and horrendous forms. The thing is to train it to take a sweet and beautiful form. Devotion is a way of transforming your emotion from negativity to pleasantness.

Devotion is a multiplied and enhanced version of a love affair, but you are not expecting any response. Your life becomes utterly beautiful because your emotion has become so sweet. Through that sweetness, one grows. That is devotion.

Devotion is another dimension of intelligence. Intellect wants to conquer the truth. Devotion just embraces the truth. Devotion cannot decipher but devotion can experience. Intellect can decipher but can never experience. This is the choice one has to make.

If you just recognise one thing, you will naturally become a devotee: the cosmos is very large. You do not know where it begins or where it ends. One simple thing you can do is consider everything in this existence as higher than yourself. If you learn to look at everything around you as higher than yourself, you will naturally become devout.

A devotee knows things that you cannot even imagine. He can grasp things that you have to struggle with because there is not much of him within himself. When you are too full of self, there is no room for anything higher to happen.

A devotee has understood what his place in the existence is. If you have understood this and are conscious of it, you will walk as a devout person. There is no other way to be. It is a very intelligent way to exist.

Courtesy: www.ishafoundation.org