SIRD Malaysia

The more the Lord becomes supreme in the devotee's mind, as the cause of his life and also as the goal of his life, the more will be the feelings of devotion in him. `I am moved by the Lord, I move towards Him, in the same way as does the world before me. As is the world a product and outcome of Nature, I, my body, mind, intelligence, everything in me, also is. I have no existence besides Nature, and so away from God's.' This will be the fresh note of his thinking every time. He will have his apparent ego, but that ego will be belonging to Nature and therefore to the Creator.

Bhakti truly emerges from humility. The broader is the humility based, the greater will be the ground of bhakti. Humility is a quality the intelligence takes to and cultivates when its vision rises and expands. The more and more you begin to observe the universe, the more will you grow in your humility. The beauty and ugliness, the cruelty and gentleness, the fidelity and betrayal, the hope and despondency, all these are displayed by the world only to point us to the supreme Grandeur, the Loftiness of the Creator, the utterly abstruse ways of Nature.

Such humility, such bhakti, will gradually generate the trait of detachment. The strong clinging which one feels right from the beginning of life towards the things of the world is born out of the tastes and pleasures the body holds out and instigates every time. When the pulls of the flesh are moderated by the promptings of the intelligence, which has now become humble, the perceptions and values change inevitably. The devotee will start seeing every phenomenon, physical or mental, as part of the world-whole, the universal whole, as a minor drop in the magnificent expanse. The sanga, the painful ties of attachment, thus grow thin and he is no more troubled by it.

With the fall of sanga, his mind becomes, clear, light and peaceful. Such a mind gets rid of its habitual preferences and prejudices. Hatred vanishes from it. The sense of universal love, equal love and concern for all the beings of the world, dawns and the mind gets inspired by it. Such a state is verily akin to the state of universalness, oneness with the whole universe, oneness with the Lord. This is how bhakti, given the colour of exclusiveness, takes hold of man, makes him a full devotee, an all-time lover of the Lord, thereby making him better, worthier and more effective, until at last he becomes conscious of his oneness with the Lord.