{"id":1224,"date":"2013-07-13T01:33:23","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1224"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:33:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:33:23","slug":"06-the-way-of-devotion-vol-21-the-synthesis-of-yoga-volume-21","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/21-the-synthesis-of-yoga-volume-21\/06-the-way-of-devotion-vol-21-the-synthesis-of-yoga-volume-21","title":{"rendered":"-06_The Way of Devotion.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n
\n


\n
\nChapter IV<\/span><\/font><\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/font>The
\nWay of Devotion<\/span><\/font><\/b> <\/font><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

                B<\/font><\/b>HAKTI<\/font>
\nin itself is as wide as the heart-yearning of the soul for the Divine and as
\nsimple and straightforward as love and desire going straight towards their
\nobject. It cannot therefore be fixed down to any systematic method, cannot
\nfound itself on a psychological science like the Rajayoga, or a psycho-physical
\nlike the Hathayoga, or start from a definite intellectual process like the
\nordinary method of the Jnanayoga. It may employ various means or supports, and
\nman, having in him atendency<\/span> towards order, process
\nand system, may try to methodise<\/span> his resort to these
\nauxiliaries: but to give an account of their variations one would have to
\nreview almost all man’s numberless religions upon their side of inner approach
\nto the Deity. Really, however, the more intimate yoga of Bhakti resolves itself
\nsimply into these four movements, the desire of the Soul when it turns towards
\nGod and the straining of its emotion towards him, the pain of love and the
\ndivine return of love, the delight of love possessed and the play of that
\ndelight, and the eternal enjoyment of the divine Lover which is the heart of celestial
\nbliss. These are things that are at once too simple and too profound for methodising<\/span> or for analysis. One can at best only say, here
\nare these four successive elements, steps, if we may so call them, of the
\nsiddhi, and here are, largely, some of the means which it uses, and here again
\nare some of the aspects and experiences of the sadhana of devotion. We need
\nonly trace broadly the general line they follow before we turn to consider how
\nthe way of devotion enters into a synthetic and integral Yoga, what place it
\ntakes there and how its principle affects the other principles of divine
\nliving. <\/p>\n

All Yoga is a
\nturning of the human mind and the human soul, not yet divine in realisation,
\nbut feeling the divine impulse and attraction in it, towards that by which it
\nfinds its greater <\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 546<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

being. Emotionally, the first
\nform which this turning takes must be that of adoration. In ordinary religion
\nthis adoration wears the form of external worship and that again develops a
\nmost external form of ceremonial worship. This element is ordinarily necessary
\nbecause the mass of men live in their physical minds, cannot realise anything
\nexcept by the force of a physical symbol and cannot feel that they are living
\nanything except by the force of a physical action. We might apply here the Tantric
\ngradation of sādhanā<\/i><\/span>,
\nwhich makes the way of the paśu<\/i><\/span>, the herd, the animal or physical being, the
\nlowest stage of its discipline, and say that the purely or predominantly
\nceremonial adoration is the first step of this lowest part of the way. It is evident
\nthat even real religion, \u2013 and Yoga is something more than religion, \u2013 only
\nbegins when this quite outward worship corresponds to something really felt
\nwithin the mind, some genuine submission, awe or spiritual aspiration, to which
\nit becomes an aid, an outward expression and also a sort of periodical or
\nconstant reminder helping to draw back the mind to it from the preoccupations
\nof ordinary life. But so long as it is only an idea of the Godhead to which one
\nrenders reverence or homage, we have not yet got to the beginning of Yoga. The
\naim of Yoga being union, its beginning must always be a seeking after the
\nDivine, a longing after some kind of touch, closeness or possession. When this
\ncomes on us, the adoration becomes always primarily an inner worship; we begin
\nto make ourselves a temple of the Divine, our thoughts and feelings a constant
\nprayer of aspiration and seeking, our whole life an external service and
\nworship. It is as this change, this new soul-tendency grows, that the religion
\nof the devotee becomes a Yoga, a growing contact and union. It does not follow
\nthat the outward worship will necessarily be dispensed with, but it will
\nincreasingly become only a physical expression or outflowing of the inner
\ndevotion and adoration, the wave of the soul throwing itself out in speech and
\nsymbolic act. <\/p>\n

Adoration,
\nbefore it turns into an element of the deeper Yoga of devotion, a petal of the
\nflower of love, its homage and self-uplifting to its sun, must bring with it,
\nif it is profound, an increasing consecration of the being to the Divine who is
\nadored. And one element of this consecration must be a self-purifying so
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 547<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

as to become fit for the divine
\ncontact, or for the entrance of the Divine into the temple of our inner being,
\nor for his self-revelation in the shrine of the heart. This purifying may be ethical
\nin its character, but it will not be merely the moralist’s seeking for the
\nright and blameless action or even, when once we reach the stage of Yoga, an
\nobedience to the law of God as revealed in formal religion; but it will be a
\nthrowing away, katharsis<\/i>, of all that
\nconflicts whether with the idea of the Divine in himself or of the Divine in
\nourselves. In the former case it becomes in habit of feeling and outer act an
\nimitation of the Divine, in the latter a growing into his likeness in our nature.
\nWhat inner adoration is to ceremonial worship, this growing into the divine
\nlikeness is to the outward ethical life. It culminates in a sort of liberation
\nby likeness to the Divine,\u00b9 a liberation from our lower nature and a change
\ninto the divine nature. <\/p>\n

Consecration
\nbecomes in its fullness a devoting of all our being to the Divine; therefore
\nalso of all our thoughts and our works. Here the Yoga takes into itself the
\nessential elements of the Yoga of works and the Yoga of knowledge, but in its own
\nmanner and with its own peculiar spirit. It is a sacrifice of life and works to
\nthe Divine, but a sacrifice of love more than a tuning of the will to the
\ndivine Will. The bhakta<\/span> offers up his life and all
\nthat he is and all that he has and all that he does to the Divine. This
\nsurrender may take the ascetic form, as when he leaves the ordinary life of men
\nand devotes his days solely to prayer and praise and worship or to ecstatic
\nmeditation, gives up his personal possessions and becomes the monk or the
\nmendicant whose one and only possession is the Divine, gives up all actions in
\nlife except those only which help or belong to the communion with the Divine
\nand communion with other devotees, or at most keeps the doing from the secure
\nfortress of the ascetic life of those services to men which seem peculiarly the
\noutflowing of the divine nature of love, compassion and good. But there is the
\nwider self-consecration, proper to any integral Yoga, which, accepting the
\nfullness of life and the world in its entirety as the play of the Divine,
\noffers up the whole being into his possession; it is a holding of all one is
\nand has as belonging to him only and <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00b9 sādŗśya<\/span>-mukti. <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 548<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

not to ourselves and a doing of
\nall works as an offering to him. By this comes the complete active consecration
\nof both the inner and the outer life, the unmutilated<\/span>
\nself-giving. <\/p>\n

There is also
\nthe consecration of the thoughts to the Divine. In its inception this is the
\nattempt to fix the mind on the object of adoration, \u2013 for naturally the
\nrestless human mind is occupied with other objects and, even when it is
\ndirected upwards, constantly drawn away by the world, \u2013 so that in the end it
\nhabitually thinks of him and all else is only secondary and thought of only in
\nrelation to him. This is done often with the aid of a physical image or, more
\nintimately and characteristically, of a mantra or a divine name through which
\nthe divine being is realised. There are supposed by those who systematise<\/span> to be three stages of the seeking through the
\ndevotion of the mind, first, the constant hearing of the divine name, qualities
\nand all that has been attached to them, secondly, the constant thinking on them
\nor on the divine being or personality, thirdly, the settling and fixing of the
\nmind on the object; and by this comes the full realisation. And by these, too,
\nthere comes when the accompanying feeling or the concentration is very intense,
\nthe Samadhi, the ecstatic trance in which the consciousness passes away from
\nouter objects. But all this is really incidental; the one thing essential is
\nthe intense devotion of the thought in the mind to the object of adoration.
\nAlthough it seems akin to the contemplation of the way of knowledge, it differs
\nfrom that in its spirit. It is in its real nature not a still, but an ecstatic
\ncontemplation; it seeks not to pass into the being of the Divine, but to bring
\nthe Divine into ourselves and to lose ourselves in the deep ecstasy of his
\npresence or of his possession; and its bliss is not the peace of unity, but the
\necstasy of union. Here, too, there may be the separative self-consecration
\nwhich ends in the giving up of all other thought of life for the possession of
\nthis ecstasy, eternal afterwards in planes beyond, or the comprehensive
\nconsecration in which all the thoughts are full of the Divine and even in the occupations
\nof life every thought remembers him. As in the other Yogas, so in this, one
\ncomes to see the Divine everywhere and in all and to pour out the realisation
\nof the Divine in all one’s inner activities and outward actions. But all is
\nsupported here by the
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 549<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

primary force of the emotional
\nunion: for it is by love that the entire self-consecration and the entire
\npossession is accomplished, and thought and action become shapes and figures of
\nthe divine love which possesses the spirit and its members. <\/p>\n

This is the ordinary movement by
\nwhich what may be at first a vague adoration of some idea of the Divine takes
\non the hue and character and then, once entered into the path of Yoga, the
\ninner reality and intense experience of divine love. But there is the more
\nintimate Yoga which from the first consists in this love and attains only by
\nthe intensity of its longing without other process or method. All the rest
\ncomes, but it comes out of this, as leaf and flower out of the seed; other
\nthings are not the means of developing and fulfilling love, but the radiations
\nof love already growing in the soul. This is the way that the soul follows
\nwhen, while occupied perhaps with the normal human life, it has heard the flute
\nof the Godhead behind the near screen of secret woodlands and no longer
\npossesses itself, can have no satisfaction or rest till it has pursued and
\nseized and possessed the divine flute-player. This is in essence the power of
\nlove itself in the heart and soul turning from earthly objects to the spiritual
\nsource of all beauty and delight. There live in this seeking all the sentiment
\nand passion, all the moods and experiences of love concentrated on a supreme
\nobject of desire and intensified a hundredfold beyond the highest acme of
\nintensity possible to a human love. There is the disturbance of the whole life,
\nthe illumination by an unseized<\/span> vision, the unsatisfied
\nyearning for a single object of the heart’s desire, the intense impatience of
\nall that distracts from the one preoccupation, the intense pain of the
\nobstacles that stand in the way of possession, the perfect vision of all beauty
\nand delight in a single form. And there are all the many moods of love, the joy
\nof musing and absorption, the delight of the meeting and fulfilment and
\nembrace, the pain of separation, the wrath of love, the tears of longing, the
\nincreased delight of reunion. The heart is the scene of this supreme idyll of
\nthe inner consciousness, but a heart which undergoes increasingly an intense
\nspiritual change and becomes the radiantly unfolding lotus of the spirit. And
\nas the intensity of its seeking is beyond the highest power of the normal human
\nemotions, so
\n <\/p>\n

\nPage \u2013 550<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

also the delight and the final
\necstasy are beyond the reach of the imagination and beyond expression by
\nspeech. For this is the delight of the Godhead that passes human understanding.\n<\/p>\n

Indian Bhakti
\nhas given to this divine love powerful forms, poetic symbols which are not in
\nreality so much symbols as intimate expressions of truth which can find no
\nother expression. It uses human relations and sees a divine person, not as mere
\nfigures, but because there are divine relations of supreme Delight and Beauty
\nwith the human soul of which human relations are the imperfect but still the
\nreal type, and because that Delight and Beauty are not abstractions or
\nqualities of a quite impalpable metaphysical entity, but the very body and form
\nof the supreme Being. It is a living Soul to which the soul of the Bhakta
\nyearns; for the source of all life is not an idea or a conception or a state of
\nexistence, but a real Being. Therefore in the possession of the divine Beloved
\nall the life of the soul is satisfied and all the relations by which it finds
\nand in which it expresses itself, are wholly fulfilled; therefore, too, by any
\nand all of them can the Beloved be sought, though those which admit the
\ngreatest intensity, are always those by which he can be most intensely pursued
\nand possessed with the profoundest ecstasy. He is sought within in the heart
\nand therefore apart from all by an inward-gathered concentration of the being
\nin the soul itself; but he is also seen and loved everywhere where he manifests
\nhis being. All the beauty and joy of existence is seen as his joy and beauty;
\nhe is embraced by the spirit in all beings; the ecstasy of love enjoyed pours
\nitself out in a universal love; all existence becomes a radiation of its
\ndelight and even in its very appearances is transformed into something other
\nthan its outward appearance. The world itself is experienced as a play of the
\ndivine Delight, a Lila, and that in which the world loses itself is the heaven
\nof beatitude of the eternal union.<\/p>\n

 Page \u2013 551<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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