Bhajan & janna

[Guest guest]

Maxwell wrote:

> there's the view of bhakti as a ladder which is discarded either for jnana

or after attaining the absolute. freeing oneself from identification with the

material body, mind, intelligence, ego means becoming fully conscious of one's

identity with the supreme brahman, and since bhakti can be applied only to

brahman read in the samsara chakra as ishvara, there's a kind of subservience

of bhakti to jnana because it's impossible to identify oneself with ishvara

whereas one's self is brahman, the "object" of jnana. to me, it's evident that

the brahman of jnana is objectified by its linguistic nature. i feel that one

objectification, by jnana, is as useful or useless as any other, say in

bhakti.

>

I don’t think that bhakti need to be discarded at any step if you do not

limit it to the personal. True bhakti is the inexpressible yearning of inner

man to go out towards the infinite. It is the sentiment that the writer of

Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad had in mind when he wrote:

>From delusion lead me to Truth.

>From darkness lead me to Light.

>From death lead me to immortality.

 

This yearning will be satisfied only when there is complete union, then it

will be transformed into bliss. It is like a child separated from his family,

the closer he came back to his home the more his longing intensified not

lessen.

>my limited understanding feels that to remove one thorn, another thorn is not

necessarily needed, especially when all thorns work to (re)move another object

and not to transcend objects. the worldly feeling that a thorn must be removed

is the only reason any notion of a thorn, or that one thorn is more efficient

than another, exists. to me, a hierarchy of thorns seems unprofitable.

>

 

You seem to be on the right track. If we have a sound concept that knows its

own limitation as an inadequate tool if used alone to realize the truth then

there is no necessity to use another thorn to remove it. Although Moksha is

not attained by process of reasoning alone, neither is it attained by

destroying of all concepts. It is true that where there is thought there is

Maya but who created Maya in the first place and for what purpose? What to do

with thought is not to identify with it, purify and make it subservient to our

true Self. In meditation we strengthen the mind to a degree that the encounter

with vast vistas of divine consciousness would not overwhelm us, thus

preserving our mind not destroying it. With this preserving mind, Jivanmukti,

even though in the state of Nibikalpa Samadhi, can function in the midst of

exacting worldly duties.

 

Best wishes,

Alex