Devotion..

August 31, 2005

A map of a city is not the city itself.When we philosophise about God,we do not really perceive God.The concept of God is not God Himself.This distinctio

has to be clearly borne in mind.We must remember that reason or intellect is

concerned with systematising the knowledge of things,not with perceiving them.But in this case,things must be perceived,experienced,realised,and that

is most essential.To perceive God as a living entity,we must raise our concsciousness to a higher and subtler plane.In this process,our intellect does not help us.Intellect is satisfied with the appearance of things while spirituality has to penetrate beyond the appearance of things and reach the heart of things,their very existence or 'Sat', which is Divinity.

There is another difference between intellectual grasping and spiritual experience, namely the difference of personal attitude to reality as conceived by the intellect and religion.Intellect reduces even a living thing to an idea.

Spirituality.on the other hand,makes even an idea a living thing.God to the intellect is a concept,to spirituality He is the soul of one's soul.To know God,

one has to drink deep of His love and be for ever lost in Him,and to that end

one has to eradicate all feelings from one's mind except the consciousness of God.One has to bring his consciousness in tune with the Divinity thru love and sadhana to reach or to achieve this stage of an inner relationship with God,

which is called 'devotion'.It is only devotion that will guide,goad one to acquire and firmly establish in the knowldge,the ideal one wants to grasp and achieve,its pros and cons and the ways and means to attain it.Of course in the first stage intellect is positively helpful as it leads one to the refinement of the mind.In the second stage, one will realise that intellect alone does not lead one to proper spiritual knowledge which one has to acquire thru a different kind of perception which is called 'spiritual intuition'.When one gets into the third stage when the mind becomes thoroughly concentrated and yearns to realize and love God alone to the exclusion of everything else,

intellect proves an obstruction and sometimes a painful hurdle.That is why the path of devotion is the surest,quickest and simplest one for the rational man of today.

Not that intellect alone but even our heart from which shuld stem true devotion

often deludes us by adopting a deceptive philosophy of love Devotees can always ask:'have not the members of our family a prior claim on our heart?Should we not love our fellow men and improve their lot?How.then,are we to

love God and God alone,to the exclusion of all other relations of ours with men and matters?'Some may even argue that it is God's will which has shouldered

them with responsibilities and objectives towards their family and society.But behind this philosophy,there are some assumptions and concepts which these devotees do not care to examine dispassionately.Does God really wait for or need man to help man?Is it not sheer ego which makes one arrogate to himself this responsibility regarding the good of the society?Is it not again mere physical attachments in the family,more often than not for personal gain or pleasure,that go in the name of love?Obviously such love standing on egoistic and selfish notions of I-the doer and 'mine these beloved ones' binds us to the physical plane and acts as a drag in our endeavour to rise to the

spiritual plane.

This is not to deny that one has got to play his role in the family as well as in the society.But once we accept spirituality as the be-all and end-all of life, the love which sustains all our relationships as also motivates all our activities,

both in the home and in the society, shuld rise above the physical and mundane plane.That love shuld be sublimated and purified by shedding all the

dross of our egoistic and selfish notions.It is from this lofty plane that one has to play his role in the home and in society as a pilgrim on life's path.This is possible only when one's perception of God has deepened in his mind and expanded in his heart.To rise to this plane one has to try to feel God's presence also in the members of the family as also in all beings.Otherwise we

wll confuse the ends with the means and thus fail to reach the goal.In other words,all our relationships and objectives in the family hv to be transformed into loving service of God-our goal-who is the core and reality of all beings.That is the way we progress in Godward pilgrimage.

Hare Krishna.

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