My problem was that I needed someone to whom I could have devotion. It remained my problem for many years. I had been to many great saints during my childhood, but I did not know how to express my devotion or how to feel devotion for them. I tried music, dance, painting, everything.
The problem was just a simple thing. I did not find the right person. Perhaps the people, whom I met perhaps at that time, did not fit my frame of reference, and I also did not know what I was expecting of them. Did I expect some sort of good intellectual education from them, or did I expect some sort of magic and miracles, siddhis, from them? I myself was not very clear and therefore my pursuit of bhakti did not yield any results at all.
God was out of the question. I thought, if God is within me, I do not have to love him, because he is the Lover. If He controls my mind, emotions and body, let Him control my devotion also, then I am not responsible. If I commit a crime, I am not responsible. If I get kaivalya samadhi, I am not responsible, because as they say, He does everything. If he does everything, then where is my role and where is my place? If He decides everything, let him decide. Then why am I blamed and why should I do sadhana at all? All these confusing intellectual cobwebs were in my mind.
Finally, when I came to Swami Sivanada everything finished. I did not love him as you understand love. I did not look at his eyes all the time, like a Romeo. I did not even meet him every day, but I did have devotion for him which I realized only years later. So, bhakti is the total dedication of one’s total emotion to someone without any intellectual intervention.
Of course, there are two types of bhakti that is related in the Narada Bhakti Sutras and Shandiliya Bhakti Sutra. One is called the transcendental bhakti, the other is called ritualistic bhakti. Transcendental bhakti is something in which your total personality and total emotion is involved. Ramakrishna Paramahamsa used to tell his disciples, ‘Wife loves her husband, she loves her child. She loves her mother. She loves her sister or maybe she loves somebody else. So she is loving a number of people. Let her withdraw all that! With the totality of that withdrawn love she should love someone else. That is called devotion. Devotion is the sublimated emotion which we practise in our daily life with everybody.
Once the true bhakti dawns, you don’t have to do any other sadhana, I am telling you frankly. You don’t need a scripture, you don’t need a sadhana, you don’t need a guru. You are mad and this madness is something which brings you closer to real experience. Unless you get a little bit mad you cannot transcend these hard realities which you face in your everyday life. How important is comfort in life? How important are wife and children? How important are money and property? You cannot transcend them.
We can only transcend them if we get a little bit high and in order to get a little bit high you need some sort of dose of divine love, and this devotion is not a religious act. Again I am telling you, it is not a religious act. It is exactly the same act which you are enacting with a beautiful girl or a young man, or with a bottle of champagne. It is exactly the same act; but the person is different and the bottle is different. Neither the young man nor the young girl is there but there is someone else. Rama, Krishna or Guru. Those who can love an impersonal god can also do that, but I don’t know how to do it.
Therefore, I do not disagree with those who feel that bhakti yoga is the most important path for the attainment of higher experience. However, I am telling you that it is a dangerous path. Dangerous not in the sense that you will get lost somewhere, or something bad will happen to you. Once you take that path, there is no thinking of anybody or anything else. The past is left behind. Your links, connections, associations, relationships are finished, and mean nothing to you anymore. There is no looking back, no looking to the right or to the left. It is just the awareness of one, the divine or the supreme, and after some time this bhakti culminates in a sort of self-illumination.
August 1984, Geneva, Switzerland