From the Archives of Swami Jyotirmayananda
Explore the profound wisdom of the revered Narada Bhakti Sutras, a cornerstone of Hindu devotion, guided by His Holiness Swami Jyotirmayananda. Immerse yourself in 45 enlightening lessons that reveal the essence of Bhakti Yoga—the path to pure love for God and transcendence of the material world.
Embrace these ancient teachings that have guided countless devotees for centuries, leading them towards spiritual perfection through unwavering devotion. Prepare to delve into the depths of divine love and find your unique path to spiritual enlightenment. Trust in the sutras, follow their guidance, and be blessed with boundless devotion.
And now, His Holiness Swami Jyotirmayananda:
Om vasudevasutaḿ devaḿ kaḿsa-cāṇūra-mardanam devakī-paramānandaḿ kṛṣṇaḿ vande jagadgurum
Om Adorations to Lord Krishna; the Preceptor of the Universe; Destroyer of the forces of Darkness and bestower of immortality; Blessed Self in all, adorations.
We are now delving into the Bhakti Sutras, specifically sutra number 66. To offer a simple introduction, this profound scripture illuminates the inherent human emotion that naturally gravitates towards God.
The River of Love Within
Imagine a river, rising from a mysterious mountain, flowing through vast plains, and ultimately merging into the boundless ocean. Similarly, the love within your heart has sprung from a source you may not fully comprehend—a mountain with many enigmatic locks, like the Himalayas. And it flows.
As this river of love flows, it encounters a myriad of experiences: frogs, fish, crocodiles, magnificent trees, vibrant green grass, blossoming flowers, and prosperous cities. Yet, through all these encounters, it steadily moves towards its ultimate destination: the ocean. This very river resides in every heart, and we call it love.
Everyone, from humans to birds and animals, is innately aware of love. If love were to be taken away from life, there would simply be no life. As you experience different facets and manifestations of love, you encounter countless changes. Your soul has journeyed through many embodiments, and your quest for love is not confined to this single lifetime; it has been a continuous endeavor, well-accomplished from life to life.
However, the contents of love constantly shift. The human mind and heart are frequently wrecked and frustrated because we seek two things: to love, and to find an absolutely fulfilling love—one with no possibility of change or variation. In human relationships, people often ask, “How long will you love?” and some verbally respond, “Forever.” Yet, that “forever” often doesn’t last even for a few days.
The Impermanence of Worldly Affection
In the human world, love manifests in many ramifications. We love our children, friends, fellow human beings, animals, and birds. We love our books, our money. And we might even love God because He helps us love these things. Yet, even within a single lifetime, many things we loved intensely are simply taken away from us.
Sometimes, we handle such losses with maturity, offering thanks to God for the experience. Other times, our minds become overwhelmed with sorrow and dejection. You might ask, “When is the time when one can positively embrace adversity?”
A Child’s Attachment to Toys
Consider a simple illustration: children are so deeply attached to their toys. The toys seem to speak to them, console them, and even “look” at them when their mother isn’t. But a time comes when the child is reminded that they won’t always remain a child; they must grow up.
They might embrace this transition positively, observing how others study, flourish, and become successful students, making the act of letting go easy. Or, they might cling to that frustration, continuing until a higher power releases them from that problem. This is just one small sample from life.
The Soul’s Journey and Shifting Bonds
In every life, you’ve formed different types of relationships—very close, profound, and intense. But your soul moves on from one embodiment to another, and all those bonds eventually move away from you. You might be reborn in a place where people you loved in a previous embodiment are still around, perhaps older, but you might now perceive them as noisy neighbors. There are moments when your heart melts for their problems, but ultimately, they are just neighbors, not Swajans (relatives), not family. Imagine, even your closest family will eventually become distant.
The Quest for Infinite Love
Therefore, what is love? How can a person truly experience it? What is that ultimate state where you have found the object of infinite love, and need to search for love no more? There’s also the other aspect: being loved. As you seek someone to love, you also seek a response.
As a child, you find love in your mother and father, then begin to find it in different ways—in your books, your studies, and your successes. Love is not limited to human beings; you can love so many things. But all these affections, like clouds, eventually drift away.
Ask a person waiting by Miami Beach to watch the sun set. It can be a poignant scene because memory is a tapestry woven with how many things and people loved you, and how many you loved. You are loved, and you love.
God: The Ultimate Fulfillment of Love
Complete fulfillment arrives when God comes into view. God is the One who has been seeking the fulfillment of love in you. He wants to love you and will never let you go, no matter where you are. His love is the ultimate, the absolute. When you have found His love, your mind no longer craves any other type of affection. So, the ultimate object of love is God. And the question of who He loves most, whose love can give me absolute fulfillment? The answer is God.
To love and to be loved—that is the entire philosophy of Bhakti Yoga.
Kabira’s Wisdom on Love
Pothi padhi padhi jag mua
Pandit hua na koye.
Great saint Kabira sings that people study volumes of books on countless subjects: philosophy and religion alone boast innumerable, voluminous works. The whole world seems to die as they go on studying all that, yet no one truly becomes a pandit—a real scholar—who can genuinely say, “Yes, I know all about love.”
Kabira suggests that if you were to study just two and a half letters, you would become a true pandit. Instead of poring over millions and trillions of letters spread across countless books, your mind should focus on these two and a half letters. In Sanskrit, love is Prem, and Prem has two and a half letters in it. To be more flexible, love has four letters. Whoever learns these four letters needs no more learning. This is the consummation of all knowledge, the goal of all attainments—the very purpose of life.
The Divine Purpose of Love in Your Heart
God installed love in your heart, and until you find the absolute blossoming of that love, you will continue to move from one embodiment to another, experiencing highs and lows. If your spiritual direction becomes more secure, you will ascend the ladder. Once you understand what the spiritual path is, and what sadhana (spiritual practice) entails, you will continue to ascend. You don’t reach the goal in one sudden leap, but you gradually discover God within you and the profound love that envelops you at all times.
Sutra 66: The Attainment of Love Alone
Without going into excessive detail, let us now turn to the 66th Sutra:
Trirupabhangapurvakam nityadasyanityakantabhajanatmakam premakaryam premaiva karyam.
Having recited it, Swami Jyotirmayananda repeats: Prem alone is to be attained. Love alone is to be attained. There is nothing else truly worth attaining in this world. This should not be taken literally, for everything you attain is a part of attaining God, of attaining love. In broader terms, you attain God because God is love. The entire project of Self-realization is the discovery of absolute love.
The Centrality of “You” in Love
The scripture states: Atmanastu kamaya sarvam priyam bhavati. For whose sake do all things in the world become dear? First, you must introduce that equation—your existence. You exist, therefore you consider the world’s problems, its miseries and attainments, and what should and shouldn’t be done. In this view, how many things you love, how magnanimous you are. Analyze and see: the entire focus is you.
You must hold on to your stability, and that is your central love. While this leads into deeper philosophy, the first thing is clear: everyone must love the “me.” If you are not there, what is the use of the whole world? All things that have some bearing upon “me” are loved in different degrees. Things directly helpful are loved more intensely; things remotely helpful are loved, but sometimes the direction of your love shifts.
However, when you return to a central understanding, everything is loved because of you. Even the scriptures you love, for whom? Because of you. You pray to God for whom? Because of you. This leads to the deeper philosophical insight: God and you are ultimately the same.
Dissolving the Triple Form of Devotion
So, the present sutra says: “Having broken the triple form of relative devotion, a devotee should incessantly practice love and love alone, even like a devoted servant or a devoted wife.” (Wherever you see the term “wife,” both sides—husband and wife—are implied.)
In the practice of devotion, as long as it remains in a relative form, there are three components:
- Dhyata: The meditator, one who meditates.
- Dhyana: The process of meditation.
- Dheya: The object of meditation.
In devotional language, these are:
- Pujya: The adorable one (God, who is to be adored).
- Pujak: The worshipper (you, who worships).
- Puja: The act of worship, prayer, etc.
These three—the worshipper, the worshipped, and the process of worship—all dissolve when you attain the highest level of devotion. That ultimate goal is known as Parabhakti, supreme devotion. Parabhakti, liberation, and nirvana are all synonymous.
Merging with the Divine Ocean
In other words, just as a river entering the ocean loses its individuality, you too do not maintain your separate identity. As long as you are aware that you are loving God and God is being loved, your mind is also aware of degrees: “Yesterday I loved Him more, today a little less.” But at the highest level, you are no longer aware of such distinctions.
Then the question arises: why did you practice all that when the goal comes? This is the mystery of spiritual movement. When a river flows towards the ocean, it might have all sorts of imaginations: “When I reach the ocean, it will say, ‘How long have you been separated from me?’ And many rivers will come and shake hands and say, ‘Welcome, welcome!'”
But all that imagination is simply swept away the moment a river enters the ocean. It knows nothing because it has become fulfilled as the ocean itself.
The Experience of Deep Sleep
If this concept seems difficult, try to understand it through the experience of deep sleep. People who struggle with sleep, a common problem, often imagine going to sleep intensely and soundly. But the mind starts whispering, making it not so easy. You don’t know where to “go.” Everything is set on the bed, but worries and anxieties enter your mind, and you just don’t know how to switch off all those thoughts.
Yet, when you finally fall asleep, all questions—how, where, when, how long, time, and space—vanish from your mind. You gently dissolve. There is no awareness of your individuality. And you love your sleep, a state where your separate self doesn’t exist. Try to understand from that point of view what it means to say, “I love God.” You become so immersed; you become God.
Kabira’s Vision of Divine Beauty
Lalee mere laal ki jit dekhaon tit laal
Kabira sings, “I went out looking for the beauty of my beloved.” The mind is always fascinated by beauty—beauty in a broad sense, anything majestic or inspiring: the beauty of the sky’s expansion, the blossoming flowers, the shimmering waves of the ocean, even the delicate beauty of a butterfly or the innocence of smiling children. In other words, if you look for beauty, the world is filled with God’s manifestations.
And if you truly seek beauty, wherever you turn, you see nothing but the beauty of God, His sweetness, His glory. “I went on looking for that love, the beauty of my love, but I myself turned into that ocean of divine existence. I myself became that beauty.”
The Sun’s Reflection: A Path to Oneness
Consider another illustration: the sun reflecting in a jar of water. The reflected sun is looking for love, and its fulfillment lies in becoming one with the actual sun. In reality, it is nothing but the sun, but from a relative point of view, the reflected sun has many problems. It might feel responsible for the little fish and frogs near it, who depend upon it.
Without over-magnifying this, the underlying goal is that the potentiality of the reflected sun is limitless. Suppose the reflected sun were to “walk out” of the bucket and seek a higher level. It would find many other jars of water and similar souls caught within them. It would develop a sense of universal love and perhaps inspire them. All this continues until the climax is reached: it realizes it is nothing but the sun.
Nothing truly “happened” from the sun’s point of view. But from the perspective of the predicament in which every soul finds itself, these movements—your journey towards God and your eventual merger in Him—are the greatest happenings.
Human Love as Illustrations, Not the Goal
The Sutra provides two illustrations from human experience:
- A Mother’s Love for a Child: In this love, individuality seems to melt away. It doesn’t melt away absolutely, hence it’s an illustration, not the ultimate goal. But if you philosophize it, you understand how, for the sake of her child, a mother forgets all about herself. This is an absolutely ego-effacing love.
- The Love of Lover and Beloved (Wife and Husband): Similarly, another profound love the human world enjoys is that between a lover and beloved. If the love is deeply qualitative and intense, the sense of separation diminishes. In very close families, shaped by a particular culture, husband and wife become one identity with two aspects and two faces.
Again, these are not the ultimate goal but illustrations. These sentiments can be directed towards God to develop the ideal bhakti we are discussing. How can we cultivate a motherly sentiment and allow it to move towards God? How can we develop a melting heart, an ego-effacing love?
The Five Attitudes (Bhavas) of Bhakti
As you read bhakti literature, five attitudes are described in the practice of devotion. Each is known as a bhava—an attitude of your feeling, indicating how that feeling is directed.
1. Shanta Bhava (Peaceful)
This is a peaceful love for God, but one that doesn’t express itself outwardly through your personality. It remains a calm, hidden, secret devotion. Scriptural figures like Bhishma exemplified this shanta bhava. Outwardly, people might not have known he was constantly chanting Krishna’s name and meditating on Him. Deep in his heart, he was an intense devotee, but outwardly, these practices were not always visible. This bhava is not easy to sustain.
2. Dasya Bhava (Servant)
This is the attitude of a servant or slave. It is a profound experience, provided you detach your mind from the dreadful connotations sometimes associated with slavery. This has nothing to do with it. It is a loving state where the master and the servant love each other intensely.
There’s a Mid-Eastern story about a house owner deeply impressed by his slave’s work. The slave always anticipated needs and performed tasks better than anyone. One day, the owner decided to show thanks. He called the slave to his orchard, sat him near a large apple tree, and plucked the ripest apple. Magnanimously, he patiently sliced and skinned the apple, offering a piece to the slave.
The slave ate it, his eyes filled with joy. The master gave another, and another, and each time the slave’s joy increased. Only the last slice remained, and the master thought, “I should try this delightful taste myself.” He took a bite and immediately spit it out—it was incredibly sour. He asked the slave, “How did you endure all those sour slices I gave you?” The slave replied, “Master, this is the first time you have given me anything. Touched by your hand, there was nothing sour in it. I never tasted anything so delightful.”
Try to understand: even in the practical world, when something is given to you by someone who loves you intensely, you don’t scrutinize it. The very fact that it comes from a loving hand fills your heart with joy. If one were to develop the understanding that God is giving you from His garden—that all your situations and circumstances are touched and blessed by God—that is the attitude of a slave: “I am His slave; I do the will of my Master.”
“Empty thyself, I will fill thee.” Be an instrument in the Divine Hand. So much so that your ego is not there; you are simply a constant channel of God. If you were to master that art, it is the sovereign remedy for all types of stress.
The entire world is ruled by Him; He conducts the whole vehicle of the world process. All you have to do is think of a train: it’s moving, someone is driving it. All you need to do is stay in your compartment and relax. Don’t carry the burden on your head; you are being led. Enjoy the ride instead of creating vexations in your mind and trying to push the train. Live in the world, but glide through your life. Do not bring vexing problems to your mind and start straining your nerves, wondering how God is going to solve them—as if He needs your help. So, Dasya: be a slave.
3. Sakya Bhava (Friendly)
This is the attitude of viewing God as a friend. This is a special characteristic of Hindu culture; otherwise, the mind might generally be uneasy, thinking, “How can I, so limited, turn to God and say, ‘O Friend’?” But there is no harm in that. God is the Friend of friends. There isn’t any secret that He doesn’t know. The only difference is that you don’t know His secrets. But a time will come when there will be no such separation. So, that is a friendly attitude.
4. Vatsalya Bhava (Mother’s Love)
This is a mother’s love towards her child. Again, this is not easy for the vast majority to understand when they turn to God—to think of God as a child. But it’s merely an illustration. God is not childlike; He is all wisdom. However, when you develop a motherly love, it means a love where there is no expectation. A mother doesn’t expect her child to go to the market and buy things, not at this stage. The very fact that you have the opportunity, the privilege, to love becomes so joyous and inspiring. God is similar. That attitude is developed.
A parable illustrates this point: Tulsidas, the author of the Ramayana, viewed Rama as his master and himself as a servant. Surdas, on the other hand, viewed himself as a mother and Krishna as his child. Both were traveling together when a chariot approached them violently. Tulsidas stood firm and faced the challenge. Surdas, however, ran and hid in a small ditch. Later, when they met, Tulsidas questioned him, “How is it you don’t believe in God? He would have helped you.” Surdas replied, “Well, my God is a baby, so I have to help Him.”
Imagine: you love God, but you have no expectation. You are simply enjoying the sweetness, majesty, and boundless joy inherent in that love. You are simply enjoying. In other forms of love, there might be a little expectation, but all these are magnanimous forms of love. The different modes of love are perfectly wonderful. Embrace whatever mode, whatever type suits you.
5. Madurya Bhava (Lover and Beloved)
The highest love in the human world is that between a lover and beloved, known as Madurya. There is a story that illustrates this point:
A devotee, a sadhaka, was worshipping God by a beautiful river. He laid down his prayer mat, a gift from a pilgrimage center, and had just begun meditating when a lady passed by. She crossed over the mat barefoot, leaving footprints. The devotee turned to her with tremendous anger and irritation, “This came from such a sacred place! Are you blind?” and so on, lashing out with all types of language.
The lady was shocked and listened patiently. When he finished, she said, “What type of lover are you? I love a human being, a mortal personality. Naturally, our love is limited. Yet, even in that love, I see nothing else; there is no multiplicity around me. All things vanish. I don’t see any difference between your rug and the sand nearby. I don’t even see your presence. And you, who are supposed to love God, still see me and my feet. You are counting my toes, and you have forgotten all about your prayers. Your tongue is lashing out all types of words.”
So, in the plan of nature, see God’s presence in these experiences of human beings. The experience of human love, at its mature state, at its height, becomes very self-effacing. This can give you an idea. “God can’t be loved that way. He is not a human being.” And you can’t love your own soul that way, because there is no duality. And yet, there is a blossoming of love that can be compared to the sweet love between two human beings—comparable, but in that state, that sweetness is magnified a trillion times.
The Blossoming of Divine Love
These are the major attitudes, or Bhavas. There is a saying by the sage Dadu:
Preetam ko patiyan likhoon Jon kahun hoya videsh
Tan me man mein nayan mein Tako kahan sandesh
“I would have written letter after letter to my beloved if he were somewhere outside of me. If he were in a foreign country, I would have just gone on emailing him. But he permeates my body, he permeates my mind, permeates my vision. How can I send any message to him?”
That is where the Dvi-ardha-akshara—the “two and a half letters” of Prem—reaches its blossoming point. So, whoever learns divine love, to whatever degree (for it doesn’t all come immediately), to that extent your real love unfolds from your heart, and your personality becomes enriched. To that extent, the world around you becomes blessed, because all gracious qualities emanate from the love of your heart.
Think about it.
Om Shanti Shanti.
Thank you for joining us on this journey of spiritual growth. It’s an honor to learn from the wisdom of Swami Jyotirmayananda. As we part for now, remember, the quest does not end. Take time to reflect on today’s insights and integrate them into your life. Until next time, stay open, stay curious, stay present. The light within you is always shining.