From the Archives of Swami Jyotirmayananda
There is a moment in the life of a river when the river stops being a river. The current slows, the banks disappear, and what was a moving body of water becomes the ocean itself. Nothing remains of the river as a separate thing. There is only the ocean.
This is the image Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda uses to describe the peak of devotion. One Sanskrit word captures it: tanmaya. Tat maya. Absorbed in That. The devotee has entered God so completely that the distinction between worshipper and worshipped no longer holds. The river has reached its end, and in reaching it, found its beginning.
Lesson 38 of the Nārada Bhakti Sūtras covers three sutras that together build toward this image, offering some of the most practically useful teachings in the entire series.
The first sutra is Sutra 69: Tirthikurvanti tirthāni. This translates to: Devotees sanctify even holy places.
The logic here is counterintuitive. We tend to think holiness works in one direction: you go to a sacred place, and the place lifts you. Badrinath, Bodh Gaya, the banks of the Ganges. These are powerful precisely because so many great souls have touched them. Their spiritual energy accumulates like light stored in stone.
Swamiji agrees this is real. But he adds something that changes the entire picture.
If true devotion develops within you, he says, you realize that sacred places are everywhere. You do not need to wait for a pilgrimage. There is a Hindi saying he quotes: Mañcaṅgā to kaṭhautī meṁ Gaṅgā. If your mind is pure, sincere, and shining with devotion to God, even in your bathtub, you say, “O Holy Ganga, come” and the Ganges is there.
The water is water. What makes it the Ganges is bhāvanā: feeling, faith, the quality of the heart that receives it. No external substance can substitute for an inner quality. And no external absence can remove what is genuinely present within.
This is not mystical vagueness. It is a precise claim about where sanctity lives. It lives in the devoted mind. Wherever that mind rests, that ground becomes tīrtha.
The Sustaining Presence We Forget
Before arriving at tanmayā, Swamiji lays a foundation through an image that is simpler and perhaps more startling.
He asks us to think about sleep. Every night, you let go of your body completely. You release all control. The elaborate machinery of your brain, your organs, your nervous system. None of it stops working because you stopped managing it. Someone, he says, is sustaining all of it. A tender, watchful Presence that arranges what you abandon.
The baby in the mother’s arms is his second image: completely enfolded, completely cared for, without needing to ask. That is the nature of your relationship with God, not as a future ideal, but as the present, continuous reality.
He calls the wish to see God appear physically, to talk to Him in sensory terms, an immature darśana. God can fulfill that wish in a second, Swamiji says. But it is not the deepest realization. Mature darśana is to understand that you are constantly sustained by God’s Presence, that He has never not been here, and that this is the fact underneath every moment of your life.
Tanmayā, then, is not escape from the world. It is the full absorption of this recognition. The devotee has stopped pretending the river is separate from the ocean.
The Explosion That Touches Centuries
Swamiji offers a striking image for what happens when someone genuinely realizes God. He calls it an explosion. Not the destructive kind: the nuclear bomb analogy he uses is deliberately inverted. A nuclear explosion radiates destruction outward for generations. The explosion of God-realization radiates light.
That light, he says, does not stop. Someone reads a book 600 years later, encounters a mantra that a sage once recited with their whole heart, and something shifts. The radiation reaches them. The mystic energy of a genuine spiritual attainment carries across time, not because of what the sage said, but because of what they were.
This is why turning the mind toward great souls has practical value. Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Rama. Their energy remains in the culture, in the texts, in the prayers people have repeated across centuries. Each repetition of Om Śrī Rāmāyaṇaṁ Namaḥ carries potency beyond its syllables because of how many awakened hearts have poured into those syllables.
And a mind that attains divine experience does more for the world than any amount of physical or verbal activity. Greater than the hand. Greater than speech. A mind blossoming with divine love touches countless other minds without any visible means of transmission.
The Flute and the Empty Self
One of the quieter images in this lesson is the flute. Swamiji describes the God-realized soul as a flute in God’s hand. What makes a flute capable of carrying music? Its emptiness. You hollow it out, and then the breath can move through it.
The personality that has become empty of all that is little or negative, of ego-drives, of old resentments, of the need to appear or impress, becomes an instrument for something that cannot be manufactured. Divine music flows through it. The flute may be old, may look unremarkable, and the melody is what matters.
This image is also a precise description of the devotee’s inner life. Not forceful, not striving, not effortful in the ordinary sense. Emptied. Available.
The One Qualification
The last sutra Swamiji covers is Sutra 72: Nāsti teṣu jāti-vidyā-rūpa-kula-dhana-kriyādi bhedaḥ. This powerful statement means: Among devotees, there is no distinction based on birth, knowledge, beauty, family, wealth, or occupation.
He offers names. Śabarī, a woman from a wild tribe, received honor from Rāma. Dhruva was a child who had never studied scripture. Kabīra’s parentage was unknown. Nārsī Mehtā was a potter. Vibhīṣaṇa was a rākṣasa. God did not classify any of them. He responded to their hearts.
The Bhagavad Gītā says the same: patraṃ puṣpaṃ phalaṃ toyam: a leaf, a flower, a fruit, a little water. That is all. Not a minimum scholarship requirement. Not a lineage certificate. The quality of offering is in the heart that makes it.
This is not consolation for the spiritually unprepared. It is a structural fact about what devotion is. Devotion is not a learned skill. It is an opening. And any human being, in any condition, can open.
That is the teaching of Lesson 38.
From a lecture by Sri Swami Jyotirmayananda, the last direct disciple of Swami Sivananda. Yoga Research Foundation, Miami, Florida. This is Lesson 38 of 45 in the Nārada Bhakti Sūtras series.
Watch the full lecture: https://youtu.be/fbObKgnXpHA