Bhakti Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

 

Excerpts from the book:

Bhakti-Yoga  is a real gratitude search after the Lord, a search beginning, and ending in Love.

Bhakti is greater than Karma, greater than Yoga, because these are intended for an object view, while Bhakti is its own fruition, its own means and its own end.

There is really not so much difference between, knowledge(Jnana) and love(Bhakti) as people sometimes imagine.

The great advantage of Bhakti is that it is the easiest and the most natural way to reach the great divine end in view; its great disadvantage is that in its lover forms it oftentimes degenerates into hideous fanaticism.

These two things are necessary for a bird to fly - the two wings and the tail as a rudder for steering. Jnana(knowledge) is the one wing, Bhakti (Love) is the other, and Yoga is the tail that keeps up the balance.

Thus people say, He is devoted to the king, he is devoted to the Guru.

The loving wife meditates on her loving husband; here also a kind of eager and continuous remembrance is meant. This is devotion according to Shankara.

Meditation again is a constant remembrance(of the thing meditated upon), flowing like an unbroken stream of oil poured out from one vessel to another. When this kind of remembering  has been attained(in relation to God) all bondages break.

'Whom this Atman desires this him the Atman is attained.' The extremely beloved is desired; he becomes the most beloved of the Atman.

"Or by the worship of the Supreme Lord" - Bhoja says, "Pranidhana is that sort of Bhakti in which, without seeking results, such as sense-enjoyments etc, all works are dedicated to that Teacher of teachers."

According to Shandilya, "Bhakti is intense love to God." The best definition is. however, that given by the king Bhaktas, Prahlada: "That deathless love which the ignorant have for the fleeting objects of the senses  - as I keep meditating on Thee - may not that love slip away from my heart!" Love! for whom? For the Supreme Lord Ishvara. Love for any other being, however great, can not be Bhakti: for as Ramanuja says in his Shri-Bhashya, quoting an ancient Acharya, i.e. great teacher - " From Brahma to a clump of grass, all things that live in the world are slaves of birth and death caused by Karma; therefore they can not be helpful as objects of meditation, because they are all in ignorance and subject to change."

Bhakti is a series or succession of mental efforts at religious realization beginning with ordinary worship and ending in a supreme intensity of love for the Ishvara.

"From whom is the birth, continuation and dissolution of the universe" - He is Ishvara - "the Eternal, the Pure, the Ever-Free, the Almighty, the All-Knowing, the All-Merciful, the Teacher of all teachers".

To attain the realization of all desires and the extreme sameness with the Supreme, we must all admit that the liberated get the power of ruling the whole universe. To this we reply, that the liberated get all the powers except that of ruling the universe.

This is proved from the scriptural text, 'From whom all these things are born, by whom all that are born live, unto whom they, departing, return - ask about it. That is Brahman.

The way is more difficult for those whose  mind is attached to the Absolute!

The greatest psychologist the world has ever known, Bhagavan Kapila, demonstrated ages that human consciousness is one of the elements in the make-up of all the objects of your perception and conception, internal as well as external.

He, soon, through the mercy of the Lord, reaches a plane where pedantic and powerless reason is left far behind, and the mere intellectual groping through the dark gives place to the daylight of direct perception. He no more reasons and believes, he almost perceives, He no more argues, he senses. And is not this seeing God, and feeling God, and enjoying God higher than everything else?

To men, therefore, who never rise higher than eating, drinking, begetting progeny, and dying, the only gain is in sense-enjoyments; and they must wait and go through many more births and reincarnations to learn to feel even the faintest necessity for anything higher.

Bhakti-Yoga, as we have said, is divided into the Gauni or the preparatory, and the Para or the supreme forms.

One ounce of the practice of righteousness and of spiritual Self-realization outweighs tons and tons of frothy talk and nonsensical sentiments.

Every soul is destined to be perfect, and every being, in the end, will attain the state of perfection.

It is not true that a high order of intellectual development always goes hand in hand with proportionate development of the spiritual side in man.

In studying books we are sometimes deluded into thinking that thereby we are being spiritually helped; but if we analyse the effect of the study of books on ourselves, we shall find that at the upmost it is only our intellect that derives profit from such studies, and not our runner spirit.

This inadequacy of books to quicken spiritual growth is the reason why, although almost every one of us can speak most wonderfully pm spiritual matters, when it comes to action and the living of a truly spiritual life, we find ourselves so awfully deficient. To quicken the spirit, the impulse must come from another soul.

The person from whose soul such impulse comes is called the Guru - the teacher; and the person to whose would the impulse is conveyed is called the Shishya - the student.

The seed must be a living seed, and the field must be ready ploughed; and when both these conditions are fulfilled, a wonderful growth of genuine religion has to be of wonderful capabilities, and clever shall his hearer be.

and when both of these are really wonderful and extraordinary, then will a splendid spiritual awakening result, and not otherwise. Such alone are the real teachers, and such alone are also the real students, the real aspirants. All others are only playing with spirituality.

When the power that attracts the light of religion in the receiving soul is full and strong, the power which answers to that attraction and sends in light does come as matter of course.

Whenever we are tempted to complain of our search after the truth, that we desire so much, proving vain, instead of so complaining, our first duty ought to be to look into our own soul, and find whether the craving in the heart is real. Then, in the vast majority of cases it would be discovered that we were not fit for receiving the truth, that there was no real thirst for spirituality.

'Fools dwelling in darkness, wise in their own conceit, and puffed up with vain knowledge, go found and round staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind.' The world is full of these.

Truth stands on its own evidence, it does not require any other testimony to prove it true, it is self-effulgent.

The condition necessary for the taught are purity, a real thirst after knowledge, and perseverance. No impure soul can be really religious. Purity in thought, speech, and act is absolutely necessary for any one to be religious. As to the thirst after knowledge, it is an old law that we all get whatever we want. None of us can get anything other than what we fix our hearts upon.

Hearing religious talks or reading religious books is no proof yet of a real want felt in the heart; there must be a continuous struggle, a constant fight, an unremitting grappling with our lover nature till higher want is actually felt and the victory is achieved. It is not a question of one or two days, of years, or of lives; the struggle may have to go on for hundreds of lifetimes. The success sometimes may come immediately, but we must be ready to wait patiently even for what may look like an infinite length of time.

In regard to the teacher, we must see that he knows the spirit of the scriptures. The whole world reds Bibles. Vedas, and Korans; but they are all only words, syntax, etymology, philology, the dry bones of religion. The teacher who deals too much in words, and allowed the mind to be carried away  by the force of words loses the spirit. It is the knowledge of the spirit of the scriptures alone that constitutes the true religious teacher.

The network of works is a big forest; it is the cause of a curious wandering of the mind.

Those who employ such methods to impart religion to others, are only desirous to show off their learning, so that the world may praise them as great scholars.

The second condition necessary in the teacher is - sinlessness.

The sine qua non of acquiring spiritual truth for one's self, or for imparting it to others is the purity of heart and soul. A vision of God, or a glimpse of the beyond, never comes until soul is pure. Hence with the teacher of religion we must see first what he is, and then what he says. He must be perfectly pure, and then alone comes the value of his words, because he is only then the true 'transmitter'.

There must be the worthy vibration of spirituality in the mind of the teacher, so that it may be sympathetically conveyed to the mind of the taught. The function of the teacher is indeed an affair of the transference of something, and not one of mere stimulation of the existing intellectual or other faculties in the taught. Something real and appreciable as an influence come from the teacher and goes to the taught. Therefore the teacher must be pure.

The third condition is in regard to the motive. The teacher must not teach with any ulterior selfish motive - for money, name or fame; his work must be simply out of love, out of pure mankind at large. The only medium through which spiritual force can be transmitted is love.

God is love, and only he who has known God as love, can be a teacher of godliness and God to man.

He who is learned in the scriptures, sinless, unpolluted by lust, and is the greatest knower of the "Brahman" is the real teacher.

When the heart has thus been opened, it becomes fit to receive teaching from the stones or the brooks, the starts, or the sun, or the moon, or from anything which has its existence in our divine universe; but mere stones or mere brooks. A blind man may go to a museum, but he will not profit by it in any way; his eyes must be opened first, and then alone he will be able to learn what the things in the m museum can teach.

Without faith, humility, submission, and veneration in our hearts towards our religious teacher, there can not be any growth of religion in us; and it is a significant fact that, where this kind of relation between the teacher and taught prevails, there alone gigantic spiritual men are growing; while in those countries which have neglected to keep up this kind of relation, the religious teacher has become a mere lecturer, the teacher expecting his five dollars and the person taught expecting his brain to be filled with the teacher's words, and each going his own  way after this much has been done. Under such circumstances spirituality becomes almost an unknown quantity. There is none to transmit it, and none to have it transmitted to Religion with such people becomes business; they think they can obtain it with their dollars. Would to God that religion could be obtained so easily! But unfortunately it can not be.

Those who come to seek truth with such a spirit of love and veneration, to them the Lord of Truth reveals the most wonderful things regarding truth, goodness, and beauty.

Such great teachers of spiritual truth are indeed very few in numbers in this world, but the world is never altogether without them. They are always the fairest flowers of human life. "the ocean of mercty without any motive." " Know the Guru to be Me," says Shri Krishna in the Bhagawata.

Higher and nobler than all  ordinary ones, are another set of teachers, the Avataras of Ishvara, in the world. They can transmit spirituality with a touch, even with a mere wish. The lowest and the most degraded characters become in one second saints at their command. They are the Teachers of all teachers, the highest manifestations of God through man. We can not see God except through them.

The time will come when we shall transcend our human nature and know him as He is but as long as we are men we must worship Him in man and as man.

What we experience in the depths of our souls is realisation. Nothing indeed is so uncommon as common sense in regard to this matter.

When men see Him, they see Him as man, and the animals, if they have any conception of God at all, must see Him as animal, each according to its own ideal, so we can not help seeing God as man, and,  therefore, we are bound to worship Him as man. There is no other way.

Two kinds of men do not worship God as man - the human brute who has no religion, and the Paramhansa who has risen beyond all the weakness of humanity and has transcended the limits of his own human nature.

To him all nature has become his own Self. He alone can worship God as He is. Here, too, as in all other cases, the two extremes meet. The extreme of ignorance and the other extreme of knowledge - neither of these go through acts of worship.

The human brute does not worship because of his ignorance, and the Jivanmuktas(free soul) do not worship because they have realised God in themselves.

Being between these two poles of existence, if any one tells you that he is not going to worship God as man take kingly care of that man; he is, not to use any harsher term, an irresponsible talker; his religion is for unsound and empty brains.

Whenever virtue subsides and wickedness prevails, I manifest Myself. To establish virtue, to destroy evil, to save the good I come from Yuga(age) to Yuga.

"Fools deride Me who have assumed the human from, without knowing My real nature as the Lord of the universe."

"As one lump of clay being known, all things of clay are known", so he knowledge of the microcosm must lead to the knowledge of the macrocosm.

The body is the form, and the mind or the Antahkarana is the name, and sound-symbols are universally associated with Name(name) in all beings having the power of speech. In the individual man the thought-waves rising in the limited Mahat or Chitta(mind-stuff), must manifest themselves, first as words, and then as the more concrete forms.

If properly pronounced, this Om will represent the whole phenomenon of sound-production, and no other word can do this; and this, therefore, is the fittest symbol of the Sphota, which is the real meaning of the Om.

Again, just as the "One Only" Brahman, the Akhanda-Sachchidananda, the undivided Existence-Knowledge-Bliss, can be conceived by imperfect human souls only from particular standpoints and associated with particular qualities, so this universe, His body, has also to be thought of along the line of the thinker's mind.

These word-symbols, evolved out of the deepest spiritual perception of sages, symbolize and express, as nearly as possible the particular view of God and the universe they stand for. And as the Om represents the Akhanda, the undifferentiated Brahman, the others represent the Khanda or the differentiated views of the same Being; and they are all helpful to divine meditation and the acquisition of true knowledge.

What is the worship of God through Pratika(images)? - It is "Joining the mind with devotion to that which is not Brahman, taking it to be Brahman" - says Bhagavan Ramanuja.

The mind is an internal Pratika, the Akasha is an external one; and both have to be worshipped as substitutes of God.

The word Pratika means going towards; and worshiping a Pratika is worshipping something as a substitute which is, in some one or more respects, like Brahman more and more, but is not Brahman.

In this kind of Pratika-worship may be included all the various forms of Pitri-worship and Deva-worship.

Worshipping Ishvara and Him alone is Bhakti; the worship of anything else - Deva, or Pitri, or any other being - can not be Bhakti. The various kinds of worship of the various Devas are all to be include in ritualistic Karma, which gives to the worshipper only a particular result in the form of some celestial enjoyment, but can neither give rise to Bhakti nor lead to Mukti.

The fruition of even the worship of Adityas etc. Brahman Himself bestows, because He is the Ruler of all." Says Shankara, in his Brahma-Sutra-Bhashya - "Here in this way does Brahman become the object of worship, because He, as Brahman, is superimposed on the Pratikas, just as Vishnu etc.  are superimposed upon images etc."

If the image stands for a god or a saint, the worship is not the result of Bhakti, and does not lead to liveration; but if it stands for the one God, the worship thereof will bring both Bhakti and Mukti.

One who aspires to be a Bhakta must know that "so many opinions are so many ways". He must know that all the various manifestation of the glory of the same Lord.

Every sect of every religion presents only one ideal of its own to mankind, but the eternal Vedantic religion opens to mankind an infinite number of doors for ingress into the inner shrine of divinity, and places before humanity an almost inexhaustible array of ideals, there being each of them a manifestation of the Eternal One.

According to Ramanuja, food becomes impure from  three causes:

1. by the nature of food itself, as in the case of garlic etc;
2. owing to its coming from wicket and accused persons; and
3. from physical impurities, such as dirt, or hair, etc.

The Shrutis say, "When the food is pure the Sattva element gets purified, and the memory becomes unwavering," and Ramanuja quotes this from the Chhandogya Upanishad.

The materials which we receive through our food into our body-structure, go a great way to determine our mental constitution; therefore the food we eat has to be particularly  taken care of.

It stands to reason that discrimination in the choice of food is necessary for the attainment of this higher state of mental composition, which can not be easily obtained otherwise.

Purity is absolutely the basic work, the bedrock upon which the whole Bhakti-building rests.

Cleansing the external body and discriminating the food are both easy, but without internal cleanliness and purity, these external observances are of no value whatsoever.

The so-called great men of the world may all be seen to become jealous of each other for a small name, for a little fame,  and for a few bits of gold. So long as this jealousy exists in a heart, it is far away from, the perfection of Ahimsa.

The man whose heart never cherishes even the thought of injury to any one, who rejoices at the prosperity  of even his greatest enemy, that man is the Bhakta, he is the Yogi, he is the Guru of all, even though he lives every day of his life on the flesh of swine. Therefore we must always remember that external practices have value only as helps to develop internal purity.

It is the strong body alone that can bear the shock of reaction resulting from the attempt to control the organs. He who wants to become a Bhakta must be strong, must be healthy.

Voluntarily weakening the body is really no prescription for spiritual enlightenment.

The mentally weak also can not succeed in attaining the Atman. The person who aspires to be a Bhakta must be cheerful.

In the Western world, the idea of a religious  man is that he never smiles that a dark cloud must always hand over his face, which, again, must b long-drawn with the jaws almost collapsed. People with emaciated bodies and long faces are fit subjects for the physician, they are not Yogis. It is the cheerful mind that is persevering. It is the strong mind that hews its way through a thousand difficulties. And this, the hardest task of all, the cutting of our way out of the net of Maya, is the work reserved only for giant wills.

Excessive hilarity is quite as objectionable as too much of sad seriousness, and all religious realisation is possible only when the mind is in a steady, peaceful condition of harmonious equilibrium.

The greatest purifier among all such things, a purifier without which no one can enter the regions of this higher devotion(Para-Bhakti), is renunciation.

The Karma-Yogi's renunciation is in the shape of giving up all the fruits of his action; he is not attached to the results of his labour; he does not care for any reward here or hereafter. The Raja-Yoga knows that the whole  of nature is intended for the soul to acquire experience, and that the result of all the experience of soul is for it to become aware of its eternal separateness from nature.

The Jnana-Yogi has the harshest of all renunciation to go through, as he has to realize from the very first that the whole of this solid-looking nature is all an illusion. He has to understand that all that is any kind of manifestation of power in nature belongs to the soul, and not to nature. He has to know, from the very start, that all knowledge and all experience are in the soul, and not in nature; so he has at one and by the sheer force of rational conviction to tar himself away from all bondage to nature. He lets nature and all that belongs to her go, he lets them vanish and tries to stand alone!

An uncultured man loves the pleasure of the senses intensely; as he becomes cultured, he begins to love intellectual pleasures, and his sense-enjoyment becomes less and less.

As first, pleasure is in association with the lowest senses; but as soon as an animal reaches a higher plane of existence, the lower kind of pleasures becomes less intense.

When a mand gets even higher than the plane of the intellect, higher than that of the mere thought, when he gets to the plane of spirituality and of divine inspiration, he finds there a state of bliss, compared with which all the pleasures of the senses, or even of the intellect, are as nothing.

The renunciation necessary for the attainment of Bhakti is not obtained by killing anything, but just comes in as naturally as in the presence of an increasingly stronger light, the less intense ones becomes dimmer and dimmer until they vanish away completely.

Bhakti-Yoga is the science of higher love.

Bhakti-Yoga does not say, Give up"; it only says "Love; love the Highest!" - and everything low naturally falls off from him, the object of whose love is the Highest.

Whenever there is any bliss, even though in the most sensual of things, there is a spark of that Eternal Bliss which is the Lord Himself.

Behind those material particles there must be and is the play of divine influence and divine love. The ignorant man does not know it, but yet, consciously or unconsciously, he is attracted by it and it alone.

"None, O beloved, ever loved the husband for the husband's shake; it is the Atman, the Lord who is within, for whose sake the husband is loved."

"None, O beloved, ever loved the wife for the wife's sake, but it is the Self in the wife that is loved."

Bhakta's renunciation is that Vairagya or non-attachment for all things that are not God, which results from Anuraga or great attachment to God.

He alone has attained that supreme state of love commonly called the brotherhood of man; the rest only talk, He sees no distinctions; the mighty ocean of love has entered into him, and he sees not man in man, but beholds his Beloved everywhere.

They feel no resentment; their minds never react in the form of hatred or jealousy. The external, the sensuous, has vanished from them for ever. How can they be angry, when, through their love, they are always able to see the Reality behind the scenes?

Jnana-Yoga is grand; it is high philosophy; and almost every human being thinks, curiously enough, that he can surely do everything required of him by philosophy; but it is really very difficult to live truly the life of philosophy.

The devil can and indeed does cite the scriptures for his own purpose; and thus the way of knowledge appears to offer justification to what the bad man does. This is the great danger in Jnana-Yoga. But Bhakti-Yoga is natural, sweet, and gentle; the Bhakta does not take such high flights as the Jnana-Yogi, and, therefore he is not apt to have such big falls.

In Bhakti-Yoga the central secret is therefore, to know that the various passions and feelings and emotions in the human heart are not wrong in themselves; only they have to be carefully controlled and given a higher and higher direction, until they attain the very highest condition of excellence. The highest direction is that which takes us to God; every other direction is lower.

In earthly love we see how often this Viraha comes. Again, when men are really and intensely in love with women, or women with men, they feel a kind of natural annoyance in the presence of all those whom they do not love.

A still higher stage of love is reached when life itself is maintained for the sake of the one Ideal of Love, when love itself is considered beautiful and worth living only on account of that Love.

"Life is sweet because it thinks of Beloved."

Even in regard to earthly love, the lover thinks that everything belonging to his beloved is sacred and so dear to him. He loves even a piece of cloth belonging to the darling of his heart. In the same way, when a person loves the Lord, the whole universe becomes dear to him, because it is all His.

The Jnani aims at the wholeness of things, at that one absolute and generalised Being, knowing which he knows everything. The Bhakta wishes to realise that one generalised abstract Person, in loving whom he loves the whole universe. The Yogi wishes to have possession of that one generalised form of power, by controlling which he controls this whole universe.

The conclusion to which the Bhakta comes is that, if you go on merely loving one person after another, you may go on loving them so for an infinite length of time, without being in the least able to love the world as a whole.

In this intense state of Bhakti, worship is offered to every one, to every life, and to every being.

To the vast majority of mankind, the body is everything; the body is all the universe to them; bodily enjoyment is their all in all. This demon of the worship of the body and of the things of the body has entered into us all. We may indulge in tall talk, and take very high flights, but we are like vultures all the same; our mins is directed to the piece of carrion done below.

The Upanishads distinguish between a higher knowledge and a lower knowledge; and to the Bhakta there is really no difference between this higher knowledge and his higher love.

The knowers of Brahman declare that there are two kinds of knowledge worthy to be known, namely, the higher(para) and the lower(Apara). Of these the lower(knowledge) consists of the Rig-veda, the Yajur-Veda, the Sama-Veda, the Atharva-Veda, the Shiksha(or the science dealing with pronunciation and accent), the Kalpa(or the sacrificial liturgy), grammar, the Birukta(or the science dealing with etymology and the meaning of words), prosody, and astronomy; and the higher(knowledge) is that by which that Unchangeable is known.

We may respect love as a triangle, each of the angles of which corresponds to one of its inseparable characteristics.

There can be no true love without its three following characteristics. The first angle of our triangle of love is that love knows no bargaining. Whenever there is any seeking for something in return, there can be no real love; it becomes a mere matter of shopkeeping.

Begging is not the language of love.

Love knows no reward. Love is always for love's sake.

This nature of real love is the first angle of our triangle. Ask not anything in return for your love; let your position be always that of the giver; give your love unto God, but do not ask anything even in return from Him.

The second angle of the triangle of love is that love knows no fear.  Those that love God through fear are the lowest of human beings, quite undeveloped as men.

The more you take the name of the Lord, the better for you, in whatever way you may do it. You are only repeating His name because you love Him.

The third angle of the love-triangle is that love knows no rival, for in it is always embodied the lover's highest ideal. True love never comes until the object of our love becomes to us our highest ideal. It may be that in may cases human love is misdirected and misplaced, but to the person who loves, the thing he loves is always his own highest ideal.

The highest ideal of every man is called God.

We find that men who are cruel and blood-thirsty conceive of a blood-thirsty God, because they can only love their own highest ideal. That is why good men have a very high ideal of God, and their ideal is indeed so very different from that of others.

None, O beloved, loves the husband for the husband's sake, but it is for the sake of the Self who is in the husband that the husband is loved; none, O beloved, loves the wife for the wife's sake, but it is for the sake of the Self, who is in the wife that the wife is loved.

Human Presentations of the divine ideal of Love:

The lowest form in which this love is apprehended is what they call the peaceful - The Shanta. When a man worships God without the fire of love in him, without its madness in his brain, when his love is just the calm commonplace love, a little higher than mere forms and ceremonies and symbols, but not at all characterised by the madness of intensely active love, it is said to be Shanta.

The Shanta-Bhakta is calm peaceful, gentle.

The next higher type is that ofDasya, i.e. servantship; it comes when a man thinks he is the servant of the Lord. The attachment of the faithful servant unto the master is his ideal.

The next type of love is Sakya, friendship - "Thou art our beloved friend." Just as a man opens his heart to his friend, and knows that the friend will never chide him for his faults but will always try to help him, just as there is the idea of equality between him and his friend, so equal love flows in and out between the worshiper and his friendly God.

If you are poor, enjoy that as fun; if you are rich, enjoy the fun of being rich; if dangers come, it is also good fun; if happiness comes, there is more good fun. The world is just a playground, and we are here having food fun, having a game, and God is with us playing all the while, and we are with Him playing.

It is only when you forget that it is all play and that you are also helping in the play, it is only then that misery and sorrows come.

The next is what is known as Vatsalya, loving God not as our Father but as our Child.

There should be no awe in love. The ideas of reverence and obedience are necessary for the formation of characters, but when character is formed,  when the lover has tasted the calm, peaceful love, and tasted also a little of its intense madness, then he need talk no more of ethics and discipline.

There is one more human representation of the divine ideal of love. It is known as Madhura, sweet, and is the highest of all such representations.

In this sweet representation of divine God is our husband. We are all women; there are no men in this world; there is but One man, and that is He, our Beloved. All that love which man gives to woman, or woman to man, has here to be given up to the Lord.

Love must get to its right destination, it must go unto Him who is really the infinite ocean of love.

God is the one goal of all our passions and emotions. If you want to be angry, be angry with Him. Chide your Beloved, chide your Friend.

Mortal man will not patiently put up with our anger; there will be a reaction.

Let all our passions and emotions go up unto Him. They are meant for Him, for if they miss their mark and go lower, they become vile; and when they go straight to the mark, to the Lord, even the lowest of them becomes transfigured.

He is the most beautiful, the most sublime, He is the Beauty itself, sublimity itself. Who in this universe is more beautiful than He? Who in this universe is more fit to become the husband than He? Who in this universe is fitter to be loved than He? So let Him be the husband, let Him be the Beloved.

When this highest ideal of love is reached, philosophy is thrown away, who will then care for it? Freedom, Salvation, Nirvana - all are thrown away; who cares to become free while in the enjoyment of divine love?

Man himself is transfigured in the presence of this Light of Love, and he realizes at last the beautiful and inspiring truth that Love, the Lover, and the Beloved are One.