The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 3/Para-Bhakti or Supreme Devotion/Human Representations of the Divine Ideal of Love
CHAPTER IX
HUMAN REPRESENTATIONS OF THE DIVINE IDEAL OF LOVE
It is impossible to express the nature of this supreme and absolute ideal of
love in human language. Even the highest flight of human imagination is
incapable of comprehending it in all its infinite perfection and beauty.
Nevertheless, the followers of the religion of love, in its higher as well
as its lower forms, in all countries, have all along had to use the
inadequate human language to comprehend and to define their own ideal of
love. Nay more, human love itself, in all its varied forms has been made to
typify this inexpressible divine love. Man can think of divine things only
in his own human way, to us the Absolute can be expressed only in our
relative language. The whole universe is to us a writing of the Infinite in
the language of the finite. Therefore Bhaktas make use of all the common
terms associated with the common love of humanity in relation to God and His
worship through love.
Some of the great writers on Para-Bhakti have tried to understand and
experience this divine love in so many different ways. The lowest form in
which this love is apprehended is what they call the peaceful — the Shânta.
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
characterized by the madness of intensely active love, it is said to be
Shanta. We see some people in the world who like to move on slowly, and
others who come and go like the whirlwind. The Shânta-Bhakta is calm,
peaceful, gentle.
The next higher type is that of Dâsya, 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 Sakhya, 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 worshipper and his friendly God. Thus God
becomes our friend, the friend who is near, the friend to whom we may freely
tell all the tales of our lives. The innermost secrets of our hearts we may
place before Him with the great assurance of safety and support. He is the
friend whom the devotee accepts as an equal. God is viewed here as our
playmate. We may well say that we are all playing in this universe. Just as
children play their games, just as the most glorious kings and emperors play
their own games, so is the Beloved Lord Himself in sport with this universe.
He is perfect; He does not want anything. Why should He create? Activity is
always with us for the fulfilment of a certain want, and want always
presupposes imperfection. God is perfect; He has no wants. Why should He go
on with this work of an ever-active creation? What purpose has He in view?
The stories about God creating this world for some end or other that we
imagine are good as stories, but not otherwise. It is all really in sport;
the universe is His play going on. The whole universe must after all be a
big piece of pleasing fun to Him. 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 good fun, having a game; and God is with us playing
all the while, and we are with Him playing. God is our eternal playmate. How
beautifully He is playing! The play is finished when the cycle: comes to an
end. There is rest for a shorter or longer time; again all come out and
play. 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. Then the
heart becomes heavy, then the world weighs upon you with tremendous power.
But as soon as you give up the serious idea of reality as the characteristic
of the changing incidents of the three minutes of life and know it to be but
a stage on which we are playing, helping Him to play, at once misery ceases
for you. He plays in every atom; He is playing when He is building up
earths, and suns, and moons; He is playing with the human heart, with
animals, with plants. We are His chessmen; He puts the chessmen on the board
and shakes them up. He arranges us first in one way and then in another, and
we are consciously or unconsciously helping in His play. And, oh, bliss! we
are His playmates!
The next is what is known as Vâtsalya, loving God not as our Father but as
our Child. This may look peculiar, but it is a discipline to enable us to
detach all ideas of power from the concept of God. The idea of power brings
with it awe. There should be no awe in love. The ideas of reverence and
obedience are necessary for the formation of character; 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. To conceive God as mighty, majestic, and glorious, as the Lord
of the universe, or as the God of gods, the lover says he does not care. It
is to avoid this association with God of the fear-creating sense of power
that he worships God as his own child. The mother and the father are not
moved by awe in relation to the child; they cannot have any reverence for
the child. They cannot think of asking any favour from the child. The
child's position is always that of the receiver, and out of love for the
child the parents will give up their bodies a hundred times over. A thousand
lives they will sacrifice for that one child of theirs, and, therefore, God
is loved as a child. This idea of loving God as a child comes into existence
and grows naturally among those religious sects which believe in the
incarnation of God. For the Mohammedans it is impossible to have this idea
of God as a child; they will shrink from it with a kind of horror. But the
Christian and the Hindu can realise it easily, because they have the baby
Jesus and the baby Krishna. The women in India often look upon themselves as
Krishna's mother; Christian mothers also may take up the idea that they are
Christ's mothers, and it will bring to the West the knowledge of God's
Divine Motherhood which they so much need. The superstitions of awe and
reverence in relation to God are deeply rooted in the bears of our hearts,
and it takes long years to sink entirely in love our ideas of reverence and
veneration, of awe and majesty and glory with regard to God.
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. It is indeed based on the highest manifestation of love in this world, and this love is also the strongest known to man. What love shakes the whole nature of man, what love runs through every atom of his being — makes him mad, makes him forget his own nature, transforms him, makes him either a God or a demon — as the love between man and woman. In this sweet representation of divine love God is our husband. We are all women; there are no men in this world; there is but One man, and this is He, our Beloved. All that love which man gives to woman, or woman to man, has her to be given up to the Lord.
All the different kinds of love which we see in the world, and with which we
are more or less playing merely, have God as the one goal; but
unfortunately, man does not know the infinite ocean into which this mighty
river of love is constantly flowing, and so, foolishly, he often tries to
direct it to little dolls of human beings. The tremendous love for the child
that is in human nature is not for the little doll of a child; if you bestow
it blindly and exclusively on the child, you will suffer in consequence. But
through such suffering will come the awakening by which you are sure to find
out that the love which is in you, if it is given to any human being, will
sooner or later bring pain and sorrow as the result. Our love must,
therefore, be given to the Highest One who never dies and never changes, to
Him in the ocean of whose love there is neither ebb nor flow. Love must get
to its right destination, it must go unto Him who is really the infinite
ocean of love. All rivers flow into the ocean. Even the drop of water coming
down from the mountain side cannot stop its course after reaching a brook or
a river, however big it may be; at last even that drop somehow does find its
way to the ocean. 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. Whom else can you safely chide? Mortal man will not patiently put up
with your anger; there will be a reaction. If you are angry with me I am
sure quickly to react, because I cannot patiently put up with your anger.
Say unto the Beloved, "Why do You not come to me; why do You leave me thus
alone?" Where is there any enjoyment but in Him? What enjoyment can there be
in little clods of earth? It is the crystallised essence of infinite
enjoyment that we have to seek, and that is in God. 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. All the energies of
the human body and mind, howsoever they may express themselves, have the
Lord as their one goal, as their Ekâyana. All loves and all passions of the
human heart must go to God. He is the Beloved. Whom else can this heart
love? He is the most beautiful, the most sublime, He is 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.
Often it so happens that divine lovers who sing of this divine love accept
the language of human love in all its aspects as adequate to describe it.
Fools do not understand this; they never will. They look at it only with the
physical eye. They do not understand the mad throes of this spiritual love.
How can they? "For one kiss of Thy lips, O Beloved! One who has been kissed
by Thee, has his thirst for Thee increasing for ever, all his sorrows
vanish, and he forgets all things except Thee alone." Aspire after that kiss
of the Beloved, that touch of His lips which makes the Bhakta mad, which
makes of man a god. To him, who has been blessed with such a kiss, the whole
of nature changes, worlds vanish, suns and moons die out, and the universe
itself melts away into that one infinite ocean of love. That is the
perfection of the madness of love.
Ay, the true spiritual lover does not rest even there; even the love of
husband and wife is not mad enough for him. The Bhaktas take up also the
idea of illegitimate love, because it is so strong; the impropriety of it is
not at all the thing they have in view. The nature if this love is such that
the more obstructions there are for its free play, the more passionate it
becomes. The love between husband and wife is smooth, there are no
obstructions there. So the Bhaktas take up the idea of a girl who is in love
with her own beloved, and her mother or father or husband objects to such
love; and the more anybody obstructs the course of her love, so much the
more is her love tending to grow in strength. Human language cannot describe
how Krishna in the groves of Vrindâ was madly loved, how at the sound of his
voice the ever-blessed Gopis rushed out to meet him, forgetting everything,
forgetting this world and its ties, its duties, its joys, and its sorrows.
Man, O man, you speak of divine love and at the same time are able to attend
to all the vanities of this world — are you sincere? "Where Râma is, there
is no room for any desire — where desire is, there is no room for Rama;
these never coexist — like light and darkness they are never together."