The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 3/Para-Bhakti or Supreme Devotion/The Naturalness of Bhakti-Yoga and its Central Secret
CHAPTER III
THE NATURALNESS OF BHAKTI-YOGA AND ITS CENTRAL SECRET
"Those who with constant attention always worship You, and those who worship
the Undifferentiated, the Absolute, of these who are the greatest Yogis?"
— Arjuna asked of Shri Krishna. The answer was: "Those who concentrating
their minds on Me worship Me with eternal constancy and are endowed with the
highest faith, they are My best worshippers, they are the greatest Yogis.
Those that worship the Absolute, the Indescribable, the Undifferentiated,
the Omnipresent, the Unthinkable, the All-comprehending, the Immovable, and
the Eternal, by controlling the play of their organs and having the
conviction of sameness in regard to all things, they also, being engaged in
doing good to all beings, come to Me alone. But to those whose minds have
been devoted to the unmanifested Absolute, the difficulty of the struggle
along the way is much greater, for it is indeed with great difficulty that
the path of the unmanifested Absolute is trodden by any embodied being.
Those who, having offered up all their work unto Me, with entire reliance on
Me, meditate on Me and worship Me without any attachment to anything else
— them, I soon lift up from the ocean of ever-recurring births and deaths,
as their mind is wholly attached to Me" (Gita, XII).
Jnâna-Yoga and Bhakti-Yoga are both referred to here. Both may be said to
have been defined in the above passage. 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. We are often apt to run
into great dangers in trying to guide our life by philosophy. This world may
be said to be divided between persons of demoniacal nature who think the
care-taking of the body to be the be-all and the end-all of existence, and
persons of godly nature who realise that the body is simply a means to an
end, an instrument intended for the culture of the soul. 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, as much
as it offers inducements to what the good 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. Until the bandages of the soul pass away, it
cannot of course be free, whatever may be the nature of the path that the
religious man takes.
Here is a passage showing how, in the case of one of the blessed Gopis, the
soul-binding chains of both merit and demerit were broken. "The intense
pleasure in meditating on God took away the binding effects of her good
deeds. Then her intense misery of soul in not attaining unto Him washed off
all her sinful propensities; and then she became free." —
(Vishnu-Purâna). 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. We find that pleasures and pains are very common and oft-recurring feelings in our lives. When a man feels pain because he has not wealth or some such worldly thing, he is giving a wrong direction to the feeling. Still pain has its uses. Let a man feel pain that he has not reached the Highest, that he has not reached God, and that pain will be to his salvation When you become glad that you have a handful of coins, it is a wrong direction given to the faculty of joy; it should be given a higher direction, it must be made to serve the Highest Ideal. Pleasure in that kind of ideal must surely be our highest joy. This same thing is true of all our other feelings. The Bhakta says that not one of them is wrong, he gets hold of them all and points them unfailingly towards God.