Articles for Saadhana

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru.

This is a quotation from Sankaracharya.

mokṣakāraṇasāmagryāṁ bhaktireva garīyasī

Of all the instruments which are helpful and which lead you to moksha, bhakti is the most important and fruitful. What is this bhakti? That is not necessarily what we are all given to doing or pursuing.

svasvarūpānusandhānaṁ bhaktirityabhidhīyate

Bhakti is considered to be that whereby you constantly reflect upon and remember your own true nature. Nobody thinks about it. What is the nature that we have? I am a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, middle-aged or old, having a family, all these are derivations and evolutes from the body. But the primary question is, are you the body or you have a body?

You have a house, a  number of articles are bought in the house. Maybe you have a car, many things are there. All these things, you don’t say I am them, I am they. I have them, they are mine. In the same manner, your body is also mine, you refer to it as my body. This one reference should make you think, then what or who am I? This point nobody thinks about. See the ignorance and delusion of people. Remembering and getting connected to your own true nature, the ‘I’, that is called bhakti, he says.

You know why we are failing in our devotion? We try to think about God. But we don’t know anything about Him. We try to persuade ourselves to think that God is the best, the superlative, the most dear, and in every way most rewarding. All these are assumptions and hear-says, and we want to be guided by them because we don’t have the touch of experience, we lack the experience, all our efforts are in vain. Until you are able to break the ignorance about God, I don’t think that your remembrance will become true or wholesome.

So between remembering God and remembering yourself, what is the difference? That I am is not a matter of doubt. Everybody feels and says, I am, I am. So the ‘I’ and the ‘am-ness’ are never a point of doubt. To some extent we experience also. Otherwise how can you say, “I am”? That am-ness indicates that the ‘I’ is within your experience. If this is so, this ‘I’ is the only constant factor, changeless factor in your life, in your personality. If you equate God with the ‘I’ and you start saying, ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’, it automatically becomes a remembrance of God.

So in order to remember God you don’t have to do anything special. It’s enough if you say ‘I’. The first personal pronoun is the only direct reference to God. All the rest is indirect, secondary, concocted, assumed, imagined, forced. We say God is omnipresent. Have we seen Him? He is omnipotent, do we know about it? Omniscient, much less we have knowledge about it. On the other hand, if you start thinking that whatever I refer to as ‘I’ is actually God whom I otherwise refer to.

The word anusandhāna also means enquiry. Enquiry means now and then you should start thinking about, I am saying ‘I’, what is this ‘I’? To which do I refer? Obviously I say my body, my mind, my intelligence, my ego, my wife, my husband, my house, my children, my job, my money, everything is referred to as mine. So what is this ‘I’ which constantly hides and eludes me? If you start enquiring into this ‘I’, this enquiry is also considered to be devotion. Between the enquiry after the self and enquiry after God, if you ask me, enquiry after the self is more genuine, more practical and more likely to fruition than the enquiry after God.

In our country millions and crores of devotees are there. If you go to any one of them, say at least 100 people you ask, “You have been devoted to God. Have you got anything from that devotion? Have you realized Him? " They will say, “No, No, No.” A God, about whom you don’t know. Even if you remember Him, will it not be a pseudo remembrance? Will it not be a fake remembrance? If the remembrance has to be true, the word remembrance itself is meaning what? You can only remember something you know or you had. Unless something is experienced by us, we cannot remember it. Can you remember your great-grandfather’s father? “Swamiji, I never remember him.” Why? Because you have not seen him. But you remember your father, your mother, your partner, your children, your relatives. All of them you have seen.

So our remembrance of God can never become true and wholesome, it will only remain fictitious as long as we are not able to realize God and that realization doesn’t come also. Therefore the better way will be to remember, to remember that ‘I’. Enquire about it. The ‘I’ springs from within your body. Close your eyes, sit and think about, what is this ‘I’, where from does it come? Something is present. That is why I refer to it as ‘I’. What is that ‘I’ reference? Where is that? Who told you that this is my body? Who told you that this is my hand, my mind? Has anybody told me? No. Maybe about body they pointed and then said, “This is your body.” What about the mind others cannot see? But you still say, my mind. How do you say that? In this way, you make an enquiry. That enquiry is what constitutes real bhakti. svasvarūpānusandhānaṁ bhaktirityabhidhīyate.

You know what a great statement is this! Unfortunately we never read them, we never give any place to them, we never evaluate them. Atleast now and then, we can think about what is this meaning, what is this meaning?

So any kind of a mento-intellectual involvement about either the self or God, that is what is called bhakti. So the bhakti is not external, it is purely internal, personal and the constituents and the source and refuge of bhakti are mind and intelligence.

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru.