Bhakti Yoga and the nature of devotion

There was a time when the most dominant factor in a human being was his emotion. Today, emotion is not the most dominant part in you but it is still the most intense part in you.

Most people are not able to get their physical body to a high level of intensity. Similarly, very few people are capable of sustaining an intense mind. They can only keep the mind intense off and on.

In energy, people are generally not at all intense. But emotion can get very intense. If not love, at least in anger you are intense. If I abuse you, you will become intense to a point where you will not sleep the whole night.

Emotion can take sweet and wonderful forms, and it can take absolutely nasty and horrendous forms. You need to train it to take a sweet form. Devotion is a way of transforming your emotion from negativity to pleasantness.

Just see, people who have fallen in love do not care about what is happening in the world. It is just that they have made their emotions pleasant, so their life is beautiful.

Devotion is a multiplied and enhanced version of a love affair. If you fall in love with a man or a woman, they do not go the way you expect them to, and it eventually gets into some trouble.

That is why people choose God. It is simply a love affair, and you are not expecting any response. Your life becomes utterly beautiful because your emotion has become so sweet. Through that sweetness, one grows.

Devotion does not mean you have to be a temple-going, coconut-breaking person. A devotee has understood what his place in the existence is. The cosmos is very large.

You do not know where it begins or ends. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies. In this vast cosmos, this solar system is a tiny speck.

If the solar system disappears tomorrow, it won’t even be noticed. In this tiny speck, Earth is a micro-speck. In this micro-speck, the city you live in is a super-micro speck.

In that, you are a big man! This is a serious problem of perspective. It is only because of this that there is no devotion in you.

If you just learn to look at everything around you with attention and care, you will realise that you cannot even figure the nature of an atom in its entirety.

Everything is above your intelligence. If everything is higher than yourself, you will naturally become devout.