Bhakti is Devotion, Faith, Love and Surrendering your ego to God

Bhakti is usually defined as “devotion to God”, but it is actually a multidimensional experience of Devotion, Faith, Love and Surrendering your ego to God. When you are devoted to the Deity, you have all of these qualities.

Devotion is actually born inside us. When we are children we are devotional, we have faith and we believe in miracles, in Jesus Christ, in Santa Claus. We believe that there is a Deity, that there are wonderful things in the Cosmos, that the angels can come and talk to us and life can be beautiful. That innocent belief is actually an aspect of Devotion and comes from an inner recognition of the Truth, that there is something outside of ourselves that is beautiful, wonderful, true, divine. But as we become educated and learn how things work, that simple faith disappears from our consciousness. Yet maintaining that simple faith will actually open the Gate to Cosmic Love.

In the Way of Cosmic Love we re-establish ourselves in that state of wonder which we call Faith. It may be faith in the Christ, the Buddha, Kṛṣṇa, Rāma, the Deity or in the Father, Son and Holy Ghost; faith in a Divine Intelligence, in the Solar Logos; faith in something beyond us, something larger, something infinite, something more wonderful. Such faith will begin to awaken a tremendous dynamic energy inside you because Faith is an actual energy, not just an idea.

Intellectuals like to debate about whether or not God exists, and they give all kinds of reasons why or why not, but it is all just fluff of the mind. But with Faith, you know that there is a God; you know that the Christ exists, that Buddha exists, that Kṛṣṇa, Rāma, Lao Tzu, Moses and Mohammed were real. How people portray these beings, how they philosophize about them doesn’t matter. The mind tries to explain things but you know that with or without the mind these things are real. Faith tells you that, and it produces an energy current inside you that lifts your life-wave to a higher level. And because that energy comes from the Heart, you can’t necessarily explain what you are feeling or why. You just look at a sunset and are struck by its beauty. I was born with Devotion, Faith and Love and I still can’t understand a person who doesn’t feel that there is another wonderful reality beyond this physical world. I can’t comprehend what that consciousness could be like because to me it is like being annihilated or living in total restriction.

A scientist looks at a flower and identifies its chemical compounds and explains how they work, but that does not explain why the flower looks so beautiful or how it arranged its various atoms to form a perfect six-pointed star. It is the same with the Cosmos: the scientific idea is that all the substance in the Cosmos was put together (nobody knows how) and then exploded to give us this wonderful universe. So the substance exploded, but why did it form itself into galaxies? Why did the galaxies form stars and the stars form planets, and why are there beings on this planet? Of course, you can give a scientific explanation but that is a non-explanation, because the reason the flower can form itself into a perfect geometric design is because there is a Divine Intelligence that works through geometry. And the reason the Cosmos is organized is because it is the work of an organized Mind in Creation that ensures there is Intelligence behind everything from the largest scale right down to the structure of the atom. Every form in Nature is simply the Divine Mind in action, and the Mind of God always produces beauty; and therefore the flowers are beautiful, the animals are beautiful, the stars are beautiful.

Now, you may have been born with faith, love and devotion toward the Deity as an innate tendency, but when you begin to consciously follow the Path, then you have to surrender your ego to God. And that is when it really becomes the Way of Cosmic Love.

Surrendering your ego is what makes you a Saint in the true sense of the word, as against a Sage. A Sage is a Knower, a Jñāni, one who knows through the Wisdom of the Heart, whereas a Saint is one who has the Love of the Heart. They are very different. Within your Heart is the ego, that structure inside you that says, I want this; I want that; I am this; I am that. Your ego is your personal self which communicates with your environment and the world, whereby you are able to live in the world and do things. Before you can carry out the Way of Cosmic Love, a major change has to take place in that ego structure. The beginning stage of this change is difficult. There can be huge conflicts because your human ego wants to carry on its activity as normal while at the same time you are experiencing impulses coming from deeper in the Heart. The first impulses are what we call conscience—you realize that you did something wrong and feel unhappy about it, not because the government or the laws of the country say so but because inside your Heart you feel that it is wrong. This is simply a manifestation of the Divine Presence inside you trying to teach you something, and it means that your personal ego is beginning to break up, that it no longer has that strong iron determination for everything to be done according to how you want it done.

As your Cosmic Love increases, the ego breaks up more and more and you become more aware of your actions and reactions, and this is where guilt comes in. You realize that you shouldn’t have done something and feel sorry for yourself. But this is only a transitory stage because when the Heart fully opens you will know three things: one, that you function in this world; two, that you are not perfect; and three, that the Path is an ever-continuous readjustment, that is, your Heart is continuously readjusting to this world and the next world. In fact, at the level of Cosmic Love the Heart functions simultaneously in the two directions of the Cross: upwardly toward the Divine and horizontally toward the world. And you are literally crucified on the Cross.

In the Bible, the crucifixion of Christ is a symbol of someone whose Heart is embracing the Divine, the Cosmic Love aspect, and at the same time is enmeshed in the actual living processes of Creation; someone, therefore, who is crucified continually between what should be done outwardly and what should be done inwardly, alternating between the inner and outer dimensional realities. And this involves pain. A good example that illustrates this is the story of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He knew that He was going to be seized by the authorities, and He didn’t want that—His ego didn’t want that. He saw no point in it: why be destroyed by those stupid religious and worldly materialists? He went through this process in his human heart, the heart that functions on the horizontal arm of the Cross, but then His Heart functioned on the other arm of the Cross, the vertical arm, and He said, “Let Your Will be done, not mine” (Matthew 26: 42). This is a momentous occasion that shows that even the Christ struggled with His human nature and His divine nature.

The Way of the Mystic, which is part of the Way of Cosmic Love, involves a similar struggle. If you read about Saints such as St Teresa, St John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart or St Suso, you will find that their lives were a battle between their relationship to the human condition and their relationship to the Divine Condition within. And that battle raged on until they finally gave up their ego completely and were in the condition of “Let Your Will be done, not mine”; until the human will no longer had significance for them and they would do exactly what the Divine Impulse coming through them wanted them to do. If it meant hard work, they would do it; if it meant travelling somewhere, theywould do it. They followed the Divine Impulse at terrific personal cost, totally sacrificing themselves.

As mentioned previously, the Way of Cosmic Love is one of the most beautiful and exalted Paths on the planet. As you go deeper into this Path, in spite of all the suffering and problems you may encounter, you will realize that there is a sea of Infinite Bliss inside you and that you live in that Ecstasy all the time.

Devotion is the cause of Bliss Consciousness.

Some Muslim Saints were beaten and tortured, persecuted in horribly cruel ways, as were some of the ancient Jewish Prophets and Christian Saints. (For some reason these three religions, the Christian, Muslim and Jewish religions, were very cruel in their dealings with Saints. The Buddhist and Hindu Saints were much better off.) These Saints had to go through the outer suffering because the religious and worldly authorities were against them. Remember, the more Light you give out, the more you attract the Opposition; that is the Law. The religious authorities were particularly bad; they went to church every day, worshipped God every day and yet they were immensely cruel to the Saints. I do not understand how those two things can exist together, being so cruel when you are supposed to be a religious person.

But regardless of the outer circumstances the Saints found themselves in, they lived in a state of absolute Bliss Consciousness. They would still register the pain of the cruelty, of course, but they would immerse themselves in that overwhelming Bliss, which is an indescribable condition far beyond joy or happiness. It was their reward on the Way of Cosmic Love and they live in that condition as a permanent state of being. So in spite of the difficulties of the Path—the struggle between the human self and the Divine Self and the persecution by the authorities—there is nevertheless an unending ocean of Bliss as the reward of the Way of Cosmic Love, and that reward is forever.

Excerpt from The New Planetary Reality (pages 149 – 154)