All those inclined to believe in God as Love come to experience expansions of their heart’s growth and personal capacity to love, rather than allowing a contraction of feeling.
But as we know, love is a very real primal emotional force and feeling that has to be cultivated and directed into the various avenues of personal life as we see is appropriate, as well as existing as a general state or attitude.
Rabindranath Tagore, the revered Indian Poet, was a Bhakti who writes of the Beloved as God in his ‘GITANJALI’ ………
” Life of my life, I shall ever try to keep my body pure, knowing that thy living touch is upon all my limbs.
Be still.
Pour your thought from the head down into the region of the heart.
From thinking love, begin to feel Love and radiate your Love – to things, creatures, to friends and to those in need and to Nature itself. Love has no limits…
Having emptied our hearts in lovingness…again Be Still ….
To feel the incoming tide of Universal love drawn to replenish us!
Whether we seek for relief from pain and suffering, or for courage to melt our fears, or for enlightenment and understanding, or look towards a recipient for our aspiration and devotion, we turn to prayer.
Although it is generally formulated in religious observances and rituals, it is something that arises in us spontaneously from our hearts and most intensely when we feel the need for a power we cannot generate ourselves when seeking to relieve the pain of another.
It is not that we need more knowledge about the mind as much as finding how to construct a life- saving bridge from our minds to the knowledge deep in our hearts.
Stranded on the shores of knowledge of the intellect alone, we eventually find ourselves lonely and devoid of real life satisfaction and experience regardless of our accumulation of information.
Love exists as a spark of the Divine Conductor of Life that commands the heart to beat.
Love and Life are synonymous in one who seeks to shine soft and warm whilst radiating energy and well being to all.
Having known how the mind can lead one astray the Bhakti knows and has faith to trust the heart.
There are many ways we express our emotional nature and particularly our devotional capacity to give our deeper feelings – whether to another person, to our work, to a cause for others or through an artform.
One avenue that is personally satisfying and also can give pleasure to onlookers, is the art of sacred dance that has had a long tradition through human civilization and has been associated with the sacred spiritual rites and culture within the protection of the temple structure of the priesthood.
The Bhakti approaches spirituality along what is sometimes seen as the simplest path but which, in effect, is one of the most difficult. It requires selfless love and a devotional attitude that is sufficient to overcome all life’s obstacles – the path that Jesus and other great teachers have indicated as ‘the Way.’
The Bhakti loves. He practises expanding that emotion from the limited and personal feelings of the heart, to the limitless expanses of universal love for all things. To such a person Love and God are synonymous. Not only does love become the most intense emotion, but love and loving kindness dictate his day- to- day activities, his moods, his goals, and provides the source of his inspiration.
Love is the cohesive and most central element in life. It is the most important factor in human life as it is in the invisible realms of the great Universe. Love is represented as the special love feeling born in the human heart. It is known as the law of attraction and of unification and can be observed in the order and design that patterns the Universe.
To the yogi, love is the ethereal but powerful fifth element. To the Bhakti yogi it motivates everything in his life as he attempts to express it in everything that is undertaken. It is exemplified in the love and devotion that permeates his lifestyle.
