Bhakti and its nuances

In Spiritual path we come across various teachings and paths. One of the most common paths is Bhakti.

We come across people who are devoted to God for something in return and some want their wishes fulfilled and some use it as bargaining tool. Though being devoted to God for well-being is not wrong, but is this true bhakti?

Only when one places God above his personal preferences, desires, ego etc., and surrenders to the will of the divine and goes on with his life, he alone is a true Bhakta.

The biggest problem with the path of bhakti is that it is often misunderstood. We think that bhakti does not require any knowledge and blindly perform acts thinking it is devotion towards divine. Know that bhakti without knowledge is useless as one needs to understand what is bhakti and its nuances.

The basic principle of bhakti is an absolute surrender to the divine and compassion towards all. Do you see people following this principle in their day-to-day life? We live in a situation where our compassion is misused and surrender is considered as a weakness.

It is at this stage that bhakti becomes a difficult path and we are conflicted and go into a self-preservation mode.

Most of the logical thinking people find bhakti difficult due to what they see in the world. Trusting, compassion or bhakti is difficult for such temperamental people. So, bhakti is even harder now.

The answer to this is knowledge of the right kind. Bhakti can arise only when one understands why it is needed. To understand this, one needs to understand the nature of the Self and the world. When one’s knowledge is firmly placed in the truth that everything is divine or an expression of the divine, bhakti and compassion become natural. But to understand this truth, study is needed.

Simply asking people to be compassionate does not help, as it may sound morally right but it will not be followed as people have their own interests to take care of. But if one understands truth, compassion and bhakti become natural.

There are few selected people who can follow bhakti path without much knowledge, but they are only select few and have many lifetimes of accumulated good karma to reach a state of natural surrender. But for the remaining, bhakti should be supported by knowledge.

It is for this reason we can see that many great bhakti saints are also scholars. Even Adi Shankaracharya who propounded Advaita, composed many hymns extolling the glory of the Lord because knowledge usually ends in compassion and surrender.

When one truly becomes a yogi, for him there is no happiness or sadness. His mind is pervaded by the divine all the time and for him nothing matters, neither birth nor death etc.

But to achieve this we have to go step by step. We cannot jump to the final stage without doing the ground work.

Also, it is very important to understand that knowledge without practice is useless. In the current age, one needs knowledge, bhakti, yoga and selfless action (karma) for any meaningful progress.