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- Devotion, the path of devotion, is the
path of surrender.
- The feminine mind will need a path of
devotion -- the path of Narad, Meera, Chaitanya, Jesus.
- Love is freedom, but not total. If love
becomes devotion, then it becomes total freedom. It means
surrendering yourself completely.
- One is the path of devotion, what in India
is called BHAKTI yoga, the path of love and devotion -- a Meera, a
Chaitanya, dancing and singing, losing themselves completely in the
act. When Meera is dancing there is only dance, there is no Meera;
the dancer is completely merged into the dance. When Chaitanya is
singing and dancing there is no Chaitanya; he has become one with
the act.
- Devotion is the highest form of love. It
is possible you may love one person, and love becomes so deep that
slowly slowly the very quality of love changes into devotion. Then
that person becomes only a window for you to take a jump into
existence.
- One has to become intensely aware or
intensely loving. These are the only two keys which can bring man
out of the state he is in: either intense awareness -- that is the
path of meditation -- or intense, total love -- that is the path of
devotion.
- The path of devotion, BHAKTI. Narada,
Chaitanya, Meera, Sahajo, Ramakrishna -- these are the people on
that path. It is the most simple, most direct, closest. You cannot
find anything easier. This is the shortcut; it is not uphill. You
need not do anything -- on this path doing will be your undoing. You
need only relax and trust.
- Devotion is unconditional.
- Devotion is the ultimate stage of
disciplehood.
- Devotion has its own strange ways. It is
not something rational, logical, something that can be explained to
you. But it is something, if you go on growing from a student into a
disciple, from a disciple into a devotee, and you come so close to
the master that there is no distinction at all..
- Devotion is the ultimate state of
disciplehood -- when you become one with the master, when the
dewdrop slips into the ocean and becomes one with it.
- Devotion is only a love affair, purified
to its ultimate state. Then whomsoever you love becomes a door, a
bridge to the universal organic unity, the experience of your small
identity dissolving in the ocean just like a dewdrop slipping from a
lotus leaf.
- In ordinary life also, whenever your
devotion is total you attain to great talents. So what to say about
God? God is the very center of existence. You can only have energy
enough to reach that center if you put all that you have at the
stake. It is a gamble, it is not a business. You have to put all at
the stake, this way or that, whatsoever happens. You have to risk.
And the love affair with God has to be passionate, hot. It cannot be
a cold philosophic speculation.
- Devotion is a blind thing. In devotion the
other becomes more important than you. It is a trust. The
intellectual cannot trust anybody; he can only criticize. He cannot
trust. He can doubt, but he cannot trust And if sometimes some
intellectual comes to trust, it is never authentic. First he tries
to convince himself about his trust; it is never authentic. He finds
proofs, arguments, and when he is satisfied that the arguments help,
the proofs help, then he trusts. But he has missed the point,
because trust is not argumentative and trust is not based on proofs.
If proofs are there, then there is no need of trust.
- The path of the heart. I become the
mystery and you -- thou, the other, the beloved -- become the real.
If you move to the very extreme, then it becomes devotion. If your
love comes to such an extreme point that you forget completely that
you are, you have no notion of yourself and only the other remains,
that is devotion.
- In devotion you surrender yourself
completely. And this surrender can be to a god who may not be in the
sky or who may be, or to a master who may not be awakened or who may
be, or to a beloved who may not be worthwhile or who may be -- that
is irrelevant. If you can allow yourself to dissolve for the other,
you will be transformed. Devotion frees. That is why we have
glimpses of freedom only in love.
- With deep devotion, results can follow
immediately. In a single moment of devotion, you can undo many lives
of the past. In a deep moment of devotion, you can become completely
free from the past.
- 'Bhakta yoga', the path of devotion. On
the path of devotion, when a satori happens it happens through the
heart not through the intellect. It happens through the emotions,
and when it happens through the emotions one goes unconscious -- it
is a flash of unconsciousness.
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