Bhakti-yoga means union with God (yog) sustained through devotional service (bhakti).
This union is one of miraculous experiences of our practice. For what does it mean to have a relationship with God? The words are easily said, but difficult to measure. To have a relationship with the divine is not to admire it from a distance, to venerate the beauty, the power, the perfection of God. It’s not enough to simply follow the rules and rituals of recognised practice. It’s not enough to obey the commands of a celestial dictator. It’s not an intellectual relation created by reading books or studying verses.
None of these paths will do because the union of bhakti-yoga is one of love. Bhakti is the practice of devotional service, service to God in and through love. It’s not blind devotion or one-sided adulation. Bhakti-yoga is a true relation with the divine: in its purest expression it takes the form of a divine love affair. Its model is the conjugal love affair of the Rādhā and Mohan. This loving relation is the model not only for the love of God but for the love between all loving, living beings.
Love has different forms and different moods. It varies in feeling and intensity, form and weight. From the lightest tingling of fancy to the deepest crush of passion, the texture and shape, breadth and weight of the love we feel varies from person to person, situation to situation. These are described in detail in the bhakti-yoga literature.
The practice of bhakti-yoga is one of exploring the contours of the experience of divine love by searching for it in our own hearts, by meditating on the landscape of our hearts, by exploring our emotions, cultivating our feelings, letting love grow.
We can only understand love, learn about love, gain insight into love through relation. We don’t give up the mind, but it through the heart and soul that knowledge of life and love, divine life and divine love, can come. We say ‘knowledge’, but what we ‘know’ about love, what is given to us to ‘know’ about love is more, far, far more than knowledge.
Love is the irreducible, undefinable, indescribable quality of the soul. It is the humanity of the human, the spiritual of the spirit, heart-felt of the heart. It is the experience of the soul becoming itself, the sacred seed in us becoming the divine.
How is this miracle possible? No amount of thinking, no amount of calculating, no amount of effort can bring this love to us. It comes to us through from the soul of the other, indeed the souls of many others, large and small, simple or evolved, profound or superficial. Every gram of love, has at its root divine love. Every minuscule experience of love, every tingle of feeling, every infatuation and heartbreak, every tenderness, every passion, is a flash of the divine.
Yet if the streams of divine love are all around, the richest, the most constant, the widest streams flows to us, and through us, from guru. And from him or her it flows from the generations of spiritual association, the chain of cause and effect of love, known as parampara.
The practice of bhakti-yoga is a practice of sharing. It teaches us to transfer experiences, memories, thoughts, of course. But what carries these things we transfer we share is love, that carries them. There is no knowledge or memory or experience that is greater than the love we transmit.
The practice of bhakti-yoga means finding the non-intellectual ways that love and knowledge about love can be passed: Through simple human contact, by loving in simple human ways, through the gaze, through the voice, through music, art and other forms of emotional expression, through taste and other sensual pleasures.
After all, divine love is not abstract. It’s not a thought-experiment. Where there is love, there is a lover and a beloved, also on the spiritual plane. Love has a personality because God has a personality. God’s love is not hypothetical, without qualities, without determined objects. Divine love, like mundane love, has a shape, a character, an intensity, a softness.
We try to see this—to live this—in the manifestations of the divine we find all around us.. How does God appear in the world and how does God love ? What does God love? If we can learn to share completely God’s love, then we will know love completely.