What does it mean to belong to God?
In one of the final verses (Verse 96) of his passionate and moving Vilāpa Kusumāñjali (Bouquet of Lamentations) Raghunātha Dāsa cries out in ecstasy:
I am Yours, I am Yours! I cannot live without You! O Goddess!
The ardent cry is directed at Rādhā, the lover of Kṛṣna, and therefore the source of the highest love in the world, the love for God. In the Bhakti tradition of Vaishnavism, the goal of life is service to this divine love, embodied through loving service in everyday life.
Of all the disciples of the diving loving pair Rādhā-Kṛṣna, Raghunātha Dāsa is known as the deepest and the most passionate. He wants so ardently to serve divine love that his very being merges with the loving energy of Rādhā, the Goddess of love.
In Bhakti, the path to transcendence is through devotional service, serving others in a way that recognises and honours the divine love in every soul. To love means to love from the heart, from the soul, not from the mind and the ego.
To love means to want what the other wants. To love means to erase the differences between our desire and the desire of the other. To love means to erase the self, to become ego-less. ‘I love you’ means: ‘there is nothing that you want that I do not want’. The greatest love is the one that wants nothing, that spontaneously, naturally gives everything.
The paradox is that we cannot want to not want. We cannot let our ego lead us to ego-less-ness. We cannot have interest in being disinterested. We can only advance on the path to the soul by letting go of ego, by letting go of attachment to material obsessions, and by releasing our fixation on those worldly pleasures that are as fickle as the weather.
In Bhakti, loving is recognised as the natural state of our soul. We are most authentic, most ourselves, when we give love. If the purest form of the our soul is to love God, our soul expresses the spark of its inner authenticity in every moment of kindness, self-less-ness and love.
By focussing on our natural instinct to love, as modest or insignificant as it may seem, we make it grow and fill an ever larger part of our consciousness. As more and more of our consciousness becomes aligned with our true spiritual nature, we come closer to God, to the divine in us.
‘Soul’ is the name of this divine in us. All souls are essentially part of the divine. Every individual soul is part and parcel of God. The closer we come to the loving instinct in our own hearts, the closer we come to God. Ultimately we will become reunited entirely with the loving energy that is the our own divinity.
So when Raghunātha Dāsa ecstatically cries out ‘I am Yours’, he is announcing his entry into the realm of complete love for God, the reunification of the divine love in his soul with Rādhā.
Yet when Raghunātha Dāsa declares ‘I am Yours’, to belong to God, he also asks us to look beyond our material assumptions about possession. ‘I am Yours’ does not mean that I am an accessory that God may choose or not choose to possess. ‘I am Yours’ is not equivalent to saying ‘this book is yours’, take it or leave it. Rather it means ‘I am of You’. Everything that I am is also You.
‘I am Yours’ is not a declaration of ownership by God. It is the realisation that everything I am, first and foremost my natural tendency to love, is, was and shall always already be divine.