Vedanta

Bhakti yoga assures us that the Lord lovingly accepts whatever we offer with devotion. But just as we can offer flowers and fruits, love and adoration, so we can offer our actions and their fruits. This is the sadhana of our third yoga, karma yoga.

The goal of bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, is to develop such intense, one-pointed love for God that no distance is left between the lover and the Beloved. The state of union that the raja yogi achieves through meditation, the bhakti yogi attains through wholehearted devotion.

While meditation has become widely associated in popular culture with relaxation techniques, meditation in the Hindu tradition is the antithesis of a passive act. True meditation is an intense and concentrated search for the divine Reality within. According to Patanjali—the ancient sage and author of the Yoga Sutras—meditation (dhyana) is "an unbroken flow of thought toward the object of concentration and has been compared to an unbroken, steady stream of oil when poured from one vessel to another."

Long ago in ancient India there lived a king who ruled over the magnificent city of Smritinagar, which in Sanskrit means “the city of memory.” One day the king—an avid and excellent hunter—left his kingdom before dawn to go hunting alone. He rode through his extensive lands and, crossing the borders of his kingdom, entered into a dense forest. As he rode through the forest, a snake suddenly slithered across the path; the horse reared and the king was thrown violently to the ground.

In my everyday life it is not necessary to have a comprehensive knowledge of my internal world. And even if I am interested in it, I have to gather information about it from the external world. Don't I have to study anatomy and physiology in bodies that are not my own? Don't I have to learn the workings of the mind by studying other people's minds? So it seems that I pursue most of the values of my life in the external world.

"Strength, strength is what the Upanishads speak to me from every page," declared Swami Vivekananda. Clearly, the source of "strength" that is taught in the Upanishads is neither the body nor the mind nor the intellect. All of these can be strong but the real strength, the real power, is in the spirit, the center of pure consciousness that every one of us really is. That unitary consciousness is the source of all power, goodness, purity, and strength.

Sri Ramakrishna used to tell a story of a rich man who instructed his servant to take a diamond to the market and to let him know how various vendors appraised the jewel.

Faith. We cannot live a day without it. We cross a street corner with the faith that the stopped cars will not run over us; we submit ourselves to the surgeon’s knife with the faith that he will cure our disease; we rely on our friends with the faith that they will help us in our time of need.

In a June 1895 letter, Swami Vivekananda wrote from Thousand Island Park in upstate New York to Mary Hale in Chicago:

The more the shades around deepen and the more the ends approach, the more one understands the true meaning of life, that it is a dream; and we begin to nderstand the failure of everyone to grasp it, for they only attempted to get meaning out of meaninglessness … Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage. Denial of the will to live, knowledge, and samesightedness is the trinity of liberation. Freedom is the goal of the universe.

It is said in the Devi Mahatmyam that the Divine Mother’s “incomparable greatness and power Vishnu, Brahma and Shiva are unable to describe.” For mortals such as ourselves, writing about Holy Mother is equally formidable because she was so successful at keeping her real nature hidden. While Sri Sarada Devi was a manifestation of the Divine Mother, she cloaked her divinity under the veil of simplicity and humility. Just as the Divine Mother covers herself with the veil of yogamaya, so did Holy Mother keep herself literally veiled, living among us as one of us. It was not for nothing that Sri Ramakrishna once jokingly described her as “a cat hidden under the ashes.”