Plan 54. Plan of spiritual devotion (bhakti-loka)
Bhakti or spiritual devotion is based on the statement: "Love is God and God is love." A bhakta devotee loves his Deity. The deity is the lover, and the devotee is the lover. The bhakta suffers from separation and yearns to meet, or at least catch a glimpse of, her lover. Nothing else attracts him, nothing holds his attention, everything else loses its meaning. Food, sleep, sex, attachments, affairs - nothing else matters. He is completely absorbed in his feeling of separation and in ecstasy prays only to receive at least one look from the Lord. When a bhakta is blessed by divine grace, he experiences inseparable oneness and a non-dual state of consciousness is established. He and his God are now one, and the experience of God itself is evidence of grace and blessing from the Divine.
Bhakti is the direct method, the shortest way to the Divine. All yoga and all knowledge, jnana, rests on the cornerstone of true faith, true devotion and love, true bhakti. There is nothing higher than love, and bhakti is the religion of love. Love is truly God. Lighting the candle of love with the spark of knowledge and practicing the yoga of love is bhakti. At the final stage of opening the sixth chakra, when the player has already acquired the qualities of fluidity he needs and cleared his mind, he understands the true value of the game. He understands reality both as it really is and as it seems. He realizes the need for austerity and true knowledge, jnana and sudharma, and selfless service. He also sees that anger, vanity, worthlessness, suffering and ignorance are all significant aspects of life experience. It is beyond any ratings. Everything has equal value and value. He knows that while he is in the body, the die of his karma will carry him forward in his journey, level by level, square by square. He knows that, along the way, he may have to fall prey to a snake, as well as that he will meet arrows.
Next to him, the player sees how others are playing the same game, how they all go through the same states, with different rhythms and with different intensities. Having mastered his will, he achieved inner stability. Now, for further development, he must find the emotional center of his life. To purify himself of self-identification, he has no choice but to identify himself with the Divine in some particular form or in all forms. But this does not matter, because for a player who has fallen into the field of bhakti-loka, each form becomes all forms at the same time. In whatever form he meets the Lord, all others will also be received by him. The form becomes the Divine, and the Divine becomes the bhakta himself, experiencing inexpressible bliss. Previously, the player could not accept the game as the basis of his own nature, remaining bound by the vibrations of the sixth chakra. His energy increased too quickly, which could lead him to violence. However, Leela's complete acceptance gives him devotion to the game itself.
He sees in the states represented by the cells of the playing board the play of divine energy and experiences unity with them. All these are manifestations of his Lord. True bhakti comes to the player in the sixth chakra. The knower and the known, the subject and the object, the devotee and the Divine, all become one. Many become one.
In the fourth chakra there is still room for duality, unity comes only after gaining knowledge in the fifth chakra. The player begins to think in terms of the ocean with which he is to merge. Spiritual devotion is the arrow that carries the drop into the ocean after the drop is aware of the presence of that ocean within itself.
This is the only direct path to the Cosmic Consciousness. The essence of the Supreme Consciousness cannot be realized by following only the path of jnana or true knowledge. Spiritual devotion turns Cosmic Consciousness into a friend, and the player comes face to face with Divine Reality. Knowledge and wisdom give only the awareness of the presence of the cosmic principle. Devotion turns every situation, every moment into an encounter with the Absolute, allowing the player to see the Lord present in everything and everywhere.
Jnana makes the player a sage, while bhakti turns him into a divine child on his Mother's lap under the benevolent protection of the Father. The wise man has a long way to go to meet the Lord. The bhakta is always surrounded by his Deity, present in myriads of his forms and names in every particle of life experience.