In the previous discussion, I said that devotion or Bhakti can be a good alternative to a person – a person who cannot follow intellectual pursuit, a person who cannot do selfless service, a person who cannot meditate – an optiion to make spiritual progress.
Devotion to some God is definitely a faith based concept. These days we come across many self claimed intellectuals who frown upon religious beliefs and faiths. They say that faith is the bane of all our present day ills. If that is the case, should we not discourage devotion that is faith based ?
Yes, I myself always write giving lot of emphasis on reasoning and rationality. At the same time, I rarely shun faith altogether. Faith is an inalienable part of our life. We can’t escape that completely.
What is important is not whether a faith is based on reality. but whether it is useful. It needs to be shun only when it becomes a menace. As some intellectuals profess, we don’t need to eradicate religions, but we just need to reject evils that have somehow become part of religions.
Devotion to God is part of most religions. Even the Buddhists who don’t accept any God, show devotion to Buddha. Is there something good in devotion?
Firstly, devotion gives a hope to a person mired deep in miseries. There is no point preaching logic and reasoning to a person who is overloaded with problems in his life. He is not going to listen.
On the other hand, hope that stems out of faith – the faith that God will take care of him - gives him courage to go ahead and fight with his problems. He is like the kitten that is sure that the mother would come running.
Devotion also gradually uplifts a person by moving him from a limited body identity to a more broad based identity. I have discussed some of these ideas in my book “How and why of Yoga and Meditation”.
There are more things.
Only a person who has experienced it, knows that devotion can be a greater elixir and intoxicant than any drug or even the ultimate experiences of meditation. Even through devotion, one can attain the state of samadhi without following the Yoga way.
There are plenty of examples where several sages and saints attained highest state of spirituality just following the path of devotion and without doing any meditation or Yoga. One comes across mentions of such sages both in the west, as well as in the east.
But is it free of ills? We will discuss that in a later post.
Since devotion assumes God or some superior entity, which God should we be devoted to? Apparently there are many Gods!
We will see that in the next post.
Based
Bhagavad Geetha, one of the most quoted and widely translated of the
ancient Indian scriptures, believed to have been composed by Vyasa as
part of the great Indian Epic Mahabharata, 5000 years ago. The
interpretation of the verses and audio recital are by Dr.King
(Copyright © 2018 Dr. King)
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