THE SADHANA OF LOVE

 
Even more important than the Sadhana of Knowledge or Action is Bhakti or love. Love is its own reason for being. It is complete in itself. The greatest of saints have been content with their love for god, desiring no more. Love is not love if based upon any expectation. In the intensity of Divine Love, the lover becomes one with the Beloved.

There is no Sadhana greater than love; there is no law higher than love; and there is no goal beyond love. God and love are identical, and one who has Divine Love has received God.

Love may be regarded as at once a part of Sadhana and a part of the goal; but the intrinsic worth of love is so obvious that it is often considered a mistake to look upon it as a Sadhana for some other thing. In no Sadhana is the merging into God so easy and complete as in love. When love is present, the path to the Truth is joyous.

As a rule, Sadhana involves effort — maybe even desperate effort; but in love, all is spontaneous. Spontaneity belongs to spirituality. The highest state of consciousness, in which the mind is completely merged in the Truth, is known as Sahajawastha or the state of unlimited spontaneity in which there is uninterrupted Self-knowledge. One of the paradoxes connected with spiritual Sadhana is that the effort of the aspirant is to arrive at a state of effortlessness.

The fructification of Sadhana involves the termination of the ego-life of the aspirant; but at that moment there is the realization that he himself has been the object of all his search and endeavour, that all he has suffered and enjoyed, all risks and adventures, all sacrifices and strivings, were for self-knowledge, in which he loses his limited individuality to discover that he is one with God.