Bhakti
Yoga
survival into the 21st century
ALICE BAILEY
http://www.rahoorkhuit.net/library/start.html
"Stand ready and watch the heart... It is not easy to love, as do the
great ones, with a pure love which requires nothing back; with an impersonal
love that rejoices where there is a response, but looks not for it, and loves
steadily, quietly, and deeply through all apparent divergences, knowing that
when each has found the way home, the home will be found to be at-one-ment."
INITATION, HUMAN AND SOLAR. ALICE BAILEY
Bhakti Yoga is the yoga of love sometimes called the
Path of Devotion. Bhakti yoga is worship of God in
all of God's creations. It is seeing everything as divine in its innermost
essence. In its most highly developed form, Bhakti
yoga is that perfect love which can give everything and ask for nothing because
it is everything and it gives only to itself. In so giving it perfects all
manifestations created out of itself. The individual
is perfected as one of these creations, until the realization of ones ness with
Pure Existence comes and then he or she becomes a perfect instrument through
which God's love expresses itself.
To the Bhakti yogi the happiness of all beings is his
or her happiness. Their joy is his or her joy, their
fulfillment is his or her fulfillment because the Bhakti
yogi sees his or her self as being the self in all. The Bhakti
yogi has perfect patience. He or she recognizes love as a process of helping
other people and beings to manifest their evolutionary expressions. The Bhakti yogi's identification and happiness goes beyond his
or her own personality to include all life. In dealing with fellow humans, the Bhakti yogi recognizes love as a process of experiencing
together. The experience is the one consciousness working through both people or human instrumentalities. Love is recognizing yourself in another person or being. The Bhakti
yogi recognizes love as being and acting in harmony with another person. The Bhakti yogi understands that as soon as we are ready to
give in love; God, as our own self, supplies us with infinite love, wisdom and
power and all resources to express love.
We have not to receive love but to become love. Love is the creative power of
our own immutable existence. It is the practical expression of our oneness with
God and the whole creation. Love should not drive us in the form of desire, it
should emanate from us as the expression of God's eternal presence in us and in
all the form of desire, it should emanate from us as
the expression of God's eternal presence in us and in all life. Love is a state
of experiencing your consciousness inside other people and beings, helping them
to grow and express outward, to present their gift to the world.
Love is also the state of total joy and happiness. Even the sense of being
unhappy implies a concept of what happiness should be which shows us that we
already contain happiness and happiness is our real nature. As a manifestation
of pure being, we must create happiness rather than try to seek it outside
ourselves. It is work to be unhappy. All work has evolutionary value. Therefore
all unhappiness must eventually lead to happiness. Evolution starts with
existence and is consummated in love. Love is the highest product of the
evolutionary process.
Love is experiencing the beauty and goodness in every detail of life. Love is a
universal force that expresses itself on every plane of manifestation. On the
highest level it is the complete harmony and intercommunication between all the
points in the universe. Without this detailed appreciation there is no
enrichment or experience. Even wisdom, great as it is, is only the skeleton of
life, the evolutionary blueprint. Love is the accomplished fact of the cosmic
harmony, the flesh on the skeleton of cosmic law, the life of the universe. In
the presence of love, all beings give up their enmity and live in peace and
harmony.
Love is God's highest gift to humankind, the force which gives meaning and
purpose to existence.
The practice of Bhakti yoga is the best means of
organizing and perfecting the desire or astral body. But it is a universal
power that will transfigure every aspect of the human being. When the highest
love incarnates in the human being, obedience to God is inevitable. In that
state human will and God's will become identical.