In plain words
Though God is in all, in those who have a heart dissolved in this way God grants His divinity in visible form.
Bolting the doors, clinging tightly to an idol, worshipping as one pleases and enjoying it: that alone does not make this Ekānta Bhakti. This is Ekāki Bhakti. One must see the One who is the Ātma, dwelling in one's own true form; experiencing an imagined form is nothing but delusion. Yet worship of imagined forms, too, is needed at the first level. However long it may be, one must not go on pouring out one's life in that phase alone. But how is this Manas to be restrained, or purified? By showing it meat or fish and training it step by step, we set about bringing down to the ground even the hawk that roams the sky. To catch the creatures of the water we show them bait. Through certain habits we make tigers and lions perform in the circus just as we tell them. People catch even snakes with poison fangs and play with them. How? When we pull out the poison fangs and throw them away, we have no fear at all. In the same way, when we remove the bad feelings and bad qualities in the Manas, the Manas too is not dangerous in the least.
‘Giving up evil feeling within one's feeling is itself renunciation, and that itself is yoga.’ With sacred feelings, with a feeling for the highest, we must set about changing the Manas. As we keep up this kind of training, we can experience the vision of the Ātma within.
The Ātma is within us. But it is not seen. The reason? It is covered over with a scum of impurity. When we still the waves called attachment and hatred, when we remove all the impurities called bad feelings, the citta takes shape as pure water. Then close your eyes and turn your Manas inward, and in an instant you will experience sākṣātkāra. Attaining this sākṣātkāra is itself Ekānta Bhakti.
As for Ananya Bhakti, here too there are a few things we must grasp. We think that saying ‘I know none other than You’ is Ananya Bhakti. We think that ‘Śaraṇāgati’ is Ananya Bhakti. On one side we say, ‘I know none other than You.’ But on the other side we do not forget, rather we believe, ‘There are my relatives, my own people.’ The feeling that there is nothing other than Him is itself Ananya Bhakti.
You alone are mother and father, You alone are kinsman and friend, You alone are learning and wealth, You alone are my all, O God of gods.
This is Bhakti of the lips. It is not Bhakti of the heart. In Ananya Bhakti we must make this resolve with the whole heart.
The whole world is nothing but the inert. With an inert body we gain inert things. With the inert we take in still more of the inert. This world that we see is only a world made up of what is seen. We take it to be Satya and lasting, and so we are deceived. We are unable to recognise that it passes in a moment. Here is a small example of this. Hariścandra gave up everything for Satya, and came to the resolve, ‘As long as this inert body lasts, we must toil somehow for our bread.’ He did not worry even about his bread. To keep the word he had given, in the very end he worked even as a keeper of the cremation ground.
At that time they brought the body of a rich man to the cremation ground. Behind that rich man came some thousands of relatives and friends. They stacked firewood round the body and set fire to it. The only one who waited until it had turned to ash was Hariścandra. With the force of this fire, the corpse rose a little and sat up. At once it lay down again. Poor man, he had been an emperor, so he had never known such things. It had sat up, after all; thinking the man might be alive, he went close. But the body was lying there, poor thing.
Embodiments of Prema! One may have experience chiefly in certain kinds of worldly learning, in feelings, in paths. The first man to reach the moon thought, it seems, ‘I have heard that God fills the atom, the body and the whole cosmos. Nowhere did I see any trace of the One who fills it! This saying is merely a delusion of the people of Bhārata,’ he thought, it seems. With what did the man who went in a rocket look? Divinity is not something seen by fixing some machines to the eye and looking. When you put on the spectacles called ‘Prema’, fit on the Manas called ‘faith’ and walk with the gait called ‘śraddhā’, the divinity called sākṣātkāra is seen.
Mahārāja Parīkṣit was to give up his body within seven days. Śuka Maharṣi, who came to instruct him, had renounced every attachment. There was nothing at all in him of worldly attractions or of these saṅkalpas and vikalpas. When such a Śuka Maharṣi went on describing the Bhakti of the gopikās to Mahārāja Parīkṣit, how sacred the Bhakti of these gopikās must be! Then Parīkṣit asked, ‘Swami! That the gopikās, leading worldly lives on material paths, experience God with Ananya Bhakti is something I cannot believe at all,’ he said.