The ideal of God-realisation which is mentioned as the background of the spirit of sadhana is, it is to be reiterated, incapable of being maintained throughout one’s life with equanimity. Even great saints are said to have lost their patience and balance some time or the other in their, lives, in their attempts to maintain this spirit perpetually. There is no one who has been entirely free from the clutches of error, which grips one in the form of greed, anger, lust, jealousy, bewilderment, melancholy, lethargy, a subtle desire for name, fame and power, which lurks like a creeping snake inside an ant-hill, and, above all, the worst of things—a feeling that one has achieved the desired end, and the only thing that remains now is to share one’s realisation with others. Students who have honestly taken to the spiritual path in the beginning have been often misled into the ruts of a desire for such things as tantrik siddhis through mantras and rituals on the one side and a longing to pursue grammar and literature, or astronomy and palmistry, on the other side. It is not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with these sadhakas, for their trouble is that they have not found a suitable guru to guide them in these confused conditions when they feel lost in a sea of hopelessness.

Now, let us come to the ideal of God-realisation again—that mysterious something which is extremely difficult for the mind to comprehend because it has no temptations to offer to the anxious mind of the seeker. Ordinarily, sadhakas are not attracted by anything that is really signified by the term ‘God-realisation’. To many it is just a nebulous phrase conveying not much practical sense, and to others it is a reality of doubtful value, since it is not clear to them as to what it is really going to bring to them. Unfortunately, that God-realisation is not going to offer us anything we want in the world is the feeling of many a seeker, because, as pre-conditions of this realisation we are asked to renounce desires and want God alone. Now, how can one want God alone and nothing else that is of glory and beauty and splendour and joy in the world? What do we gain by reaching God and losing everything else which we would like to enjoy? Though theoretically, by the argument of the intellect, we may conclude the God is the sole objective to be aspired for, the heart with its feelings that are accustomed to see and hear of the pleasures of this creation cannot reconcile itself with the arid logic that sees no good in the tasty dishes which this splendid universe with its glorious heavens is ready to offer it. These are facts which every one has to confront on the way to God-realisation, and it is not easy to get over the temptations as long as the heart is not united with the understanding. In most cases the head and the heart are like a quarrelling couple who make a hell of the family. There cannot be peace unless the two have common aims and cooperate with each other in the fulfilment of a higher ideal.

The students of both the path of devotion and the path of knowledge should remember one very important point, for it is this point which decides whether their sadhana is successful or not. To the bhakta or devotee, God is everything, and he sees God in this manifestation as the world. This does not mean that the devotee should have reached, in the very beginning itself, the state of para-bhakti or the devotion which sees the whole world as God shining in various forms. Even in the initial stages of bhakti, when such a vision of God is very far, when one is busy with the worship of an image in the temple or in one’s own house, or when one is engaged in purascharana of a sacred mantra, or in svadhyaya or sacred study, the important prerequisite is exclusive devotion to one’s sadhana, whatever be the form of the sadhana, even if it be in a primitive form, where one is concerned only with one’s sadhana and not with the affairs of the world outside. This exclusiveness of devotion saves one from falling into mental states of lust, anger, greed, jealousy, ambition, etc., for the sadhaka has no time to think such things. This is so even when the sadhana is in its beginning stages. What, then, should be the fortune of him who, in his rarefied devotion, sees God everywhere, in the high and the low alike?

To the student of knowledge, objects, as such, do not exist, for, to him, all objects or things are transformed into  the status of a Universal Seer or a Totality of Subjectness, where the ‘worldness’ of the world vanishes, thus leaving no scope for him to get caught in the passions and ambitions which flood what we called the world. There is only a ‘Seer’ who is everywhere and nothing that is ‘seen’, for the ‘seen’ is also the ‘Seer’ himself appearing, as dream-objects are nothing but the thinking of the mind which is unified into a single whole in waking. Where, then, is a chance for prejudice, anger, craving and egotistic expressions?

This is the spirit of sadhana, whether in devotion (bhakti) or knowledge (jnana), which is to animate the daily routine of the sadhaka. It is this that gives meaning to sadhana. It is this, again, that decides one’s success or failure in spiritual practice—to what extent and in what proportion the God-element in sadhana preponderates over other aims and objectives.