The Bhakti Shastras tell us there are four ways of worship. There can be many other details of this fourfold way, but principally they are designated as four, known as chariya, kriya, yoga and jnana. We have a temple in the ashram - the Lord Vishvanath and Lord Sri Krishna temple. There are people who worship the divinity by collecting flowers from gardens, plucking bael leaves from outside, cleaning the temple - keeping it neat and clean, spic and span. This is worship of God. It is worship of God because you want to keep the area of this holy abode of God neat and clean, as your mind should be when you worship God. These persons do only this work. This is one stage: chairya.

Kriya is an inner cooperation in the offering of worship, such as keeping the lights of the arati neat and clean, dipping the wicks in the oil, placing it in the proper position and lighting it up - putting camphor on it, then creating a flame - and offering this lamp to the person who actually performs the worship. An internal seva, the inward cooperation in the performing of worship, is what is called kriya. The external cooperation is chariya. But before reaching the pinnacle of the actual performance of worship, there are two more stages. The one who is outside has done his duty in picking flowers, offering bilvapatra and keeping the temple clean, and the inner one has done his own job in providing all the necessities to the performer of the worship by arranging lamps and other things.

But what does the performer himself do? We call them pujaris. Pujari is a very poor word. He himself is an incarnate divinity. As I mentioned to you, very unfortunately these days everything has become commercial. It has become a routine. Mechanically, like a bulldozer moving they do worship, and the mind is somewhere else. It becomes an act without a thought, much less a feeling. This should not be. You should not disregard temples. They are representations, visibly before you, of the miniature structure of the cosmic operations of God. You must feel a thrill when you enter the temple. It is not like entering a police station or a railway platform. See the difference.

Where there is no movement of the heart, there is no affection. A stone heart cannot love anything. Love is a melting process of the very being of yourself. The performer of the worship does a miracle before he actually performs the worship. He does what is called yoga. As I mentioned, there are four stages: chariya, kriya, yoga and jnana. What is this yoga? Yoga is the identification of oneself with the form of the deity to be worshipped. These ways of identification of oneself with the deity, and vice versa, identifying the deity with oneself, is known as the performing of nyasas. Anganyasa and karanyasa are the principal ways of nyasas. What is nyasa? It is the placement - fixing - of the parts of the form of the deity in your own personality. "The head of the deity, of the beautiful divinity, is my own head, and my head is the head of the divinity." Intensely he feels and thinks in this manner so that the mind of the divinity enters the performer. Every part of his body gets identified with every conceived part of the divinity - the hand with the hand, the feet with the feet, the heart with the heart, the face with the face; everything is set in tune. Do you know what happens when you practice this kind of meditation? The performer of the worship, in deep meditation, considers himself as a replica of the divinity that is worshipped. God possesses him - at least, He is expected to possess him. And, he is possessed of God.

This technique is applicable in various other fields of life also, such as thought transference, telepathic communication and such other things with which you may be acquainted. If there is any other person to whom you want to transfer your thought, think like that person. You become that person. You lose the consciousness of the form of your body as this Mr. So-and-so; you become that person. Who is thinking? You are not thinking; that person is thinking, whose mind has to operate according to your wish. This is about telepathic communication, thought transference, etc. This technique is also employed in the case of God, in worship. Sometimes the worshipper trembles if he has really equipped himself with this process of self-identification with the parts of Lord Siva, Lord Krishna, Lord Vishnu - whoever it is. The cosmic superstructure of the Almighty is represented in the form of the image of the portrait that is worshipped in the temple. The whole cosmos is vibrating there.

Inasmuch as God is everywhere, He has to be present in the idol also. There are some people who decry idol worship. They say it is stupidity. It is not stupidity. If God is everywhere, he has to be even in your pencil, your fountain pen, the pig that you offer in sacrifice in homa, and in the idol that you worship, in the portrait, in the yantra, in a diagram - everywhere He has to be. Otherwise, you cannot accept the omnipresence of God. People who consider idol worship as a kind of stupidity and a meaningless caricature of divine devotion do not understand what God is. So this performer of the worship gets possessed due to this self-identification of the structure of his being with the structure of the divinity whom he is worshipping.

There is another stage, called jnana, in the process of worship, along with chariya, kriya and yoga. I have explained to you briefly what yoga is in the course of performing worship in a temple. If it is not in a temple, it may be on an altar in your own room. Some people have a mini-temple or altar of worship in their own puja room. The same process takes place in your adoration of the deity that you have, in a mini-form, on your puja room altar. While yoga is identification of yourself with the form of the deity and identification of the form of the deity with your own self, jnana takes you a step further.

When God possesses you in the act of the yoga that I have explained, you cease to be yourself. The energy, the power, the consciousness, the form of God has entered into you and taken possession of the whole structure of your being. When you act, It acts. When you speak, It speaks. This occurrence is sometimes called avesha - the superabundance of being possessed by the deity. You can be possessed by anything if you love it deeply.

Why do you find it difficult to love anything? The hard ego prevents you from giving any concession to another person. The ego says, "I am all-in-all! Who cares for another?" It is not possible to love anything when the ego adumbrates its hard, single point of view and carries on a political affection, as people have in a parliament. There, every member has affection for another member, but you know very well what kind of affection it is. They are broken pieces struggling to get united. Such a thing is not affection.

To love God, you have to love everything. This also follows as a consequence of the love of God. Yo mam pashyati sarvatra sarvam ca mayi pashyati (B.G. 6.30) is a line from the Bhagavadgita: "When you see Me in everything, you also see everything in Me." The presence of God in every nook and cranny of creation makes you feel a divine presence in everything in the world. I have already mentioned that it is not easy to love God. I have to repeat this again and again. Until your stone-like heart melts - unless your ego melts - this will not be possible.

The lover of God - the true lover of God - transcends the realm of shame. When you love God, you may become something which will not be understandable to society, the public of people. Nobody could understand Mira, the queen of a kingdom, dancing in the streets. What did the king feel about it? "My wife, the queen, dancing in the streets like a crazy lady?" When true love emanates from the personality of a person, the difference between the lover and the beloved ceases. I am not going to that side of the matter just now; I shall touch upon this after some time. What actually is your relationship with God? When you love God, what is your position? And what is the position of God?

Sometimes it is said that there is a duality of concept in the bhakti marga, or the path of love of God. It may be so in one sense of the term, because when you love something, you behold it before you as a 'something' which is not yourself exactly. But in the case of God, it is not 'something' that you are loving. It is all things. So the duality which is generally said to be in the bhakti marga diminishes, and it becomes a non-dual love. Thus, bhakti leads to jnana in the end. Non-dual love - can you conceive of it? Whom are you loving in non-dual affection? Are you loving God? Or are you loving yourself? The lower forms of devotion, known as apara bhakti, have the appurtenances of items of worship, gestures and performances of different kinds, but in the higher bhakti you love in such intensity that the purpose of love is fulfilled in its consummation.

Do you know what is the consummation of love? What do you want from the object that you love? What is your expectation? You want it to be very near you. You want to touch it. You want it to enter into you. You do not want it to be separate from you at all. "My child is me!" cries the mother in love. It is not any more 'my'; it is 'me' only. The 'my' becomes 'me'.

Inasmuch as you have to accept that the presence is in all things - accept His omnipresence - loving such a thing is loving the entire creation at the same time. Apara bhakti becomes para bhakti, which is identical with jnana. Jnana does not mean learning. It is not academic knowledge. It is the actual apprehension of the true being of God himself. It is not the object called God, but the very Being of God - inseparable from yourself also, because God is omnipresent. In this tremendous ecstasy of the identification of the omnipotence of God with one's own self, puja - worship - becomes consummate. In heightened forms of worship, the performer, the pujari, waves the arati before the deity; he goes in circles - round and round, round and round. Finally, in certain forms of worship, he waves the arati to himself. Mostly, you might have not seen such a thing in temples. In the ecstasy of his performance he ceases to distinguish himself, his existence, from the existence of the God that he is worshipping; the arati turns to himself. I have heard it said that Swami Vivekananda was once performing worship. In his ecstasy, he turned the arati to himself - to the chagrin and shock of all people. "Are you worshipping yourself or are you worshipping God?" Only a worshipper knows what worship is.

Whatever I have told you just now is the inner significance of the fourfold types of worship: chariya, kriya, yoga and jnana. And I also mentioned that you must read the lives of these saints: Saint Mira, Saint Haridas, Saint Varender Das, Saint Kabir Das, and the Alvars and Nayanars.