The scriptures point out that you can move along these bhavas in a graduated way or you can take them all together, at the same time, if you are an adept in the path. Sometimes it is also possible to choose one aspect of the bhava, and not all of them together. Consider. You love so many things - father, mother, child, wife, husband, and so on. Among all these things, which one attracts you most? Think over this matter. It is not that you love all of them in equal measure. You will not be able to decide this issue so suddenly, so quickly. You will make a mess in thinking. If you are unselfish in the analysis of your personality, you will know there is something which takes you above yourself. The nearness of the object of love to yourself is the test of your intensity of affection. Is your father closer to you, or is your mother closer? Who is closer? Decide for yourself. Is the spouse dearer, or is the child is dearer? Is your office superior a better object of affection, or is your spouse a better object of affection? Think over this matter. Do not make a mess of your analysis. Be careful in this matter.

We pass through all these experiences in our life. No one is free from them. Every one of us has these bhavas, these feelings of affection, every day. Often they are smothered by certain pressing activities which are of a personal nature. We have to go by the injunctions of the great masters who lived intense spiritual lives. It is better to follow the path of these great men than try to understand things by ourselves. Follow the path of the great men. Maha-jano yena gatah sa panthah (C.C. 17.186): Which is the way? The way that was trodden by the great masters of yore, that is the way. You cannot independently judge yourself. You do not know which you love more, which you love less. You make a jumble of all things every day, and you are unhappy from moment to moment because of the impossibility to judge what you want, finally. You like your spouse, you like your boss, you like money, you want wealth, you want prestige, and whatnot. You do not know what you want, finally. You want everything. Is it true, or is there something more?

The transmutation of human affection into spiritual affection, which is called devotion, is a great art of psychological operation. This psychology of the human being is what is called the work of the antahkarna, or sometimes known as chitta, the root of our psychic activity. In the language of yoga teachers like Patanjali, the root of our psyche is called chitta. But in other cases we classify the functions of the antahkarana, the inner organ, into four facets: the thinking, the self-asserting, the understanding and the memorising activities. But there is a root of these fourfold activities. The root has to be taken into consideration and get transmuted completely. It is not sufficient if you merely think of God, or remember God in a psychological fashion, or accept that God exists. Your root has to accept that it is so. When you love anything, it is the root that loves. It is not the ego that loves, not the memory that loves, not mere logical understanding that loves. There is a root in you which comes up to the surface of action and wells up in great intensity. Very rarely can people bring this principle of affection and love to the surface of their activity.

Wholly we cannot love anything. Partially we love. Our love is finite. Devotion to God is an entirely complete form of affection, outside which nothing can be. It is all-in-all! You may feel sometimes, "My child is all-in-all; I may die for the child." Your father is all-in-all. Your mother is all-in-all. "My wife is all-in-all." "My husband is all-in-all." You may say that, but they are not really all-in-all if you go deep into the matter. There is a condition put on this affection. These affections are limited by certain circumstances. The father loves the son - accepted. The son loves the father. But they are conditioned by certain circumstances. The son would expect the father to behave in a particular manner. The father would expect the son to behave in a particular manner. Otherwise, there is a great rift between father and son. The father asserts independence. "You quit this place!" he tells the son. And the son does the same thing to the father when there is no collaboration of feeling and attitude between them. You may say the love of husband and wife is very intense, but even that is conditional. There is a reciprocation, a give-and-take policy even in the husband-and-wife relationship. It is not true that they love each other one hundred percent, because if the condition necessary for that love is broken, see what happens.

This should not happen in the case of love of God. Inasmuch as in all objects of love in this world there is a limitation imposed upon these objects, they are not complete in themselves. God is complete Being. We may define God in this manner. Whatever complete Being is, that is God. Complete Being means a Being that has nothing outside itself, because if there is something outside, then the Being becomes finite and it is not complete Being. You have to adjust your consciousness with dexterity to place before your vision the presence of such a complete Being, and then move towards it. The bhavas, or the feelings of love to which I made reference, are categorised in five or six ways, as I mentioned, but some are more intense than others, as you yourself may feel.

In mortal affection - human love of persons and things in the world - there is an expectation from the object of love. Unexpected, total affection is not seen in this world. When I love you, I expect you to love me also in some way. It is not that I unilaterally love you, whatever be your behaviour. That is not seen. If there is a give-and-take commercial policy in affection, naturally it ends in tragedy, bereavement. Can you love anything unconditionally - let that do anything, let it be anything, in whatever way? Have you seen such affection in this world? No. The partners in affection can separate on the littlest of suspicions and doubts arisen between themselves in their relationship. This can happen everywhere - in the office, in the family, and in every way of your life. Bereavement is the necessary consequence of worldly love. But, love being an essential ingredient in one's nature, it cannot be set aside. Though it does not work well in this world, it has to work somehow, as in the case of your activities in the world. Though every action has a defect, you have to act somehow by freeing it from the limitations that may be imposed upon it.

Though every love in the world is defective, it has to be there somehow. You cannot exist without it. In a morbid form of affection which finds that everything that is its object of affection is lost, it turns itself upon itself and becomes narcissistic love. You love your own self, afterwards. You become a maniac of self-love - a megalomaniac, sometimes.

It is a great art to turn the affections of human circumstance to God. I mentioned to you to choose one form of your affection which will be turned towards God. "Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come…." is one form of prayer. Usually religions consider God as a father, for whatever reason. Sometimes God is considered as a mother also, especially in Indian circles. God as mother, God as father. Sometimes God is treated as a brother-companion-friend, as in the case of Arjuna who had the companionship of Bhagavan Sri Krishna, whom he knew as divine and yet he was a colleague and a friend - an equal, as it were. How will you turn your love to God?

All aspects of love should come together into a focus of single attention in the case of love of God. When such a thing becomes difficult at the outset, people take to one side of affection and become devotees of God in terms of ordinary worldly relations, chosen one by one, or all together, or only one at a time. Bhisma of the Mahabharata is said to have had the attitude of a son of the Supreme Father in respect of God. He was a philosopher, so he philosophically conceived the Supreme Being as his original Source, the Parent of all things. Hanuman is reputed for his dasa bhakti, love manifested in a servant towards his master. Mother Yashoda, renowned in history as the mother of Sri Krishna, was fond of Sri Krishna as a baby. Prahlada also considered God a parent and accorded him such affection. Arjuna's love is an example of the love of companionship - friend to friend. In the case of the gopis of Brindavan, it was an apex of affection. Affection becomes complete and it reaches its climax when the lover loses his self-consciousness. As long as you are existing as a lover, your ego is also preponderating at the same time. In an intense form of love, the lover loses consciousness of oneself and merges into the consciousness of that which is loved. The lover becomes the beloved. The gopis had this experience. They hugged a tree, embraced a dry stick, kissed a leaf. They could visualise their beloved in all these things when they found that they could not actually, physically, see their beloved.

Sri Rama had that experience, as we have it in the Valmiki Ramayana, especially when he lost Sita. He cried, wept and ran hither and thither asking, "Where is my beloved?" - asking the trees, asking the twigs, asking the leaves, asking the animals, "Have you seen my wife?" It was Rama's experience in the wilderness; so was also the gopis'. This is madhurya bhava - love which is sweet in its nature, which is apart from the logical love of the master and servant, the love of friend and friend, etc. They become, in this form of ecstasy of sweetness of love, commensurate with all creation, practically. They become sahaja, as it is called in Vaishnava theology. Sahaja marga is a form of devotion to God where you become equal to the object of love. We do not actually become the lover of the object; we ourselves assume the role of the object of affection, so that we do not know whether the two mingle as two distinct things, or one looks like two things. We do not know, in the sahaja avastha, whether it is the beloved loving the lover or the lover loving the beloved. If water in two tanks is on par on the surface level, we do not know which water moves to which tank. There is a pair of companion-tanks in Brindavan called Radha-kund and Krishna-kund. There are two tanks; I have seen them. It appears that no water moves from one tank to the other. One cannot make out from which tank to which tank the water is moving. There is a little passage of movement of water from one tank to the other.

Likewise is this devotion in its heightened form of madhurya bhava. Who loves whom? You cannot find out. When this madhurya bhava is taken to the apex of perfection, is God loving you, or are you loving God? Can you understand what it is when God loves you? When you love God, it is called bhakti. When God loves you, what is it called? There have been great masters who compelled God to love them. That is a greater devotion than your loving God.

As a diversion from the main subject, here is a story, for your information. There was a sadhu who was known to be a person capable of conversing with God daily. He would talk to God at night. People knew that he was capable of conversing with God every day. A lady from the vicinity used to come daily to this sadhu, prostrate herself before him and put a mud pot of kheer before him, then leave without uttering a word. This went on for about one year or so. The sadhu did not utter a word as to why this kheer was coming. The lady also did not say anything. When a year passed, the sadhu asked, "Mataji, why do you come every day with a pot of kheer for me? What is the matter?"

The lady cried out, "I did not want to say anything; I thought you knew because you talk to God. I have no child, though I got married twenty years ago. I wish to be blessed with a child. Please ask God tonight, in your conversation, whether or not I can have a child."

"I will talk to God tonight and tell you tomorrow," replied the sadhu.

The next morning, the lady came. "Maharaj, what is the order of the Almighty God?"

"I have talked to God. He said you cannot have a child," replied the sadhu.

"Wretched is my life!" she exclaimed.

She ran along the bank of a river, intending to commit suicide by jumping into the water. Along the way she found another sadhu, looking like a crazy man with billowed hair. He saw this lady running in distress and asked, "Mother, Mataji! Where are you going? What is the matter?"

She said, "I have had no time to talk. I am going to end my life!"

"End your life? Why? What is the matter that you are ending your life? Tell me," the sadhu said.

"I don't want to say anything. God has refused my wish," she replied.

"God has not refused your wish. It cannot be possible. God does not refuse the wish of anybody. Tell me what the matter is," insisted the sadhu.

"I wanted a child. God has denied me," said the lady.

"Oh, that's all - simple matter. You will have. . . . How many children do you want?" asked the sadhu.

"One," she replied.

"One? You shall have two," he said.

Though God has denied everything, the psychology of the human being is very peculiar. One good word from a person satisfies; it cools the heart. When the sadhu said "You will have two," the lady withdrew her intention to end her life and went back and wept in the house.

It so happened, after a long time, the lady had one child, and after that she had another child. A year after having two children, she took the two children to the very same sadhu who said that God had denied her a child. She went to the same sadhu who used to talk to God, and prostrated herself before the Mahatma with her little children. He recognised the lady.

"Who are these children?" the sadhu asked.

"Your own, your own," the lady said. "They are your own."

"Heh? These are mine?" he said.

"Your children," she replied.

"No, it is not possible. God had denied you, yet here they are!" he said.

The sadhu was angry with God. "I shall quarrel with God tonight. How has God insulted me and told lies to me? No, it is not possible. I shall quarrel with God and tell him how He has blackened my face!"

That night he said, "What have you done to me? You have painted my face black. Oh! She has got two children when you denied even one!"

Then God told that sadhu, "What can I do, tell me? You are running after me, I know very well. You are my devotee. But that one, who told the lady that she can have two children - he is the person after whom I'm running! So what can I do? I have to accede to his wish."

Here is the power of God!