Ultimate State – In Gita Verse 12.2 The Supreme Personality of Godhead said: Those who fix their minds on My personal form and are always engaged in worshiping Me with great and transcendental faith are considered by Me to be most perfect.
Krishna says that Bhakti Yoga is most perfect.
Only if you have the courage to go beyond yourself, devotion can be understood. Those who hold themselves and sit, devotion will not be able to understand them. Those who accept their intellect as the ultimate criterion, the truth of devotion will not be able to sit in their criteria. Understand this thing first.
WHAT IS DEVOTION?
Devotion is the ultimate stage of disciplehood.
A man ordinarily comes to a master as a student, curious, wanting to know more. If by chance it happens that the master is not only a teacher… Because a teacher is one who deals in information; with a teacher, you become taught.
With a master you are caught. It is no longer a question of giving you more information; on the contrary, the master starts cleaning you of all the information that you have collected before.
A master really washes your brain; it is a dry cleaning process. It brings you into a state of tabula rasa, nothing is written on you – a pure consciousness which knows nothing. But as knowledge disappears, a strange phenomenon starts happening: you start feeling yourself more. You know less, but you are more. You start growing roots, you start growing wings, your being starts expanding.
I am reminded of a beautiful story.
A master had a monastery. There were two wings of the monastery and just in the middle was the master’s home. He had a beautiful cat, and all the disciples loved the cat. One day the master had gone out. When he came back, both wings of the monastery were fighting over the cat: to which wing does the cat belong when the master is out, to the right wing or to the left wing? The master was amazed, seeing this stupidity.
He pulled out his sword and told the disciples, “Anybody from either wing should come out and give me an authentic answer that comes from the being, not from the mind. Then only can you save the cat; otherwise I am going to cut it in two and give half to the right wing and half to the left wing, because I don’t want any kind of struggle here.”
The disciples were very much shocked. Nobody wanted the cat to be killed – but they knew their master. And nobody could manage to find an answer that was coming from the being; many answers were coming, but they were all from the head. And they knew that if they came with those answers, instead of the cat their heads would be cut! So everybody remained silent.
The cat was cut and given to both wings.
Sad and crying, they went back to their rooms, cottages, utterly shocked – not only that the cat was killed… but five hundred disciples, and not a single one could come out with some authentic answer.
And then one disciple, who had gone out with the master and had stayed behind to do some work in the market, came back. He heard the story. He went to the master and slapped him as hard as he could.
The master said, “Good! If you had been here, the poor cat would have been saved. But now nothing can be done; the cat is dead.”
The whole monastery was agog with this new situation – that the disciple slapped the master, and the master laughed and said, “It is unfortunate that you were not here; otherwise, the cat would have been saved.”
This was the right answer. What a foolish thing the master was doing – cutting the cat, who had done no harm, who was not responsible at all for the quarrel that was going on. The master needed a good slap! But to slap the master, one needs a disciple who has come to the point of devotion; otherwise it will be insulting. Anybody else hitting the master would have been an insult; in fact, nobody could even conceive of it.
Devotion is the ultimate flowering of discipleship.
When love is so deep, the respect is so immense that everything is forgiven, the disciple can slap the master and yet the master simply laughs – because he knows his devotion. He knows that this slap has not come from a logical mind, it has come from a loving heart. It is as if with his own hand he has slapped himself – no distinctions are there anymore. Even to say that the devotee is close to the master is not right, because closeness is still a distance.
The devotee is one with the master.
His oneness is something not of this world.
In this context, Krishna is saying – Devotion, Bhakti is the ultimate state of disciple hood – when you become one with the Krishna, Universe, when the dewdrop slips into the ocean and becomes one with it.
Tags: Ultimate State
