"Bhakti Yoga"

By Robert A. Johnson

Certainly India's greatest gift to me was the art of Bhakti Yoga. I
had read volumes on this way of worship long before I arrived in India, but
neither the translations into English nor my level of development allowed
me more than an intuitive understanding of this simplest of all forms of
worship. Simplicity seems the hardest art for a western mind to
comprehend and it has taken me most of a lifetime to gain even a slender
hold on this jewel of India.
India is far richer in its comprehension of the inner life than we are
and it is naive to think that we can appreciate their depth with our
present language and thought forms. India apparently gave over its major
energy to study and development of the inner world much as we did just that
to study the outer world. This resulted in a genius of understanding of
what we call the unconscious or inner world. Example: Sanskrit based
languages have 96 words for LOVE, Persian 80, Greek 3, but we only l. The
results are predictable: India has a wealth of inner understanding and a
cataclysmic ineptitude for outer things. Their culture is disintegrating
for lack of the most basic understanding of matters of health, government
and just the rudiments of the mechanical world. When I lived in Halasangi,
a little village in central India where I was the first white person to
have blundered into that remnant of an ancient culture, there was an
immediate love affair of two opposite mentalities as different as our
language and the color of our skins - and a blank incomprehension of basic
concepts of the nature of reality. I can sum it up with an example: I was
concerned with whether the glass of water, which Amba Shankar offered me
with the grace and devotion which had a thousand generations of love behind
it. had been boiled, while he was concerned with the caste of the person
who had prepared it for me. Two vastly different points of view collided,
I gave way in the argument, and observed a degree of love I had never known
before - and had dysentery in a few hours. Small price for so great a
revelation, but one I could not maintain for many weeks. I knew I would
die soon if I stayed in that village and even the thought that I would 'die
of love' could not keep me there.
I cant help observing the same phenomenon going on frequently in my
American setting: I have the safety of clean water, sterilized food and
the wonders of recent surgery for a hip replacement; but some loneliness,
some retching for lack of ---- well, what? ---- will not cease deep
within me. India dies for lack of the most rudimentary understanding of
the laws of the material world; we die for the the most rudimentary
understanding of the laws of love which are missing in our culture. We
stole from the feeling function to evolve our science, while India did just
the reverse.
On a collective level I have no insight what can be done about either
of these losses; but I have some thoughts of what an individual can do to
bring about a way of life not starved in either of its basic needs.
All of this by way of introduction to Bhakti Yoga:

India, in her superb wisdom of inner things, devised four basic ways
of drawing the fractured human soul into some coherence. The four ways
correspond with Dr. Jung's four basic psychological types and it is
tempting to think that they must have known Jung long ago. Of course, the
reverse is true; but we still jump to our naive conclusions.
India devised four disciplines to correspond with the four basic
patterns of temperament which appear in humans whatever age, culture or
language one observes. To simplify outrageously, it only remains to find
the discipline that fits one's native temperament and devote one's self to
that path. The great teachers all agree that each path leads to the same
goal and Rama Krishna likens the journey to choosing which of four paths
leading up the four basic cardinal sides of a mountain he will choose.
They all lead to the same mountain top. He chose his own native path,
Bhakti, but later trod each of the other three to attain the same mountain
top.

The four paths:

Gnani yoga is the art of using one's thinking function to pierce
through the illusion of our faulty view of reality. This is so foreign to
my own natural functions that I can hardly do more than observe it in its
most rudimentary form. I think I see such a path in some of my friends who
find an ecstatic beauty and joy in a mathematical formulation or an
Einstein devoting his life to a Holy Grail he called The Unified Theory of
Matter.
If this were the only path to salvation I would have not the
slightest chance!

Hatha Yoga is the art of observing and obeying the laws of physical
nature - chiefly one's own body - until one sees the divine workings in all
their mystery and glory. This is for the sensation type individuals. I
sometimes find this in the eyes of a friend who has the genius of seeing
the human body as the temple of God and I am near enough to the art to be
overwhelmed by the appreciation of the physical beauty of another person.
But I don't have the physical endurance to travel that side of the mountain
any farther than I managed the Matterhorn years ago in Switzerland. Hatha
yoga is the most popular of the arts in the western world and most people
identify yoga with the art of physical control of the body.

Raja Yoga, the 'Royal Yoga' is for intuitives and consists of
'listening' in meditation until one begins to hear the divine music or
hears-sees-intuits the Splendor of God. Of course this is not any ordinary
audible hearing but 'hearing ' the reality in back of every sound or sight
or impression. One is promised the sound as of bells, then of the most
sublime music, then an indescribable harmony, then the sound of the
universe itself. I see this shining in the eyes of intuitives, more often a
woman than a man, and suffer with that individual in trying to find any
possible expression of the vision in our earth-bound culture and language.

Then to Bhakti yoga which has touched me so deeply and seems a
language so well suited for the impasse we find ourselves in now. This is
for the feeling type, that orphan faculty which the west finds so puzzling.
The art of Bhakti consists of so simple a process that it seems near
incomprehensible; but that is only because of our rudimentary development
of the feeling function itself. One is instructed to chose a person - man,
woman, someone known personally to you, or a historical figure - and pour
out one's love for that individual with no intention of any feeling being
returned. Most of the instructions are what NOT to do; one must not pester
the recipient of one's love, expect anything in reply, presume a
friendship, expect any sexual response, or fantasy any extension of that
love into the time-space world. It is the simplest form of love - simply
to BE.
I have been on both sides of this Indian exchange and found each to be
the most profound experience of my life.
Indian Bhakti teachers, with remarkable generosity, often point out
Jesus Christ as the greatest of the Bhakti masters.

And that is the heart of the matter, to BE. Our language and customs
are so far from this understanding that it is all but impossible for a
westerner to embrace such a discipline. So often when I speak of the
possibility of being, the reply is, "Yes, but what do I DO"? There is one
suggestion of differentiation in our language (how one longs for a language
as rich as Sanskrit!) which offers a clue. We do use two terms, to love,
and to fall in love. If one can follow this possibility we can observe two
levels of love; to love as applicable to loving another person for the
attributes of that person, his/her characteristics, likes, dislikes,
virtues, faults, idiosyncrasies. This is cool love, human in dimensions,
durable and lending itself to long term relationships. It is the stable
stuff of marriage, friendship and long term commitments.
To fall in love is an abyss of ecstasy and bewilderment that is far
beyond our western understanding. It is nothing less than seeing the image
of God in the form of another person and being transfixed by a splendor
beyond our comprehension. The art of falling in love is recent in human
experience, probably not much known before the advent of our own modern
age. It is still not known, or honored, in the eastern world except as
they drink up our customs and ideals by the sudden deluge of the
information age. It is astonishing to see how quickly an easterner takes
on western characteristics - both good and bad - as he adopts the English
language and western customs. Only one generation is required to turn a
traditional easterner into a jeans-clad ambitious youth clambering to get
to America where the streets are paved with gold.
So, what is the strange love required of the Bhakti yogi? It is very
much akin to our romantic love, or falling in love. I am inclined to think
that our capacity to fall in love is a new faculty of religious
comprehension for which we have so little insight as to be catastrophic.
We naively presume that falling in love is the ideal preparation for
marriage, when the facts are that virtually no ordinary human arrangement
can hold the immense power of the Divine Love which has fallen upon us.
Perhaps romantic love, falling in love, appeared when our traditional
religious forms began to lose their power to mediate the Splendor of God
for us. To ask another fallible human being to carry this splendor is to
ask the household wiring of our ordinary life to carry the hundred thousand
volt power of the Vision of Heaven.
I observed traditional Indian youths going to the temples frequently,
sitting in yoga position before an image of God, tremble with the power of
the experience, then go about their daily work and family without being
tempted to ask that vast impersonal experience of a mortal human.
Probably the most volatile problem our modern world faces is what to
do with the uncontrollable power of the love that is greater than any
individual. Little wonder that romantic love, that lightning bolt that
falls from the heavens, when laid at the feet of a mortal human , fails
both persons involved. The origin of the term Honeymoon implies that it
lasts for a month.
But what about 'reality'?
Bhakti yoga offers a possibility of investing the great love in a way
which can support it and thus leave our human love to a realm which is
appropriate for it. To mix the two is a sure program for disillusionment
and bitter disappointment.
All models prove inadequate finally, and it must be admitted that all
loves are the same love - of divine origin ; but this is a rare experience
to be found only after the most careful differentiation. Freud was right:
everything depends on sex as the origin of its power: however, he declined
ever to define his term, perhaps in humility at the power of it. He might
have been better understood if he had used the term Love. But it is a rare
individual who has earned the right to this Unitive vision.

Later
Some thoughts,
'In Love' seems to be fate's retribution for our having been nearly
bankrupted in our religious life. In our frantic effort for freedom and
independence we have severed virtually every tie to anything larger than our
own ego structure. In our cry for freedom we have accomplished only
loneliness. 'In Love' is the return of our abandoned religious life in
virtually the only form available to us - the sudden eruption of the
Splendor of God in another human being. We have grown past any of the
traditional forms of experiencing God; only the immediacy of another human
being seems able to touch our isolation. Old teachings and proverbs warned
us that God would reappear in the last place we would expect to find Him.
An eruption of so much power is also the circumstances for near
incineration and we are thrust into that agony of crucifixion which we
thought we had superseded long ago.
The experience of 'In Love' also seems a device of God for singling
out those rare individuals who are destined for a higher level of
consciousness than known to ordinary man. One vision of the Splendor of
God in any form is enough to annihilate the ordinary ego consciousness that
we commonly live. It would seem that the only vulnerable place where ego
consciousness can be challenged is in this incinerating vision of Love.
It still hangs in the balance whether this is the next great step in
evolution or whether it is a last frantic effort of fate trying to recall
mankind to his proper place in the universe.

© 2000 Robert A. Johnson

This work is not to be published, or sold without the Author's written permission.

Our thanks to Robert A. Johnson for sharing this previously unpublished work with us.

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