of love and supreme sweetness, until the lover breaks through his limitations and loses himself in the being of the Beloved.
When love is deep and intense it is called Bhakti or devotion. In its initial stages devotion is expressed through symbol-worship, supplication before the deities and reverence and allegiance Different stages of devotion to the revealed scriptures, or the pursuit of the Highest through abstract thinking. In its more advanced stages devotion expresses itself as interest in human welfare and the service of humanity, love and reverence for saints and allegiance and obedience to the spiritual Master. These stages have their relative values and relative results. Love for a living Master is a unique stage of devotion, for it eventually gets transformed into Para-bhakti or divine love.
Para-bhakti is not merely intensified Bhakti. It begins where Bhakti ends. At the stage of Para-bhakti, devotion is not only single-minded but is accompanied by extreme restlessness of the Para-bhakti heart and a ceaseless longing to unite with the Beloved. This is followed by lack of interest in one’s own body and its care, isolation from one’s own surroundings, and utter disregard for appearance or criticism, while the divine impulses of attraction to the Beloved become more frequent than ever. This highest phase of love is most fruitful because it has as its object a person who is love incarnate and who can, as the Supreme Beloved, respond to the lover most completely. The purity, sweetness and efficacy of the love which the lover receives from the Master contributes to the insuperable spiritual value of this highest phase of love.
Part III
THE WIPING OUT OF SANSKARAS
LOVE for the Sadguru or Perfect Master is particularly important because it invites contact with the Sadguru. Through such contact the aspirant receives from the Sadguru impressions which have the special potency of undoing other past impressions, thus completely transforming the tenor of his life. Impressions from a Sadguru can transform life The recipient of the impressions may entirely give up old habits of life and ways of thought. Such contact changes and elevates the tone of the most depraved life. A person might have been leading a life of reckless dissipation without ever thinking of anything other than the fulfillment of mundane desires. He might have been caught up in the thirst for possession and power, with no ideal other than that of acquiring and hoarding money and making merry. But even such a person, who cannot by any stretch of imagination think of freedom from earthly fetters, may find that the sanskaras which he catches from his contact with the Sadguru are potent enough to drop forever a curtain on his old manner of thought and existence, and open for him entirely new vistas of a higher and
SANSKARAS
