Bhakthi is the Lamp

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Today’s food for thought is:

"Bhakthi is the lamp which destroys the darkness called grief"

Here you will find two sets of words:

Bhakthi - Grief

Lamp - Darkness

The root word of bhakthi is “Bhaj” which means “to be attached to God”.Bhakthi is also love for love sake, there are no expectations there.

On the other hand grief is all about owning or being owned. When we own something and when we lose it, we grieve. When we are being owned by desires and when it is not fulfilled, we grieve.

When we put the two together ie. bhakthi and grief, it cannot coexist, when one enters the other, leaves. That is why I have compared bhakthi to a lamp. Lamp needs oil, wick; oil is the fuel which is needed all the time for the wick to burn and illuminate isn’t it.In the lamp, oil is the mental state of the bhaktha and wick is the sadana the combination of the two alone can bring about bhakthi in a person isn’t it? A person has to be in a proper mental state of mind, must be prepared to walk the path of bhakthi otherwise all his effort in sadana will be only a ritual and not amount to bhakthi. Likewise if the person has the mental state to follow the path, but has no inner discipline then in spite of having the temperament he/she cannot walk in the path of bhakthi. Hence both the ingredients must be present, one without the other is rendered useless like a lamp without oil or wick.

A bhaktha who walks the path will realize that with bhakthi as the lamp when he walks into a room like the dissipating darkness his grief will also dissipate. How? A bhaktha when engrossed in bhakthi will have only love and no expectations from God. He has no attachment to any object or being. He expects nothing, he feels nothing, he fears nothing. He has no disappointment, frustration or failure or loss. Therefore he has no grief.

How can grief manifest when one is immersed in the joy of bhakthi, all that he feels is just divine bliss.

Grief is mental creation. It will manifest only when a person is attached to something or someone. So how do we remove this ?

1. When the mind is freed from such attachments and selfish acts, divine bliss fills in like air filling up in a balloon.

2. Hatred for none - when you exercise love then hate will also exist in the mind, when you remove hate it will remove love, if you remove love it will remove hate, thereby facilitating non attachments to person or object. So no attachment, no hatred.

3. Grief is removed when you do not put yourself in front of the deeds that you do. Grief will manifest only when the ahankara is there. The self importance overtakes the deed that you do then it will always end up in sadness, because ego has the quality called dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction leads to overperformance; overperformance leads to sadness and grief.

So in conclusion I would say, to keep away from grief, burn the lamp of bhakthi and walk down the path of life to enjoy the blissful love of Ambal.