Daily Offerings from Alokda

Knowledge, love and will are the three mystic keys hidden in our nature which can, if applied steadily with faith and in the right way, open the doors of the Supreme Divine Mystery in us. Of these, bhakti is indeed the simplest and the most direct since the Divine Presence dwells in the heart of man and hence is most easily accessed by the power of love. In fact, bhakti is nothing else but the turning of love in the human heart towards its Divine Origin.

Bhakti, very simply is, to take joy in the Divine. It may start with a Name, a Form, a Manifestation of the Divine. The bhakta finds joy in It. But slowly this universalises until he finds the Divine in all names, all forms and the entire Manifestation. Each element of creation begins to yield the Divine element within it until the Divine Beloved is felt and seen everywhere and in everything. Each name and form become a mask, some beautiful, some terrible, yet nevertheless a mask of the Divine who inhibits It and shines through it. Universal love and compassion, maitri-karuna, become the hallmark of the bhakta. Even as the Divine whom he adores, the bhakta is a friend to all creatures and hence he is ever engaged in doing good to all.

The core of bhakti is love, its master movement is love and surrender. Love may start with longing bearing the stamp of the ego at first with all the movements to which the human vital is prone including pride and possession, joy of union and the pain of separation or even dark emotions such as fear and jealousy and anger thrown upon the Divine. But sooner or later these get purified by the Divine touch and a sacred longing that waits upon the Lord, an adoration, the wish to serve the Divine begins to replace the lower emotions. Love changes into sweet intimacy, a constant nearness and eventually a growing union and identity with the Divine.

Surrender may start with the will to offer something of oneself, – money, work, life to the Divine. It may start with offering that which one has in excess, with the desire self-eyeing upon the fruits of this offering or else the ego diluting and polluting the offering by making claims and demands from the Divine, or tainted with pride and ambition of being an instrument or someone special to the Lord. The Divine touch purifies these too until the giving and offering is for the joy of giving with no other demand except the nearness of the Divine and the joy of His service. Eventually all life becomes a ceaseless worship and all one is and has and does is given to the Divine, for His joy, for His work and service.

The actual method of bhakti is cannot be systematised just as love cannot be turned into a mechanical routine or a soulless ritual. Yet in the early stages of the soul’s contact with the Divine these outer forms of rituals and worship, bahya pooja, may have its place. But as the soul grows and our consciousness deepens and we become aware of our subjective self through the inner being, then the flame of bhakti grows quietly in our inner self, often unseen and unrecognized to the outer eye of man until one day the flame bursts through the mask, burns the covering and trappings of the ego and all all discloses the unseen Beloved. It finds joy in taking and hearing the Name of the Lord, reading and meditating upon Him, speaking and listening about Him, thinking of Him, serving Him, living for Him and according to His Will.

Bhakti is all about love for the Divine, the joy of the love, the self-forgetfulness and the new self-finding of oneself in the Divine, the union that comes through the force of love and as a consequence of this union, a progressive transformation of the bhakta into the being and nature of the Divine, samipya, sayujya, sadharmya gati. But unlike the path of knowledge, love is not a monotone of self-absorption in the Self, nor like the path of works, a simple and single-hued relationship with the Divine of the servant and worker with the Divine as Master. Instead, we see here a manifold relationship with the Divine that breaks every barrier of distance until all in us belongs to God and exists only for His joy and His service and His sake. Sri Aurobindo reveals to us:

‘Discipleship to God the Teacher, sonship to God the Father, tenderness of God the Mother, clasp of the hand of the divine Friend, laughter and sport with our Comrade and boy Playfellow, blissful servitude to God the Master, rapturous love of our divine Paramour, these are the seven beatitudes of life in the human body. Canst thou unite all these in a single supreme and rainbow-hued relation? Then hast thou no need of any heaven and thou exceedest the emancipation of the Adwaitin.’

Since love and surrender to the Divine Mother are the central keys to the transformation in the Supramental Yoga, therefore true bhakti and self-giving are its master movement. Love is indeed the key, the crowning movement, the swiftest way and the easiest means to the fulfilment of the integral yoga. The easiest means to develop it is to open to the Mother, call the Mother, pray to the Mother, love the Mother, think of the Mother, serve the Mother, read and dwell upon their books especially Savitri along with Prayers and Meditations. For indeed, as the Mother says, ‘Consciousness has built the worlds but Love is its saviour’.

Alok Pandey

A New Age has dawned upon the horizons of humanity and few will deny it. Yes we can debate whether it is the newest of the new or simply a repetition of the old ‘new ages’ that have repeatedly dawned upon man, only to end in yet another twilight and the ambiguous Night. We may also argue whether it is something ‘positive’, a turn of humanity for better or it is something that is evil, a loss of degradation of values for the worse. Of course, each age of humanity brings its own set of values and is conditioned by it. These values, the ways of living peculiar to an Age become a sort of comfort zone for the society conditioned by it. The more strongly we are conditioned as in a certain rigid and narrow doctrine, religions and ideological groups, the more there is the tendency to regard change as evil. Similarly, the more a society is governed by purely external frames of behavior and less by the spirit behind it, the more it resists change. When the focus is on the spirit, then we can understand that the same spirit can clothe itself in different forms and yet remain alive and a vibrant dynamic influence on humanity. But when the focus is only on the form, the externalities, the conformism of common behavior rather than conformism of ideas and still deeper of the divine essence in humanity that clothes itself in different ideas, then the change is shunned, denied, opposed or forcibly suppressed and violently crushed.

But the change imposes itself for the change is again not just a change of external way of living, – which is incidental, but a change of poise of the spirit that governs humanity. It finds its way as a river its path towards the sea. And if we have to look somewhere for the change then it has to be found in this spirit of humanity rather than in outer behavior and patterns of life. The change in outer patterns is an after-effect, the result and not the cause, the rearrangement of things on the shore or the land after a giant tidal wave or massive winds have flown past. The winds break many old structures, the giant wave takes back into the sea many shells lying on the shore and give back some new ones. So too after the tornado has passed away, a clearing of the debris follows and then, new colonies of plants and people, new arrangements of relationships emerge. Until the whole process is over, there is confusion, the blinding of our vision, the breakage and the wreckage, rather than buildings and institutions of a new hope. But meanwhile there is often a rainbow phase that colours our vision, makes us momentarily forget the fury and fills our eyes with hope and renewed charm. But the rainbow is only a sign of the gods, the change upon earth comes afterwards through much labour and effort. We seem to be passing through such a rainbow phase now. Like the honeymoon of the newly wed it is full of happiness and charm and dreams of the new creation yet to arrive. Nevertheless for the new relationship to endure and succeed a phase of evolutionary struggle must follow, a phase where past atavism, subconscious habits, the pull of the old will assert itself until the new equation between heaven and earth has been discovered and humanity settled in the new poise. Such is the phase of evolutionary struggle that we are now going through and will go through for quite some time until the New has definitively conquered, transformed and integrated the old.

Yet, it is precisely here that a word of caution is needed.

None can deny that something has changed and fundamentally changed in the earth and humanity since 1960. A seeking for new things, for a new adventure, for new experiments has begun. The old, stable theories, paradigms, systems, constructs, institutions are being broken and set aside or are undergoing an enlargement and change so as to accommodate and prepare for a new kind of thought and a new way of life. But it is precisely here that a word of caution is needed. All that is off-beat and in-fashion is not necessarily ‘new’ even though it may indirectly help in ushering the New Age. Very often it is like a distraction that helps to dislodge the mind from being glued to past formation. But the passage can be perilous too for the mind loosing the safe anchor of the old may suddenly sink into a bog and mire worse than the immediate darkness of the past. Renouncing the human way it may gravitate towards animality instead of swimming upwards towards divinity. The prison bars of Reason removed and the light of intuition not yet dawned, it may rush blindly towards the precipice driven by infra-rational forces that may imitate the supra-rational.

Nor is the New Age served on a platter, ready to eat as some fast food. It is not a rainbow dream sold to us for a shilling. There are many such dreams which are flooding the market in times of transition that we live in. These dreams come as various products as well as various ready-to-satisfy inner experiences. Momentarily, some of them, may serve as a bridge between the Earth and the Beyond. But soon enough they fade away under the debris and smoke of the old world whose destruction is still under way. When this happens there is a disillusionment, a disbelief in the New Age itself. There is then a tendency to fall back on the ‘old, tried and tested’ ways.

The real cause of the confusion is that we are in transition. The old ways do not work well any more since their time is over. And the new is yet to be discovered. Meanwhile our mind and heart rush at every glimmer and mistake it for the New Light. What we forget is that even when the Light has dawned we still have to emerge out of our prison-homes, remove the thick draperies of Ignorance, cleanse our eyes of the debris that is flying around and then dare to step out into the vast to discover the true and the Beautiful.

The New Consciousness is not ready-to-eat dish. It is a new ingredient, a new element that has been added just as fire was one day discovered and added to man’s life. This discovery did not automatically lead to an application of the presence of Fire in many ways that have changed our life. The first humans probably simply felt ‘awe and fear’. The Fire was there, born amidst man, but its meaning and power and full possibilities were yet unborn, waiting for our effort.

So too, now, the New Consciousness, the Supramental Force is there upon earth and activated in humanity. Now we have to slowly learn to receive it rightly. Perhaps some may get burnt in the process as the discoverers of fire might have been. But slowly as man grows in this new experience he will be led and guided over a period of time wherein he will learn to change his individual and collective life, to reorganize his dealings with himself and the world, to readjust the balance and equation with inner and outer nature. This is what’s being worked out slowly but steadily and assuredly in the Divine laboratory called Earth and within the ‘Divine reactors’ called man. The Divine experiment is meanwhile going on and extending itself so that more and more bodies and souls open to this ‘New element’ and integrate it with their life.

Till then the labour and the effort, the struggle between the old and the new will be there. It is only when the price is fully paid and our ego-bound individuality drops off and desire driven nightmare cease, to be that we shall truly see, live and be the Dream Divine.

Alok Pandey

The Mother’s Presence is often first felt as a warmth and sweetness in our heart, also as a growing Peace in all our members spreading from the heart.

Later it changes into Joy, the Joy of loving Her and Serving Her, the joy of simply belonging to Her, the Joy of surrender to Her, the joy of knowing a little of what She chooses to reveal of Her infinite Mystery, the joy of Her countless wonders disclosing before our eyes, the joy of simply reading and writing about Her and many more things that surpass our thought and feelings.

I am sure She grants all sincere prayers, and for each one of us a time is marked when Her Presence will draw near and close and intimate until She makes us one with Her Being and one with Her Substance.

Personally I have found it much easier to be in contact with Her through Service offered at Her Feet, reading Savitri and Prayers and Meditations, loving Her in my heart.

When you feel an aspiration for closeness, and a flower of Love to Her has blossomed in your heart, it is itself a sign that She is close, very close, even when our outer consciousness does not necessarily feel Her.

Alok Pandey