The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 3/Para-Bhakti or Supreme Devotion/The God of Love is His Own Proof
CHAPTER VIII
THE GOD OF LOVE IS HIS OWN PROOF
What is the ideal of the lover who has quite passed beyond the idea of
selfishness, of bartering and bargaining, and who knows no fear? Even to the
great God such a man will say, "I will give You my all, and I do not want
anything from You; indeed there is nothing that I can call my own." When a
man has acquired this conviction, his ideal becomes one of perfect love, one
of perfect fearlessness of love. The highest ideal of such a person has no
narrowness of particularity about it; it is love universal, love without
limits and bonds, love itself, absolute love. This grand ideal of the
religion of love is worshipped and loved absolutely as such without the aid
of any symbols or suggestions. This is the highest form of Para-Bhakti — the
worship of such an all-comprehending ideal as the ideal; all the other forms
of Bhakti are only stages on the way to reach it.
All our failures and all our successes in following the religion of love are
on the road to the realisation of that one ideal. Object after object is
taken up, and the inner ideal is successively projected on them all; and all
such external objects are found inadequate as exponents of the
ever-expanding inner ideal and are naturally rejected one after another. At
last the aspirant begins to think that it is vain to try to realise the
ideal in external objects, that all external objects are as nothing when
compared with the ideal itself; and, in course of time, he acquires the
power of realising the highest and the most generalised abstract ideal
entirely as an abstraction that is to him quite alive and real. When the
devotee has reached this point, he is no more impelled to ask whether God
can be demonstrated or not, whether He is omnipotent and omniscient or not.
To him He is only the God of Love; He is the highest ideal of love, and that
is sufficient for all his purposes. He, as love, is self-evident. It
requires no proofs to demonstrate the existence of the beloved to the lover.
The magistrate-Gods of other forms of religion may require a good deal of
proof prove Them, but the Bhakta does not and cannot think of such Gods at
all. To him God exists entirely as love. "None, O beloved, loves the husband
for the husband's sake, but it is for the sake of the Self who is in the
husband that the husband is loved; none, O beloved, loves the wife for the
wife's sake, but it is for the sake of the Self who is in the wife that the
wife is loved."
It is said by some that selfishness is the only motive power in regard to
all human activities. That also is love lowered by being particularised.
When I think of myself as comprehending the Universal, there can surely be
no selfishness in me; but when I, by mistake, think that I am a little
something, my love becomes particularized and narrowed. The mistake consists
in making the sphere of love narrow and contracted. All things in the
universe are of divine origin and deserve to be loved; it has, however, to
be borne in mind that the love of the whole includes the love of the parts.
This whole is the God of the Bhaktas, and all the other Gods, Fathers in
Heaven, or Rulers, or Creators, and all theories and doctrines and books
have no purpose and no meaning for them, seeing that they have through their
supreme love and devotion risen above those things altogether. When the
heart is purified and cleansed and filled to the brim with the divine nectar
of love, all other ideas of God become simply puerile and are rejected as
being inadequate or unworthy. Such is indeed the power of Para-Bhakti or
Supreme Love; and the perfected Bhakta no more goes to see God in temples
and churches; he knows no place where he will not find Him. He finds Him in
the temple as well as out of the temple, he finds Him in the saint's
saintliness as well as in the wicked man's wickedness, because he has Him
already seated in glory in his own heart as the one Almighty
inextinguishable Light of Love which is ever shining and eternally present.