The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 3/Para-Bhakti or Supreme Devotion/The Preparatory Renunciation
CHAPTER I
THE PREPARATORY RENUNCIATION
We have now finished the consideration of what may be called the preparatory
Bhakti, and are entering on the study of the Parâ-Bhakti or supreme
devotion. We have to speak of a preparation to the practice of this
Para-Bhakti. All such preparations are intended only for the purification of
the soul. The repetition of names, the rituals, the forms, and the symbols,
all these various things are for the purification of the soul. The greatest
purifier among all such things, a purifier without which no one can enter
the regions of this higher devotion (Para-Bhakti), is renunciation. This
frightens many; yet, without it, there cannot be any spiritual growth. In
all our Yogas this renunciation is necessary. This is the stepping-stone and
the real centre and the real heart of all spiritual culture — renunciation.
This is religion — renunciation.
When the human soul draws back from the things of the world and tries to go
into deeper things; when man, the spirit which has here somehow become
concretised and materialised, understands that he is thereby going to be
destroyed and to be reduced almost into mere matter, and turns his face away
from matter — then begins renunciation, then begins real spiritual growth.
The Karma-Yogi's renunciation is in the shape of giving up all the fruits of
his action; he is not attached to the results of his labour; he does not
care for any reward here or hereafter. The Râja-Yogi knows that the whole of
nature is intended for the soul to acquire experience, and that the result
of all the experiences of the soul is for it to become aware of its eternal
separateness from nature. The human soul has to understand and realise that
it has been spirit, and not matter, through eternity, and that this
conjunction of it with matter is and can be only for a time. The Raja-Yogi
learns the lesson of renunciation through his own experience of nature. The
Jnâna-Yogi has the harshest of all renunciations to go through, as he has to
realise from the very first that the whole of this solid-looking nature is
all an illusion. He has to understand that all that is any kind of
manifestation of power in nature belongs to the soul, and not to nature. He
has to know from the very start that all knowledge and all experience are in
the soul and not in nature; so he has at once and by the sheer force of
rational conviction to tear himself away from all bondage to nature. He lets
nature and all that belongs to her go, he lets them vanish and tries to
stand alone!
Of all renunciations, the most natural, so to say, is that of the
Bhakti-Yogi. Here there is no violence, nothing to give up, nothing to tear
off, as it were, from ourselves, nothing from which we have violently to
separate ourselves. The Bhakta's renunciation is easy, smooth flowing, and
as natural as the things around us. We see the manifestation of this sort of
renunciation, although more or less in the form of caricatures, every day
around us. A man begins to love a woman; after a while he loves another, and
the first woman he lets go. She drops put of his mind smoothly, gently,
without his feeling the want of her at all. A woman loves a man; she then
begins to love another man, and the first one drops off from her mind quite
naturally. A man loves his own city, then he begins to love his country, and
the intense love for his little city drops off smoothly, naturally. Again, a
man learns to love the whole world; his love for his country, his intense,
fanatical patriotism drops off without hurting him, without any
manifestation of violence. An uncultured man loves the pleasures of the
senses intensely; as he becomes cultured, he begins to love intellectual
pleasures, and his sense-enjoyments become less and less. No man can enjoy a
meal with the same gusto or pleasure as a dog or a wolf, but those pleasures
which a man gets from intellectual experiences and achievements, the dog can
never enjoy. At first, pleasure is in association with the lowest senses;
but as soon as an animal reaches a higher plane of existence, the lower kind
of pleasures becomes less intense. In human society, the nearer the man is
to the animal, the stronger is his pleasure in the senses; and the higher
and the more cultured the man is, the greater is his pleasure in
intellectual and such other finer pursuits. So when a man gets even higher
than the plane of the intellect, higher than that of mere thought, when he
gets to the plane of spirituality and of divine inspiration, he finds there
a state of bliss, compared with which all the pleasures of the senses, or
even of the intellect, are as nothing. When the moon shines brightly, all
the stars become dim; and when the sun shines, the moon herself becomes dim.
The renunciation necessary for the attainment of Bhakti is not obtained by
killing anything, but just comes in as naturally as in the presence of an
increasingly stronger light, the less intense ones become dimmer and dimmer
until they vanish away completely. So this love of the pleasures of the
senses and of the intellect is all made dim and thrown aside and cast into
the shade by the love of God Himself.
That love of God grows and assumes a form which is called Para-Bhakti or
supreme devotion. Forms vanish, rituals fly away, books are superseded;
images, temples, churches, religions and sects, countries and nationalities
— all these little limitations and bondages fall off by their own nature
from him who knows this love of God. Nothing remains to bind him or fetter
his freedom. A ship, all of a sudden, comes near a magnetic rock, and its
iron bolts and bars are all attracted and drawn out, and the planks get
loosened and freely float on the water. Divine grace thus loosens the
binding bolts and bars of the soul, and it becomes free. So in this
renunciation auxiliary to devotion, there is no harshness, no dryness no
struggle, nor repression nor suppression. The Bhakta has not to suppress any
single one of his emotions, he only strives to intensify them and direct
them to God.