How do we know what love is? Do we know it just by saying it?

A feeling? Can you describe the feeling clearly?

I think we know the feeling before we can really understand it and not be afraid of it.

I can’t and I think that’s why poetry gets so elaborate. People struggle with describing it.

According to bhakti yoga, you can’t describe love easily, because it is not something you are meant to understand really, not in any sort of “thinking” sense.

You don’t need to know why a baby bonds with their mother, but you know they would not live very long without it. Exactly. The student of bhakti yoga sees their devotional practice in the same way as you describe the mother and child relationship.

It’s why you act without thinking when a loved one is in danger? It is indeed why.

So the reason they have their prayers and rituals and charitable work is a way to express the love and feel it stronger. You either embrace love or distract yourself from it, at least in a certain way of seeing things.

Maybe that is why new couples fight a lot. It’s not considered a failure of devotion even if the bhakti follower feels at odds with the object of their devotion. The more powerful ones love for the divine, the more meaningful their experiences and reactions will be. One of India’s most recent acknowledged avatars, a human being who was considered to be a living embodiment of one of these divine spirits or ideals, used to have long animated conversations with a statue of Kali. He could describe vividly his sense of his relationship with her and how he felt she would see any particular issue. So his messages weren’t so much preaching a dogma as answering from his heart the question, “What would Kali do?”

The follower of bhakti or devotion seeks the state of “being in love” with the object of their devotion, even to the point that it occupies their attention in mundane matters. The bhakti knows their devotion has grown when even while just eating breakfast and reading the newspaper their awareness of the divine occurs to them. Their practices use the human social circuitry to incorporate what might be seen as inhuman or more than human presence in the world.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~