Worldly usages are also to be recognised until then, but eating and other necessary bodily activities will remain as long as the body is retained.
If any doubt remains as to the nature of the love of which the Narada Sutra treats, as to whether it refers to human passion or that other wonderful attribute, divine in its nature, which man can make manifest within himself, Sutra 7 sets this at rest. The very nature of this Love is renunciation.
Love may be divided threefold.
1. Where the only motive is to receive pleasure—to take all and give nothing.
2. Where there is exchange, and the loving depends upon being loved—“I love Thee because Thou lovest me.”
3. Where there is unconditional devotion, the giving everything and seeking nothing, no recognition, no return.
In the first category must be placed the sensualist; in the second, the ordinary human love between men and women, or between friends; sometimes this is dashed with some small fragrance of the third. He who holds only the third is the true Bhakta. He alone stands on the verge of himself, being merged entirely in Love—in Deity—and in the non-recognition anywhere of “I” and “thou.” To him it is all “I” or all “Thou,” with no division either between himself and others, or between himself and God.
If any doubt remains as to the nature of the love of which the Narada Sutra treats, as to whether it refers to human passion or that other wonderful attribute, divine in its nature, which man can make manifest within himself, Sutra 7 sets this at rest. The very nature of this Love is renunciation.
Love may be divided threefold.
1. Where the only motive is to receive pleasure—to take all and give nothing.
2. Where there is exchange, and the loving depends upon being loved—“I love Thee because Thou lovest me.”
3. Where there is unconditional devotion, the giving everything and seeking nothing, no recognition, no return.
In the first category must be placed the sensualist; in the second, the ordinary human love between men and women, or between friends; sometimes this is dashed with some small fragrance of the third. He who holds only the third is the true Bhakta. He alone stands on the verge of himself, being merged entirely in Love—in Deity—and in the non-recognition anywhere of “I” and “thou.” To him it is all “I” or all “Thou,” with no division either between himself and others, or between himself and God.
Heaven — as long as he has a coin to spend, a loaf to divide or a coat to give. And it will remain with him until the end. Care of the body must not be ignored, and the degree of advance towards true Knowledge and Love depends upon the attitude of the mind, as to whether the body be looked upon as “my body” or merely as “this body.” Perfect chastity and the intensely positive state which is produced by constant control of all angry, envious, ambitious or sensuous thoughts reacts upon the physical frame. There is no loss of force in nature. The will turned back from dissipating itself upon these external states reasserts itself in a superior manifestation as ojas — power, vigour, fire, splendour, applied to everything that is undertaken. By ojas, the bhakta, the jnani and the tapaswi — the lover of God, the man who has attained perfect discernment, and the ascetic — defy alike the biting winds and snows of the mountain height and the scorching sun of the plains and deserts.