A devotee requested that Baba elaborate on bhakti yoga — the path of devotional practices. Baba said:
An easier way to progress on the Path and ultimately attain eternal bliss is bhakti yoga. It is an easy method in comparison with karma yoga, but it requires firm determination. There should be only one firm resolve to attain God, and devotions offered with that firm determination will be fruitful. Devotion is not gained by crying out with some selfish motive: “O God, give me a wife, give me a son, give me wealth … let honors flow to me!” Such “devotion” is insipid and dry, and quite empty.
Devotion should be offered with the intense desire to see God — to be one with God. This one-pointed devotion should completely absorb the devotee’s mind. During such devotional practice, there should be no thought of one’s surroundings, one’s relatives or the world at all.
Devotion does not consist in reading holy books all day long or chanting God’s name for hours on end. That is not devotion; it is sheer deceit, a show. The heart should be linked with God. Even five minutes of real devotion without any other thought, with concentration only on God, is the real thing. This sincere devotion gradually creates the thirst to love God, and eventually it results in merging in the Ocean of love divine. The more deeply you concentrate, the more intense will be your devotion and the speedier the result.
Bhakti yoga especially requires aloofness and segregation on the part of the aspirant; it will come naturally in the course of time. As the mind becomes more absorbed in devotion, the more detached it will become from the world and its affairs. This is not the case in karma yoga, where the connection with the world is maintained.
If both bhakti and karma yogas are practiced together, all the better. But it should be in the way which I have described. These two yogas need wholehearted intense longing and selfless devotion to realize God.
-www.lordmeher.org, p1040
Jul/Aug, 1929; Dhulia