The Road to Devotion Starts Here

At the roots of whatsoever devotion dwells love. And, love indeed is unconditional no matter what you are made to believe.

The whole concept of devotion and dedication towards a thing, person, or place collapses when one tends to confuse the term love in the obscurity of what I call, a fogged mind; the impaired vision when you drive on a cold winter morning with low visibility and poor AQI. 

When one tends to like too much of something, he instinctively considers it as his love for that thing, person, or place without asking himself if that liking is compulsive or conscious. 

Anything compulsive can never fall in the bandwidth of love, unlike the intense fondness towards anything. The soul of love, thus, does not lie in the compulsion, but in the conscience that is almost always ignored. Affection without complete consciousness doesn’t make one choose something but makes him the chosen one. One not becomes the player of the game but gets played instead by his unconscious mind. He becomes the puppet of an external stimulus (emotions in most cases) and falls into the compulsion of fondness to gain pleasure from it. He becomes so captivated by a particular kind of pleasure that it ultimately becomes a compulsion to act upon it, with the sole purpose of extracting the pleasure from it. This can be anything but love  that doesn’t intend to extract but bestow.

Falling into prejudice is what we have been trained for since the beginning of our existence in this world. Defeating prejudices to clear the vision is the first step toward a conscious life. The thirst of an empty mind is much more painful than the hunger our stomach feels in absence of food. All our senses are tirelessly working to the outer self in the quest of fulfilling the thirst of the mind, failing to understand that it needs to work inwardly to satiate it. This misconception lays the foundation of one’s ‘Give & Take’ habit with people around him. Everything he does is to gain something and that becomes his primary goal; the priority, the driving force that dynamisms him to act, to give and, to love. The mind keeps on working, focused on the results it seeks. Every action of his is based on the rules of a fruitful extraction. The hunt for pleasure to defeat the thirst of an unconscious mind becomes the sole purpose of life. But, nothing seems to quench the thirst and the terrible, overwhelming outward journey continues till death without even experiencing the ounces of pure bliss. This is where he fails as the supreme creation of the cosmos. He gives and gives and gives, not because giving is his true nature but he gives because he desires to gain something out of it. Here comes the business of ‘Give & Take’ in role. Most of the unconscious relationships are based upon this. The day he stops receiving is the day he stops giving. The business of a relationship collapses and he wonders what went wrong. Any business is bound to fail when there is a discrepancy between demand and supply. If two people fail to keep a balance between the both, the whole existence of the relationship fails for them. The fine line upon which this ‘Give & Take’ concept runs, is a double-edged knife and they continue to walk on it all their lives in pursuit of a pleasure that never satiates their soul. He begs pleasure from the other one, misapprehending it as happiness. He forgets that happiness can never be demanded or taken but can only be given. The much-sought happiness lies at the heart of giving and not taking. That’s the happiness a conscious mind needs to quench its thirst and not the garbage-fill of begged pleasure. Each one of us who is looking to fulfill the mind with pleasure and not happiness gets lonely at his heart. The beginning of any devotion starts exactly at the point of taking the responsibility of searching the happiness at his own end. That’s the integrity, the foundation, upon which he builds castles of a fulfilling life with others. The more he seeks others to carry the burden of his thirsty mind, the more he falls into the trap of ‘Give & Take’ business. Here should the integrity come into play. Integrity is not making anyone else the victim or the burden-bearer of your desires. Integrity is being consciously whole inside-out and exchanging mutual happiness. Integrity is not to act selfishly in a quest to extract pleasure out of the other one to banish your hungry demons. Happiness lies in a place just opposite to this. The better one learns to give without asking for anything in return, the more he fills his soul with exactly what it needs; bliss. That starts the first step of devotion that leads to a content and conscious life. 

- A