The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda/Volume 3/Para-Bhakti or Supreme Devotion/Conclusion
CHAPTER X
CONCLUSION
When this highest ideal of love is reached, philosophy is thrown away; who
will then care for it? Freedom, Salvation, Nirvâna — all are thrown away;
who cares to become free while in the enjoyment of divine love? "Lord, I do
not want wealth, nor friends, nor beauty, nor learning, nor even freedom;
let me be born again and again, and be Thou ever my Love. Be Thou ever and
ever my Love." "Who cares to become sugar?" says the Bhakta, "I want to
taste sugar." Who will then desire to become free and one with God? "I may
know that I am He; yet will I take myself away from Him and become
different, so that I may enjoy the Beloved." That is what the Bhakta says.
Love for love's sake is his highest enjoyment. Who will not be bound hand
and foot a thousand times over to enjoy the Beloved? No Bhakta cares for
anything except love, except to love and to be loved. His unworldly love is
like the tide rushing up the river; this lover goes up the river against the
current. The world calls him mad I know one whom the world used to call mad,
and this was his answer: "My friends, the whole world is a lunatic asylum.
Some are mad after worldly love, some after name, some after fame, some
after money, some after salvation and going to heaven. In this big lunatic
asylum I am also mad, I am mad after God. If you are mad after money, I am
mad after God. You are mad; so am I. I think my madness is after all the
best." The true Bhakta's love is this burning madness before which
everything else vanishes for him. The whole universe is to him full of love
and love alone; that is how it seems to the lover. So when a man has this
love in him, he becomes eternally blessed, eternally happy. This blessed
madness of divine love alone can cure for ever the disease of the world that
is in us. With desire, selfishness has vanished. He has drawn near to God,
he has thrown off all those vain desires of which he was full before.
We all have to begin as dualists in the religion of love. God is to us a
separate Being, and we feel ourselves to be separate beings also. Love then
comes in the middle, and man begins to approach God, and God also comes
nearer and nearer to man. Man takes up all the various relationships of
life, as father, as mother, as son, as friend, as master, as lover, and
projects them on his ideal of love, on his God. To him God exists as all
these, and the last point of his progress is reached when he feels that he
has become absolutely merged in the object of his worship. We all begin with
love for ourselves, and the unfair claims of the little self make even love
selfish. At last, however, comes the full blaze of light, in which this
little self is seen to have become one with the Infinite. Man himself is
transfigured in the presence of this Light of Love, and he realises at last
the beautiful and inspiring truth that Love, the Lover, and the Beloved are
One.