Regarding devotion Shankara says: “No doubt, of the means available for liberating ourselves, the most substantial hardware is Bhakti; and identifying ourselves with the Self is called Bhakti.”
Identification is the truest measure of Love. The devotee, forgetting his own individual existence and, in his love, identifying to become one with his beloved Lord, is the culmination of Divine Love. The Vedantic student who is the seeker of the Self, is spiritually obliged to renounced all his abject identification with his matter vestures and to discover his true nature to be the Self.
Only those who are thus capable of identifying themselves with the One unifying Truth that holds together, in its web-of-love, the plurality, can experience, “ME IN THIS FASHION” — in my Cosmic Form.
The three stages in which realisation of Truth comes to man are indicated here when the Lord says, “TO KNOW, TO SEE, AND TO ENTER.” A definite intellectual knowledge of the goal and the path is the beginning of a seeker’s pilgrimage — TO KNOW. Next comes the seeker’s attempt to masticate the ideas intellectually understood through his own personal reflections upon the information which he has already gathered — TO SEE. Having thus ‘known’ and ‘seen’ the goal, thereafter, the seeker, through a process of detachment from the false and attachment to the Real, comes to experience the Truth as no object other than himself — TO ENTER. By the term ‘entering,’ it is also indicated that the fulfilled seeker becomes the very essence of the sought. The dreamer, suffering from the sorrows of the dream, ends it all, when he no more sees, but “enters” the waking-state, himself to become the waker.
HOW? … I SHALL EXPLAIN, SAYS THE LORD AND ADDS:
