Devotion is to give yourself in fullness to Love.....

What is there, apart from God? There is nothing, no? So, what we want is we want Him. But yet we don´t want to surrender. We don´t surrender ourselves completely to Him. That´s why there is always incompleteness inside. But to surrender means to say to God, “Lord, I give myself, my body, mind and soul completely to You”. Isn´t that what spirituality is about? That doesn’t mean that you have to leave your family and renounce everything, but live in a detached way. Try to put God always first in your life. Like that, He can work through you. We all want to be somebody, we all want to Realise our Selves, we all want to know who we are in Reality, but with this mind, we will never be able to. We have to calm the mind. We need certain knowledge, yes, to achieve the Divine, to attain Him, but we need devotion, we need bhakti. When bhakti arises inside, we give ourselves completely. Bhakti – devotion is to give yourself in fullness to Love. Like I said in Algarve a few days ago, when you are in love, you always want to be with your beloved, no matter what. You will leave father, mother, everybody, you know. You will fight for your beloved, isn´t that so ? Yes or No? So you know it very well. The real Beloved is God, because He is the only one who is always fresh. His love always renews itself. Whereas all the other loves, they start very fresh, like a beautiful flower, and they, also, fade, the same as the other flowers. You know that. How many times in your life have you fallen in love? You have really fallen in love? And then to rise, it is a very difficult achievement to be made. About surrendering, there is a beautiful story about the flute of Krishna. You know Krishna always holds a flute in his hand, but there is a great story behind it. Everyday Krishna would go in the garden and say to all the plants, “I love you”. The plants were very happy and responded back and said “Krishna, we love You, too”. One day Krishna rushed quickly into the garden very alarmed. He went to the bamboo plant and the bamboo plant asked, “Krishna, what´s wrong with you?” Krishna said “I have something to ask you, but it is very difficult”. The bamboo said “Tell me: if I can, I will give it to you”. So Krishna said “I need your life. I need to cut you”. The bamboo thought for a while and then said “You don´t have any other choice. You don’t have any other way?” Krishna said, “No, no other way”. And it said “OK, I surrender to you”. So Krishna cut the bamboo, made holes in it, and each time, while he was doing that, the bamboo was crying with pain, because he was paining the bamboo so much. Krishna made a beautiful flute out of it. And this flute was with Krishna all the time. 24 hours a day, it was with Krishna. Even the Gopis were jealous of the flute. They said, “Look, Krishna is our Lord, but yet we get to spend only some time with him. He wakes up with you, He sleeps with you, all the time you are with him”. So one day they asked the bamboo, “Tell us the secret of it. What secret do you have, that the Lord treasures you so much?” And the bamboo said “The secret is that I´m empty inside. And the Lord does whatever he wants with me, whenever he wants with me and however he wants with me”. So this is complete surrender: where God can do whatever He wants with you, whenever He wants, as He wants. And for that you don’t need to be scared, you know, you have just to give yourself. And who is yourself in reality? It’s just Him! In the Gita, Krishna said: Everything is me. In the Bible, Christ said: Give what belongs to Caesar, to Caesar. And what belongs to God, to God. But what belongs to God? It is your spirit. It is your true Self. If you want to Realise your Self, be like the flute! Make your prayer like this, “Lord, do whatever you want with me, whenever you want with me, and however you want with me”. And in your mind don´t ask any questions. This is a poison, because the mind always doubts. The mind always thinks it knows best. And when you surrender this mind to the Divine, bhakti will arise, devotion will arise. And when devotion arises, the purity of Love will also arise together with it. It´s not a love where we just say “I love you, I love you”. It´s a Love where when we say “I love you”, there is no condition in it. It is not “I love you because of something. I love you because of your body. I love you because of your wealth. I love you because you are beautiful outside and if I pull the skin from your body, I don´t love you anymore”. But it’s because when you say “I love you” you love Him the way He is. And that´s the purity of Love, the Unconditional Love, the way God loves, the way your heart knows how to love. That´s why you do feel Love, but the moment you start to put conditions to that Love, it fades. But when you stick to this purity of Love, and make this Love grow, it will grow. Because Love is like a seed, which is inside the heart of man: the seed has to grow, has to blossom, also. It has to germinate and grow big; the seed can´t just stay like that. That´s what Christ said, also. There are so many similarities between Hinduism and Christianity. Christ said: If you plant a seed on a stone, it will never grow. But if you plant it in the heart of man it shall grow.” And this is the Love in the heart of man, when real Love is felt, when real Love starts to grow. It grows in six different stages, which are called: Sneha Prem, Pranaya Prem, Mana Prem, Raga Prem, Anuraga Prem, and Maha Bhav. These stages of Love - of course, I will now not go to detail about it - grow when this purity is there, which leads you to complete surrender to the Divine. But first, what is in regard to normal life, is to calm the mind and let Love itself start to grow inside of the heart. Only through this Love will you know who you are. And this is not up to me to tell you, it’s up to you to make the first step. The easiest way to calm the mind is to sing the Name of God, because you can sing the name of God anytime, wherever you are.