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| Home > Bhakti Yoga > Gurus & Mantras
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| | Gurus & Mantras in Bhakti Yoga
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The Bhakta must be absolutely earnest and sincere in seeking the company of a true lover of God, renouncing all worldly connections. If a worshipper meets such a real Bhakta, he should follow all the instructions from the Bhakta, as the former is his guru and take special care to keep it alive and make it grow, until it becomes a large tree bearing the fruit of Divine Love. He should have respect, reverence, and love for his guru, who will open his spiritual eye and transmit his own spiritual powers to his soul. When these powers begin to work, the soul will be awakened from the deep sleep of ignorance and self-delusion.
The Guru, or spiritual eye-opener, knowing the natural tendency of the disciple, will advise him to look upon God as his Master, or as his Father or Mother, and will thus establish a definite relation between his soul and God. Henceforth the disciple should learn to worship or pray to the Supreme through this particular relation. During this period he should avoid such company, such places, and such amusements as make him forget his chosen Ideal. He should live a chaste, simple and pure life, always discriminating right from wrong and struggling to control his passions and desires by directing towards God and he will gradually succeed in correcting his faults and in gaining control over his nature.
So long as the devotee thinks of God with a form and believes that he is outside of his soul and of the universe, he can make a mental picture of Him and worship the Divine Ideal through that form; or he may keep before him some symbolic figure like the cross which will remind him of his Ideal at the time of devotion. Gradually, as the Bhakta approaches God, he will rise above such dualistic conceptions and realize that his heart is purified and selfishness is dead. The devotee thus rises to the second grade of Bhakti Yoga and gains the Divine Love, which is the result of his Bhakti and attains all other divine qualities, to the highest ideal of Bhakti Yoga.
The Om Mantra
To practise Bhakti yoga, apart from having an immense love and devotion for god, something more is also required; the knowledge of the mantras. The Siddha-Gurus (teachers who have attained the goal) convey spiritual wisdom to their disciples by means of words (Mantras), which have to be meditated upon. From the many mantras, the mantra "Om" is an important one that relates the bhakta to the god.
The universe is an entity that is the form of Spota, which is the manifester or Word and this Spota, has one word as its only possible symbol, and this is the Om. The Om and the Spota are eternal and inseparable; and, therefore the Om is out of this holiest of all holy words, the mother of all names and forms, the eternal Om, that the whole universe may be supposed to have been created. It is important to know that Om Mantra is very often used in conjunction with other mantras, usually with the Om being the first or last sound in the whole mantra. Often these other mantras refer to a specific deity or name of God. However, there are a variety of ways of using Om Mantra.
The universal symbol Om, evolved out of the deepest spiritual perception of sages, and it symbolizes and expresses, as nearly as possible, the particular view of God and the universe it stands for. And as the Om represents the Akhanda, the undifferentiated Brahman, the other mantras represent the Khanda or the differentiated views of the same being; and they are all helpful to divine meditation and the acquisition of true knowledge. Regardless of how one uses the mantra, there is a universal truth that the vibration of Om will be experienced on the inner journey since it is presented as a means of contemplation and meditation.
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