INTRODUCTION
SWAMI VIVEKANANDA ON PARA-BHAKTI
Swami Vivekananda writes in the section of 'Para-bhakti or Supreme Devotion' of his Bhakti-Yoga:
'We see love everywhere in nature. Whatever in society is good and great and sublime in the working out of that love; whatever in society is very bad, nay diabolical, is also the ill-directed working out of the same emotion of love.
It is this same emotion that gives us the pure and holy conjugal love between husband and wife as well as the sort of love which goes to satisfy the lowest forms of animal passion. The emotion is the same, but its manifestation is different in different cases. It is the same feeling of love, well or ill-directed, that impels one man to do good and to give all he has to the poor, while it make another man cut the throats of his brethren and take away all their possessions.
The former loves others as much as the latter loves himself. The direction of the love is bad in the case of the latter, but is right and proper in the other case. The same fire that cooks a meal for us may burn a child, and it is no fault of the fire if it does so; the difference lies in the way in which it is used.
Therefore love, the intense longing for association, the strong desire on the part of two to become one- and it may be, after all, of all to become merged in one-is being manifested everywhere in higher or lower forms as the case may be.
'Bhakti-Yoga is the science of higher lover. It shows us how to direct it; it shows us how to control it, how to manage it, how to use it, how to give it a new aim, as it were, and from it obtain the highest and most glorious results, that is, how to make it lead us to spiritual blessedness. Bhakti-Yoga does not say,'Give up;' it only says, 'Love; love the Highest'- and everything low naturally falls off from him, the object of whose love is the Highest.'