Three stages of Bhakti

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Bhakti is intense devotion and dedication to anything that is divine or noble. In the Hindu concept of Bhakti of a personal God , there are Three stages of Bhakti. They are:

[edit] Bāhya bhakti:

This is external devotion. It assumes that God is external to us. He is in the temples, in bathing ghats, in banyan trees. One feels ‘I must go there and worship’. This is a tāmasic bhakti or unenlightened bhakti. Even this has a place in all religions because it is this popular fact of religion that is visible to the outsider and it is here that faith starts. It is this which gets expressed in processions, festivals and melas.

==Ananya bhakti:== This, categorised as rājasic bhakti, is the exclusive devotion of a deity irrespective of anything else. The classic example is that of Tulsidas, the author of Ramcarita-manas. In every line of this monumental work we find the ananya bhakti of Tulsi reverberating. Not only this. In every line we also see the exclusive Godhood of Ram as the Ultimate Godhead of Hinduism.

[edit] But no intolerance

To the credit of this type of bhakti, however, it must be said that never did such bhakti in India lead to intolerance though the dividing line was and is rather thin between this type of exclusive passionate devotion and religious bigotry. This is because such devotees are so fully convinced of the all-pervading nature of their God and they are more fully convinced of the One-God foundation of the Hindu religion that they really believe that any other god that anybody else worships is only a different manifestation of their own ishta-devata (Favourite deity). This is the most welcome spin-off (particularly in view of the modern upsurges of religious fundamentalism all around the world) of the philosophical foundations on which bhakti in Hinduism stands. A Rama bhakta like Tulsi would sincerely believe that a Jesus or a Buddha is nothing but an avatār of his Rama and therefore there is no question of any intolerance.

==Ekānta bhakti:== This is the third stage, the noblest stage. It is sātvic bhakti. It is devotion done purely as a duty to God, expecting nothing in return, in the fullness of God’s love and living in that Love completely, totally merged in that Love of God. It is a divine ever-flowing love; it is the love of the Gopis to God. It is a self-effacing love, unmatched by any other love or devotion that we know of.

Source: Sathya Sai Speaks. Sathya Sai Educational Trust. Prasanthinilayam, A.P. India.