Message by Babaji for Tapas Purti, 2013
"Very often, bhakti marga, the path of devotion, is misunderstood as a bundle of rituals. A ritual is a spiritual exercise which helps in tapping all your emotional energies and eventually helps you to fall in love with The Divinity that is simply all pervaded. When you can fall in love with The Divine, it is paying total attention with a single pointed focus of your mental energies. In that awareness consciousness only The Divine is there and nothing else, not even individual consciousness. It is meditating on the ultimate truth. Thus you exercise all your emotional energies to pay attention to your real SELF.
When you rise above the levels of duality in your consciousness, when your consciousness would have given up all types of imaginations including the imagination of 'I', that awareness that is SELF neither appears as existent nor non-existent. Awareness does not create any feelings of existence or non-existence. Though for sake of communication and understanding we talk of consciousness of existence, it is neither.
In Tapas, eventually everything that had been imagined, including an existence of yourself as an individual, gets burnt. Here 'burnt' word is used symbolically and not of fire, the element. In fact that imagination of existence of an individual self with so many definitions simply disappears without a trace. Its appearance was due to imagination and once that imagination stops due to constant watching that you practice, that appearance of individuality disappears.
It is always amusing for a Yogi of any appearance. 'Amusing' word is also symbolic for sake of understanding and in the silence of consciousness it is neither something nor nothing. An experience of awareness which is neither as existing nor as non-existing. In this world mind is used to dualities and hence it fails to grasp the truth of silence, neither existent nor non-existent.
From the beginning itself if you simply practice to watch, looking, gazing which are not thoughts or imaginations, you would be able to experience the awareness of being. On the path of devotion also you have to end up watching the form of The Divine you would have imagined in your consciousness. During a ritual you shall simply watch if you are really devoted. Thus, if you are a real devotee you shall simply watch and accept things as it happens. You would not think either as happening or non-happening. In the silence of that consciousness, where there is no more imagination of dualities or non-duality you are in THAT Truth, as THAT Truth.
