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Inner Devotional Experiences
Spirituality is an inner path in which love is purified until we become divine love that transcends all torment. Spiritual practices, like sense control, ceiling on desires, meditation, mantras, and silence, allow us to direct consciousness inward where we can find expanded peace, exhilarating freedom, and God’s omnipresent love. The path to an inner experience of devotion is different for each of us. In the following excerpt1 Swami describes the inner experience of devotion in certain saintly people.
No one can define the path of devotion and demarcate it as such and such. Since it has many forms, many roads, and many types of experience, it is impossible for anyone to describe it accurately and fully. Each devotee gets bliss only through his individual experience. Through the experience of other devotees, he can get, at best, only encouragement and guidance. The experience changes from one person to another, so it eludes comparison and even description. If anyone is able to describe it by examples and limits, then he can be sure that his experience is not real. The limited soul is immersed in the limitless love of the Lord, and how can words describe that experience, called by the Upanishads as the “unbroken uniflow of sweetness?” (SSB)
Sense Control and Expansion
When the senses are withdrawn from external objects, they can be used to enhance inner experience. The inner power of the senses can be harnessed when light, sound, touch, taste, and smell are directed inward. For instance, in a dark room we can still see an inner radiating light if we visualize a burning candle in our mind’s eye. We can inwardly chant a mantra and be freed in the sound vibration that is not aached to any external object. If we do a hatha yoga stretch, we can become
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