(Continuation of a talk given by Jagadguru Shri Kripalu Ji Maharaj on December 23, 2009, in Bhakti Dham, Mangarh, explaining a new kirtan verse)
In the Ramayana, Saint Tulsidas has said,
More man prabhu as vishvasa,
Ram te adhik Ram kar dasa.
The devotee Saint of supreme God is greater than God. In the Bhagwatam, Shri Krishna says, “The one who wants to become my divine devotee by practicing devotion to Me is ignorant. The one who is a devotee of My devotee Saints is extremely dear to Me. He alone can attain My divine love. My divine love is found in the care of such a Guru.”
God comes to reside in one’s heart only after it has become completely purified. Shri Krishna says in the Gita (9/22), “Surrender completely to Me and purify your heart and then I will come.” So who is the one who will do this dirty work of purifying the minds of the souls? God tells the souls to go to His Saints. They are the ones who will clean the hearts and minds of the souls. When the drawing room of one’s heart is perfectly clean, then God will come and reside there.
So Saints do such a big job for us. First, they make the souls correctly understand spiritual philosophy, such as who is the soul, who is God, what is Maya, what is the world, what is detachment, what is attachment. If the Saint didn’t make the souls understand this, even if God were standing before them, their experience of Him would amount to nothing. This is because God is divine; we can’t see Him. He is already residing in our hearts, but what difference has this made to us? He is also omnipresent, but how are we benefiting from this?
So first the Saint will teach correct spiritual knowledge, then He will teach practical devotion to the souls. He will sit with his disciples and teach them just as a primary school teacher sits with his students to teach them the alphabet. A teacher says, “Say ‘C’.” The child says, “C”. The teacher says, “Say ‘A’.” The child says, “A”. The teacher says, “Say ‘T’.” The child says, “T.” Then the teacher says, “Now say it all together, CAT.” The child says, “TAC.” The teacher says, “No! Not TAC! Say CAT.” Then the child will say “CAT.” This is how we were taught. Everybody was like this at the beginning. How much effort our primary school teachers exerted just to teach us one single word!
So your teachers have worked very hard to educate you from this age graduate school. In the world, they receive money for doing this. Whether you come to class or drop the class, it’s all the same to them. But Saints give us such knowledge in a short amount of time which is the essence of all the scriptures, and which we couldn’t learn on our own in thousands of years of study. If not, we would forever remain confused, because there are two contradictory points of view found in every scripture.
So the Guru gives us correct spiritual knowledge, shows us how to practice devotion, and upon the complete purification of our hearts, it is he alone who also graces us with divine love. Then our senses, mind and intellect are made divine. When a soul attains divine love, then even God Himself comes under the control of that devotee’s love.
God alone is supremely independent; all others existences are dependent. But after a soul attains God realisation, this definition of God becomes reversed. Only one power is independent – the God realised Saint; all others are dependent to him, even God Himself! Due to this, Shri Krishna declares, “I walk behind My devotee Saints so that I may be blessed by their footdust and be purified.” (Bhagwatam, 11/14/16).
In this way, it is correct that God is the greatest, it is also correct that God and the Saint are one, and from the point of view of our self-interest, the Saint is greater than God. We should feel particularly grateful to him because he delivered us to God and was with us from the very beginning until the very end.
When a child is born, under her father and mother’s care she is nurtured, educated, and taught skills and virtues. When she turns 18 years of age, a boy comes to interview her as a potential marriage partner. The father did all the hard work, from her birth until her 18th year and then gave her in marriage to the boy. The daughter simply encircled the ceremonial fire during her marriage ceremony and then left her parents home. So God is our eternal relation, but it is the Saint who exerts all the hard effort for the soul and then joins him with God. For this reason it is said that the Saint is greater than God. In this way, all three statements are true.
© Jagadguru Kripalu Parishat and Bhakti Bliss, 2009
