Devotion to God is not to be calculated on the basis of the institutions one has started or helped, the temples one has built or renovated, the donations one has given away, nor does it depend on the number of times one has written the Name of the Lord or on the time and energy one has spent in the worship of the Lord. These are not vital at all, no, not even secondary. Devotion is Divine Love, unsullied by any tinge of desire for the benefit that flows from it, or the fruit or consequence of that love. It is love that knows no particular reason for its manifestation. It is of the nature of the love of the soul for the Oversoul; the river for the sea; the creeper for the tree, the star for the sky, the spring for the cliff down which it flows. It is sweet, in bad times as well as good. It is an unchanging attitude, a desirable bent of the mind, standing steady through joy and grief.
Devotion is no sign of weakness; it is a sign of courage, of wisdom, of discrimination; it alone can give soukhyam and shaanthi (happiness and peace). Every one has one day or other to fall in line with you, for every one is terribly anxious to get these two. They try, in their ignorance or excitement, various other remedies, but this remedy alone can cure them.
Make four resolutions about your life hereafter:
(1) Purity: Desist from wicked thoughts, bad habits, low activities that weaken your self-respect.
(2) Service: Serve others, for they are the reflections of the same entity of which you are yourself another reflection. No one of you has any authenticity, except with reference to the One Original.
(3) Mutuality: Feel always kinship with all creation. See the same current flowing through all the objects in the Universe.
(4) Truth: Do not deceive yourself or others, by distorting your experience.
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