Swami Prakashanand Saraswati, a revered spiritual teacher, offers profound insights into the nature of divine love and devotion. In this Question & Answer session he distinguishes God and true spirituality from psychic or material experiences, and highlights the soul’s need for a personal relationship with God.
Question & Answer with Swami Prakashanand Saraswati..
Question: In “The Path to God” you have written, “Only the experiences of an intimate affinity resulting from the relational feeling for the personality of God are classified as spiritual.” Could you explain this?
Answer: You see the word ‘spiritual’ we use as Divine, Godly. But, in the West they use it both ways as if psychic is also spiritual. Anything beyond material logic people call,“spiritual”. We call Divine only as spiritual. Psychic field is material. There are two main kinds:
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1) Material space
2) Spirit space and Celestial space
You see when we have a vivid dream, we travel and walk and talk, where was the space? It is a different dimension, but it is psychic; it is material.
God is Divine. When we talk of God we talk of something very personal, very intimate, very friendly, very loving, very beautiful… all together. That’s all we want. We want a companion who loves us, cares for us, is kind, beautiful and lives forever, not departing in the middle. This is the definition of God only.
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God means personal Divine existence. Like we have a personality;a personality has a mind. Energy has no mind like fire has no mind – it may burn a church, or a pub or a club, it’s all the same for fire. God has a mind, He is kind. This means a personality, but not a personality like us. He has a Divine personality that is omnipresent. He is omnipresent with His Divine personality and all His Divine attributes.
When you relate to Him, with intimate feelings, that is divine, devotional or bhakti. When we unite our mind with God and think of a form of God as either Ram, or Krishn or Vishnu or Shiv, or any form you prefer, they are all human-like forms. Then you feel He is really related to your soul. Other things relate to your body. All the relations are from the body, you are boss, servant, son, father, but your soul has no classification. Soul-to-God relationship is an intimate relationship, not physical. When you began to trust Him and love Him as your Divine beloved friend, that is called “bhakti”, and that is spiritual.
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Conclusion:
Swami Prakashanand Saraswati beautifully emphasizes that true spirituality begins when the soul forms an intimate, loving bond with the personal form of God. Beyond intellect and energy, it is bhakti “pure devotion” that connects us with the Divine. His teachings inspire seekers to prioritize a consistent and heartfelt relationship with God.
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