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→Role of Bhakti in Integral Yoga
This Yoga [Integral Yoga] too is not a Yoga of knowledge alone—knowledge is one of its means, but its base being self-offering, surrender, bhakti, it is based on the heart and nothing can be eventually done without this base.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/combining-work-meditation-and-bhakti#p43</ref>
<center>~</center>
The realisation of the Supreme, the Ishwara, is certainly the essential thing; but to approach him with love and devotion and bhakti, to serve him with one’s works and to know him, not necessarily by the intellectual cognition, but in a spiritual experience, is also essential in the path of the integral Yoga.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/35/this-worldliness-and-other-worldliness#p1</ref>
<center>~</center>...but bhakti is the very soul and heart and summit of this richer, completer, more intimate union.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-supreme-word-of-the-gita#p10</ref><center>~</center>This Yoga of love will give you a highest potential force for spiritual largeness and unity and freedom. But it must be a love which is one with God-knowledge. ... But when the God lover is also the God-knower, the lover becomes one self with the Beloved; for he is the chosen of the Most High and the elect of the Spirit. Develop in yourself this God-engrossed love; the heart spiritualised and lifted beyond the limitations of its lower nature will reveal to you most intimately the secrets of God’s immeasurable being, bring into you the whole touch and influx and glory of his divine Power and open to you the mysteries of an eternal rapture. It is perfect love that is the key to a perfect knowledge. This integral God-love demands too an integral work for the sake of the Divine in yourself and in all creatures.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-message-of-the-gita#p33</ref><center>~</center>
Thus only can we aspire through the offering of all our nature and being to a living union with the One who has become in Time and Space all that is. Here is the place of bhakti in the scheme of the Yoga of an integral self- liberation. It is an adoration and aspiration towards that which is greater than imperishable self or changing Nature. All knowledge then becomes an adoration and aspiration, but all works too become an adoration and aspiration. Works of nature and freedom of soul are unified in this adoration and become one self-uplifting to the one Godhead.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/19/the-secret-of-secrets#p8</ref>
===Limitations of Thought and Knowledge===
The pride of the philosopher looking down on the passion of the devotee arises, as does all pride, from a certain deficiency of his nature; for the intellect too exclusively developed misses what the heart has to offer. The intellect is not in every way superior to the heart; if it opens more readily doors at which the heart is apt to fumble in vain, it is, itself, apt to miss truths which to the heart are very near and easy to hold. And if when the way of thought deepens into spiritual experience, it arrives readily at the etherial heights, pinnacles, skiey widenesses, it cannot without the aid of the heart fathom the intense and rich abysses and oceanic depths of the divine being and the divine Ananda. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p7</ref><center>~</center>If knowledge is the widest power of the consciousness and its function is to free and illumine, yet love is the deepest and most intense and its privilege is to be the key to the most profound and secret recesses of the Divine Mystery. Man, because he is a mental being, is prone to give the highest importance to the thinking mind and its reason and will and to its way of approach and effectuation of Truth and, even, he is inclined to hold that there is no other. The heart with its emotions and incalculable movements is to the eye of his intellect an obscure, uncertain and often a perilous and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the reason and the mental will and intelligence. And yet there is in the heart or behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition,—for that, though not of the mind, yet descends through the mind,—has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human intellect in its pride of knowledge. According to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden Purusha, is in the mystic heart,—the secret heart-cave, ''hṛdaye guhāyām'', as the Upanishads put it,—and, according to the experience of many Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice or the breath of the inner oracle.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/23/the-ascent-of-the-sacrifice-i#p16</ref><center>~</center>
Love too as well as knowledge brings us to a highest oneness and it gives to that oneness its greatest possible depth and intensity. It is true that love returns gladly upon a difference in oneness, by which the oneness itself becomes richer and sweeter. But here we may say that the heart is wiser than the thought, at least than that thought which fixes upon opposite ideas of the Divine and concentrates on one to the exclusion of the other which seems its contrary, but is really its complement and a means of its greatest fulfilment. This is the weakness of
the mind that it limits itself by its thoughts, its positive and negative ideas, the aspects of the Divine Reality that it sees, and tends too much to pit one against the other.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p8</ref><center>~</center>And it is true that philosophy by itself without the rapture of spiritual experience is something as dry as it is clear and cannot give all the satisfaction we seek, that its spiritual experience even, when it has not left its supports of thought and shot up beyond the mind, lives too much in an abstract delight and that what it reaches, is not indeed the void it seems to the passion of the heart, but still has the limitations of the peaks.<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p10</ref><center>~</center>It [thought in the mind] finds a greater truth in the delight of the One in itself, a lesser truth or even a falsehood in the delight of the One in the Many and of the Many in the One, a greater truth in the impersonal and the Nirguna, a lesser truth or a falsehood in the personal and the Saguna. But the Divine is beyond our oppositions of ideas, beyond the logical contradictions we make between his aspects. He is not, we have seen, bound and restricted by exclusive unity; his oneness realises itself in infinite variation and to the joy of that love has the completest key, without therefore missing the joy of the unity. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/24/love-and-the-triple-path#p10p9</ref>
=How to Walk on the Path of Bhakti Yoga?=