Baba says, ‘those with a loving intellect claim a high status‘. A high status is that of a self-sovereign.

In the epic Mahabharata, there is a sequence where both Arjuna and his cousin Duryodhana go to Krishna (depicted as God) to ask for His help in the war. Krishna promises to help them but puts forth a couple of conditions: (1) you have to choose between Me or My vast army of millions of soldiers (2) I will not pick up a weapon and fight. Arjuna who regarded Krishna as his Friend chose Him. Duryodhana was happy to have the army.

One had a loving intellect and the other had a worldly intellect. For Arjuna, he wasn’t concerned about ‘winning’ the war, he wasn’t even thinking about outcomes, logic…none of that. He simply wanted God to be on His side, he wanted his Friend to be with him. Duryodhana was motivated with ‘winning’, with conquest. He figured that there wasn’t much use of having just Krishna on his side without His vast army and besides, He wasn’t even going to fight. What’s the point in that?, he thought.

When I have a worldly intellect, I am so caught up in ‘I’ and ‘mine’, in the name and fame, motivated by the need to win that I become foolish enough to reject God. I don’t see the value in what He gives me, in what He makes me. I believe that this old world is where value is and I spend my time hustling to find my place in it. I inevitably come back empty-handed, live an unfulfilled existence and cause myself and others sorrow.

‘You develop a loving intellect according to the effort you make‘, says Baba.

The effort is to become soul conscious. Unless I realize myself, experience myself to be a pure, peaceful, loving soul, I cannot remember Baba. When I cannot remember Baba and really get to know Him, I don’t develop love for Him. Baba says, ‘this journey of remembrance is a journey of love‘. Many ask: what do I need to do to experience God’s love? It isn’t what I need to do, it is who I need to be and that is honest. Honesty starts with being who I really am – a soul. As long as I think of myself as the body, operate on the basis of ego, I will continue to be stuck in the many traps of Maya. I will feel like a plug looking for the socket but never quite finding it.

Baba says, ‘turn on the switch of awareness of being a soul and the false awareness of being a body will turn off automatically‘.

In bhakti, while we’d say we had love for God, we didn’t really know Who He is. We didn’t because we didn’t first know who we were. So we worshiped various deities with corporeal bodies as God. We made Him look and think and be like us and therefore automatically looked to Him to help us with things related to the corporeal- small, petty, mundane things.

God, the Incorporeal One, comes at the confluence age to this physical plane in an ordinary body to meet His children. He needs to come and sit face to face to remind me of who I am, of Who He is and of what my purpose is. There is so much artificiality, so much mixture, so much falsehood that He needs to come to speak the truth. Only He knows the truth because He is never adulterated by Maya. He remains beyond and in constant realization.

But He is extremely subtle and invisible to these physical eyes. I need a loving and faithful intellect to be able to first move inward to touch base with my own truth and then to remember Him, to experience Him. Otherwise, I easily develop doubts and continue to shop around among the many false gods and gurus in the world.

‘You are incorporeal too‘, He reminds me. You came bodiless and adopted a body to play your part. Now, you have to return home bodiless.

To become bodiless requires me to pay attention to how I spend my day, not just the time I spend sitting in remembrance. If I allow myself to become loose, think/see/hear wasteful things, engage in speaking or doing wasteful things, I will be pulled to the corporeal. Baba says, ‘spin the discuss of self-realization throughout the day’. This helps me nip the waste in the bud while making me happy as I see my own elevated part, my destiny throughout the cycle.

A loving intellect is also a faithful intellect. The more I develop love for Baba, the more motivated I am to follow His Shrimat (elevated directions) and the more I follow His directions, the more elevated I become. When I see change in myself, when I see results, when I experience happiness, I develop faith. I want to do more…it is a virtuous cycle.

‘Where there is love, there is no effort‘, says Baba. If I experience difficulty in letting go of the old world and it’s deceptions, if I experience inconvenience in following Shrimat and the code of conduct, if I experience remembrance to be a chore, if I am constantly battling the sanskars, let me check myself today: am I operating on the basis of love or compulsion?

Loving God is to love the self. He comes at the end of the cycle to uplift me and show me the path to my elevated destiny. It is not the world with all the gurus, pundits, experts, the rich and famous that will give me my inheritance, only my Father can give it to me. I don’t need the army to claim my sovereignty, I only need Him.