Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Bhava-Bhakti
Generate and deepen a living emotional relationship with the Divine — taking on a chosen ‘bhava’ (devotional attitude) until love intensifies into absorbed remembrance — and to extend that devotion into seeing the same Divine presence in all beings.
In 5 lines: Choose one loving relationship to the Divine — child to the Mother, servant, friend, beloved — and inhabit it sincerely. Call with feeling through worship, chanting and longing; let love ripen into absorbed remembrance. Hold single-minded to your chosen ideal and keep holy company. Don’t chase ecstasy — feed the love and let it deepen. Then carry the same reverence outward: see and serve the Divine in all beings.
What it is
Ramakrishna’s central practice was bhakti — love of God — cultivated through bhava: deliberately taking on a devotional attitude or relationship toward the Divine and inhabiting it until love deepens into absorbed remembrance.
Rather than analysing or emptying the mind, the practitioner becomes a lover of God in a chosen role — child to the Divine Mother, servant to the Lord, friend, or beloved — and lets that relationship saturate feeling and conduct.
This belongs in embodiment state because the method is precisely to adopt and embody a state (a relational/emotional stance) until it transforms experience. Ramakrishna’s own bhakti for Kali, the Divine Mother, repeatedly intensified into mahabhava — speechless ecstatic absorption — and matured into a vision of the same Divine presence in all beings, expressed in his teaching to serve others as living forms of God.
The Method
A faithful summary of the practice as recorded in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna:
- Choose your bhava (relationship). Adopt a single, sincere devotional attitude toward your chosen form of the Divine (ishta): santana-bhava (child to the Mother — which Ramakrishna himself recommended as safest and sweetest), dasya (servant), sakhya (friend), vatsalya (parent), or madhura (beloved). Pick one and inhabit it.
- Worship and call with feeling. Through worship, chanting the Name, song, prayer and longing, call on the Divine with a child’s trust and yearning — Ramakrishna wept for the Mother like a child crying for its mother. Feeling, not technique, is the engine.
- Let love ripen into bhava, then absorption. As devotion intensifies, longing matures into bhava — speechless absorption in the thought of God — and, at its height, mahabhava / samadhi. The practitioner does not force this; sustained, sincere love deepens of itself.
- Practise single-minded devotion (nishtha). Hold steadily to your chosen ideal rather than scattering across many. Keep the company of the holy (satsanga) and faith (sraddha) to feed the flame.
- Offer and receive. Concrete devotion — offering food, flowers, service before the image, then receiving it back as blessed — gives the love a daily, embodied grammar.
- Extend it: see God in all. As devotion ripens, deliberately carry the same reverence into ordinary life — treating beings as living forms of the Divine (“serve them as God”), so the bhava becomes a way of seeing, not only a private rapture. (Sourcing note: the bhava categories and the child-attitude recommendation are Ramakrishna’s, recorded by ‘M.’ in the Kathamrita/Gospel. The numbered protocol faithfully describes his consistently-taught devotional path; his spontaneous samadhi was his own extraordinary realisation, not a step one can simply execute.)
Source & Lineage
Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa (1836–1886) was a Bengali mystic and priest of the Dakshineswar Kali temple whose intense, experiential devotion — and his claim to have realised the same Reality through many paths (Shakta, Vaishnava, Vedanta, and even Christian and Islamic practice) — made him one of modern India’s most influential spiritual figures, transmitted to the world through his disciple Vivekananda and the Ramakrishna Order.
His teaching survives chiefly in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, recorded by his devotee Mahendranath Gupta (‘M.’). This entry captures his bhava-bhakti / devotional-embodiment method and is distinct from generic affirmation or mantra entries.
Common refinements
Going through motions without feeling. Bhakti is the feeling — sincerity and longing are the practice, not ritual correctness.
- Scattering across many ideals. Ramakrishna stressed nishtha — steady single-minded devotion to one chosen form deepens faster than diffuse worship.
- Chasing ecstasy/samadhi. Pursuing trance states is a trap; love ripens of itself when fed patiently. Pursuit breeds strain and self-deception.
- Privatised rapture that ignores others. The path completes in seeing God in all and serving them; devotion that hardens into self-absorption has lost its way.
- Forcing an unnatural bhava. Choose the relationship that genuinely moves you (Ramakrishna favoured the child-to-Mother attitude as safest and most natural).