Osho Quotes on Devotion or Bhakti Yoga

• Being in deep devotion comes as a surprise the first time, because it is so difficult for people to feel even love, and devotion is the highest form of love... just the essential fragrance of love. If love is the flower, then devotion is just the fragrance. You cannot catch hold of it. You can feel it, you can smell it, you can be surrounded by it, you can be drowned in it, but you cannot catch hold of it. It is not that material.
   

• The other part of humanity, the female part, the passive part, cannot move on the path of will. It needs another illusory path: the path of surrender, devotion, bhakti. One day or other, devoting yourself and still finding that something is lacking, because the devotion can never be total -- anything illusory can never be total: surrendering and surrendering, and again and again finding that you are still standing behind, you are not yet surrendered -- one day suddenly you become aware of the fact. What are you going to do? Surrendering something which you don't have? -- how is it possible? Suddenly the ego has disappeared. Now there is no need to surrender, because there is no ego left.
   

• You choose one path. Either you follow the path of love, devotion, dancing, KIRTAN, BHAJAN, dissolve yourself completely into your love towards the Divine. That path is of dissolving, no awareness is needed. You are needed to be drunk, completely drunk with God, you will need to become a drunkard. Or, choose the path of meditation. There you are not needed to be dissolved into anything. You are needed to become very crystallised, you are needed to become very integrated, alert, aware. Follow the path of love and one day, suddenly, you will see that meditation has flowered within you -- thousands of white lotuses.
   

• Be creative. Don't be worried about what you are doing -- one has to do many things -- but do everything creatively, with devotion. Then your work becomes worship. Then whatsoever you do is a prayer. And whatsoever you do is an offering at the altar.
   

• Devotion has its own strange ways. It is not something rational, logical, something that can be explained to you. But it is something, if you go on growing from a student into a disciple, from a disciple into a devotee, and you come so close to the master that there is no distinction at all.
   

• It has happened, women have helped their husbands, sacrificed their whole lives, never thought about themselves. Their surrender, their devotion to their lovers has been total. In this totality, they have achieved before their lover has.
   

• One is the path of devotion, what in India is called BHAKTI yoga, the path of love and devotion -- a Meera, a Chaitanya, dancing and singing, losing themselves completely in the act. When Meera is dancing there is only dance, there is no Meera; the dancer is completely merged into the dance. When Chaitanya is singing and dancing there is no Chaitanya; he has become one with the act.
   

• Love is a conditional relationship. Devotion is unconditional. Devotion means you are not to be in any way conditioned by me, and I do not expect anything from you. Devotion is not objective, it is subjective; love is objective. I love someone because the object of love is such; it is lovable. Or, I am in devotion because in me there is devotion; the object is irrelevant. My subjectivity is the source of it, and then anything -- a stone lying on the street -- begins to be an object of devotion. A tree, a river, a hill -- anything, anything that exists -- simply by being there it begins to be an object of my devotion. The whole of existence becomes the object.
   

• Love can become devotion. Love is the first step; only then can devotion flower. But for us even love is a faraway reality, sex is the only real thing. Love has two possibilities: either it falls into sex and becomes a bodily thing, or it rises into devotion and becomes a thing of the spirit. Love is just in between. Just below it is the abyss of sex, and beyond it is the open sky - the infinite sky of devotion.
   

• Devotion is toward something else and devotion is a blind thing. In devotion the other becomes more important than you. It is a trust. The intellectual cannot trust anybody; he can only criticize. He cannot trust. He can doubt, but he cannot trust And if sometimes some intellectual comes to trust, it is never authentic. First he tries to convince himself about his trust; it is never authentic. He finds proofs, arguments, and when he is satisfied that the arguments help, the proofs help, then he trusts. But he has missed the point, because trust is not argumentative and trust is not based on proofs. If proofs are there, then there is no need of trust.
   

• Devotion differs. Devotion exists for the total existence, without the counterpart, mm? There is nothing against devotion. There is hate against love; there is nothing against devotion. No-devotion is not against devotion, it is just absence. So when someone says, "I am devoted to Rama," really he is using a wrong word. If he loves Rama, then he cannot love Krishna. If someone says, "I am devoted to Krishna," then he cannot love Christ. He is using a wrong word. He is continuing the love phenomenon; it is not devotion.
   

• Devotion means for the total; it is never for Rama, never for Krishna. Of course, Rama and Krishna are implied in the total, but it is never for a chosen one. Love is always for the chosen one, devotion is for the whole. So you cannot be a devotee of Rama. If you are for Rama, you are only a lover; and when you are a lover, then competition is bound to be there. Then Krishna will be a competitor, and Christ will be a competitor, and the same jealousies, the same conflicts, and all the same nonsense will follow. It has followed.
   

• In devotion you surrender yourself completely. And this surrender can be to a god who may not be in the sky or who may be, or to a master who may not be awakened or who may be, or to a beloved who may not be worthwhile or who may be -- that is irrelevant. If you can allow yourself to dissolve for the other, you will be transformed. Devotion frees. That is why we have glimpses of freedom only in love. When you are in love, you have a subtle freedom. This is paradoxical because everyone else will see that you have become a slave. If you are in love with someone, those around you will think that you both have become slaves to each other. But you will have glimpses of freedom.