I pray to my Deity or to my Guru. What does this mean to me personally?
1. This means I have a personal ideal, a friend or a goal - a point of reference for my behaviour.
2. The deity or guru has qualities which have benefited me, and which I like to emulate. Skillfully and steadily I would train my body to the likeness of my deity or my Guru. The guru’s behaviour then becomes a blueprint into which my behaviour gets moulded.
3. Therefore, I find it helpful to first reduce the deity I worship to some key characteristics. The invocation of the name of the deity should act as signals to the tissues of my body to display the characteristics.
Over a period of time, I formulate and reformulate my behavioural image of the deity or guru. This way the channel of communication between the deity and myself becomes more concrete and profound. The effectiveness or otherwise of the process has to be personally assessed.
The Gita advocates Japa as the best of approaches. “Constantly
thinking of Me, You will become
Me.
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