Knowledge Vs Devotion
We often hear the expression ‘god-fearing’ attributed to virtuous persons with a sense of approval. A god-fearing person is supposed to be an upright, honest, reliable and generally good person. I was brought up in a society having these sort of values, in which I had the fortune to be recognized a god-fearing boy. And I always felt guilty whenever I felt that I did some thing wrong or something against my conscience.
But now I feel and understand that the basic emotion underlying the need to be god-fearing is only pure fear, and not the desire to be good. What is actually required is not fear of God, but love of God, pure devotion or divine Love. Fearing God is just fear of one’s own conscience. Of course it has its own virtue for making one desist from doing things considered wrong or ‘sinful’.
One may ask why the love of God or devotion is more important than fear of God? Because, while fear of god helps keep a person pure in mind without the feeling of guilt, and prepare him ready to seek spiritual blessings, it does not help one to experience the Ultimate. Even intellectual knowledge of the Absolute is useless without devotion. Intellectual knowledge separates the knowledge from the known. To know reality, knowledge and the known has to merge and be one with the knower. That would be possible only with utmost devotion where the knower merges with the absolute. To know God one has to be God. Only in divine love oneness happens. That is why it is said, ‘Surrender to the Infinite, the Ultimate Reality that is God’.
But is the other way around true, meaning, does knowledge of the absolute come from devotion alone without any effort to know? The logical answer is, of course, having known God everything else is automatically known. Nothing is left to be known.