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xxx11] God's Relation to His Devotees
411 the bhakti exists in the bhakta, and being a power of God it is in essence neither different from nor identical with Him. Bhakti is only a special manifestation of his power in the devotee, involving a duality and rousing in God a special manifestation of delight which may be interpreted as pleasure arising from the bhakti of the devotee. When God says that He is dependent on the bhakta, the idea is explicable only on the supposition that bhakti is the essence of the essential power of God; the devotee through his bhakti holds the essential nature of God within him. Now the question arises whether God really feels sorrow when the devotees feel it, and whether He is moved to sympathy by such an experience of sorrow. Some say that God, being all-blissful by nature, cannot have any experience of sorrow; but others say that He has a knowledge of suffering, not as existing in Himself, but as existing in the devotee The writer of Sat-sandarbha, however, objects that this does not solve the difficulty; if God has experience of sorrow, it does not matter whether He feels the pain as belonging to Himself or to others. It must therefore be admitted that, though God may somehow have a knowledge of suffering, yet He cannot have experience of it; and so, in spite of God's omnipotence, yet, since He has no experience of the suffering of men, He cannot be accused of cruelty in not releasing everyone from his suffering. The happiness of devotees consists in the experience of their devotion, and their sorrow is over obstruction in the way of their realization of God. God's supposed pity for His devotee originates from an experience of his devotion, expressing itself in forms of extreme humility (dainyātmaka-bhakti), and not from experience of an ordinary sorrow. When God tries to satisfy the desires of His devotee, He is not actuated by an experience of suffering, but by an experience of the devotion existing in the devotee. If God had experience of the sorrow's of others and if in spite of His omnipotence He had not released them from them, He would have to be regarded as cruel; so also, if He had helped only some to get out of suffering and had left others to suffer, He would have to be regarded as being only a partial God. But God has no experience of the sorrows of others; He only experiences devotion in others. The efficacy of prayer does not prove that God is partial; for there is no one dear to Him or enemy to Him; but, when through devotion the devotee prays for anything to Him, He being present in his heart in one through the
