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426 Jiva Gosvāmī and Baladeva Vidyābhūsana [ch. one's personality entirely to God; this complete renunciation of oneself to God is technically called ātma-nivedana. The rāgānuga, or purely emotional type of bhakti, must be distinguished from vaidhi-bhakti; since the rāgānuga-bhakti follows only the bent of one's own emotions, it is difficult to define its various stages. In this form of bhakti the devotee may look upon God as if He were a human being, and may turn to Him with all the ardour and intensity of human emotions and passions; thus one of the chief forms in which this type of bhakti manifests itself is to be found in those cases where God is the object of a type of deep love which in human relation would be called sex-love. Sex-love is one of the most intense passions of which our human nature is capable, and, accordingly, God may be loved with the passionate intensity of sexlove. In following this course of love the devotee may for the time being forget the divinity of God, may look upon Him as a fellowbeing, and may invest Him with all the possibilities of human relations and turn to Him as if He were his intimate friend or a most beloved husband. He may in such circumstances dispense entirely with the ritualistic formalities of worship, meditation, recital of His names or glories, and simply follow his own emotional bent and treat God just as may befit the tendency of his emotion at the time. There may however be stages where the rāgānuga is mixed up with vaidhi, where the devotee follows some of the courses of the vaidhi-bhakti and is yet passionately attached to God. But those who are simply dragged forward by passion for God are clearly above the range of the duties of vaidhi-bhakti; not only through such passionate attachment to God, but even when one's mind is filled with a strong emotion of anger and hatred towards God, so as to make one completely forget oneself and to render oneself entirely pervaded by God's presence-even as an object of hatred-one may, by such an absorption of one's nature in God, attain one's highest. The process by which one attains one's highest through rāgānuga-bhakti is the absorption of the nature of the devotee by God through an all-pervading intense emotion. For this reason, whenever the mind of a man is completely under the sway of a strong emotion of any description with reference to God, he is absorbed, as it were, in God's being and thus attains his highest through a complete disruption of his limited personality.
