What the Bhakta’s Tears Are Really Crying For
There is a question that arrives quietly, without urgency, the way the most important questions always do. Why is it that a lifetime of devotion — sincere, embodied, unbroken — can carry within it a clear and unmistakable asymmetry of love? Why does one face of the Absolute call the heart forward, while another, equally luminous face, equally honored, leaves it unmoved?
For a Bhakta, this is not a theological problem. It is a revelation.
The tradition knows this. It gave it a name: ishta devata — the chosen deity, the face of the Real that meets you, specifically, in the particular shape of your longing. Not chosen by the intellect. Not selected from a catalog of available divinities. Discovered — the way you discover that you have always been walking toward a certain door without knowing it was a door.
I have no devotional pull toward Kali. I have sat with this honestly, without apology or embellishment. Kali is the Goddess of annihilation, the naked dark mother who dances on cremation grounds, who wears a garland of severed heads, who tears the veil of Maya not gently but in one catastrophic movement. Her great lovers — Ramakrishna above all — describe a love that is nearly unbearable in its intensity, a consuming fire in which the devotee is not sheltered but destroyed into God. There is nothing wrong with this. It is one of the supreme paths.
It is simply not mine.
My heart moves toward Shiva. And in understanding why, I have come to understand something essential about the shape of my own soul.
The Still Point What does the mountain offer that the storm cannot?
In the great iconography of Shaivism, there is an image of inexhaustible teaching: Kali dancing on the prone, still body of Shiva. She is movement, dissolution, ecstatic force. He is the ground she dances on. Without her, he would be inert. Without him, she would have nowhere to stand.
This is not a hierarchy. It is a cosmology.
The devotee drawn to Kali is drawn to the dance itself — to the vertigo of dissolution, to being swept up and undone. The devotee drawn to Shiva is drawn to what makes the dance possible — the stillness that underlies all movement, the consciousness that remains when every wave has spent itself.
I have spent eight decades living in a body governed by what Human Design calls Solar Plexus Authority. This is not astrology or metaphor — it is a structural description of how my inner life actually moves. The Solar Plexus is the emotional wave: it rises, crests, falls, rises again. Clarity does not arrive in me like a lightning strike. It arrives like a tide going out, slowly, after the weather has passed. I have learned — slowly, across a lifetime — to wait for the settling. To trust the stillness that comes after, not the urgency that comes during.
Which means I know Stillness the way you know water after a long thirst. Not as a concept. As a relief.
This is why the tears come when they come — not in moments of ecstatic overwhelm, but in moments of sudden, inexplicable quiet. A particular mantra. A film score that opens without warning into something vast. The Gāyatrī Mantra in Deva Premal’s voice, arriving not as music but as the sound of a door standing open in a room you had forgotten was yours.
These are not tears of emotion. They are tears of recognition. The wave recognizing the ocean it rose from. The motion recognizing, for one transparent moment, the stillness it has always been moving through.
Shiva is that stillness. Not distant, not indifferent — but foundational. The mountain under all my weather.
The Asymmetry of the Heart What does it mean that love is not distributed equally?
There is a temptation, even among sincere practitioners, to feel that spiritual generosity requires an equal openness to every divine form. That to love Shiva and not feel the same pull toward Kali is somehow a limitation, a bias to be corrected, a gap in the completeness of one’s devotion.
The tradition says otherwise.
The ishta devata is not a preference among equals. It is the precise correspondence between the shape of a soul and the face of the Absolute that can most fully receive that soul’s love — and most fully return it. Ramakrishna himself, who moved between divine forms with extraordinary fluidity, understood that the ishta was not a ceiling but a door. You enter through the door that is yours. All doors open into the same house.
My door is Shiva. And the particular teaching of that door is this: that beneath the anxious surface of the emotional life — beneath the wave, beneath the weather, beneath the rising and falling that the Solar Plexus body knows so intimately — there is something that has never moved. Has never been disturbed. Has never once been touched by the storm it holds.
This is not a teaching I arrived at through study, though study confirmed it. It is something I have occasionally, unmistakably, been. Those moments when the music parts the wave and something recognizes itself through me — that is not an experience of peace. It is the recognition of what peace actually is. Not a state that comes and goes. A nature that remains.
The tradition calls this Sahaja — the natural state, the permanent condition of one who has seen through the movement to what underlies it. Not heroic. Not dramatic. Simply ordinary in the most extraordinary sense: the wave discovering it is also the ocean, and then continuing to be a wave, but differently. Without the forgetting.
Aradhana and the Mountain What does worship ask of the one whose heart is made of stillness?
The Sanskrit word Aradhana means worship — but its root carries something deeper: ara, drawing near; dhana, treasure, wealth. To worship is to draw near to the treasure. To come close enough that the distance between the devotee and the divine begins, almost imperceptibly, to thin.
I carry this word on my skin. It was not chosen for decoration. It was chosen because it names what the whole of my devotional life has been: a drawing near. Not a conquest. Not an achievement. A continuous, patient, love-driven approach toward a Stillness that was never actually far.
Bhakti in the Shaivite key is not the bhakti of petition or of longing for a God who is elsewhere. It is the bhakti of recognition — of loving what you are already, in your deepest nature, within. Shiva is not a figure I look up toward. He is the ground I discover when I stop moving long enough to feel what I am standing on.
The tears are the proof. Not manufactured. Not sought. They arise when the veil thins — when a piece of sacred music or an unexpected moment of silence opens the gap between the wave and the ocean, and for a breath, both are visible at once. The wave and what it rises from. The motion and the stillness that contains it.
This is what the Bhakta’s heart, my heart, has been crying toward across a lifetime of practice.
Not annihilation. Not the ecstatic undoing that Kali offers her beloved.
Just this: to come home to the mountain. To rest — fully, finally, without apology — in the Stillness that was always here.
The one that transcends all else, and holds all else, and is all else.
The one that I, apparently, have always been.
Epilogue
The wave does not become the ocean. It discovers it never was anything else. And in that discovering — briefly, completely — it weeps.
Sources & References
Primary Traditions
- Shaivism & the Ishta Devata: Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga Tradition (Hohm Press, 2001) — comprehensive treatment of the ishta devata principle across Hindu devotional paths.
- Kali Iconography & Ramakrishna: Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali’s Child (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Swami Nikhilananda, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1942) — primary source for Ramakrishna’s devotional relationship with Kali.
- Shiva as Stillness beneath Kali’s Dance: David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses (University of California Press, 1986) — the iconographic teaching of Kali dancing on Shiva’s prone body.
- Sahaja Samadhi: Georg Feuerstein, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Yoga (Paragon House, 1990); Ramana Maharshi’s teachings as compiled in Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi (Sri Ramanasramam, 1955).
Devotional & Philosophical
- Aradhana (Sanskrit etymology): Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1899) — root ārādhana, the act of propitiating or worshipping; drawing near to the divine treasure.
- Human Design & Solar Plexus Authority: Ra Uru Hu, The Definitive Book of Human Design (HDC Publishing, 2011) — the emotional wave and the authority of the Solar Plexus center.
- Bhakti as Recognition: Swami Vivekananda, Bhakti Yoga (Advaita Ashrama, 1896); Sri Chinmoy, Meditation: Man-Perfection in God-Satisfaction (Agni Press, 1989).
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