What Is the Most Important Among Knowledge, Devotion and Practice?

[A question by Shri J. Prasad (Professor of Sanskrit, Central University, Hyderabad)]

Swami replied: Attainment of Sadguru and from Him attainment of complete spiritual knowledge in which all doubts get clarified is the first step. This first step is the slowest step in the sense that this step takes almost all the time. The second step is attainment of devotion from knowledge. The third step is attainment of practice from devotion. The fourth step is attainment of fruit for the practice. The second, third and fourth steps are spontaneous and take a fraction of second only. The first step is the slowest among all the steps of overall reaction taking many years and even many births. The overall reaction is attainment of salvation (fruit of practice) from the attainment of complete spiritual knowledge from Sadguru. The time taken for the overall reaction is exactly the time taken for the first step–reaction. This is the concept of ‘reaction kinetics’. This means that once you attain the complete spiritual knowledge from Sadguru, it means that you have attained salvation. This does not mean that attainment of complete spiritual knowledge itself is the salvation. Since once the spiritual knowledge is attained from Sadguru, the attainment of devotion from spiritual knowledge, the attainment of practice from devotion and the attainment of salvation from practice are spontaneous taking a fraction of second only and hence, we are saying that attainment of true spiritual knowledge itself is attainment of salvation. This is the meaning of the statement of Shankara that salvation is from true spiritual knowledge (jnaanaadeva tu kaivalyam).

★ ★ ★ ★ ★