The Devotee Desires Service, Not Merger
Narada teaches that the highest devotees often prefer the eternal joy of loving service to the impersonal merger of liberation.
Many great lovers of God, the tradition holds, do not seek to dissolve into the absolute but choose to remain eternally in loving relationship, savoring the sweetness of devotion forever. They say they would rather taste sugar than become sugar — preferring the joy of loving God to the loss of the lover in undifferentiated oneness. This reveals the distinctive flavor of bhakti: it cherishes the eternal play of love between devotee and beloved as itself the highest state, higher even than liberation conceived as merger. Narada's path thus offers a goal of endless loving relationship rather than extinction. The devotee's heaven is to love and be loved forever. For such souls, separation into lover and beloved is not a flaw to be overcome but the very condition of love's joy.
I do not want to become sugar; I want to taste sugar.
The devotional preference for eternal relationship over impersonal merger marks the central theological divide between dualistic bhakti schools, such as those of Ramanuja and Madhva, and the non-dualism of Shankara.
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
Written about in
- What the Narada Bhakti Sutras say about freedom
The sharpest disagreement with the non-dual paths: many lovers of God do not want to dissolve into the absolute and prefer to stay in relationship. The image is of wanting to taste sugar rather than become it.