Maya bhav - the desire to broadcast the little devotion we have within, to just show it as being very, very big.
“I am a big devotee.”
A woman goes to the temple and hears the kirtan. She feels good and then she starts getting up. She starts dancing and then starts screaming. If anyone ever did that in Mangarh, Maharaj Ji would say, “Hey, go! Go to the back and sit down there, stop making noise, because you're disturbing everybody!”
But let's say that this lady is making noises and she is dancing and people also, naive people, start saying, “Wow, gopi bhav. She's gone to bhav bhakti, (ये तो भाव भक्ति में चली गई।- Ye to bhav bhakti mein chali gayi.)” She's gone, where? In bhav bhakti.
Do you know what bhav bhakti is? Bhav bhakti means that when you reach bhav bhakti if there is a huge reason for you to get angry, you don't get angry. Somebody's spitting at you, you don't get angry.
“What? Is she in bhav bhakti? She fights with her husband ten times a day, she gets angry at everyone.” She has no friends left, but just because she's dancing in the temple, she is a gopi. Or we think to ourselves, “That lady may be us. What am I thinking? A couple of tears come into the eyes with the grace of God and Guru and I start thinking, ‘Hmm, I cry. I'm crying, look at me! I'm crying.’”
And that little bit of humility we have, it just goes away because we think, “I'm there. I am a devotee.” So to broadcast and to show, to make an external show of inner devotional sentiments and to show that I have more devotion than I really do have that I have a little bit and I'm showing it like I have so much; that is maya bhav. It’s very detrimental to self-surrender because that increases our pride.
And why is Ramanujacharya ji telling us this? Because we are guilty of all this. We have all these shortcomings, otherwise he wouldn't have to say anything. Shri Maharaj ji would never address these issues and Shri Maharaj ji addressed them a lot. If we did not need to hear it, he wouldn't have said it.
So pride does come in. The pride of doing devotion comes in. The pride of being a sadhak comes in, “I am a devotee and these people are not.”
That is very detrimental to our devotional progress and our progress on the path to self-surrender.
