Saints Namdev, Tukaram and Sakkubai all melted when they thought of their beloved Vittala, the deity of Pandarpur. The deity here is evidence of the Lord’s celebrated soulabhya, Kidambi Narayanan said in a discourse.
In Pandarpur, devotees can embrace the Lord who reigns in their hearts. Devotees shower their love upon Him, shed tears of joy upon seeing Him. Usually, people who are educated or enjoy a high status in life are fully aware of their scholarship, or of their power, and cannot suppress the pride that results from the knowledge of their superiority. Hence they tend to look down upon others. If at all they talk to someone, they make the person feel that a favour is being shown to him. But the Lord, who is all powerful, exhibits no such arrogance. He never displays by His actions or words or gestures that He is superior to everyone. If He did, would we have the courage to approach Him? He stoops down to our level, because of His love for us.
In Pandarpur, devotees , after singing bhajans, embrace each other. That is because they do not see the humanness of those with them, but they see divinity in the human beings. They see in their fellow human beings Lord Mahavishnu, who graces Pandarpur as Vittala. When Krishna disappeared from the company of the Gopikas, they pined for Him and imagined themselves to be the cows and calves of Gokula, and even imagined themselves to be Kaliya, the poisonous snake, and they enacted all of Krishna’s childhood deeds. One Gopika imagined herself to be the snake, and another, imagining herself to be Krishna, danced on her friend’s back, in imitation of Krishna’s dance on the hood of the snake!
Devotees are not concerned about any discomforts or difficulties they experience. Their constant thought is of how best they may serve Him. When the crocodile caught hold of elephant Gajendra’s foot, Gajendra was not so much concerned about his own pain. He was sorry he could not take the lotus to the Lord. The lotus, he reasoned, must have done penance for eons to have become sacred enough to be picked to adorn Him. And yet, because he was caught by the crocodile, the lotus was being deprived of a rare honour.
