Month: April 2024

Caress of the divine

What is a caress?

It’s the place where mundane love meets divine love, where we reach from our material bodies to our spiritual. 

If, as we believe, our souls are made of a tiny drop of the ocean of the soul of God, then the love we feel, mundane or magnificent, is an expression of the divine love in us. 

We all carry this love. We all experience this love. And yet we struggle to identify ourselves with it. We struggle to understand and realise that, at the bottom, we are nothing else but this love. 

Bhakti philosophy teaches that the material energy that shapes our daily lives (māyā-śakti) is there by purpose. The struggle against our material attachments is our journey of devotion. Māyā-śakti guides us. It gently loosens the guṇas, the ropes of our material attachments, all in the right time, the right way, with right intensity and feeling. Māyā-śakti is a school for lovers, taking us tenderly by the hand and guiding us back to ourselves, to our svarūpa, our soul identity, as servants of Rādhā, the servant of love for God (prema).

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Sat-cit-ānanda

Eternity—knowledge—bliss: these are the qualities of the divine in both God and in every realised soul. How do we advance toward this realisation?   

Spiritual practice begins with observation, as both idea and as exercise. It starts with the idea that the foundation of life is spiritual, and that realising this foundation requires observation, self-observation, attention to our interior life, to the life of the mind and the of the soul. This means nurturing techniques and habits for recognising our interior life as it unfolds, then increasing awareness of it.

By asking the simple question ‘who am I? we stand already before the extraordinary realisation that someone is directing a question to someone else. 

The very idea of our self, and even the most simple questions we might want to ask about it, produces the strange realisation that we are two. There is one who asks, and there is another who answers. There is a mind-ego and there is a soul.

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From Om to Rādhārānī

Om is both a word and a sound. 

What is om the word for?

All meaningful words refer to objects that give meaning. Doesn’t the word ‘tree’ refer to a certain perennial plant with a wooden stem and branches covered with green leaves? Doesn’t the word ‘golden’ refer to a colour? Doesn’t ‘brave’ refer to a person without fear?

All words that give meaning refer to objects that have meaning. All words, perhaps, except for one. Om is a word, discrete and clear. It follows all the rules of grammar, all the rules of sense making. And it refers to nothing. 

And yet, it is a word that gives meaning. And yet, we all know that speaking or chanting the word om has noticeable effects on us, on our health, on our well-being, our happiness, our peace and our serenity.

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What is hlādinī-śakti?

hlādinī-śakti [energy, ability, strength, effort, power that brings pleasure, bliss, happiness]

The Upaniśads tell us that the divine, the soul, the self (ātma) existed even before the universe. Cosmic creation took place when that divine substance expanded into matter in order to create all existing things. The vehicle for that expansion—which is still going on everywhere and at every moment—is energy (śakti).

Energy is not soul, but without energy the soul has no being, no life, no relation, no attraction, no longing, no desire, no zeal. In short: no love. Energy is not the divine itself; it is what brings the divine into being through potency of love.                           

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Love and the guṇas

O mighty-armed Arjuna, the three guṇas born of material nature–goodness, passion and ignorance–bind the immutable living entity who dwells within the body 

Bhagavad-gītā, 14.5

The meaning of life is to love, its highest purpose is to love God. 

If every drop of love that dwells in our hearts emanates from the divine soul within us, then it is also the nature of that love to return to its source. This is our most natural tendency: to love our way back to God, driven by a loving energy that is equally divine.

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