In a poignant scene in Verse 89 of Śrī Vilāpa Kusumāñjali, Rādhā leads her maidservant Tulasi mañjarī to a secret cave in Govardhana Hill to teach her songs about divine love. Whose love? Her own.
Rādhā, the embodiment of divine love, knows and feels every emotion available to our mundane hearts, and more. But she is very shy about teaching songs about these emotions.
The mundane mind can understand this. After all, they are songs about Rādhā’s most intimate and confidential pastimes with her divine lover Mohan. The songs are an intimate history of their divine love affair.
The songs, which Rādhā only shares with her dear maidservants, can be used to revive her dear Mohan in case he should faint in the throes of passion. By singing to him the story of his own love, he is brought back to consciousness.
But as Ananta Dāsa Bābājī points out, Rādhā herself is the subject of these songs, so she can hardly sing them to someone as if she were not involved in the story. She is the story and cannot simply step out of it in order to tell it to another.
Rādhā is the divine lover, Mohan is the divine beloved. The divine lovers cannot simply leave the picture in order to tell it to others. This love story isn’t simply one romance among others. It is the story of everything—the story that unites the universe.
In the Vedic tradition, telling the story of the Divine is straightforward. Since God is already aloof from those who worship him, there is no problem with telling the story from a distance, detached, anonymously, impersonally, indifferently.
But the appearance of Caitanya Mahāprabhu changed this reality. Caitanya taught that divinity is an experience of proximity connected by feeling. Devotion is an experience of love through service. Veneration means intimacy. Belief means knowing with the heart.
In other words, the divine is not a thing, a stone, or a piece of wood we can pick up from the ground and examine indifferently or scientifically.
The divine is a relation, an interaction, an exchange, a bond. The divine cannot be experienced without entering into this relation, without connecting through feeling, without feeling through the heart.
In the words of Ananta Dāsa: without bhāva (feeling), one cannot taste rasa (spiritual flavor); without rasa, there can be no development of bhāva; and without bhāva and rasa, there can be no ānanda (bliss).
This is why the hero of this story is the mañjarī: she is intimate with the cosmic love story and yet detached enough to tell it. She knows the feelings of divine love but seeks only to serve them. She lives in the flavors of the sharing of tenderness, but instead of seeking to steal them for her own pleasure, she nourishes them for the pleasure of God, and thereby for the pleasure of all souls.
Unconditional love is the generosity of emotion that benefits another.
Mañjarī-bhāva is the unconditional love that benefits all by serving divine love.