Verse 53
We observe our bodies and we see the physiology of men and women, of male and female. This material confinement of gender and sexuality steers mundane social conflict and political debates about which bodies we are authorised to love. The life of material love, of material desire, is intertwined with the dualism of genders. In our modern experience of sexuality this dualism is sometimes inverted, exchanged or reassigned. But we seem unable to imagine ourselves, to grasp our identities without it.
The Svetsvatara Upanishad says that the spiritual body is neither male, nor female, nor neuter. In our spiritual identity the gendered body falls away. Yet in our loving moods the different aspects of gender flow like waves.
In the loving mood of the maidservant, mañjarī-bhav, the soul takes on female features, empathy, tenderness, sweetness, affection, care-giving. And yet the magic of the maidservant is not simply to provide loving care to her mistress Rādhā, though she does this with devotion. Mañjarī-bhav is more layered and complex than this. Our hearts join the heart of Sarasvatī, author of these verses, our souls join his soul in loving Rādhā.
But there is more. This emotion, this mood we share, mañjarī-bhav, is not only the mood of love. We have an additional desire. It is to witness love, to see love unfold, to enable Rādhā’s own love for Kṛṣṇa and his love for her. We want their love, we desire their desire, we crave their craving, and we long for their longing. We yearn not only to love, but to witness Divine love, to see the Divine lovers love divinely. Not some inert passive love, not love like a relic in a museum of emotions, but true, living love.
This is why each verse of Rādhā Rasa Sudhānidhi is not only a prayer to Rādhā to serve her in her love, but a prayer, a supplication to the Divine to empower us to serve love itself.
We spend our material lives, men and women, in male consciousness, trying at all costs to create enjoyment for ourselves and others, to gather together the elements, the people, the events to fabricate love. This is the love of homo faber, man the maker, making love by arranging for sensations and preparing for pleasures. Male consciousness makes love, female consciousness lives love.
To want divine love will never mean to seize and hold it, less still to build it from aesthetic sensations. To seek divine love is to want divine loving, not to make it, but to live it, never to own it, but to attend to it. Not to enjoy it like we might enjoy a well prepared meal, a beautiful image or a well-crafted poem, though these experiences point the way. Such enjoyment, once it is consummated in its finitude is gone forever. To want Divine love is to want to be the servant of the Divine lover and thus of love itself, to everywhere strive to let this love flow in others, close at hand and far away, but mostly in the loving devotion to the Divine.
The remnants of this divine love are all around us, easily seen when we first open our hearts. Every sight, sound or fragrance that touches our mundane senses is a remnant of Divine loving, like the fragrance of Rādhā in the tattered clothing she has left for Sarasvatī, so many remnants of the of the sights, sounds and fragrances of the Divine lovers whose loving pastime never ceases.