By diving into this nectar-ocean his body, mind and life-airs had become wholly nectarean.
Ananta Dās Bābāji
In Verse 84 of his Rādhā Rasa Sudhānidhi Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī derides what he sees as the misguided principles of traditional religious practices.
First, if traditional Vedic principles warn against material sense gratification, they do not recognise the meaning of the spiritual senses, the spiritual longing that appears in the heart of everyone. Second, seeking the answers to our prayers by studying the many verses of the Vedas is equally fruitless. Third, to search for liberation by the merging with the divine, will only deny us the experience of a loving relationship with God. Finally, worshiping only the power and opulence of Vedic gods will leave us incapable of appreciating or sharing in the tender loving emotions of divine love.
Instead, Prabodhānanda assures us that all we need in order to find fulfilment is to become absorbed in the loving flavours of Rādhā. Ananta dās Bābāji shares the same sentiment in his commentary to the verse : ‘By diving into this nectar-ocean his body, mind and life-airs had become wholly nectarean’.
The book-length prayer Rādhā Rasa Sudhānidhi takes its title from the image of this very same ‘nectar-ocean’. ‘Sudha’ is the Sanskrit word for divine nectar, the drink of the gods and of immortality. ‘Nidhi’ means ‘endless reservoir’.
Indeed, images of liquid emotions and flowing sweetness abound in Bhakti prayers and songs. Feelings are fluid, not fixed. Experience is not a parade of facts, but a flux of intensities. Thoughts can be directed, governed, and control. But the authentic heart is a rebel. Its softness is its force, its sweetness is its power. It gently and sweetly overwhelms us in the hushed moments of our experience. Who learns to follow the heart knows how to live a life that sees no difference between purpose and pleasure.
The dry sharp edges of our rational, logical experience cannot grasp the soft shapes of divine experience, the twists and turns of its movement. The soul is nothing if not endless longing and endless generosity. It is flirtatious and playful, sly and coy, caressing and prickling. It sings and sighs, screams and sobs. It is pure courage and endless timidity.
It seems so obvious to us that the facts of the world change. What we see less easily is that the feelings of our experience of the world, while also changing, never cease to converge into a soul that is always growing, always renewed. All things in this world are finite. But the soul’s love (prema) never ceases to increase.
In Bhakti, this experience of spiritual emotion is called rasa, literally ‘juice’ or ‘nectar’. Nectar is the most condensed flavour of any fruit, the concentration of all that is good, of all that can be relished. The nectar of a fruit can be tasted with the tongue, but the experience it produces surpasses our material senses.
We know this because its flavours make the heart flutter and the hair on our skin stand on end. They explode our biologically determined experience of empirical reality. They don’t contradict it, but they surpass it, and gently absorb it. They remind us that the pleasures we feel in material enjoyment are married with spiritual pleasures. Together they produce an experience, not only of the beauty of one particular flavour, but of the beauty of the world.
This ability to relish the divine in the mundane is the power of the soul. It’s the proof that all of our emotional drives converge, sooner or later, here or elsewhere, in this life or another, to a love for God (prema).
The flavour of our souls is the last and most mysterious aspect of spiritual experience. This is why we cannot speak of knowing the soul. Rather, we speak of relishing its beauty. To relish is to glimpse the spiritual in material experience.
Accomplishing this experience requires patience and persistence. It’s not a practice of seeking new pleasures, or different pleasures, but of realising how the pleasures we already know, and perhaps reject as flashes of insignificant excitable energy, are the voice of our soul trying to show the way to who we really are.
We are already swimming in the nectar-ocean. We always were. The only challenge in our mundane lives is to quietly, softly, lovingly, take in the extraordinary, and ultimately divine, flavour of ordinary experience.