acintya-bhedābhe [inconceivable oneness and difference]
‘Realisation’ is the name we give to our understanding of the Divine in the world. Or maybe: our understanding that the world, in all its depth and complexity, is divine.
When we say we have realised something we mean that we see and feel and grasp the reality that lies behind the facts of the world. We understand the origin and the purpose of what we experience and what we feel. It means that we do not observe the facts as facts alone, but as parts of the divine story. We understand that facts have another purpose, maybe many other purposes, and that the hidden energy behind the facts will lift and carry us to places we do not know, if we surrender to it, like clues in a detective novel we have not yet read to the last page.
Srīla Prabhupāda call this way of seeing: ‘science (vijñāna)’, ‘spiritual knowledge’ or ‘wisdom’. It means the understanding of the divine in the mundane, the reality of God.
But how can the Divine live in the mundane? What business does the highest of all entities have with lowest of all things?
The answer is given by the Principle of Inconceivable Oneness and Difference (acintya-bhedābhe-tattva). This idea, which dates back to the Upaniṣads and beyond, says, simply put, that the Divine is both transcendental and mundane, both absolute and everyday, both universal and individual.
This agesless philosphical idea is the glorious hidden key to Bhakti.
The Principle states that the Divine is simultaneously unique and embodied in and endless number of different living entities, a perfect contradiction. This mystery lies at the heart of all the mysteries of the Bhakti, both in thought and practice.
The Principle makes possible the relation of Supersoul (paramātama)—absolute and unified—to the countless individual souls of which it is part and parcel. God lives in each individual soul and yet each soul is unique.
It lets us fully experience the presence of the Divine within us, and to understand that the energy that flows through us, lifts us, inspires us and sometimes frightens us, is nothing other than the Rādhārānī’s pleasure-giving potency (hlādini-śaktī), coursing through our hearts, by her mercy and for the enjoyment of her Mohan.
But if the strange Principle of Inconceivable Oneness and Difference answers so many questions about Bhakti, it also begs realised souls to answer one last question that it cannot answer :
Why are there differences between souls in the first place?
Why must the Divine be multiple and not one? What is the jīva part and parcel of the Divine. Why must the Divine expand itself into countless souls? These questions—and their answers—will delight the hearts of all devotess.
Differences—between individual jīvas, or between jīvas and the Lord—are the spaces of relation. They are the spaces of energy. They are the spaces for the flow of feeling, of emotion, of love. They are the space of Rādhā’s pleasure-giving energy (hlādinī-śaktī).
This is why the miraculous and puzzling Principle of Inconceivable Oneness and Difference is the promise of Bhakti:
It’s the framework that lets the Divine express itself not as an endless ocean of transcendental bliss in the form of Kṛṣṇa, but rather as the flow of the bliss-giving love embodied by Rādhā-Mohan, a flow that benefits all and, by benefiting all, please the Lord even more.
The Principle gives meaning to Divine expansion, the presence of Rādhā-Mohan, the Divine līlā, and teh guru in the heart of every devotee,
And in its most common form the assurance that at the heart of all existence is the love the binds us in loving one-ness to all those who are different from us.