Nitai Gaura has given us the gift of divine love
Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s appearance in 1486 changed the way we think about the relation between God and love.
In Western Semitic religions we are accustomed to thinking of God’s love as a transcendental substance, accessible to saints and priests, passed on to us only by their mercy. In those traditions, God is equated with love, but reserved for those who love God directly or receive it directly from God.
The love of God is understood as an abstraction, a transcendental goal, reached only by the most purified souls, obtained only after long struggle and sacrifice.
This is not far from the image of Vaishnavism before the appearance of Caitanya Mahaprabhu.
Caitanya Mahaprabhu or Gaura (because of his golden colour) became the combined avatar of Mohan (in the beloved, acting, pleasure-seeking, male mood) and Rādhā (in the loving, caring, pleasure-giving, female mood).
The appearance of Gaura on earth was thus the appearance not of divine love itself, but of a divine loving couple, continuously experiencing love, continuously playing out the thrills and sorrows, the passions and pains of loving. God appeared not as love, but as loving.
It was no longer possibly to consider love as something that could be added to life or withheld from it according to our wishes. Loving is the foundation of human reality and human experience.
With Gaura’s appearance, the task of devotion is no longer to transcend this world in order to reach divine love, but to realise how the world is already a putting into action of divine love.
The foundation of reality itself is the flow of divine loving energy.
Since Rādhāmohan (Kṛṣṇa) is everywhere in everything at every moment in everything, so is the divine loving relation. Every soul, even the least realised, will know the tingling emotion that is the trace of the divine in the heart. Ever soul possesses at least a trace of prema-śakti the generous, loving, happiness-giving, female energy of Rādhā.
The more we become aware of this feeling of love, the more it will grow, and the more we realise the presence of Rādhā.
The more we realise this presence, the more our lives will take the form of service to divine love, service to Rādhā, herself the servant of Mohan’s wish for the love of his devotees.
Mohan is said to be a reservoir of bliss (hladini), deep, spiritual pleasure, gathered by the spiritual senses, drawn from the deepest well of beauty in the world. Rādhā is the personification of the energy (hladini-śakti) that sustains this bliss.
Again, as Rādhā–Mohan live in our souls, the creative, sustaining energy of bliss also has a well there. It is a deep well of beauty that we most often don’t understand the depth of, and sometimes don’t notice at all.
Spiritual development means gradually opening our eyes to the simple, everyday, divine beauty in each of us.
Finally, if Rādhā–Mohan is everywhere and in every thing, then the energy of divine beauty (hladini-śakti) flows through the external world as well, giving life to plants, animals and the universe at large.
To realise this beauty, and our own, is to learn to equate it with the divine, to realise ourselves, to catch sight of our souls, and to live divine love in simple ways in everyday life.