Tag: divine love

What is śaktī?

śaktī [power, energy, potency] 

There is nothing without energy. 

There is no heat in the fire, no movement of the water, no light, no sound. Nothing.

Without energy, there is no life in nature, no flowers that grow or trees that reach to the sky, no insects that creep, no animals that roam, no human hearts that pump warm blood through the veins.   

Without energy there are no sensations, nothing to smell or taste or touch or see.   

Without energy there is no feeling, no tremors of emotion, no sensations of the heart, no sensations that surprise with their appearance, and astonish through their vanishing. 

And so without energy there is no soul, there is no life, there is no love.

Love is the name of energy in its highest form. It is energy that is equal to God. The desires we experience, the attractions that seize our senses are the expressions of this love, this divine love, this divinity. 

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What is a mañjarī?

mañjarī [maidservant, bud, flower]

On the transcendental plane called Goloka Vrindāvan, a mañjarī is a female maidservant of Rādhā. Sheis both a servant of Rādhā but also a friend. She is friend through service and a servant through friendship. She does not serve by obligation or personal gain, but by love. The relation or Rādhā and her mañjarīs is of the most intimate kind, only surpassed by the intimacy of conjugal lovers.  

What is an intimate friend? First, an intimate friend is one who has knowledge of her friend, one who shares experiences, who knows the same feelings, the same desires, one who is curious about the same things, who seeks the same things, who loves the same things, who fears the same things. 

But an intimate friend is something more. An intimate friend shares not only interests and goals, tastes and preferences. She shares a world, a reality. An intimate friend is one who as the same answer to these questions: what is real? what is true? what is beautiful? and most of all, what is love?

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Caitanya Mahāprabhu gave us mañjari-bhāv

Caitanya-caritāmṛta, Ādi 1 Chapter 4, Verse 16

The Lord wanted to taste the sweet essence of the mellows of love of God

Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja Gosvāmi

Throughout the ages Lord Kṛṣṇa is beloved by all. The word ‘kṛṣṇa’ itself means ‘all attractive’.  Nowhere is this more clear than in the rāsa pastime, in which the countless milkmaids (gopīs) of Vrindāvan are irresistibly drawn to him, the local cow-herd boy . According to the legend their eagerness and jealousy is so great that Kṛṣṇa expands into countless embodiments of himself, one for each gopī, so that the dance can go on, each girl delighted that she alone has the privilege of entertaining Kṛṣṇa.

There seems to be no end to the love for Kṛṣṇa. And why not? He is after all everything: all existence (sat), all knowledge (cit) and all bliss (ananda). In other words, whatever exists stems from him, whatever can be the object of consciousness, stems from him, and whoever knows pleasure knows it from him. 

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I am yours

What does it mean to belong to God?

In one of the final verses (Verse 96) of his passionate and moving Vilāpa Kusumāñjali (Bouquet of Lamentations) Raghunātha Dāsa cries out in ecstasy:

I am Yours, I am Yours! I cannot live without You! O Goddess! 

The ardent cry is directed at Rādhā, the lover of Kṛṣna, and therefore the source of the highest love in the world, the love for God. In the Bhakti tradition of Vaishnavism, the goal of life is service to this divine love, embodied through loving service in everyday life. 

Of all the disciples of the diving loving pair Rādhā-Kṛṣna, Raghunātha Dāsa is known as the deepest and the most passionate. He wants so ardently to serve divine love that his very being merges with the loving energy of Rādhā, the Goddess of love. 

In Bhakti, the path to transcendence is through devotional service, serving others in a way that recognises and honours the divine love in every soul. To love means to love from the heart, from the soul, not from the mind and the ego.

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Swimming in Rādhā Kuṇḍa

Verse 69

Because the kuṇḍa is endowed with Priyājī’s qualities of dearness it bestows a love equal to Radha’s on one who bathes there even once. 

Śri Ananta dāsā Bābājī

We are natural born lovers. Our deepest and most authentic qualities are realised through the expression of that love. This happens on many levels, in many forms, and towards many different kinds of people.

In the last sentence of his commentary to the final verse of Bhagavad-gītā Śrīla Prabhupad declares that the ‘normal condition’ of every living entity is in the ‘pleasure-giving potency’ of Kṛṣṇa, the divinely loving energy of Rādhā. He means that to love God is our highest aspiration and our most natural state. And yet we all find ourselves so far from that state, so far from being ourselves.

What can it mean to love God?  It does not mean turning our back to our imperfect existence in order to seek God somewhere far away in the desert or high on a mountain top. It must mean to love what is purest in us and what is purest in others. 

To love God does not mean to look elsewhere, but to look in ourselves. To love God does not require us to search for something perfectly loveable beyond us because what we are is somehow not loveable. On the contrary, to love God is to love the divine within us. 

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Doer and viewer

What is consciousness? 

Consciousness means ‘self-awareness’, being aware both that we exist and being aware of what is going on around us, both internally and externally. 

Consciousness is a both a very modern word and a very Western idea. Consciousness is what asks the question ‘who am I?’… and then arrogantly answers it. The answer is usually something like ‘I am someone who knows‘, ‘I am someone wants‘, or ‘I am someone who does‘. 

Our modern, Western consciousness is based on an equally modern, Western idea: the ego.  Consciousness is the ego saying: I perceive, I know, I want, I act, I do. It says: The things I make are the product my own creativity; the experiences I have of the world are the result of my own ability to understand it.  

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Perfect love

Verses 10.22-10-30

The closing sequence of Bhagavad-gītā Chapter 10 can seem tedious. 

After Kṛṣṇa declares his affection for Arjuna in the first lines, his disciple again asks for more detailed knowledge about him. God answers him over the final 19 verses of the chapter in the form of no fewer than 58 comparisons of himself to the greatest phenomena of the universe: ‘Of the rich, I am richest’ (10.23), ‘of the mountains, I am tallest’ (10.25), ‘of the rivers, I am longest’ (10.31), and so on. 

But the model used by Kṛṣṇa in these lines never involves just a simple comparison. It is never a simple matter of ‘this’ or ‘that’. Kṛṣṇa’s presentation of himself always takes the form of a progression. It always builds on a quality that can be increased, intensified, or deepened.

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Love and relation

Bhakti-yoga means union with God (yog) sustained through devotional service (bhakti). 

This union is one of miraculous experiences of our practice. For what does it mean to have a relationship with God? The words are easily said, but difficult to measure. To have a relationship with the divine is not to admire it from a distance, to venerate the beauty, the power, the perfection of God. It’s not enough to simply follow the rules and rituals of recognised practice. It’s not enough to obey the commands of a celestial dictator. It’s not an intellectual relation created by reading books or studying verses. 

None of these paths will do because the union of bhakti-yoga is one of love. Bhakti is the practice of devotional service, service to God in and through love. It’s not blind devotion or one-sided adulation. Bhakti-yoga is a true relation with the divine: in its purest expression it takes the form of a divine love affair. Its model is the conjugal love affair of the Rādhā and Mohan. This loving relation is the model not only for the love of God but for the love between all loving, living beings. 

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