Tag: love

We too have always been in love

Rādhā has always been in love with Mohan. There has never been a time when her entire being was not driven by a love for him. There has never been a world in which this love was not burning. There has never been a reality where divine love was not the living force.

Rādhā’s love for Mohan is not just an important event in the history of events. It is reality itself.

It’s not something that exists in the world; it is the world. It’s not something that fills our heart; it is our heart. It’s not a simple pleasure for the satisfaction of God; it is divine pleasure itself.

Rādhā’s love is time itself. Rādhā’s love is space itself. It is always and everywhere. Rādhā’s love is reality, truth, beauty and goodness There is nothing more real. There is nothing more true. There is nothing more beautiful, nothing more good. Rādhā’s love is desire that is everywhere desired. 

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Love has no rules

Verses 1.19-1.20

Parakīya means ‘belonging to another, to a stranger, to a hostile’. A parakīyā is thus the wife of another. Parakīyā-bhāv is love for the wife of another, forbidden love. 

Parakīyā-bhāv is traditionally denounced as a violation of traditional Vedic dharma. But in the Gaudya tradition it is venerated.

Rūpa Gosvāmī writes in Ujjvala-nīlamaṇi:

The supreme position of śṛngārara-rasa [loving feeling] is established in upapati [parakīyā-bhāv] or paramour love (1.19).

At first glance this notion may seem scandalous to us. Monogamous marriage is regarded as one of the pillars of society.

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Prema datta Nitai Gaura

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. 

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What is devotion?

Therefore Bhagavad-gītā should be taken up in a spirit of devotion.

Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda

Bhagavad-gītā takes the form of a dialogue between Arjuna, a noble prince in spiritual need, and Kṛṣṇa. It is the story of Arjuna’s self-discovery as a soul, and therefore our self-discovery as souls as well. In other words, it is an auto-biography of the soul. It’s the story of a soul realising that it is a soul. 

To understand that one is a soul is necessarily a self-discovery. No one can express it to us, no book can explain it to us. Paradoxically, insight into the soul can only be received through the soul. It can only heard through the ‘language’ of the soul, can only be experienced through the ‘senses’ of the soul.

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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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Seeing with spiritual eyes

Verse 66

The desire of my heart is to see the amorous playful enjoyment of Rādhā and Mohan. The fulfilment of my heart lies in the pure fulfilment of the divine loving relation. The realisation of that loving relation is the goal of any jiva. That is the goal of practice: to deepen and enhance the project of Caitanya Mahaprabhu who appeared in order to full understand and feel what loving relation is, understand by feeling, feeling-understanding. 

We, the ‘villagers’, are ‘fortunate souls’ (puṇyātma) in that we are allowed to observe the couple in this way. This good fortune (puṇya) does not come to us because we deserve it. It is mercy. There is no cause or reason for it. Mercy comes to us only through devotion, through loving relation to God. 

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The power of divine love

Verse 42

In his commentary to Verse 42 of Vilāpa-kusumāñjali, Ananda Das Babaji describes the different classifications of love. There are four levels of intensity of that love, spanning from the love of ordinary devotees, to the love of the great sages, to the love of the Vrajavāsīs, to the love of Rādhārāni, which is the greatest love of all. 

Kṛṣna, he goes on, ‘is controlled by His devotees according to the amount of love they have for Him, and Śrī Rādhikā has the greatest love for Him (parama mahān), therefore She controls Him to the utmost’. 

Ananta das babaji thus gives us an important lesson about the difference between divine love (prema) and mundane love (kama) 

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Neither male nor female

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. 

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