Tag: prema

Caress of the divine

What is a caress?

It’s the place where mundane love meets divine love, where we reach from our material bodies to our spiritual. 

If, as we believe, our souls are made of a tiny drop of the ocean of the soul of God, then the love we feel, mundane or magnificent, is an expression of the divine love in us. 

We all carry this love. We all experience this love. And yet we struggle to identify ourselves with it. We struggle to understand and realise that, at the bottom, we are nothing else but this love. 

Bhakti philosophy teaches that the material energy that shapes our daily lives (māyā-śakti) is there by purpose. The struggle against our material attachments is our journey of devotion. Māyā-śakti guides us. It gently loosens the guṇas, the ropes of our material attachments, all in the right time, the right way, with right intensity and feeling. Māyā-śakti is a school for lovers, taking us tenderly by the hand and guiding us back to ourselves, to our svarūpa, our soul identity, as servants of Rādhā, the servant of love for God (prema).

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What is rasa?

rasa [juice, nectar, transcendental taste] 

Bhakti Yoga begins and ends with feelings. There is no other pure source of meaning and guidance. The path of Bhakti, through teaching of guru or others is always to find and follow the narrow path of pure feeling. 

Therefore the guiding question is not ‘what should I feel?’ It is rather ‘what is this that I feel and where does it lead me?’ Thought will never lead to feeling, feeling will lead to thought and then transcend it. 

In the ‘Southern Section’ of Bhakti Rasāmṛta Sindhu, Rūpa Gosvāmi defines rasa as ‘the indescribable wonderful relish that is beyond the power of human thinking and arises in the pure heart brightened by goodness’ (2.5.132).

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Having love and being love

Soul-consciousness means the awareness that we have a soul, that we are soul-beings, and that the soul is divine. 

Since the soul is not material we cannot achieve soul-consciousness through our material senses. We will never find the soul by simply gazing out of our window. It is true that the hints and clues of our material world—beauty and charm, sweetness and attraction—touch our hearts and lift our souls. But the moment of soul-consciousness will come spontaneously, surprisingly, mercifully. 

Soul consciousness comes as a revelation. It is not the creation of new knowledge. It is the discovery of everything we already knew but did not realise. It comes not as a discovery of all the wonders that were unknown to us. It comes as the discovery that everything is familiar, has always already been so close by that we could touch it.  

Soul consciousness arrives not through the familiar experiences of our material experience, but through the mystery and charm of our spiritual life. The soul is playful, light and sweet. It is neither shy nor timid. While the mind is cautious about the dangers of the material world, the soul is open and naive, curious and searching, eager and affirming.

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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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Rādhā’s love is not given externally 

I constantly remember the foot-dust of Śrī Rādhikā, whose unlimited power instantly subdues even the Supreme Person (Śrī Kṛṣṇa), Who Himself cannot be easily seen even by the greatest devotees like Lord Brahmā, or Śiva, Śuadeva Muni, Nārarada Muni and Bhīṣma. 

Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī, Rādhā Rasa Sudhānidhi

In Verse 4 of Rādhā Rasa Sudhānidhi, Prabodhānanda Sarasvatī sings praises of Rādhā in two ways. First, he glorifies the dust of her lotus feet. The power of this dust is so great, he says, that even Kṛṣṇa, God himself is under its power. Then, he notes that she is so glorious that other powerful devotees cannot even see her.   

Dust that is powerful enough to subjugate Kṛṣṇa himself? Gods, demigods and mighty kings who cannot see what they wish to see? What can this mean?

The answer lies in the mystery of Rādhā’s power.

Prabodhānanda describes Rādhā’s power as unlimited, capable of instantly subduing Kṛṣṇa, where other great beings cannot even see him. Her power is greater than any ordinary material power. 

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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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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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