Tag: the divine

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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Surrendering pride

Verse 1

In the first of his Teachings for the mind, Śrīla Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī instructs us to give up our pride. 

Giving up our pride is a special kind of surrender. In the West we are taught the importance of pride. We are taught that in order to be successful in life we must take pleasure in ourselves, be satisfied with our selves. Those who succeed, we are raised to understand, are those who have esteem for themselves, those who value themselves, who find satisfaction in themselves, those who are able to care for themselves and, ultimately, love themselves. 

Self-pleasure, self-satisfaction, self-care, self-love: these are all precious qualities. Why then do the the saint admonish us to surrender them?

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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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The longing we feel

In the love that is objectless and subjectless, there is no ego that loves, and no thing that is loved. This longing we feel, this suspicion in hearts, this sliver in our minds, is the hint of longing on its way to us, longing that is growing, longing that will see the light of day. 

Yet it is by longing for material things that we resist the divine longing, standing intentionally, or perhaps intuitionally in the way, Of course we want to feel that weak signal of divinity, for that is what lies behind every moment of pleasure we have. All the aesthetic sources of pleasure—beauty, fragrance, taste, sensation—are also clues to the inner longing for the divine beauty.

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Desire to surrender

Every child recognises the push and pull of desire in its simplest form: I want the thing I do not possess. But my desire is not only connected to the object of my desire. It is also woven into the thought that I do not want to desire. I want this desire to end. I want the longing to be over. It’s not the thing I want, whatever it may be, so much as to put an end to wanting it. I want it to be mine, I want to be one with it, I want this feeling of wanting to dissolve into my unity with the thing, so that there will be no more wanting, no more longing, no more desire, no more separation. 

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