All glories to the congregational chanting of Ṡri Kṛṣṇa’s holy name, which cleanses the mirror of the heart and mind, which extinguishes the forest fire of material existence, which spreads moonlight on the white lotus of good fortune, which is the life of the bride named transcendental knowledge, which increases the ocean of transcendental bliss, which makes us relish full nectar at every step and which thus showers the whole self?
Śrī Śikṣāṣṭakam, verse 1
The first verse of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu’s Śrī Śikṣāṣṭakam embodies all of Bhakti. In it, thought becomes feeling, then feeling becomes reality itself.
The stirrings of the first verse are a call to the self, to the soul. Our better self, our purer self, awaits us behind the mask of our egoism. Reaching it, reaching ourselves, is possible through sankirtan, the power and pleasure of congregational chanting.
But to fully enjoy sankirtan, we must first remember how Caitanya Mahāprabhu made it a gift to humanity.
The years of the Mahāprabhu’s passage in this world, culminating in the formulation of Śrī Śikṣāṣṭakam, were an unimaginable fusion of self and soul, love and desire, divinity and mundaneness.
We can wonder at how Caitanya Mahāprabhu could possibly live in the extraordinary circumstances of his appearance. He was born with the soul of Kṛṣṇa, yet lived in the body of a man, shrouded in the endlessly tender mood of Rādhā.
It is too little to say that the powerful verses of Śrī Śikṣāṣṭakam express Mahāprabhu’s emotions. It is too little to say that they express a doctrine or philosophical teaching. All words fall short. We must put to sleep our eager minds and only float in the sea of what such an existence might feel like.
The words of Śikṣāṣṭakam are not a treatise flowing from the pen of a philosopher. They express the dream sent forth from the heart of God, and at the same time from the love of the one who loves God more than herself. They form a body, both material and spiritual, traversed by the greatest love of the universe.
Caitanya Mahāprabhu is Rādhā longing for her Mohan, and Mohan longing to enjoy his Rādhā, enjoyment that comes, will come, has always come, through the mercy of Rādhā alone.
Caitanya Mahāprabhu is sankirtan embodied. His life is nothing more, nothing less, than worship of the beloved Kṛṣṇa. It is not a life filled with worship, nor a life in which worship is done. Rather, it is life, living itself, as worship. For Mahāprabhu, to live is to worship. There is no difference between sankirtan and life, no difference between singing praise of God and being God. This is because Caitanya Mahāprabhu is both God-the-lover and God-the-beloved, both infinitely desirous and infinitely longed for.
The mundane consequence of this miraculous flow of the energy of love is that the more the devotee surrenders to the song of the lover and the beloved, the more the material coverings of mundane life fall away.
When the flow of our hearts is immersed in the thought of the divine loving exchange, the play, both heavy and light, of the lover and the beloved, then we too are fully in our soul, cleansed of the dirt of our material, egoistical existence.
And the more the mirror of our heart is purified, the more the suffering itself caused by our own confused hearts is purified, the more the suffering that is the product of our own attachment to the fickle and fleeting happiness of material withers and wanes.
Thus the fire of material life is deprived of its fuel. The flames are not extinguished by the power our will, by our wanting to rid ourselves of the ego. That is a contraction of intentions. These flames are suffocated by the cooling, refreshing waters of the soul, the true, unfiltered, unpolluted soul, which nourishes and gives life not to the ego, but to the heart.
As the bright light of the flickering fire of ego wanes, the cool moonlight of Rādhā’s sweet, soft face, and the presence of her love for Mohan becomes more visible to our tired eyes, she becomes for us the joy of existence. Our love becomes hers, and hers becomes his.
In Rādhā, the generous energy of love for God, for guru, for husband or wife, for child, for friend or stranger, becomes present. We must only understand and embrace that we in truth call her forth from our own hearts, and that it is we who are also contributing to the ongoing cycle of love that sustains the universe, that we too will enjoy the pleasure of giving pleasure to God.
With this realisation the ocean of transcendental bliss that is Mohan flows again in us, as it did at our origins, in our constitutional state.