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.
Energy connects everything. It connects magnetic materials, it gravitates the planets, it holds electrons in orbit around their atomic nuclei. It connects all the parts of nature, sentient and non-sentient. It connects the hearts of conscious beings, ties the souls of soul-beings.
And most of all it ties the cosmic reservoir of love—Kṛṣṇa—to those beings, large and small, who experience love in all its forms and on all levels of intensity, from the touch of a handshake to the depth of a conjugal embrace.
To say that nothing is not energy, is to say that God is energy.
We will not be surprised then to learn that Kṛṣṇa is described everywhere as energy. And that, more importantly, the spiritual practice of devotional love—Bhakti—is a practice of energy. The greatest of all energies is Rādhārānī’s hlādinī-śaktī, the energy of giving love for the enjoyment of the other. In its highest form, it is the energy in service of the enjoyment of Kṛṣṇa.
Nothing is more precious to Kṛṣṇa. It is through energy that he manges the creation: the material (external) creation, the subtle (marginal) creation of minds and intellects, thoughts and ideas, and the spiritual (internal) creation. What Bhakti reveals to us is that the purest, most intense, and most beautiful of these is the spiritual energy, which is soul, which is heart, which is the flow of love.
Bhakti is the spiritual practice that blesses us with a double life-changing understanding of both what love is and what God is. Both of these revelations flow from the appearance of the Caitanya Mahāprabhu.
First, by understanding love as a form of energy, the highest form of energy, we are able to realise that love is not an idea, a thought, an ideal, a picture on the wall, or a memory from the past. Love is something we do, it is action, giving that intensely focused on the present, insistent on the gift to give in this moment, because every moment. Love is the flow of the this energy, a flow from one to another, a flow that happens through relation, any and all relations. There is no relation, bond or connection between two beings that does not involve the energy of feeling that we call love. It appears in tiny, humble forms, and it appears in monumental life-changing forms.
Love is not a thing we have, a picture on the wall that we can admire at a distance. Love is a way of being, of connecting to every living being, because every living being contains a part of the the divine, and is carried by the divine energy of Rādhā.
Second, we know this because of extraordinary merci of Mahāprabhu. In the Age of Kali, Kṛṣṇa, all love, all beauty, all power, is admired and enjoyed and loved by all of creation. He lacks nothing, for he is everything. His energies flow through all things and return to him in the great eco-system of being. When it comes to love, he is endlessly loved by all, admired by the creation, desired by all that is.
Yet to know this experience of feeling love for God is only possible if he takes the position of one who has divine love for God. Thus he takes the mood and shape and external lustre of Rādhā, his childhood sweetheart, in order to seek this experience of being the lover, the subject, the giver of love.
In this way Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa become the Divine who is neither the giver of love, nor the gift of love, but the giving of love.
This giving of love is called hlādinī-śaktī, the greatest, the purest of energies, the force of life with in all of us. It’s the energy, whose highest goal is to love: to love the child, the partner, the parent, the guru, or the stranger. The path to this goal is the realisation that any action, understood in its essence, because it grows from the relation of one soul to another, is alway love.
If we live in this love we live in God.