I used to be quite an ecstatic dancer in kirtan, but now I don’t do that. I think it’s a cultural practice that just isn’t part of the culture I live in. Now kirtan is my wife and I chanting sitting before our home altar. Just as the Orissa devotees moved from loud kirtans to […]
God-dess paradoxically indicates union of the opposite ideas of difference and non-difference leading to a higher, fuller unity. This means perfection, or the ability to encompass all extremes of experiencing reality.
We cultivate a higher taste like when we enjoy music, literature, plays, art, and poetry. Free the mind from the dross, and learn to taste the ineffable beauty and bliss of spiritual life.
Yet, absorbed in each other’s love and lost in each other’s thoughts there is scarcely room in their hearts for thought of anything else. God-dess and the devotee become mutually subservient to each other and surrender their freedom to each other. The pure divine love of the devotee controls God-dess.
Thus, we arrive at a point where the highest human conception of God-dess and the highest service one can render them is for them to be a loving young couple, with us as their friends and lovers, totally unaware of their divinity. Deep, intense love remains the key element.
Braj is a place of pilgrimage in Uttar Pradesh, India, but the spiritual Braj exists in the hearts of devotees wherever they are. Radha-Krishna’s pastimes go on there now and forever. One can see them only by the grace and sweet will of Radha-Krishna or their beloveds.
They combine breadth of spirit, intense modulations, eternal peace, and calm perfection with dynamic, eternally self-revealing, self-fulfilling creative activity, and quickness of movement with intense harmony and grace. Radha-Krishna awaken these modulations in us, satisfying our longings for love, knowledge, and peace in an integrative synthesis.
In our progressive aesthetic view which uses the amount of sweet taste as a measure of spiritual rapture, Undifferentiated Oneness is considered the lowest manifestation of divine self energy and Radha-Krishna are the highest manifestation.
To Radha on Her Appearance Day
Having been disillusioned by fundamentalist Christianity as a teenager, I became a beat and then a hippy seeker. This led me to A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. I was living in a commune in Haight Ashbury on Ashbury Street with a young woman. As soon as I saw Swamiji, I intuitively knew he was my guru. My […]