Spiritual Import of Religious Festivals :Ch-8. Part -3.

Chapter 8: Sri Radha – The Divine Mystery-3.


Two extremes meet in the concept of God's Glory, and in the mediocre approaches of devotees on the path of divine love, these extremes are not felt.

Most of us, may we say all of us, are mediocre followers of the path of God.

The extreme steps are not intended for fragile minds, weak bodies, impure emotions and tarnished intellects or prejudiced reasons.

The vehicle that can contain the divine mystery has to have the capacity to bear the fire which is God's Glory.

Many times it is said that the embrace of God is an embrace of fire, and no man has lived as man after having seen and embraced God.

These are some of the statements we hear from the adepts on the path.

The Radhakrishna mystery is a secret, even as God Himself is a secret.

 What can be a greater secret than God's Existence!

You cannot know where God is, or what God is doing, or why God has created the world.

You cannot say what His relation is to us, or, our relation is to Him.

You cannot say anything about Him, and the less said the better.

Thus it is that when we read the Srimad Bhagavata Purana, the Brahma-vaivarta Purana and certain other texts where such extreme forms of divine relation are expounded, we retrace our steps and turn back dumbfounded  :-

"Yato vacho nivartante aprapya manasa saha"

-Speech and mind turn back from that which they are not supposed to express or understand or think.

The reason behind this difficulty is that we are, as human beings, not prepared to shed the human way of thinking.

We have a reservation always, secretly maintained in our own minds, a secret which we wish to hide even from God's eyes.

There is a fear in the human individual, a fear, on the one hand, of losing the meaning that one attaches to the laws operating in human society and, on the other hand, the fear of losing oneself in what devotees call Love of God.

Swami Krishnananda
To be continued  ...