Spiritual Import of Religious Festivals : 11.7.

Chapter-11.The Sport of the Infinite-7.
 ( Rasa-Lila message given on the 22nd of October, 1972.)

We have, today, a very auspicious occasion which we call the Rasa Purnima, the full moon day in the month of Asvini, which is associated with the Lilas of Bhagavan Sri Krishna, who is Shodasa Kala Murti, Purna-Avatara, Divinity condescending to come down to the level of our physical perception. Here the glory of the Infinite is condensed or pressed into and focussed through the finitude of human perception.

That was Bhagavan Sri Krishna's Avatara in which we have a very fantastic and inscrutable phenomenon of what they call the Rasa-Lila, a sport which He is supposed to have played on the banks of the Yamuna, in Madhuvana, in the sylvan retreat of the holy Vrindavana, on the night of this particular full-moon day. This is not merely a historical or an epic event that we are narrating, contemplating and reciting, but a spiritual phenomenon, because God cannot but be spiritual. If at all God is anything, He is spiritual. And if He can do anything, it is only spiritual activity.

If there is any purpose behind His operations, it is spiritual alone. In and out, through the length and breadth of His creation, it is spirituality that is operating. Materiality is unknown in the world of God. It is a thing that does not exist. So it is a spiritual history that we recite and read in the Srimad Bhagavata and the Mahabharata in connection with the life of Bhagavan Sri Krishna.

It is not a mortal biography that we read, because in the realm of God mortality does not exist. Mortality, vicissitude, transience, materiality, externality, pain and death are all limitations of consciousness brought about by an error of perception, and they do not exist by themselves. They have no existence as such, but they are only processes tending towards this Supernal Being.

Swami Krishnananda
 To be continued ...