Purva Raga

When we think of love’s most beautiful moments,
they are usually purva-raga moments.
Which is true and correct,
for the birthplace of love is a tirtha
that should be visited often
to take a holy bath in its sweet waters,
to drink them as a sacramental wine,
and to rehearse the liturgy of that avatar of love
until it is the one language that you know.

For you will return often to that fording site
for shelter, to remember that first sweetness
in moments that are both sweet and bitter,
to sift its sands for secrets now forgotten
in the place where reality met the myth of origins.

The true story of love has many more chapters.
And each chapter asks:
Was the attraction strong enough?
Was its conception immaculate?
Was it pure enough to sustain the sadhana of Love?

And if you have the good fortune
to experience purva raga again
after misfortunes in love,
then savor it. Savor it and let it trail off
into infinity without any knowledge
of anything but a flowing faith in its inevitability.

Savor it until it melts into
the eternal myth of romance,
into the holy rasa ocean of Radhe Shyam.

Let the minds melt into one another
before the bodies touch.

Let Love’s birthplace be numinous, a Vrindavan
in the midst of flutes and flowers and fairytales.
Look at love from the peak of Govardhan,
from the vantage point of Goloka.

And here on earth,
bedeck the birthplace of love with patience,
and build the foundation of the temple slowly,
in expectation of many happy returns.

So says Jagat:
Melt the mind with Love’s steady selfless flame:
The imprint of God’s face will forever there remain.

Icebergs melting in the ocean of rasa

We are all icebergs… melting.

We keep our personas happily masking the meltdown,

going on below the surface

and we don’t know what it is.

Our philosophies are our attempts to explain

and perhaps be honest. But the melting goes on

and the tip of the iceberg is anxious for its survival.

What is my philosophy?

Can you have certainties where God and love are concerned?

Nothing is certain, but believe in Love anyway.

God says look at love, look at the human. I am there.

Love me, love my dog. And all the rest that is mine,

but especially that which is made in my image:

all the “me’s” that I have manifested everywhere for you to love.

You have found Me, you think, on the altar, in the Bhagavatam,

in words and paper and stone, in the rules of dharma,

supplication and surrender to the God Above and Within.

And even in the golden alleyways of Vrindavan.

Your bliss is your praman, but your journey just begun.

Where am I?

I am the Waldo of the world. Where will you find me?

In the clouds or in a kiss? Where do I reside?

If Prema is the prayojan, then look in the direction of prema.

As your eyes improve, you will see more clearly

and I will appear to you with form as the Beloved 

and without form as Love Itself;

Its rays will shine forth through you and light the world.

Can you have certainties where God and love are concerned?

Nothing is certain: But believe in Love anyway.

Run blindfolded, you will not slip or fall,

I will be there to catch you always.

When you finally see Me, you will finally know what

a kataksha is. How one eyeblink length glance

has more content than a thousand pages of shastra.

This is how you enter the lila, one kripa kataksha at a time.

One glimpse at a time until you get the composite picture.

Says Jagat: Below my iceberg tip, below my philosophies,

Radharani’s glance is melting me into the ocean of rasa.

Words from the Chaittya Guru

(1)

The beginning of civilization is respect, nay veneration, for the feminine.
Respect for motherhood, respect for the Goddess, the mother in all mothers.
There is no love without respect. There is no Radha without Devi.
There is no understanding of Radha and Krishna
without first understanding Shiva and Shakti.

(2)

It is quite simple really:
Goddess is Archetype. Woman is type.
There is therefore "Goddess-ness" in every woman.
Radha is Goddess. Krishna is God.
Therefore Radha-ness exists in every woman.
And Krishna-ness in every man.
The sadhana for the man is to see the Radha-ness.
The sadhana for woman is to see the Krishna-ness.
The sadhana of the couple is to see the Yugalness.
The sadhya is prema.

(3)

Wherever the Lover and Beloved enter into popular consciousness,
that is a manifestation of the Archetype.
But archetypes exist on a scale
from fullness (pūrṇa) to mediocrity (tuccha).
This is the scale in which prema stands at one end
and kama at the other.
Krishna is not God: He is the fullness of Love's Object.
Radha is not Goddess: She is the fullness of Love's Feeling.
The Yugala is their Union. Their Union is Prema.

(4)

A myth is what never happened but is always true.
What never happened is that there was "Nothing But Being"
and Nothing was happy, because even just being is joy.
But Nothing became conscious of its being
and said, "Let me become, for there is more joy in becoming."
And the first thing it became, the first Twoness,
was man and woman locked in embrace.
The first Idea, the Adi-rasa, became Radha and the Adi Purusha.
And from that bliss came all the worlds, material and spiritual.

(5)

The anima and animus are the unconscious desire for love
given ideal form -- suitable for love.
If one takes all the animae and all the animi in the world
removes all impurities and distills their essence,
one has the arrow that points to Radha and Krishna.

Love means seeing
the Radha-ness,
the Krishna-ness,
and the Yugal-ness.

But Love sees beyond the projection to the real person.
Because God is really in the person,
not the anima, not the animus.
Love means seeing both the self and the Self in the other.

Absence and Love

What is love other than forgiveness for imperfection?
And where is imperfection's root but in absence?
Will absence not then be love's greatest test ?
And demand the greatest sacrifice, that of being joyful?

Tabula Rasa

Shiva’s trident glitters gold
as the sun trickles over the Shivalik Hills
and a new day breaks over the Ganges.
The terrors of Terra’s trembling
toppling temples and towers in Kathmandu,
destroying lives and hopes, has left no marks
on the rising of the dawn.

A friend is incommunicado.

And here too a minor earthquake
in the liminal spot between one paradigm and another
the shifting of a tectonic plate
that has been rubbing and grumbling for far too long.
Inner houses and temples, beliefs and attachments
so sturdy in semblance, crumble once again.

A companion has become incommunicado,
unavailable to touch or sense or mind.

Do we build anew, or do we remain in the blissful
open air? Why build again that which only crumbles?
What are we going to write now
on the few blank pages that remain
in the book of Thanatos?

Rasa Magic

You cannot treat Harikatha or Harinam
the way you treat the words or mind.
As a ping pong ball of dodging battled thoughts.

Words to bypass that trickster's what we need to find,
we're searching for the sound that catapults
us into ras. That is where you leave the words behind.

And rasa magic then transforms our every word
from heard millions of times to never heard,
.

We are not scientists

The minutiae of creation, science, and that which lies beyond it.
The big bang, the single point of light, the nada-bindu.
The expansion of space, creating space first into which to expand.
All for the manifestation of what? Rasa.

Our field of knowledge is different. We are from the world
and the wheres and ways of creation to us irrelevant,
except as a curiosity. We are gopi girls, simpletons,
milkmaids who know nothing but the beauty of our beau.

Our field of study is different. We study the human life
of which love is the apex. We say the world is real,
not reduced to pinpoints of light, but to archetypes.
Life as it existed and exists in the pinpoint, beyond the pinpoint
in the highest of archetypal realities. A reality
that only needs the acquiescence of the mind to be true.

Our world of transcendence is that of our romantic imaginings.